Off the Cliff

Whole entry vanishes when I leave the page to look something up. And I did do 'select all' and 'copy' before I left, but then I went and thoughtlessly copied something else.  Oh well. You don't need to hear me moaning about my owie tendons or hangul study.

But I did break down and buy vol 4 & 5 of MDZS on kindle and have finished the main story. I will say, it's compulsively readable. But also confusing with its extended flashbacks of various sorts. Took my copies of 2&3 back to the library yesterday, also Heaven Official 1&2, which didn't  grab me, and Hild, that I didn't get far with.  But yesterday I was despairing of being able to walk again, or at least to walk without pain, and the first sleet of the season was scheduled for today, an omen of things to come. Granted the library no longer has fines, it's also currently unable to tell me when all these books were due, owing to someone hacking the system; and for all I know it can't process holds either. But I still wanted to get these much in demand volumes back to the source.

It's a pleasant enough life I lead these days‐ squaredle every morning, Questionable Content every (weekday) evening,  tiktok videos of sheep herding dogs (that's shepherding dogs, Border Collies to be precise) from which I learn that 'Come by' tells the dogs to go clockwise and 'Away' means 'go counter-clockwise', which Pratchett failed to inform me  in the Tiffany Aching books. Also Chinese webnovels at need. Approach the end of vol 3 of MDZS and discover the library doesn't own vols 4 & 5 in any form, alas. There are kindle versions for not excessive amounts though I'd hoped to be done with amazon and kindle for at least a month after having glutted myself on David Wishart through most of October. And in any case I have not merely two volumes of Heaven Official to get through but Hild as well, appearing at the library just as the library's computers went down, and I doubt Hild reads as quickly as Chinese BL.

I walk even when it rains because my wonted sedentary life will barely get me a hundred steps. Today was sun and dry and brilliantly yellow, so I didn't have to deal with the leaf mat that sticks to the walker's wheels and requires carrying a water bottle and a cloth to remove them periodically. Can only conclude that I never went out walking in the days before my operation, or not in the rain, because I don't recall having this problem at all two years ago and now it's a chronic one, spring and fall. Of course, what I did get today was a dry leaf secreting itself invisibly in the casing and driving me mad with its rustling. Rain returns tomorrow,  of course, and temps fall to normal or below. Got a last laundry on the line- shall rely on the furnace hereafter- and filled a garden waste bag with leaves from the front yard trees. Elbows and back screamed at me for doing so. I hope tomorrow's acupuncture will ease the former at any rate. And then I can go back to sleeping in in the mornings. I have no objection to waking at 9:15 but I hate getting up then, and people *will* give me 1 p.m appointments that obviate against sleeping in till 11:30.

And may I say how very very much I hate those paper garden waste bags? They're too deep to reach into to unfold the bottom quarter but if you don't they fall over and fall down and generally induce screaming rage in me. I swear I'm going to start cutting the top foot off just to ease the frustration.

Seen today: two guys tipping over one of the huge recycle bins (a good 1.5 metres in height) so the idiot raccoon that had somehow got itself inside it could get itself out. Also two hopping insects, a bit small and dull to be grasshoppers, disporting themselves amongst the fallen leaves.

Two nights of disturbed sleep for no reason I know of. It's very disconcerting for me to wake up to darkness several times. Once yes, but three times? Anyway, last night got me two literary dreams: the first was a Dick Francis novel which sleeping brain thought was one of his real ones, just in technicolour. Details gone so I don't know if it was or not. Second was a Peter Grant involving, if I have this correctly, sex magic with fish milt, commentary on Peter's methodology provided by a young girl who should have been Abigail but may have been me.

Lots more Mo Xiang Tong Xiu arrives at the library, along with the newly purchased Jane Austen A/U which must read first ('20 people are waiting'). By the time I get through that and three volumes of MDZS, vol 1 of Heaven Official's Blessing may have arrived. Meanwhile I'm halfway through MDZS 1. I was wondering  when we'd get to the ostensible premise of The Untamed, 'Together they fight crime!' and I think we just got there. Pretty amusing still, with everyone balancing on swords and swooping about. I did wonder if I shouldn't just watch the series on netflix, but probably not. As with the anime, I have a sneaking suspicion that the live action version was for people who'd read the web novel; certainly the sense of What's going on here? as well as the general darkness was what put me off the anime. Yes, I know it starts at night; I still couldn't make out what was going on.

