Off the Cliff

Dear lord, let Gladys Mitchell once set a book in Scotland and you can either skip a quarter of the verbiage because it's all place names, especially if a boat is involved, or get out an atlas and learn a little geography. I'm willing to admit that if someone did this with a place I know, like Japan, I'd be all happy nostalgia. I know nothing of Scotland and so I skip. Though it was another Mitchell that taught me where the bay of Biscay is ie not where I thought.

The elasticity of the Dead Days still amazes me. Impossible that Christmas was less than a week ago. But when you cram three seasons into seven days, and do nothing unusual on most of them, and *do* do the same things on all of them, time elongates like a holiday abroad. 

My baking friend brought her baking around last night. She assures me that lumbar pain needs core strengthening to cure it and that core strengthening begins with diaphragm breathing. I thought I already did that, though it's mostly when I'm lying in bed.  Well, I shall work on it along with the exercises I already have which don't seem to have affected my core at all. Online has all sorts of suggestions for it, which involve kneeling or holding weights or raising hands in the air, none of which my knees and elbows will permit.

I assume it's the pressure changes that are making me so sleepy and headachey. We haven't had that much snow, and I don’t know if there's any ice under what there is. The temps didn't plunge that fast, and certainly my steps seemed OK after I swept them off. But I wasn't about to do more than that.

Miraculously, in view of the English PO and our banks' SOP, both incandescens' present and my new bank card came in the mail today. And now the poor posties who slogged about in today's wind and slick have four days off, and more power to them.

My bank card seems to be tappable-- 'no need to enter your PIN'-- which strikes me as extremely dangerous. So if I drop it somewhere, anybody can use it to access $500 worth of merchandise? In what way is this safe and secure, guys? I shall be very very careful with it from now on, as I wasn't last week when I absent-mindedly stuck it in the freezer: is why I have a new one.

I may need to reconsider Kindle Unlimited Except Not. Their reasonable fee is in US dollars which becomes borderline questionable once converted. Am I likely to read $13 worth of ebooks a month, now that I see the end of Mrs. Bradley approaching? Well, maybe. Shall keep for the time being. Have just started on The Worsted Viper, which I in my innocence thought was about a viper that Mrs. Bradley got the better of. It's not, of course. Worsted as in wool, a Britishism from my past. But if you're calling things worsted, why is Laura wearing a sweater? and if that sweater wasn't in the original, what else has been changed?

On again, off again, good day, bad day. Have lost count what's what because relative warmth in December means dank. I call it a bad day when even the operated knee hurts, which it did today. This may be due to no massage or chiro for ten days, and I hope it is.

I withdraw from reality into books. Largely Mrs. Bradley, though I'm appalled at the fact that apparently when someone dies at a country house, in flipping August already, we just... leave the corpse in the bedroom for a day or two until the coroner can get around to empanelling a jury which will then view the presumably rotting body in situ, while everyone else goes on merrily drinking their martinis and playing tennis. Which surely can't be right?

Otherwise read Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadows, which is as other-worldly as one needs, and have a Wole Soyinka waiting. We draw near the end of borrowing physical books because snow will happen eventually. But I've discovered- to my astonishment- that I can actually read e-books on my phone without pain, or at least, can read Mrs. Bradley.

Is DW changing something around or what? Gives me a total blank screen until I start typing and then I have the entry box again. Unless I stop and then it's blank screen time again until I resume typing.

Accomplished yesterday, though it was one of my owie days. Got my Chrsitmas cards, next year's calendar, and next year's daybook from Midoco, got a new sinus rinse set at the pharmacy because the old one was looking grungy (nothing like squirting bacteria up one's nose) also eardrops for wax buildup though what I wanted and they didn't have was polysporin for ears. Which I forgot to look for at Loblaws today. Couldn't bicycle because  knees objected even with the setting turned down a notch, but managed 40 minutes today, so yay me.

