Short and Sweet (?)

 

I have, as regular readers know, been making another of my ATTEMPTS to cut down on the ridiculous amount of stuff I keep trying to jam into my life and the twenty-four crummy little hours in an entire day.*  Well I’m declaring Wednesday to be an Official Short Blog Day, because it’s the only regular double-drama weekday:  the matinee is the silent prayer service at St Margaret’s with Aloysius** and the evening performance is tower practise at Forza.***  This week however we also have a major invasion of family arriving on Friday so I may exercise my new short-blog skills again soon.†

But for tonight I will leave you with a pretty amazing advance review of SHADOWS from a blogger who tweeted the link:

http://www.flyleafreview.com/2013/07/book-review-shadows-by-robin-mckinley.html

And yes, I think Hix is pretty cute too. . . . ††

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* I’m not even counting cruising on-line yarn sales and cross-referencing with Ravelry about both the yarn and what I might be able to do with it.  I needed another time-waster.  I don’t fritter away enough time reading book reviews and sample chapters and making lists.  The latest variation on that theme is sheet music.

** Although he and I are the only ones sitting on the floor on zafus.  It fascinates me who with advancing age and ME has an increasing number and amount of stupid aches and pains that I can sit cross-legged and more or less motionless for more than forty-seven seconds.  I can’t sit on a chair without fidgeting, but plop me down on my meditation or, in this case, prayer cushion and I subside into a surprisingly convincing facsimile of calm.  Unfortunately this goes away again as soon as I stand up, and I suspect trying to introduce a laptop to the situation would not go well.

Those old Zen masters were clearly onto something about human anatomy however.  If any of you want to try it, I bought mine—on Aloysius’ recommendation—from http://bluebanyan.co.uk/meditation-cushions.html  Mine is the bog-standard buckwheat zafu.

*** Not too bad, thank you.  But I went to the twice-a-month additional practise for the slow and dim at Fustian last night and was told to go home and learn the calls for Cambridge minor.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  I can’t ring a plain course reliably.  They seem to think learning what happens in a touch is going to help.  Good ringers have no clue what it’s like being a not good ringer.

† I’m also really enjoying Guest Post Sundays. I have two left in the queue and then. . . . Any of you who have either promised guest posts and then run away apparently forever, or who are contemplating all those fabulous photos you took of the Inca trail and dawn over Machu Picchu and wondering what you want to do with them . . . ahem.  Allow me to make you feel welcome and desirable.

†† And yes—sigh—I’m aware that my ‘slow to get going’ is one of the reasons I’m not a fabulous best seller and not worrying about money all the time.  But I don’t seem to be able to help it.  It’s the way my stories go.  Aggravated, I’m sure, by the fact that I tend to like this approach in other people’s books.  The story is the story, but it is inevitably shaped and coloured by you the teller.  Which is one of the things that keeps us tellers awake at night.