Though I hope Wei Wuxian will start being a tad less tiresome in time, because for now he's very tiresome indeed.

The partial eclipse up here was nothing much. The sun was behind a cloud so no wonder if things looked a tad pale. Even the full eclipse in 2017 didn't do much except leach colour from the world. I was expecting, yanno, a twilight darkness or something like in The Last of the Wine.

The thing that makes Marcus Corvinus so readable, one of the things, is the dramatis personae at the start. I'm trying to read a Gervase Fen and cannot, cannot, keep the five or six white-bread-named male characters (all introduced in the first chapter) separate. One of them's a Nigel, which ought to help, but there's a Nicholas as well, and a Robert and a Richard and a Donald. Granted it's not as bad as American Jim and Bob and Jack and Matt and Tom, but it's still not easy.

Walking to Bathurst and back gets me over a thousand steps, meaning it really is farther than to my old coffee shop out west, which comes in at about 800. Walking down to Bloor and then to my usual Japanese restaurant gets me close to 2000, and that I regard as an ordinary walk. Of course today was an achy all over day, especially my ankle in its brace, so it wasn't by any means a *fun* ordinary walk. I do wonder who are these people who get 10,000 a day. Maybe they take three hour walks? The app wants me to believe I only walked 35 minutes all told which seems unlikely. It takes me 30 minutes just to get to Bathurst.

Also this is the second Korean/ Japanese restaurant to introduce spoons for drinking one's miso soup. I have no idea why, after all these years. I know Korean etiquette is against picking up your bowls to eat, but miso shiro is Japanese and you always drink from the bowl. Frankly I hate using a spoon for soup: there's always spillage and of course western etiquette is not to tuck your napkin in at the neck so of course your top gets stained.

I have a bad habit of many years' standing of frittering my autumns and winters away reading mystery series. They aren't always time wasters but frequently are enough so, that I get scratchy about my inability to do anything but read about various Inspectors (Rutledge, Barnaby, Ben Ross, Mitchell and Markby, Campbell and Carter) or Flavia deLuce or Wells and Wong or the much abused Sebastien St Cyr. Or Nero Wolfe, which one should read at least once, or Sarah Caudwell ditto, or Hazel Holt or Christianna Brand. (I don't count Gladys Mitchell in this. Mitchell is an immersive experience.)

Anyway, I'm trying not to be sucked into wise guy private Roman eye Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and his wine snobbery, but it's a losing battle. Especially when my alternate Littrachure reading is the oogey-making Lincoln in the Bardo, which finished today thank goodness.

Coherent dream last night of being back at what passed for my Japanese dorm which was a much more upscale place with french doors leading out to a garden. It had been snowing heavily-- several feet worth-- but the blessed Japanese staff had cleared it all away so I could go catch my train no problem, because the garden was also the platform for the trains. And then I was in a train dream, heading out to meet Finder Jean as I often am in these dreams, amid the grey looming concrete of the stations. And as also often happens, there was some problem getting there, but I've forgotten what. Usually it's me trying to call and the phone not working.

Swiffered the bathroom and upper hallway yesterday, was unambitious and achy today so only succeeded in cleaning some hard water deposits on the bathroom sink. Lincoln in the Bardo awaits me at the library but meanwhile I'm doing Dick Francis in Rome ie David Wishart's White Murder. Marcus Valerius Corvinus is preferable to Marcus Didius Falco if only because he has fewer hangups and doesn't make such bad decisions. Though one of these days he's going to call the wrong person Sunshine and that will be that.

(When you're wondering how often men think about the Roman Empire, factor in what they're reading at the time. I have spent close on fifty years not thinking about the Romans but now I do. And I'll say this for them: in Rome a slave could buy their freedom which you couldn't in any other slave owning society I know of.)