Did the math and subscribed to Kindle Unlimited because $10 a month is cheaper than buying half a dozen Mrs. Bradleys at 2.15 a pop and then discovered that the first month is free. Discovered also that it's scarcely Unlimited because after I'd snagged two titles I was informed that I'd reached my borrowing limit. Also it seems that I don’t actually own the titles I'm reading? That I've borrowed them only? Must look closer at the ToS.

Was rooting about the mudroom the other day in search of something I won't find until I cease to need it, when I glanced at my bikes and thought Wonder if I can get my leg over the bar now? Tried and couldn't. Well, what about the smaller one? Tried and... couldn't. This left me disheartened, because it seems I'll never bicycle again and never walk unassisted again and oh woe is me might as well move into assisted living now.

Today I was going to hang some clothes on the line-- the window for which BTW is closing rapidly: if you don't get them there before 10 they won't be dry by 4. They promised us a warm fall which so far is not happening: highs are in the normal mid-teens which doesn't warm the house or dry the laundry. And I thought let's just try the bike, and this time I got my leg over the bar no problem. I'm still wobbly doing it and wouldn't dare trying to actually ride it, but still. Progress of a sort. But really, everyone was all about getting your range of motion back and nobody said a word about being steady on your feet. Certainly in the spring I was unable to stand on the scale because it wobbled and now I can. But sheesh, that took six months??! Equally, in the spring I could walk without the rollator for short distances but now muscles cramp constantly and I daren't let go.

Picked up a P.D. James from a Wee Free earlier this week when I was dining out and forgot to bring a book. Began reading and thought 'actually this isn't bad' and then my hamburger arrived. Picked it up today and within a page there she was again, burbling on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the beautiful proportions of the rooms in a Georgian house. Back to G. Mitchell who is currently burbling about Edinburgh. I can stand her geography porn much better than James' architecture porn because Mitchell's geography doesn't involve moral judgments, while James' architecture certainly does. In James, spoiling the lines of a drawing room by making a huge space into something more efficient is a crime worse than either murder or incest.

Mind, Mitchell occasionally prattles on, giving you information (like who is sitting where in relationship to whom at a dinner party) that actually has no bearing on the case in hand. Actually that dinner party happened before there was a case at all, and the whole set-up was one grand red herring.

It's odd that, though Toronto doesn't get typhoons-thank-god, it certainly gets typhoon weather, and today was one such. Grey, moist, uneasy fretful currents of air: and achey, oh so achey. More properly, I suppose, this is pre-typhoon weather before the real wind arrives and the horizontal rain starts. Only it didn't. The day resolved itself into the shimmery unreal sun that I remember from odd days in childhood and adolescence. Still humid, and made more unreal by the bleached-out yellow that the trees have gone after our dry summer. I mean, it's also 'try to remember the kind of September, when life was slow and oh so mellow' but certainly it's the antithesis of brisk fall days. And of course in such weather the allergies bloom like- well, like the bumper crop of ragweed up and down my street. Have finally had recourse to the heavy duty cough syrup and wait to see whether it has a benign or malignant effect this time.

Ever since the strawberry season started I've been having flax cereal and strawberries for breakfast. Such a nice change from overnight oats. But given the rate at which I go through cereal, I bought a family size box to save on packaging (and if only Nature's Path would have it in bags as they do several other of their cereal, I could save on the cardboard box too.) But strawberry season is ending. Fiesta had no Ontario strawberries yesterday and I know from experience that the imported ones are a pale imitation: quite literally pale, being white inside and tasteless. So I was pleased to find baskets of Quebec strawberries at the Palmerston greengrocers. I bought two, and may have enough to last most of the rest of the cereal box. Frozen strawberries are vile so not an option. OTOH frozen blueberries are fine, so I might use those when the real strawberries end. Can't say that I'm pining to go back to overnight oats, healthy though oatmeal is supposed to be.

