In Which Our Heroine Doesn't Even Try To Catch Up

28 September 2005

Well, and so. Sunday I was alternating between driving and riding home from Chicago by way of Milwaukee. (Mostly I was riding, but Mark needed a break in the middle of Wisconsin.) So that's why I didn't post then. I have no excuse for last Wednesday except that I didn't feel up to it, so I didn't. Which actually seems like a decent reason to me these days.

I'm currently reading Dorothy Dunnett's Scales of Gold. I find I'm having a hard time keeping track of the titles of the books in this series. I'm not calling them the wrong things, I'm just saying things like, "I'm reading...you know, the next Dunnett...Thingy. Whatchem. Whatever." I'm basically looking at them long enough to verify that they are, in fact, the next ones in the series, and so the words I know are words like "Fourth." The books themselves are so far quite distinguishable, with different settings, different plots, different major characters dead already. But titles? Elephino.

The other thing I keep saying about these Dunnett books is, "Gosh, there are lots of dead people in these books."

I was in Chicago for Scott's wedding. Scott is not my oldest friend, but he's my oldest close friend. The oldest friend I still see regularly, the oldest friend I still rely on much. I wish I had urged him and his wife to take their honeymoon in Hawaii or Yellowstone or scenic Cleveland or anywhere at all that wasn't in hurricane season. Because now I'm checking the weather in the Caribbean rather more intently than I am generally wont to do.

I'm almost through this read-through of Sampo, and, dang, I know I keep saying this, but I've never gotten a book so wrong on the first time before. It's really rather boggling and something of a relief: I can screw it up this badly and still find a salvageable book somewhere in all that? Cool!

This is why I claim to be a congenital optimist. I think "bloody-minded" probably belongs in that phrase somewhere.

I swear sometime in the next few days I'll get the pictures from our Monday in London posted here. Really. Soon.

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