Mug, mug, mug. Went to the super two blocks away, came back, dropped groceries in blissfully cool by comparison house, went up to physio three blocks away and was *sopping* when I arrived. Yes, good thing I showered before leaving, but now must shower again before going to bed. And frankly I see no evidence that sweating actually cools you.

Temps should drop in tomorrow's storms but they're still calling for humid weather. A humid 26 isn't that much different from a humid 30 in my experience.

The linden is shedding its secondary leaves or whatever they are. Some day will get around to sweeping them up. Some day will attack the backyard vines that totally cover the walkway and are trying to seal the garage door shut. Gardener emailed me asking would I like some work done. Yes, but can't afford it. It's not that she charges $75 an hour, it's that she takes two hours to cut the backyard vines.

I have The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes from the library, John Dickson Carr and Adrian Doyle's missing cases. Have read Adrian's before, haven't read John, am actually not that impressed with him. But dissatisfaction may be due to the weather and the aches as much as anything else. Roll on mid-month when autumn is supposed to start.

Two more ebook holds trotted in yesterday so there was my weekend settled. Though in the intervals of goddamned bloody planes sonic booming overhead ('air show from 12 to 3:30' my left hind foot) I creaked up to the LCBO and bought gin. If it doesn’t make the owies better, it makes me not care about them. That today I woke up with every joint and muscle aching is, I aver, due to the humid heat we'll be having until Thursday and not, I hope, the tomato sandwich I had for lunch yesterday. They think nightshades don't really inflame things, but then again, they think weather doesn't affect joint pain,  the fools.

Did go out today to get more mixers and Sinutabs because alcohol, any alcohol, fills the sinuses and the ragweed is blooming in abundance. But now I'm on the couch with beanbags over the hip muscles and shall stay here. Finished an  Agatha Christie yesterday, expect the Lindsey Davis to take longer, have given up on my two quasi-Chinese fantasies. I think I got them from one of those bookriot recs, 'ten books with unusual magic systems', and bookrecs are all about YA with the inevitable love triangles and iddy male charas and things only adolescents can love. When the planes stop booming I shall run them back to the library.

The Sibyl in Her Grave was really really good, quite the best of the Hiary Tamars by me. It features as well what I think of as anti-Dick Francis characters: those poor hapless English souls who simply can't say no or enforce what we today call boundaries. Whereas Francis is full of out and out bullies and harpies who have never heard of the rules and ride roughshod over everyone's boundaries as if they don’t exist. And not all of them are the arrogant rich, though of course some are. But the rest are just unpleasant people who probably cut in line, which I believe is supposed to be the English sin that cries aloud to heaven for vengeance. Though of course no one says anything when they do.

The mug of the past few days blew away finally as I was out spending money in restaurants, so I walked over to the subway to see what progress has been made on installing the elevator. Damned little. Signs say project will be finished by the end of 2024. I can still subway back to Christie because it has up escalators, supposing them to be in operation and not closed off for cleaning. But there's no way down with a walker unless one wants to rely on the kindness of strangers, always a dicey proposition. And I'm convinced I'll be using this walker to the end of my life. Though I should recall that I didn't walk for years after that cyst and my legs consequently stayed weak just as long. But neither did everything else hurt as much as it does now.

My sister finally has a date for her hip replacement. Alas, it's just before Christmas. I am not impressed by her hospital, nor by the rehab centre she'll probably go to. Which was well enough in the day, but seems to have had a falling off since covid. My dentist had horror stories of her 90-some year old aunt not being allowed to walk around post-knee surgery because the staff thought she might fall, so she got 30 minutes of exercise a day, period. But I say nothing; it is what it is. Luckily S has all her church friends as well as good up and downstairs neighbours.

Bro and s-i-l are in Stratford. S-i-l was mightily unimpressedby their production of Richard II, which I understand rather plays up Richard's (dubious IMO) rep as one of what was known in my day as the faggot kings of England. It's no use them trying to appeal to any audience but Boomers because no one else can afford their prices, and come to that, neither can this Boomer. 