Reason I was down at Palmerston was to pick up three Gladys Mitchells from the library. Computer informed me I had four but the fourth hadn't been shelved yet. In fact I had to find the third on the shelving trolley, and the fourth was probably still being elasticed with the hold slip. No matter: shall pick it up in a day or two. And have put holds on three more.

It's vulgar to rejoice in having Lots, but in reading I rejoice without shame. I wish I still had the oomph of my first year in lockdown when I attacked Mt. Tsundoku with might and main. Now all I want is easy reading easily come at. Thus it is that this year has seen me run through virtually the whole oeuvre of Elizabeth Peters in her various avatars, all the available Rex Stout, all the Ann Grangers except the Victorian ones which oddly left me cold, and am now happily going through the Mitchells that aren't in ebook form, because those I read last year. Some day I may find the energy for serious literature but for now, Mrs. Bradley it is.

Evidently muggy was not the word for yesterday. The humidex was *37* all yesterday evening. No wonder I dripped on the way home.

Today was marginally better in that a temp of 22 had a humidex of only 30, but of course it rained. Once again I got out between cloudbursts to pick up meds. And could have made it to the library for more holds this evening after the rain turned to magnificent purple and gold cumulus clouds, but elected to wash dishes and vacuum the living room instead. Then essayed getting onto the floor- easily done from the couch- and the exercise my chiro gave me yesterday- a variation on the bridge that can't be done on a mattress and that I can barely do on the floor. Of course, then came getting up which is letussay problematic. Or problematic on rainy humid days when knees refuse to play nicely.

Because it's allergy season I can't drink wine and don't want to drink tonic, so yesterday I bought various coolers to try. And my but coolers work remarkably well to iron out the achey pains. Fewer calories than I would expect, less sugary than my local's Singapore Slings, but also- really not something I should be drinking at all.

Christopher Fowler does not like Agatha Christie, as he says so very often either directly or in side swipes. But I'm finding Fowler's recs unsatisfactory, so when  I returned the tedious Miss Hargreaves yesterday, barely forty pages in to its 300 and many,  I got a collection of Christie short stories and read them tonight most happily. 

Oh, and that Innes was truly like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express, and even more unlikely. Shall say no more for fear of spoilers, but yikes.

I may have to buy my own copy of The Book of Forgotten Authors because even if I take notes, I forget the exact write-up, and may find myself putting a library hold on a domestic tale of smothering horror instead of a classic thriller written by a woman.

Though speaking of 'written by a woman', this is written by a man, which is the only reason I can think of why he includes Georgette Heyer as a forgotten author. Given that he's also a Brit, I have no idea why he also includes those household names Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, and Edmund Crispin. Man clearly doesn't move in the same circles I do. Did wonder if it was a generational thing but no, Fowler is a mere three years younger than I am. Maybe he believes nobody reads the above authors now except for people with literate boomer parents who passed their libraries on to the kidlings. But I'm a boomer and I got Ronald Firbank from my preWW1 mother. 

(Really, either she was a very strange woman or I was a very odd child, and I still don't know which. Who gives an eleven year old Swinburne and Sappho for Christmas, along with Louisa May Alcott and Antonia Forest's school stories?) 

 Bro and s-i-l came back from the cottage to find two inches of garbagey water in the sink. Maintenance came and snaked it to no avail. Unit above them had the same problem. Maintenance said it must be in the waste stack. Bro says there's no way for that unless someone put an elbow bend into it and who puts a bend into a waste stack. This is why I have no desire to rent a condo apartment, let alone buy one.

Went out to the super today with odd clouds besieging me from all sides. Came out to a black sea to the north and walked briskly as the thunder roared loudly, while the sun continued to shine from the rest of the sky. There was no rain and the thunder stopped after ten minutes. There was a severe thunderstorm with golf-sized hail in the northern part of the city, but it simply didn't make it downtown.

