1 August 2003

Okay, here's a personal question that has nothing to do with the rest of the entry. It's for those of you in the reading audience who have boobs. Do you use them when opening a difficult jar? I don't mean some kind of freak show boobular twisting maneuver. It's just that if I have a jar of jam or pasta sauce or whatever else comes in jars, and it's not opening, and I have the plastic gripping dealie out to get traction on the stupid thing and it's still being difficult, I will often stick the jar in the cleavage to facilitate the opening process. So that both hands are a bit freer to get the jar open. And this week I discovered that some people -- the male type people, the ones without boobs of their own -- not only do not do this but didn't realize I did, either. It never occurred to them. And then it occurred to me that I don't know if I'm the only one who does this. People? Women-people, I mean? Or, I guess, men-people, if you've seen this done. I just had the sudden need to know that it isn't just me. If, in fact, it isn't just me. Help.

Also unrelated to anything else: I got the best spam subject line yesterday. It said, "Damsel, your no-fee Visa card awaits." My plastic in shining platinum. Swoon.

So. Worked on several things from yesterday's list, and it's shorter but has not disappeared. Not even close. Sigh. Some of these items are going to creep onto next week's list, I just know it. Especially now that I'm trying to juggle more social plans with out-of-towners. Which will be fun if I can get it all worked out. (And if I can get this darn postnasal crud to leave me alone!) It's just not all that conducive to finishing every little thing on the list for this week.

It also doesn't help if I get sidetracked doing things from next week's list. But at least I know that it is definitely and for sure much more expensive to tow our car behind a U-Haul than to get C.J. out to help us take two vehicles separately. The jury is still out on various moving combinations and services, but evidently the rental truck people think that they're All That with the car towing thing. And they are only a small part of That. So. That took a bit of time, tracking down all sorts of small pieces of information.

In my huuuuuge sidetrack, I got an e-mail from Peridot Books saying that they want to reprint "The Handmade's Tale" in their next issue. Rah! They're not actually Books. They're a website. But I don't really care what they are, because they like my story and are reprinting it, and it's been rather unavailable since Future Orbits went boom. So. Happy for me.

I finished reading This Cold Heaven yesterday and made a small start on Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas, which is at least as infodumpy to begin with as Pears' The Raphael Affair but feels somewhat smoother to me.

And in This Cold Heaven, I learned the Greenlandic word for creativity, for the creative mind at work: qarrtsiluni. Its literal meaning is "waiting for something to burst." That's where I am right now, people. I'm letting off a little steam and a little steam, and then a little more steam, but most of it is still building up in there. "Something," in this case, is most likely my head.

Until then, I'm going back to letting off a bit of steam at a time. Sorry things got so brief and disconnected today.