Pleasant long weekend two thirds of which was spent rereading Going Postal and Making Money,  and I wish he'd lived long enough and well enough to have Moist take on the tax system. Or maybe that was a throw away line and the subject matter would have elicited Hamlet's 'make her laugh at that.' Today it rained so I stayed in and played Squaredle and Addiction solitaire ergo a lost day.

Also at some point finished Spring Snow, which happily fell apart on me so I need have no qualms about sticking its brittle pages in the recycle. And Mishima actually lampshaded Ukifune in there, so go him, dweeb though he was.

Physio said I might feel the aftereffects on Sunday, and I did a bit, but the real achy day was today. I take this as a sign that my core strengthening exercises are actually working, so go me.

The lindens have gone to town with their seedlings, which are not only profuse but sticky, so that the wheels of my walker- already pitted by two years of contact with Toronto sidewalks- become immovably gunked up with them whenever I go out. Also it appears that at some point I walked over a patch of black rubbery stuff that, unlke the seedlings, can't be washed off with lots of water and an abrasive cloth. Ah well. It's too hot to be walking outside anyway. Though it's a nice dry heat like August in Tokyo and otherwise I would.

Finished Carpe Jugulum. One shouldn't use Granny as a role model but there are very few admirable old women in genial literature around, so one takes what one can. Because otherwise you've got achy old women in reality and I have enough of that in my own reality, thank you. 

Couldn't sleep last night so thought I'd start a boring book and there was Spring Snow on the bookshelf beside the bed. Oh dear oh dear. We have a Japanese Bao Yu here, one of whom was quite sufficient. Also life is too short to read Mishima but it's July, a month to be got through however one can.

Mind, July also brings government goodies in the form of sales tax rebates and grocery rebates and such. I can't reconcile the dizzying sum depisited into my account with the sum the gov't says people in my income bracket get, but I'll take it.

So after yawning my way through yesterday,  last night I couldn't get to sleep. No reason, just I was awake. And stayed awake. And got up after an hour and went and read Dick Francis one-eyed until a quarter to four, which is cut-off for no headache sleeping. Rewarmed the beanbags and got into the wool and feathers and eventually drifted off, to dream of sorting out my various treasures in what purported to be my bedroom at Bedford, only it was twice the size of that not-unsizabe chamber and also thought it was somehow part of that Dick Francis novel. 

I woke, as expected, at 10. I can't count on 4 a.m. bedtimes resulting in only 6 hours  of condensed sleep or I'd do it more often, but at least I wasn't a basket case. Didn't accomplish anything today, of course, except dishes. And finishing Dead Cert. Francis is wonderful comfort reading if not indulged in too often. Helps if it's one of the ones I don’t remember and this was, in spite of that annoying mystery topos of love at first sight and will you marry me after two? three? meetings.

Come to that, the Angel of the Crows would have to be Cumberbatch, wouldn't it? He's the only Holmes who looks even remotely like an angel. I'm just sorry this isn't a whole series. A London whose genii locorum are attached to buildings is a London after my own heart, to say nothing of aetheric doctors and necrophages and respectable werewolves who run respectable hotels. Though of course there ought to be an Angel of London since cities too should have a genius loci.

Otherwise am much better for an acupuncture session today, and my Holmes fan arrived at last. Had been getting chirpy messages-- three to date-- from Fedex to the effect that the fan had been delivered as promised on Friday: to somewhere in Pennsylvania. No word of getting it over the border and I was resigned to not seeing it again in this life. But anyway, here, and needs only to be assembled.

Extremely achy night and waking so I thought the hell with it and took two of the heavy duty anti-inflams. Results: bupkis. So I might as well stop taking them entirely and see what fast-acting tylenol can provide. Oh, and do all those mini exercises the tiktok guys advise, like heel raises and toe raises and all.

Finished a Thorndyke mystery and failed to guess the murderer's MO in spite of Pratchett having used exactly the same one. 