In Siren Queen, Nghi Vo is actually doing what Jo Walton did in Tooth and Claw- making metaphors into reality- but that's not at once apparent. If you go into it blind, it seems to be straight historical fiction until little oddities start to creep in and you realize that actually we're really not in Kansas anymore. You're left to figure the oddities out for yourself, and really I should go back and read the introductory chapters to see just when the strangeness begins. But I don't want to. And that's mainly down to my loathing of Los Angeles and all its works: because  Vo's Los Angeles is even worse than the real one. It gives me the same nightmare impression as Gideon the Ninth, a book that curdles my stomach just to think about-- even though I only got halfway through it.

Most of the handful of Inneses I've read so far have Appleby coming to or coming upon a stately home of some description- sometimes smaller, sometimes half ruined- where people proceed to be murdered. So it was nice for once to start a London-set mystery, except that in very short order things went-- well, if you don’t know Pratchett, Google 'Pratchett Summoning Dark images'. Things went like *that*. We're in wartime London, bombs falling all around, so of course we send two seniorish policemen off across the Atlantic on the trail of a psychic horse that can count. Not to aid the war effort either. Just because some aristocratic lady wants the horse found. I mean yes the past is a foreign country etc and I've read enough (in Rickman and elsewhere) about how the upper classes could get away with even more then than they can now, but still. I'd expect class privilege to be suspended for the duration

Am I to assume from that fourth wall breaking comment that early Innes does this sort of thing often? If so, I'll be more careful with my copyright dates.

But the weirdest thing of all is that I've read this book before and remembered nothing of it. Not the psychic horse, not the witch's cauldron, not Samuel Johnson and his servant Francis Barber failing to see the ghost in a haunted house. Not until I got to Appleby and the girl with several personalities did I realize that yes, I knew this book. And remembered that scene after all these decades because at the time I was certain it doesn't work like that. And still am.

Weather here is warm but pleasant. Went out to library, to Ninetails coffee shop with its beautiful androgynous Japanese baristas, and the new banh mi place at the end of the street. Was trotting home with my banh mi when I espy Josie from up the street standing with two rollators at the house cattycorner from me. One rollator was her own and the other was a freebie and she was debating how to get it back home. And since I'm semi-mobile, maybe, at times, I offered to take it over to my place and come back. Which did, but by that time Josie had also acquired a silver tray and some china odds and ends. She doesn't have a basket on her walker and I do, so shou ga nai, I ended up taking her finds up to her place, walking back to my place, taking her rollator up to her place, and walking back. She has a ramp to her front porch so I didn't have to do steps but the ramp (built by her sons) is unnervingly bouncy and I'm still not steady on my feet when in shoes, which is depressing. Did however score a Psmith book from the clean-out. I gather someone's surviving parent died and daughter was emptying the house of stuff no one wanted, like school texts of Shakespearian plays.

Finished Half a Soul, first of Atwater's regency fairytale. Enjoyed it but the author and her editor (if any) has no notion of the difference between will and shall. I know usage may differ by region (in Scotland at least) and by person for sure, and I'd have to think to tell you what the rules are: but my ear says that Atwater gets it wrong and it's like fingernails on the blackboard.

 In odd moments I've been watching youtube videos about Encanto and basking in the nostalgic fannish energy. Granted it's largely guys doing the talking, which is not fandom as I'm used to it, still. It's been so long since I've read people poring over a source and zeroing in on little details to construct explanations about who actually knew about Bruno and why the casita is actually the avatar of abuelo Pedro. 

(How do I turn off autocorrect on this thing? Not knowing fandom is one thing, not recognizing Spanish is quite another.)

And then there's the production guys going through the ideas that they rejected, which is like being given AUs by the writers themselves. Which the fans then discuss in detail, arguing about why this would have been good and that would have been disastrous. Ah, good times.

Rain was forecast and it certainly looked like rain but I went out to the laundromat anyway, go me. Except that I *of course* forgot the two items that I specifically wanted to wash in hot water, and forgot them because I use them daily and didn't put them in the laundromat hamper. Chiz curses.

