Found around

Gender-switched Hobbit, with much fun as the comments segue off to Lord of the Powertools: "Do not read the instruction booklet aloud! For it is written in the Black Andecker Speech..."

Got this from lnhammer who cites his subject lines, as ever- 'from "As Hermes once took to his feathers light," John Keats.' I, one-eyed and blurry, saw that as 'As Holmes once took to his feathers light' and wish it had been.

ETA: LJ seems to be doing its occasional trick of not showing lj users' names after the tag, at least not on my outdated browser. That's lnhammer.

And here dreamer_easy provides a nice parallel to the Japanese ability to suss out other people's rank so as to be able to talk to them.

Time travel

Christmas season is bad enough for scrambling the time sense. But having two days off smack in the middle of the week, which we haven't done in forever*, completely confuses my sense of what happened when. The weekend? The holiday? Or one of those unscheduled days off? Not helped by liberal doses of snow and ice, that reduce one's memory to indistinguishable episodes of Shovel and Slide.

* Every year since 2002 the two-day holiday has attached to a weekend or been prorogued to the following Monday or Tuesday, or both. Only exception was 2007 when Monday 24 was a half-day on holiday schedule and I didn't work. No wonder I'm adrift.

But cudgelling brains reveals that it was just last Friday that I went to the local coffee house for an at-long-last latte. Cafe has small book exchange, rarely disturbed, with several of my duplicate Pratchetts and someone else's Dick Francises. Picked up Proof, read sixty pages, found myself back in February 1994 in Tokyo. Good times, good times.

Am half-tempted to finish it with my at-home copy and half to keep on with the one there. This supposes my being able to get there at all in this end of week's forecast arctic temps.