Belatedly registered this as a long weekend but am supplied with most things needed, especially as the greengrocers are open on holiday Mondays. But stocked up on toilet paper just to be safe, and should maybe have bought cereal and pepsi as well. Stores sctually tend to be emptier on holiday Sundays so shall shop then after the rain moves on.

The rain started Friday afternoon. It stopped long enough yesterday to let me get to the super for salad and a chicken dinner, then started again last night. It has not stopped all day today. The bunker roof is Kusama-polkadotted with cherry blossoms as the tree slowly denudes in the rain. I should get up and move a bit because not moving only stiffens me more, but I'm on the sofa under a blanket with a hot beanbag against my back and standing up will hurt.

Sent The Ruin of Angels back to the library a scant quarter through. I can't read 600 page books on my tablet in the time given me, and don't want to. I can barely parse Gladstone's action in paper, as demonstrated by my current rereading of Full Fathom Five, now on the third go-around, with nothing sticking in my memory. But I need to reread that and Four Roads Cross and *then*, somehow, I'll get down to Bakka for a hard copy of Ruin.

Meanwhile the whatever you call it in Chrome that usefully gives you your frequent webpages has taken to giving me long ago google search items instead. I can clear cache and then replace them one by one, but mostly I just want Chrome to stop doing it.

Late April is when I bleed money, but of course if I'm going to suddenly up and call a junk service to take that wood away from my back yard I can't stand it a minute longer, I will bleed more. Yes I could have/ should have got estimates but paralysis of the will doesn’t work like that. The guys I got started at a very reasonable $165 for a small load, much better than the 400 I paid last time, but it turns out that a disassembled deck is much more than 'small'. So it came in at just under 300 because I was too wimpy to refuse a tip. 

Then the gardener came to remove my mulberry and chop my hedge down 2/3. We shall see if this encourages it to grow back bushier or if it really has run its course. 'It doesn’t get enough sun to really grow,' she said, which is true, because when I planted it there were no trees on my front lawn and now there are two. She only charges $55 an hour and I don’t think she took an hour over the work.

Then my taxes come Purolatoring back to me, ending one of April's chronic anxieties ('will they be done in time?') and pinging the others ('How much do I owe this time?') Accountants have raised their fees $50. Oh woe. And then I screw courage to sticking point and look at my return. If the gov accepts the accountant's figures I will... be getting a refund of close to $1500, which is twice what I've had any time this last decade. Oh joy oh yay callooh callay! All is well again.

Except the niggle in my current happiness which is that the last two books in the Craft sequence haven't been published in hardcover and that they have a different cover artist. I have no idea why Macmillan made that decision, but it was the wrong one.

Fighting the failure of the will that accompanies hot weather, especially unseasonable and sudden hot weather, I did succeed in vacuuming the doownstairs and swiftering the kitchen floor,  but that was after a day spent on the couch doing Squaredle, to which I bought a subscription last night. My argument is that I'm on my last acrostic book and need another time-waster, which I am and don't, especially if I'm getting all these exra reveals. Should cancel my kindle unlimited to balance the outlay, but then kindle will remove all my books.

Finished a Thorndyke and started in on another, but alas this seems to be the volume where he tells you about the murder first and then tells you how Thorndyke solves the murder, which is not at all satisfying.

Have been reading  Miss Marple pastiche which is...  basically a number of writers putting Miss M into their own universes, usually in the 60s and 70s, with varying results. The one that's dated to the 50s doesn't recognize that the Ms honorific dates to 20 years after the McCarthy era. Otherwise she travels to Cape Cod and Shanghai and New York and Oxford,  far from the small village that gave her the knowledge of human nature needed to solve murders. Oh well. Read as fanfic, and like fanfic, don't expect too much.

Must get tax stuff together. Must not go into tax tailspin. Easier said than done.