Sent the collection of Aickman stories back to the elibrary, having made it through a grand total of three, or one quarter of the book. He's not quite as bad as Ishiguro, whose sense of menace is diffuse and unfocussed and may for all I know be peculiar to me. I mean, he  doesn't rank as That Kind Of Author, so the uneasiness I feel may never resolve into horrors. I just don't feel like tackling any more of his books because, after all, they might. (See: Never Let Me Go.) With Aickman you know things will be unheimlich, you just never know how, so my nerves are always stretched taut, waiting for the blow. This is not pleasant.

Having run out of cozy Ann Grangers for the moment, that would take the taste of Aickman out of my mouth, I started Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful. Bad move. I've never read Gatsby and don't want to read Gatsby because everything I've heard about it makes it sound nasty, brutish, and far too long. Vo may ring changes on it if I give it enough time, but so far the Gatsby bones are showing through, and I need something much blander or at any rate completely different to be going on with. I suppose I could take up Bleak House again...

The gov't sends me nudging emails about getting my second booster, but when I inquire at the pharmacy where I got the first I'm informed they have none. Gov't is saving them for the mass gov't run inoculation centres, where I have no desire to go. Well, shall see. Next omicron variant won't be around for a few months yet.

This was one of the things on my to do list which, by dint of ignoring my inertia reflexes, got done today.

Item: trousers to the tailor to be shortened to just below knee length so I can hopefully wear them in hot weather. I have one no-problem pair of heat wave pants that are growing thin. The new ones I bought turn out to be polyester, even if very loose, and I hate the feel of them. I have an ancient cotton pair that tends to ride down my hips and has been mended twice. All the others fit me fifteen pounds ago and don't fit now.

Item: getting new cheques on my lineof credit. Took forever because the clerk had to fill out all the details by hand, while consulting two other clerks. Evidently cheques on l.o.c and not on a chequing account is one of the things they didn't automate. Last time it was a matter of minutes, however many years ago that was.

Item: stamps from the postal outlet at Shoppers Drug. Not the closest post office to my house but feels like it is because it's east of me, not west. Now must fill out rebate form and mail.

Then went to Thai restaurant and dammit did have a cocktail and pad thai, even though there's still only one waitress there. It annoys me when I have an expensive massage and things still tighten up and spasm. Then went to new coffee shop three blocks over and had a caffe latte and a ginger cookie. Reckless indulgence. Worked it off this evening by bagging up vines I cut earlier, also many loads of cherry pits. And lower back still hates me.

Continue with Brideshead. Ex-Catholic me has a visceral Iya da! reaction to any and all Catholic characters. This may be the only thing I have in common with Southern Baptists, and that comparison ought to make me modify my attitude, but a reflex reaction is a reflex reaction, sorry. Though I agree with the character who called Sebastian's mother a vampire, and think her Catholicism was definitely a part of it.

Yesterday was the last guaranteed dry and blowy day, so I played Clothesline Roulette with the cherry tree and the birds. Lost two shirts to the cherries, by the look of it: dark stains that I immediately took dish detergent to. But my sleep shirt dried intact, in time for heat returning tomorrow. I give the cherries another week: they've largely been pecked at, but half-eaten squashy ones still litter my back garden.

Discover I have massage tomorrow and not Wednesday, luckily, because Wednesday will be in the mid-30s and possibly raining.

I've read a single Georgette Heyer in my life (the disappointing These Old Shades, because the young lad was not what I thought) but A Civil Contract showed up in someone's Wee Free Library and hell, it's summer, why not. Also my local library branch's computer has been down for days, so none of my holds can get registered and put on the shelf (librarian on Saturday waved a dispirited hand at the field of plastic boxes behind her, all holds waiting for a computer.) Thus I am down to my last two Ann Grangers, and one of them is a slow-moving Inspector Ross, so must make them last.

Speaking of Wee Frees, I'd kind of like to reread the Tiffany Aching books, but hesitate. I  read the first one in an unchancy and depressing June a dozen years ago, and I'd rather not be reminded of it. I reread it in an unchancy and anxiety-ridden April ten years ago. I think the only safe time to read the series is the fall.

