Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

+ Tiny dusting of snow!!! I will take it. It's better than no snow.

+ Concert last night: good good good. Antje Duvekot opened, and WPA was the main act. Definitely worth my time and energy and money to see. Also it was a grown-up concert at the Cedar, which means chairs to sit in and a concert that starts on time. Hurrah. Duvekot said it was her worst set ever. If this is the case, she is a candidate for best worst set ever.

+ Pepparkakor dough in a minute. Cookie Day tomorrow. Yay! First Cookie Day with Grandma in town to share it! Yay!

- People. Nobody is tone death. Some people are tone deaf. Tone death would be some kind of superpower; I'm pretty sure you only wish that the person in your office who cannot sing but does so anyway would die a tone death. One problem with teaching children to spell phonetically is that some of them do not enunciate for sour owl crap, and spend their time around other people who do not enunciate for sour owl crap.

- Online clothing retailers, seriously: size first, color second. When does anybody ever say, "Well, I totally want the purple one, but I don't care which of the six sizes is available?" This is an instance where size very much matters. You do not buy your 2XL aunt or your XS aunt an M sweater because M is what the retailer has and you like that sweater. If you do, you are being stupid and should stop.

- DVD manufacturers: stop putting an infinite repeat sound loop on the menu screen. It makes perfect sense to put the DVD in and go somewhere else to do laundry, put something in the oven, etc. while the warnings and disclaimers are playing. Nobody who is up to their elbows in clean, dry towels finds the experience enhanced by the same thirty seconds of your theme song over and over again. Just stop.

My primary e-mail (marissalingen.com, not gmail) is receiving but not allowing me to send. In fact, it appears to be eating the things I have attempted to send, including one longish epistle. This is not the most pleasing event ever, though of course I am quite capable of coming up with ways it could be worse without breaking a sweat. The resident networking systems expert and I have scowled at it and determined that any of a number of things could be wrong with it, none of which are fixable on our end. Bah. Bah, I say! Also possibly harumph.

Having a well-fitting, comfortable brassiere, a string of very shiny stones, and warm socks on (along with assorted other garments and adornments) does not fix everything. In fact, it fixes hardly anything.

Still nice, though.

The lussekatter, you will recall, eventually did rise. Hurrah. But my favorite music box is broken and the meringues won't mer, and I have given up. No meringues this year. I have made them a dozen times, and it always went better than this. I think the cream of tartar is old, and I will get new cream of tartar next year, and we will have meringues then. But this morning it is not Solstice, and it's not Christmas Eve, and I accept defeat. No meringues. Also no driving my dad mad with the music box when he comes to fetch me for our Christmas Eve outing. It will still be Christmas without those things. I know that. I'm still not pleased with them. I think I can be allowed to have a merry Christmas and not be merry about a few things in specific.

(Two notes: these are not just any meringues, so going out and buying me random bakery meringues absolutely will not help and will probably make me miserable instead. Also, I am an experienced baker and know what to try to fix things like meringues that won't mer, and none of it worked, and so now is not the time to poke your nose in suggesting that what I really ought to have done to make the meringues go was ______. Thanks.)

I mean, I could sing "Jingle Bells" in a really annoying nasal voice, and it would probably also drive my dad nuts, but it just wouldn't be the same. The point is not to drive my dad nuts at random. That's not how this goes. It's to pull the string on the music box. To no avail, and markgritter tried fixing it and did not manage it, in such a way that I think this music box has reached the end of its tinny, annoying, beloved lifespan.

Also I still can't lean on my left elbow without the pain shooting up my arm, and it was ten days ago that I had that fall, and sure, I've had others since, but not on that elbow. Bah.

Pretty soon my relentless good cheer and bloody-minded optimism will come flooding back to me. But now would be a good time to tell me a few of your favorite things.

Here, I'll start:
1. gaaldine's evil laugh in its tiny breathy evil juggernaut glory.
1a. When gaaldine is laughing evilly because she's being evil to the_overqual. That enhances the experience so much.
2. Godkids and niecelet, together again for the first time.
3. Icelandic Christmas goblin in the mail (thanks, A.!).

What I wanted this year -- what I have wanted every year since I became verbal -- was snow on Thanksgiving. And I got it. Only a dusting, not enough to cover the grass, but still, it's an early Thanksgiving this year; any snow is bonus snow. My grandfather's health has improved drastically in the last ten days, with every indication that this is to be a lasting improvement; we have plenty of pie; and the porch roof is covered with snow. If that's not good, I don't know what is.

The world continues to be so full of a number of things. Thank you for being one of those things, and for exposing me to more of them.

Despite waking up for an hour or so in the middle of the night too dizzy to sleep, I went back to sleep, and woke up rested and non-dizzy!