I was right to drag my feet on assembling the Dirtdevil. There's a hose that fits into a ring that fits into the canister, and the hose came out of the ring and wouldn't go back in. The manual treats hose and ring as a single unit and gives no idea how the one goes into the other. So after fifteen minutes of pushing and squeezing and grunting I concluded that the part was defective, packed all the bits back into their plastic bags, and put off the tiresome question of how to return an amazon order. And then, because I can no more stop scratching an itch than I can stop looking for words-that-aren't-there in Squaredle, I pushed and squeezed and grunted some more until, with the arm strength of a young man, the hose got pushed far enough into the ring that I could turn it righty-tighty into unmovingness. So go me, and feh.

Last night's dream purported to be about the Marlows at home with visits by vague relatives and much to-doing over bath times and Lawrie not able to be the Shepherd Boy after all because she had such a hissy fit over her bathtime that she started to run a fever so (somebody- Esther?) had to/ got to play him after all.

Reading Austin Freeman's Thorndyke mysteries because the library has them and Gore Vidal is getting up my nose. I strongly suspect that his view of politics is plain and simply Wrong. The gossip about the Kennedys is interesting enough  (no news to me that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was no JFK either) but leaves me feeling slightly grubby. Of course, Thorndyke is no fast fun raad either, but still an improvement. What I want is more PMT, so instead I keep going over the last story in vol. 1 and its very odd happenings, like the menacing man the okami-san ushers out of the establishment on (if I'm reading this correctly) days that have eight in them but who *seems* to show up two days running? and who may not be the proprietor's favoured client/ boyfriend at all but the personification of the psychic detritus it's necessary to clear out at regular intervals.

Accomplishment for the day: tightening the screw on the leg of my side table in the bedroom. Had been held in place with a handkerchief for never mind how many months. Have still not unpacked my new vacuum.

OK, also did laundry and dishes, but still. A few more pages of Palimpsest, which jumps about in time so I can't keep track of what happens when. And also, if I want to check something about Vidal's mother I have to google her because the index goes by last names and she married three times, last time to a nonentity, so none of the names I associate with her (Vidal, Auchincloss) will lead me to her.

More happily, continue with When the Angels Left the Old Country, though I'm fearful it will end up in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

And still continue to sleep till noon every day. Maybe it's allergy season meds, who knows?

 Snow incoming tomorrow evening, again, which I hope explains the annoying click-catch-ow of my elbows all day. The knees are partly down to no massage last week, so when I had one yesterday she had the devil's own time getting the quads to stop being a solid muscle mass. And the right knee is still as unhappy as it has been for a fortnight. Maybe weather, maybe muscles, maybe degeneration, who knows.

Finished June Hur's The Silence of Bones, though I have no idea what the title refers to. More Joseon detectiving. Late Joseon sounds like no fun at all, which should not surprise me. Confucian countries are not happy countries. The First Emperor had the right idea-- or would have had the right idea if the whole story hadn't been based on a single misunderstood hanzi.

Also started on some of my bunker books with a view to downsizing. Trent's Own Case, a presumed sequel to Trent's Last, which I'm not sure I've ever read: but if I haven't why is it i  the bunker? And Gore Vidal's Palimpsest. Vidal makes a nice analogue to Walpole, at least in the scandal gossippy sense. But lord! what a family to grow up in! 'It's indecent, and like all forms of indecency, it's irresistible.' I've come to disagree with Kenneth Clarke about almost everything, but that line is still true

Somehow forgot to take meds yesterday afternoon and by the time I remembered it was late evening and pointless because I was going to sleep, right? But I didn't. White night with aching elbows-- both of which might have been attributable to the weather. Anyway, got up at 2 and read a cozy Anglican mystery one-eyed until past three, when I made myself go back to bed. I could have stayed awake probably till 6 but doing that invites sleeping to noon and  headaches, whereas sleep, or at least bed, before 4 will see me awake six hours later. And did, but have felt crappy all day. Which might, again, be the weather.