I'm accustomed to the happy serendip of finding change in the pockets of a fall jacket or winter coat. Finding a pair of glasses in a summer hapi coat is a new one by me. Since I regularly and still misplace my reading glasses, I can't pinpoint exactly which 'what on earth did I do with my (backpack/ kitchen/ living room) glasses?' this pair is, but glad to have them anyway.

Allergies still bite so took a sip of codeine cough syrup. Doing this on Wednesday led to happy druggy experience. Today was just mild malaise.

Went to library yesterday to pick up two holds. Got my two holds, both Ann Grangers. Thought "wasn't there supposed to be a Pratchett waiting for me?" Yes, there was, and it's still there, but my mind was fixated on the number two. Also is supposed to rain this afternoon so won't be getting it before Monday. No matter: I have two Ann Grangers to read.

All respect to John Dickson Carr but truly I don't find it 'perfectly simple' to take a doorknob off, attach a string to the shaft inside so you can loosen the other knob at will and thus reveal an inch wide opening in the plate through which to shoot your victim with a crossbow. I don't think this MO would occur to anybody, let alone a middle-aged spinster in the 1930s who'd never used a crossbow in her life, or even taken a doorknob apart to see how it works.

Eating my belated breakfast yesterday (belated because I was indulging in a blissful warm lie-in amongst the feathers and flannel) I heard an odd low noise from somewhere seemingly in the house. Got up to investigate, got to bedroom door, and warm air puffed around my ankles. The furnace had turned on. Early in May when the lows still got to single digits C, I shoved the thermostat down to 15, figuring if it got that cold I'd be glad of some extra heat. When I got downstairs and checked the thermostat,  the thermometer part said 18, but obviously my furnace wanted to show willing. Turned the whole thing off because it's spring easing into summer here.

But then after I ran the water to wash the dishes, I could see steam rising from the sink. This doesn't usually happen. May be because the cold in the house is also a damp cold. But whatever it is, the chill has happily continued into today when that muggy warm air mass moved in. A cold house gives the AC effect of making outside seem warmer and damper than it is, which is one reason I stayed inside today. The other was that I took a water pill. Taken everyday, the effects aren't that noticeable; taken every few days, now that my ankles swell in the heat as they didn't in the cold, you'd better have a strong pelvic floor or court disaster, and I don’t have a strong pelvic floor. So I finished Abigail instead, and a very satisfying read that one was.

Then I go back to my library John Dickson Carr and his uniformly white upper class cast of characters, and oh dear, the contrast. Though I was wondering, all through Amongst Our Weapons, if Aaronovitch was being a little starry-eyed about his police force and the English public. Like, do white Londoners really not object when they're being questioned by two black policemen with no pale faces in sight? And Seawoll, who apparently prefers to mentor women rather than men, even if they're lesbians or Somali. This does not sort with what I read about police forces in the Graun.

  There was a helicopter or two buzzing the area as I limped down to the library this evening, round and round and round and driving me frantic. More evidence of neurodiversity, maybe? Couldn't think what or whom they might be looking for, but neighbourhood FB group said someone threw a suspicious package through the window of  a business down Bathurst. The bomb squad was called and traffic was halted down Bathurst which is a parking lot at the best of times. No idea how a helicopter can help in a manhunt, but whatever. Earlier today a boy was slashed in the arm by a knife at Christie Pits, the big glacier-scar park down the road from me. Urban scuttlebutt says it's a drug dealer hangout, which seems unlikely to me. Wide open spaces full of dogs, with no shelter or dark corners.The hold I went to get is another Midsomer murder. The last one dispatched the victim by page 60, so it rattled on, but this one is looking to be another 'Cranford with murder' so you must irst be introduced in depth to a whole bunch of unpleasant people, their thoughts and backgrounds, for several hundred pages before anyone is killed. Can't I have another easy-read Golden Age detective instead?

