(no subject)

This is where I'm going this afternoon.

Half of the rosemary buns are in the oven, and the other half are already out.

One of my friends in California e-mailed, "I'm surprised it's nice enough for a picnic there."

It's not, not really. It's cool and drizzly. We're going anyway. I'll have the little terra cotta thing in the bread basket to keep them a little warm. I think it'll be good.

Week of October 17-23

Two rejections, no acceptances. And four "Oh, hell, I give up"s. I hate giving up on a market, even temporarily, but sometimes it needs doing. Eight months after the query -- on a short story submitted long before that -- no. Just, no. That market loses.

Picnic: good. It rained. It was cold. My hands got severely chilly, and I begin to think Ceej was right to wear his goofy furry hat. I think I would have enjoyed myself less if it had been balmy. There was soup with slices of garlic in it, and as I got towards the end of what I was able to eat (of the portion markgritter had given me -- he's not used to gauging how much I can eat), I fished out the garlic and ate it, even though the rest of the soup was also good, because, hey, I mean, garlic. People ate many rosemary buns, but we still have some leftover for today and tomorrow.

I have never had leftover rosemary buns 48 hours after making them. In this case, I made a double batch but then took them to share, and if there are any left by the time our dinner guests get here tomorrow, I'll bet there won't be when they leave. In fact, just talking about it makes me want to go downstairs and get a rosemary bun now. But I will wait for dinner. Whatever that ends up being.

I got my necklaces from porphyrin and now have "Stella check" on a note on my monitor. Now that I've removed the large fuzzy thing, the foxtail-colors necklace goes perfectly with what I'm wearing today, and I'm learning what beads it has while I think. There is more of it than of me, when it isn't looped up. But it is looped up, so. Happy beads.

I'm currently reading Jon Margolis's The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964: the Beginning of the "Sixties": The Book With Too Many Subtitles. I bought it at the April book sale (there's one going now, and we don't know if we're going tomorrow or not), when I had just gotten Kurlansky's book on 1968. Seemed like it would go well together, but then I read the Kurlansky and never picked this one up. I was feeling like some nonfiction totally unrelated to Thermionic Night, so here we are, it and me. Margolis has the good grace to immediately admit that it's a bit disingenuous to refer to Americans as innocent in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never mind the whole slavery and treatment of indigenous peoples thing, so he started out not annoying me as much as he could have if he'd bought into the Innocent, Innocent Fifties meme. Occasionally he gets carried away by his own rhetoric into saying something blatantly stupid, but I have had to mutter comparatively few imprecations. Always a bonus.

Revisions progress nicely. I'm still enjoying them. I'm generally in a really cheerful mood this week, despite some less-than-cheerful events and despite being the only healthy person frequenting this address just now. markgritter leaves on another business trip Monday, so that's not the best thing ever. Also I'm coming into the part with my new birth control where two of the three previous prescriptions started misbehaving themselves severely, so I'm a bit wary of making plans. But I think I should just alert people to the fact that we may have to do something involving me scrunching up my face and drinking something warm, and then it'll be fine. And with the mood I've been in, I may be scrunching up my face and drinking something warm but cheerfully. Who knows.