When I got up my sidewalk and front path had been cleared by, I think, Sadie's mom: because Good Neighbour Chris always does his south neighbour Signora as well as me, and when I went outdoors to check the presence or absence of freezing rain, Signora was shovelling her sidewalk. We may have had some freezing sleet to begin with yesterday but the sidewalk seemed gritty not smooth and the snow falling was definitely snow. Late afternoon it seemed closer to rain, so I sprinkled the last of the realio trulio rock salt on the sidewalk, and that should hold it for any pedestrians.

The cozy Anglican etc is a kindle ebook and I should be reading my library ebook instead. But it's The War for the Oaks, considered a classic forerunner of urban fantasy, and it's giving me oogie flashbacks to Racefail 2007, and not just because of the author's husband. Elizabeth Bear also had a pooka with unfortunate overtones, and I keep expecting Bull's to go there because, well, she too was one of the GoHs that behaved so badly during that confrontation. So yeah.  Maybe I'm better off with 6'1 female Anglican deacons.

Time goes flexible/ wonky in winter, especially when winter comprises three seasons in four weeks. It seems an age since I went any farther than the two supermarkets and is probably less than three weeks, unless I've forgotten something which I probably have. Anyway, made it to the library and got Pratchett's biography, then had bulgogi at one of my two Japanese-Korean restaurants (the other is closed on Mondays) and came home. Body is the better for moving but is still twitchy about walking. My exercises are now all about quad strengthening and quad stretching because something is definitely going on with them. Massage tomorrow anyway.

I finished the last of the Timothy Herring books and just as well. It's unpleasant seeing someone in the 60s being miffed because he suspects his handyman of being insolent. Timothy don't half fancy himself. Also goes about tipping the lower classes for talking to him, which this North American finds insulting. Especially when the insolent handyman actually tugs his forelock, and not ironically either.

Anyway, Wilkins and Sir Pterry are a breath of fresh air after that. Though for some reason I stopped and read Babette's Feast in the middle of it, and Dinesen has cast an odd shadow on the day in consequence. Never realized before how basically unheimlich Dinesen is.

Reading backwards in Phantom Moon Tower gets me at last to vol.3, first story dating to 2008. And yes indeed, we're in prime WTF Ima territory, of the 'read three times, look up every fifth word, still can't figure it all out' variety. A bit better than her prime 100 Demons method of 'write the plot points on separate cards, throw cards in the air, draw story in the order they fall down in' but that's not saying much. Anyway, on I go. In the meantime I read Gladys Mitchell's Timothy Herring series. The first three had an odd echo of PMT in that everyone wants Herring to get married, as everyone in Shōichi's family wants him to get married, but Herring was being a stubborn bachelor while Shōichi was pursuing Yōsaburo. But Herring gets affianced at the end of book 3 so now he has a wife. And is becoming that Mitchell favourite, a high-handed bullying manly man, which is what women really want, not gentle considerate lovers like the one his wife had before. Mitchell wasn't married, of course.

Reading back DW entries reveals that I've always coughed and sneezed my way through January, even in polar vortex years like 2022, so no surprise if I'm doing it in this hitherto mild winter. There's no more dust than usual, which isn't saying much, but I keep checking my furnace filters and my furnace filters keep being the same colour as my new ones ie still clean. Presumably the guy who checked the furnace last October did some cleaning, because this is unusual. Then again, I've not been using the thing as much, thriftily relying on jackets and throws to keep me warm. But I'm still sneezing and coughing from the sinus drip, and I do wish it would stop.

I'd also noticed that stairs were getting easier to go up and that I could sit in my rocking chair reading and get up from *that*- which hasn't been possible for years‐ so I happily assumed my dry January had lost me a few pounds. Well, no. I've lost exactly half a kilo and today the less said about my knees the better. Scar still aches in cold damp weather and, ok, I've stayed indoors two days running. So things may be better tomorrow when we're promised rare sunny periods.

Complicated dream last night that still sticks with me, of travelling or living in Japan with a bunch of Asian girls, vaguely Chinese but some others as well, which probably owes something to the international cast of Himawari House. And we were all packing up to go home and trying to fit things in our suitcases and I had to decide what things to leave behind before the porters came. And now that I've written this the dream details fade: they were accessible only as long as I had no words for them.