In these cold April mornings of 'bed is so warm let's just stay here' sleep-ins, I have very vivid, very detailed dreams that never carry over into full wakefulness no matter how much I rehash them when I believe- erroneously-- that I'm fully awake. But I do know that I'm almost always Japanese or in Japan. (Oh, right: today's was about the extreme national mourning for the Meiji emperor which somehow involved cutting long, shiny, bright red tickets out of magazines. And another, with no details or visuals remaining, was about the frustrations of navigating the Tokyo subway.)

It feels like I've been reading something Japanese that slops over into my dreaming, like previewing something in Libby, but Libby is stubbornly insistent that I haven't previewed anything since Rex Stout even though I know I have: something unheimlich that my mind refuses to remember. So maybe the fons et origo really is Black Water Sister and its spirits. (I didn't need google for that one, unlike Spirits Abroad, but I'd have liked a character list because I can't keep the various gods and shamans straight.)

Lovely March day- blue skies, breeze, jacket weather- so I walked to acupuncture and on the way stopped at a new cafe in the 'hood that was once a Korean grocery, then a convenience store, then a dry cleaners- and which now is a place I must avoid because its cinnamon walnut rolls are so utterly utterly. The idea is that I'm trying to lose the plus/minus ten pounds/ 4.5 kilos that bread and butter and crackers and jam and chocolate and alcohol and lack of exercise put on in the last two months, and cinnamon walnut rolls is not the way to do it. Nor is the Japanese cheesecake I ordered on Saturday nor is the fried chicken and fries I had for dinner. Some day, maybe.

But yes, walked there and walked back and whatever my back and knees and hips are like in the morning (hint: unmoving spasm) once I'm in motion things are better than they were. So I must be content.

Archie's view of women apparently reflected Rex Stout's. Stout thought that any man could write better than any woman. Then he read Austen and conceded he was wrong, at least about her. Which is sheesh enough, but then I remind me that in his last book he had a feminist character (de Beauvoir and Friedan on the bookshelves etc) that Archie wants to go question, but Saul says he'll go instead because "I don't look like a male chauvinist and you do." Touche, Mr. Goodwin.

I have finally stopped answering comments on FB,  which is much better for my health. Of course, it leaves me with no social interaction at all, but also of course, interacting with jackasses is  bad for the blood pressure. Also depression: it's hard to believe anti-maskers are a minority when there's so many of them and they talk so very loud. This is why I should wean me off FB entirely, especially as FB likes to hide posts from the people I actually want to read.

Taking a break from Nero Wolfe with Dorothy Gilman. Horndog Archie is getting on my nerves. Maybe I *should* reread some Brust. Vlad ma be an assassin but he's a nicer person than either Nero or Archie.

Came back from acupuncture to messages on the voice mail. Somebody's garbled thank you for supporting blah blah blah. Probably a food bank but since I can't hear who, I delete. Next: 'This is a message from UHN (my hospital) Your appointment tomorrow has been changed to 10 o'clock.' Er well, I have two phone appointments tomorrow, one at 8:45, one at 5. I hope it's the 8:45 one but just in case I keep the phone by the bed. Which rings at 8:50. The surgeon checking in, who seems happy with my condition (I'm not) and will call me again in a year. Oh joy.

So it's the 5 pm one changed to 10. I do minimal exercise and go to have breakfast at the computer. 10 o'clock comes. 10:15. 10:20. Call up voice mail. 'The following message will be deleted from your mailbox. Your message from (pause) UHN dated (pause) January 5 at (pause) 9:15 a.m. "This is a message from UHN..." You could have told me the date yesterday, guys, and I could have gone back to sleep for an hour.

In the past few days I've come across people reviewing The Man Who Died Twice. Didn't read because I haven't read it, but my hold came in on Sunday. Went to look for the reviews in the FL and FFL where I'd seen them. Not a sausage.  There are only three people whose FL/ circle I cruise, but I've gone back two weeks on all of the them and no sign of any review. Vexing, because after a chapter or two I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep reading-- spies being not my thing-- so eventually I sent it back to the '5 people waiting' and returned to my line of least resistance Nero Wolfes. 

