Off the Cliff

I shouldn't really be all chuffed about having walked over to SND's and down the alleyway to check the vent, with just my staff to hold onto, but I did and I am. I've known for a while that I really need to start walking outside without the walker, but it's always easier, not to mention less painful, with. Must also go back to massage because the pain is from lower back and hip flexors rather than knees. And shall do when this  cruel war is over.

Otherwise have finished rereading Four Roads Cross and Full Fathom Five, and will start again on Ruin of Angels. I want that one in a trade paperback buf it doesn't come in trade paperback so must beaver through the bitsy-feeling print of the pocketbook size.

Reread also Good Omens, Pratchetty enough, though from the little I know, I think the TV series may have been better.

Weather warning for high winds so I stayed in today, finishing The Fifth Elephant and starting another Miss Silver mystery. Miss Silver is readable enough, I suppose, and certainly better for the stodgy brain than Four Roads Cross but I'm not sure I'm exactly enjoying this. However, the library copy is much in demand so I forge onwards. Some day I'll find the energy to do something more than the bare minimum of anything and stop sitting on the couch all day, which of course makes things hurt worse when I do get up. But for now wanhope has me in its grasp and I simply don'wanna do anything about it.

A belated happy 100th birthday to President Carter, and a happy new year to those who celebrate.

I think I'm about done with Unruly, with a fair amount of skimming. Didn't really tell me anything I didn't know and was unfortunately not much help in untangling the Anglo-Saxon kings. But of course the A-S are as difficult to untangle as their coevals, or co-evils, the Merovingians. Nasty, brutish, and short, the lot of them: and the women just as bad as the men. Why would anyone want to be a monarch? What's the appeal of power? especially when having it means everyone else wants to take it away from you. But it's like those dudebro billionaires who, not content with having more money than they could ever spend in three lifetimes, seem to want a voice in politics as well,  which will give them-- what? What is it they haven't got?

Otherwise I've finished nothing else this week. On the go is Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, of which I had high hopes. But it has switching time frames, a new one every chapter, which I find far more disconcerting than switching PoVs. And *seems* to be doing a Craft schtick in which divine power is governed by, or involved in, the stock market, which was head-hurty enough in the Craft books.

Also a couple of manga, and Chuang Tzu (why did the translator use Wade-Giles? I'm no fan of pinyin, but at least it semi-makes sense), all of which are library books and the manga at least are 'five people are waiting' ones. Will get back to Aaronovitch eventually.

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.

 Uncomfortable sleeping conditions led to much waking last night: room too warm, moving air too cold, elbows and knees too unhappy. On the up side I retain clear memories of several dreams. I was at L and WT's place with both their daughters, arguing that (unplaceable male character from Austen novel) was the best archetypical protag because both kind and (some other quality). I'm afraid that one came from a tumblr post on what constitutes a himbo ie someone who is beefy, kind, *and* dumb. Beefy and dumb is a jock, beefy and kind is a hunk, kind and dumb is a normal guy.

This segued into a dream set in ancient China, accompanying an army marching into new territory, except new territory was a narrow road lined on both sides with shacks or lean-tos built wall to wall with no spaces between, that went on and on for miles. Inhabitants hid on the roofs. We reached a boundary, otherwise unmarked, and our general was pleased to discover that there were apples in abundance to feed the troops with.

After which I was in a cozy murder mystery with a white haired old lady as sleuth more or less, which took place at our family home and ended with little old lady preparing a powder to put in the food that was being prepared out on the driveway, in order IIRC to poison the local squire.

Meanwhile the heat has subsided to merely warm and brought out the forsythia and the sakura on the south facing streets. Went to the library for the Craft Sequence book I don't have and started it in the Ninetails coffee shop. Instant time travel: Gladstone belongs firmly to the Before Times when I was still able-bodied enough to bike and work. However I note that my glacial recovery has reached a point where I can occasionally walk into a store without the walker. I limp and my back still spasms occasionally, but it's more than I could do six months ago.