The box of Ha'penny and A Chosen Few and my first Mammals CD and timprov's Dar Williams DVD arrived!

Non-dizzy means that very soon I will be baking a cake! Because I knew you were coming! So I'm baking a cake! How-de-do, how-de-do, how-de-do! Well, for some limited values of "you," anyway!

I think we've figured out our charity budget for the year, and that means I get to give money to people who will put it to excellent uses artistic, scientific, and humanitarian!

Being not-dizzy when I feared I would be dizzy sometimes goes to my head. But not in a dizzying sort of way. Just in a "using up the exclamation mark quota for the rest of the year" sort of way.

Josh Ritter in concert is good. Good recording artists don't always mean good performing artists, but Josh Ritter is having an awfully good time on stage, and so are the guys who play with him. I expect that I'll want to get to future shows of his, and timprov and elisem seemed to have similar reactions.

In other news yesterday, I remembered when I was walking the dog that I got my first glasses in the fall. I remember what a revelation it was that you could see the individual leaves on trees, that they weren't just a blur of one color with sometimes shading into others. I appreciate that again every fall. I know that sounds all breathy and rose-colored, but it doesn't hurt to remember that some things actually are pretty nice, all things considered.

I've been trying to revise one stupid short story -- all right, it's not stupid, and that's the problem: if it was stupid, I could trunk it and walk away. But anyway, I've been trying to revise this same story for quite awhile, and I've gotten a phrase here and a paragraph there and gone back and redone some of the redone phrases and paragraphs. The time it has been sitting here waiting for me is far out of proportion to its length. (Far. No, really. Farther than that. Very far.) And then yesterday while I was standing looking at a stand of poplars gone yellow and waiting for the dog to finish adequately sniffing a particularly fascinating clump of grass, there was a plot point neatly wrapped and tied with a bow, wholly relevant and fitting the spot where something needed to go, and all of a sudden the story looked un-stupid again. And also the book revisions continue going well, so in general I am very cheerful about revising. Which is most of the writing work I'm doing for the next few days, so good cheer in that area is pretty meaningful in the rest of my life, so...good then. Definitely good.

You remember how I was talking about trying to see things as opportunities rather than obligations?

You would need a really big mallet to get more opportunities into my life right now, is the thing. Even just the ones that are entirely self-generated and have nothing to do with real, life, interactive other people.

Here are some recent opportunities:

I had the opportunity to learn (from a very small friend) a song featuring the chorus construction, "Wait a minute -- we're fish! We don't have to ______." Of course, my brain says, "Wait a minute -- we're fish! We don't have to figure out which novel to write next."

I had the opportunity to walk a very happy small dog and a moderately happy big timprov over to the library and back.

I had the opportunity to read the first several chapters of a book I recently drafted, and to discover that while they need revision in several particulars, they are not irredeemably sucky and do not make me want to moan and howl and hide under the desk until the big bad book goes away. And that, in fact, some of the problems with these chapters and some of the things I was hoping to manage to do in the next draft line up rather nicely. This opportunity will continue for many, many more chapters.

I had the opportunity to clean the new front steps in preparation for waterproofing them. Better living through chemistry usually sounds more interesting than this, but since doing it will give me the opportunity not to have to pay for new steps again in another couple of years from not taking care of these, all right, opportunity recognized.

I had the opportunity to review our bank's procedure for when several thousand dollars of deposit goes awry. Fun fun!

I had the opportunity to do something very silly that will (I hope!) make a friend laugh a great deal next time she comes here, so we will have to see about making that latter opportunity happen.

You will please excuse me, as I have the opportunity to fall over soon.

One rejection. I've managed to slip in some short story work this week without harming the focus on the novel, which is nice. I'd like to have a few more stories making the rounds.

I got copies of these today to give to a rather small percentage of my relatives. Haven't gotten my contributor's copies yet, but I saw that Amazon had them in stock, and I had some hopes that they'd arrive while the Swedes were still here. (Didn't, obviously, but I have some other things to put in a package to send over there anyway.) Ahh, the magic of glue.

I'm hoping for books for my birthday, because my to-read pile is now nonexistent: I'm in the middle of the last book that was on it. There's at least one thing on markgritter's pile I haven't read yet, and of course there is plenty of potential for rereading, with the books we have around here. I won't go into text starvation mode. But -- still, no books on my to-read pile! Astonishing!

One rejection. And I need to find time to send that story back out again -- not sure where it's going, is the problem -- but now is not that time. We have company now and will until July 5, varying somewhat over that time. It's all good company, but don't expect a lot of posting until after July 5.

Also I am missing some other social functions I would otherwise have liked to attend, but the world is full of wonderful things. Even when I can't share them with you, I hope you're enjoying them yourselves.