The cordless phone in the bedroom is less than satisfactory, in that I can barely hear the person on the other end. Looking at it today, I saw an unnoticed button in the corner: Spkr. You have to press the speaker button to hear anything, just as with my cell. And my question is, simply, why? What purpose does it serve? It's just another button to press. And on a cordless? The phones at work never had spkr buttons, and I'm annoyed that this one does.

All this made worse by the fact that the person I was trying to talk to- before I transferred to the study phone- was calling from the insurance company, asking questions I'd already answered before, in an Indian accent so thick I had to keep asking her to repeat things, which is embarrassing. Normally I can handle most Indian accents but I've either lost the ability or lost part of my hearing or both. She said things like GAIR-edge for garage, and I heard furnished for finished, and it was an exercise in serious cross-purposes. But at least she called me to ask about updates instead of happily waiting for me to read the new policy and call them and tell them that, seriously, the plumbing *has* been updated since 1910, though the policy itself came back not updated at all. Possibly my new roof and new breaker panel will cut something off my premiums, though I'm not holding my breath. And I could have done without her tut-tutting that I should call them any time I have work done on the place, a bit of information that no one has ever mentioned in the thirty-five years I've been paying insurance.

I grow more and more crippled so must go back to the intellectual doing of exercise, which I neglect because I'm back in the paralysis of the will that began last week, and also because I really don't want to return to those thrilling days of last summer and its three times a day of 45 minutes exercise. I'm *tired* of exercise. 'I do not like this game, I don't want to play it anymore.'

I've also been resisting the urge to read Vlad Taltos because that's a rabbit hole I don't want to disappear down. As a substitute I read Nero Wolfe, or rather Archie Goodwin, who goes down easy and has fifteen zillion ebooks to borrow and isn't quite as addictive as Vlad or even Paarfi.

No point in doing a look back at 2021 because there was little to remember. By comparison, 2020 was crammed with activity. But I became seriously crippled in the spring and didn't want to do anything after that but read mindless detective fiction. The roof was reshingled. I had some nice dinners in the summer and early fall with bro and s-i-l. I did a lot of exercise. But the operation really solved nothing because everything that hurt before still hurts, except now it's the other knee that pangs. But still with the lumbar region and the ITB and the damnable elbows that are missing their weekly acupuncture session.

Got down to the bank machine on Bloor and deposited my cheque, go me. Except I have a sneaking suspicion that walking is what causes those waking muscle spasms. I hope not. Have tanked up on the prescription relaxants and done much stretching all day, so we'll see what happens tomorrow. Six weeks post-op and I still need my walker in the morning, and of course when walking outside. The operated knee still feels weak, but doing stairs should strengthen it.

Should have stopped by Doug Miller to see if they have Our Mutual Friend, though come to that, isn't that the one with the Golden Dustman and his sickening little plot? (Can't google it because desktop Chrome now won't link to wikipedia. Clock errors. I want someone to clean up my WinXP so I can go on using it, because I will never buy another Microsoft product. Too damned old to learn new OSs.) Anyway, still have many hundred pages of Sentimental Dickens Hates On Chancery to get through first.

Oh, that lost Victorian detective story on Gutenberg is The Dorrington Deed-Box and I read at least two of the stories therein a year ago, over Christmas in fact, probably in some Rivals of Sherlock Holmes collection. Which collection left out the first story, the one that tells you that Dorrington is actually a Master Criminal and not an upstanding sleuth at all, so that I was a tad perplexed to find him taking on murderers as business partners. But there's a story about a Japanese sword that the son of a samurai family wants to get back from the English collector who has it in his collection, and fairly clearly Arthur Morrison knew his way around Japan. Can't google howcum because no wikipedia-- and very few other sites either-- but he collected woodblock prints and left them to the BritMus.