Didn't I Miss Your Smilin' Face

By the way, markgritter and I are back from Milwaukee. timprov has more or less always been here (Maple Grove is nearly "here"), and missista is with my folks still (and until after the sleep-dep study at least -- we don't know specifics yet).

This morning I'm feasting on bread and water. Well, toast with homemade strawberry jam and water. Still, the milk had gone off enough that I could smell it, and we're out of almost everything else. So I get to brave the grocery store crowds with people who are shopping for their New Year's parties: joy! Still, necessary and all that. If I was really bright, I'd get in the shower right now and go while the clerks are all still bleary-eyed, but I'm apparently not that bright.

Also there will be laundry in, lo, great abundance. And unpacking. And finding spots for new things and writing down new books. I finished all but two of my pre-Christmas pile, and one of those is a WFC freebie and the other is something markgritter bought during the Pre-Christmas Book Blackout, on the theory that a) he didn't know Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley had co-written a book and b) we were unlikely to buy it for him out of the blue anyway. What this means, among other things, is that my book pile is now filled with things I wanted to read a good deal more and more recently than stuff I paid 10c for at a library book sale a year and a half ago. This Is Good.

2005: the book post

Books this year: 344.

Started but not finished: 29. This does not count the one I'm still reading today. This is books abandoned. This number is up from last year, which is up from the year before and so on: I didn't used to abandon books ever. I would read things that made me just miserable, but I would by God finish them. I no longer feel that this is a virtue. I have not been to the library this calendar year (and the reason is named dd_b), and my library list is five closely written pages and needs an update. There is absolutely no reason why I am a Good Kid for finishing books that aren't any good or aren't hitting me right at the moment. So I don't.

Notable rereads: I finished rereading the Vlad Taltos books and the Miles Vorkosigan books. Now I want more. Also I got Helen Cresswell's Ordinary Jack to read for the first time in almost two decades, so that was a happy thing. Oh, and Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, a-hey-hey. Also the annual-ish reread of Tam Lin, which has lost nothing except a bit of structural integrity -- the physical object, I mean, not the narrative.

I also reread the first six Anne of Green Gables books for the first time in years, and in some ways they held up well, and in others...not as well, I guess. Anne is a bit of a Mary Sue from time to time, and my reason for liking Emily of New Moon better still holds: Emily's best friend Ilse is not a sidekick but a best friend. Neither of them would have ever stood for being a sidekick. Anne's best friend Diana, on the other hand, could not be more of a sidekick if her parents had died in a highwire accident.

( Recommended )

Fortnight of December 18-31

Four rejections. I decided that when I didn't get this post done on the 26th when markgritter and I were home, declaring it a timely fortnight post instead of a timely and a belated week post would be a good idea. I'm surprised I haven't seen more postal rejections (even with the holidays) from people who don't want to pay the extra 2c on something they've had sitting around their office for months. I suppose they can always use the e-mail I've put prominently on the cover letter and manuscript both.

This afternoon we watched two Futurama Christmas episodes and a Tick Christmas episode. We could have been geekier, but not by much, I don't think.

We are just back from a lovely evening at Dragonsept, started a little earlier than perhaps one or two members of the household anticipated. I doubt that I'll see in the New Year, and that's kind of how the last half of 2005 has gone: cut back, no energy. Bleh.

As I said last year, I don't make resolutions all in a chunk, because when I see something I want to change, I tend to charge right in and try to do it right away. Charging right in has been one of the things I've been working on changing, this last half of 2005, but I just want to moderate the tendency, not get rid of it entirely.

Moderation. Yah. Hard key word, there. Well, have an immoderately happy New Year, then.