Lurgy Update*

 

It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.**  I'm catching up on back issues of magazines.  I've thrown a few more books against the wall.***  I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I'm keep hearing that it's the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games.  It's okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover.  It's not as good as MONTEZUMA. 

            But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they've been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same.  And it really was pretty fabulous.  We didn't even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡ 

katinseattle

I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.

No pressure. 

Certainly not.  I'm very relieved, since I've been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation.  Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . .  noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph].  This is not how this scene went last time.  Yelp!  Arrrgh!  Yaaaah!  —It's going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it.   I so need sleep.  

blondviolinist

You know how there's Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡ 

I'm on team Mongo. 

::Beams:: 

* * *

* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the '12' of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it's still last month?  Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is? 

** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation.  I admit I'm a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days.  Uuuuuuungh.  And unless I've developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing.  I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope.  Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony. 

*** I'm an even nastier reader when I'm ill and short of sleep. 

† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing. 

†† I was talking to a friend today who'd been ill in the night too.  She has cats.  And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her.  Hey!  You're up!  Great!  Aren't you glad to see us?  Aren't you going to feed us?   Barring the 'feed us' part, hellhounds have a similar reaction.  Hey!  You're up!  Hey!  All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don't care which four they're awake for are very disorienting . . . when you're pretty disoriented anyway.  But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I'm drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough.  So, we're going out NOW, right?  I wonder if they could learn the concept of 'dressing gown'?^ 

^ Mongo could.  The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do.  If you don't give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.    

††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa.  You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^ 

^ I'm also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+  I'm practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers' opinions on.  Why don't people do their homework.  His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be.  Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.    

          I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn't may be blurry in some areas.  I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I'm asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++  And she's also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it's reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids' books I'd just tell her what I know.  Which is not, in fact, much, and she'd be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.

          And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you're professional writers?  Say, I'm writing a children's book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have.  There wouldn't even have been any blood loss (probably).  But he shows up on our (Peter's) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand?  No.  Not on.+++

            So I don't want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV.  So I'm practising.  I'm not watching TV, mind you, but when I'm going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on. 

Ajlr

I'm so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one's brain is going to be shaken out through one's forehead at the very next convulsion. 

I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough.  Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains. 

            Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#.  Eventually I figured out how to call up 'information' and was apprised that this was a film called 'The Trail of the Screaming Forehead' in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads.  Ahem.  I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe. 

+ They breed.  Like coathangers and odd socks. 

++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.  

+++ I am a curmudgeon.  But we knew that.  And I haven't read it—that's Peter's self-immolation.  But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup. 

# Carefully missing the Christmas tree.  I'm not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet.  Hey, I'm sick.  

‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise. 

‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon?  Ewwwwww.  I'm on Team Sam.