M's birthday party next door. There was a chronically whining little kid who was getting on my nerves- 'someone pay attention to that toddler please'- until it occurred to me that it was probably one of those noise-maker whistles, the kind that shoots out a rolled up paper. 

In these days of Trump and Black Lives Matter, reading Dalemark and its homicidal despots is not terribly fun. But I slept in to 11 this morning so I could continue a dream about it, except the dream turned into an animated Dalemark virus that took over my computer and I couldn't get rid of the screens with the cartoon on them because my computer screen was the side of a wall ten feet wide and fifteen high and the little x was way out of my reach.

Did buy the new Max Gladstone, even though I haven't finished the last Max Gladstone. There's a long weekend coming up and my 100 Demons has still not arrived after three weeks, though it was sent air.

Half a tooth crumbled at dinner and the raccoons were back in the yard this evening. Should have kept spraying those trees. Assembled one of the raccoon scarers, but it may be too far away from the plum tree where they're roosting now, and the ultrasonic sound may not bother them a bit.

Tuesday night I dreamed about H and her family leaving, all of us in tears and H a good ten years younger than she is, and their golden retriever running away and having to be corralled (except in RL they have two youngish... beagles, I think) and then riding with them part of their way, but we were in train tunnels that passed through bookstores, the larger than life shelves right by the windows, and the titles of Japanese books were flashing by and I thought 'Oh I wanted to read that one- and that-'

Woke to a cool placid Autumn Preview morning and daegaer talking about the Gaiden and suddenly it was a dozen or more years ago in the calm happy days of fandom. Realize now that one thing that makes fandom calm is having one's attention focussed on fictional people and situations, not RL ones. Also the using another language thing. Time was I needed to have my dictionaries all handy here by the computer. Not any more.

(The H dream followed one about petronia and her elegant Chinese friends, probably inspired by the cover of Full Fathom Five.)

Thunder and rain last night, so I sat up and finished Rosemary and Rue. Which is reasonable enough, and have ordered vol 3 from the library, but I must note one oddity. Possibly I was scarred by learning Japanese, but my mind insists that breezy familiarity is not the way one goes about addressing one's liege lord. 'Oh, but he's her friend!. And so is his wife! Formality is saved for nasty snow queen figures! *Good* kings are greeted with 'Hey, So-and-so.' That's how we know they're good.' American convenient fictions: 'we are all equal', 'we are all friends,' and 'close is good, distance is bad.' Hence one can never be on friendly terms with a person whom one addresses politely, and vice versa.

But then there's Gladstone's Tara addressing her boss and mentor. No 'Hey, Elanyes' there. Because formal manners and distance are just fine in (pseudo)corporate culture and (quasi)law firms. Ironically, it's courts alone that don't require courtesy.
( The one poem where Wallace Stevens makes some kind of sense )

I really have no idea what Max Gladstone is doing in Three Parts Dead. Cover blurbs keep mentioning John Grissom, which may be the problem, since I've never read any Grissom. Nor am I sure if one should view his Craft-workers as straightforward versions of our own lawyers (and not just any lawyers either: corporate and contract, of all the yawn-a-minute fields) or if that does an injustice to his world-building. For sure what happens in their 'judicial' hearings isn't fine argument and close interpretation of statute.

That view, however, may be what accounts for the outfit the heroine is wearing on the cover-- though in fact the heroine does wear what she, at least, calls a dark suit. I'm just wondering if that automatically equates to jacket, skirt and white blouse. (Given the magic tattoos and knife. Just sayin'.) Whatever, because Gladstone uses a show don't tell kind of world-building, it's taking me a while to read. I suppose I can see why people want a this-world-parallel shortcut to help them in the process.

Plus point: there's no physical description of the heroine for what seems pages and pages (but remember I read slowly.) I was almost hoping someone had done a 'black as default' cover for a character who could be anything. Well, not yet, but maybe some day.

Minus: Gladstone has an American verbal tick that twitches me as much as Griffin's 'was sat.' 'A couple books.' People don't say 'a pair books' or 'a set dishes', so why does 'a couple' drop the 'of' so often?