flemmings | (no subject)

Happy birthday,

incandescens! I hope it is/ was excellent, and that the continuation of it at work tomorrow at least partially soothes the fact that it's Monday (and that you have to provide your own birthday cake, which seems to me *all wrong*.)

Is cold. Is not cold enough to kill off the ragweed or whatever causes the itchy eyes and itchy throat. Passing Blawblaws y'day, saw they were having a tax free day and so bought two bottles of my lens solution for a scant $20. And then thought, 'I've worn my lens maybe one afternoon out of the last month and even then it wouldn't stay in. Why am I buying this stuff again?' My brain seems to have happily settled to this 'left eye short-sighted, right eye long' thing; unlike

mvrdrk's husband, I have no difficulty with middle distance.

Years back

paleaswater lent me Martha Welles' The Death of the Necromancer, pointing out the vanishing m/m subtext ('it was there when I read it the first time and then it wasn't.') I found it well enough but not grabbing; bought my own copy intending a reread some time but never did. Now someone on my FFL says 'isn't tDotN sort of Sherlock Holmes but from Moriarty's point of view?' That plus hints of steampunk (a word I didn't know in '05) suggests the reread should be soon.

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Thank you very much! It is being very nice and rather lazy.

I'm probably just used to the "bring in the cakes yourself" aspect by now: I do note that with fourteen or so people in the team, it does result in a nice turnover of nibbles. And to be fair, the team did all sign a birthday card for me. (One only gets Kindles or similar-scale presents on the 40th birthday or other important dates...)

Is true: left to the Powers, you'd probably get the same sort of cake every time. (Mousse in our case, and I'm no fan of mousse cakes.)

Kindles doubtless ease the pain of major birthdays. A nice thought.

Another coworker recently had his 40th birthday. His present, purchased via a whip-round from the team, included a pair of sock-suspenders. (He is a stylish gentleman.) I emailed him a copy of the Diplomatic Platypus poem. (I had a duck-billed platypus when I was up at Trinity / With whom I soon discovered a remarkable affinity...)

There is, of course, the issue of getting cakes which are neither the lowest common scrape-the-bottom-of-the-barrel denominator, nor so expensive that it makes other team members feel uncomfortable. But there are worse problems to have.

But how did you know he wanted sock suspenders? Had he been dropping hints? (Calf-high socks are guaranteed to fall down. No elastic is strong enough to keep them up, and I wonder greatly why manufacturers keep making them instead of knee highs. Then again, knee highs fall down too.)

I'm honestly not sure why they were chosen as a present for him (I just dropped a couple of pounds into the kitty). He is a bit of a dandy. In a nice way. His shirts are always excellent. And I understand he has been wearing the sock-suspenders. Possibly he'd dropped a hint in the ears of those who were purchasing the presents, or at least expressed an interest.

Definitely this calls for a reread for me as well. I got another one of her more recent books. Rather forgettable (in fact have forgotten the name already), but I also read an interview about it, and I kind of understood why I was getting that confused sense of something from her books -- when she was in fandom she wrote slash, but her thing/button was bisexuality. No wonder...

That explains much. Her style does nothing for me-- it's workable American prose ie tapwater-- so one needs some kind of hook to keep going. It's possible that the Sherlock thing was deliberate; wish I could remember whose FL I was reading when I found that.