I'm kind of delighted by this horse story found over at incandescens' twitter feed. Go Her Maj!

City's relief for Impoverished Elderly Homeowners (which is kind of an oxymoron, since any house in this city is effectively a money tree) came through this month ie they didn't deduct my property taxes, so I indulged myself by cancelling my 11 o'clock acupuncture appointment at short notice. For which I shall have to pay, but fine. This is the humid achy season when people so disposed (me and the cook and coworker S) are troubled in all our joints. Add allergies to that and you get super-doped me who really didn't want to leave her bedroom, let alone bike the pot-holed streets for half an hour. Who didn't want to wake up before 10, actually, and is sorry she did. And who was rousted from comfort by a real estate agent cold-calling with 'we recently sold a house in your neighbourhood and...' Jackals. It takes three lifetimes living in shanty towns and under bridges to expiate the guilt of having been a real estate agent.

Fast-cooking oats (not instant) make the best overnight oats. Lemon yoghurt takes away most of the oatmeal taste. But no matter what I eat in the morning, my insides rumble disconsolately afterwards, is why I'm not a breakfast person.

My current mission is to clean one kitchen bookshelf of books. This involves, alas, finishing Halprin's Winter's Tale, which I suppose is magic realism and which I don't actually *mind* except for its undefined but pervasive Written By A Guy-ness. Makes me think of Little, Big which I then think I must reread except that life is short. Maybe follow with Love in the Time of Cholera which is also (I assume) Mag.Real, and is also a kitchen book.

Purple Hibiscus also chugs along. There's some hope that Papa the wife beater will get his comeuppance some day, but meanwhile it reminds me why the religion of my childhood is, at the very least, something men should not be allowed near.