A note on the occasion of the catastrophic collapse of a cafetiere

Tell yourself that your coffee is Turkish at heart, and chew valiantly.

In other news, I ran my eye across the new books in the Lit & Phil, and thought how to the prepared mind they could all sound like science fiction: Sky Men and The Warmth of Other Suns and 15 Minutes, though some of them would need to be short stories: "If You're Reading This..." and "Small Corroding Words" and and and.

Thing is, though, this was the non-fiction shelf. (Sky Men is about paratroopers, and The Warmth of Other Suns is about migration in America, and so on.)

Confession is probably good for the soul

Is it bad of me, I wonder, to have written this whole scene - nay, to have developed this whole character - only to be able to use the phrase the fog-feller's masterstroke?

Oh, there's other stuff in it too, there's always other stuff, but that's why it happened. Because I could.

I will leave you to imagine a fog-feller. Is he a wight or a wraith, a troll or an ogre? Or a fog-ogre, a fogre...?

Waaaah this is really hard

Why yes, once again I am daunted by putting books in boxes.

Specifically, I have scared myself once again by how many books I want to take, how many boxes that amounts to. Given limited funds and limited space at the other end, and so forth.

Thing is, I've just started boxing up the SF paperbacks. Which even all through these last weeks I've been thinking oh, there's only a few shelves, I'll just sling them all in, they're lightweight and they don't take up much space, mass market paperbacks...

Ahem. There turn out to be rather a lot of shelves, which would add up to rather a lot of boxes if I didn't discriminate. So now I'm trying to do that, but oh it is hard. I did have this vague rubric in mind, if I'm not going to (re)read it, I'm not going to take it, and that's that - but these are the books I've been accumulating since I was a kid, they're kind of like an expression of myself as I was, an act of autobiography, y'know? And okay, I'll probably never want to read the Stephen Donaldsons again, and if I haven't read the Jane Gaskells by this time I'm probably never going to, but even so. Leaving them behind is hard.

(And yes, it's fascinating that I really did have all those Philip K Dicks, and no, I don't believe that I'll ever reread more than a handful, but whoops, I do seem to have packed them all...)

Because 8.30 is just too damn early to go to bed

...therefore I shall stay up. But ooh, I am tired. I ache, and my back hurts, and all my bones are heavy in me and my flesh is an inefficiency of drag. Wanna go to bed. But it's too stupid early. But I don't want to write any more, and I don't want to pack any more books, and there's nothing on telly and I've read all the internets and and and.

I suppose I could have a bath. Then by the time I've soaked and indulged and pottered about after, it'll be closer to ten o'clock, and that may indeed be three hours earlier than I used to go to bed but that was long ago and I am old now. And I could read. I could read in bed. That would be nice, oh yes. *blesses his Kindle*

I think that's what I'll do, then. I'll take my bad back to my hot bath, and listen to radio programmes about hidden redwoods and the An Lushan rebellion; and then I'll read more Miles Vorkosigan, and then I'll turn the light out and listen to more radio until I fall asleep. Doesn't that sound lovely?

On the breathing side of things

I was smitten by a revelation, in my bath. Splish-splosh, and oh-good-grief.

There I was, thinking about how difficult it had been to breathe at night recently, and how the inhalers were helping but not for long, not for long enough to see me through till morning - and then I thought, oh, wait. What have I been doing, these last weeks? Why, yes. Sorting through thousands of books. Thousands of dusty books. What am I allergic to? Why, yes...

Okay, so I'll take a benadryl when I go to bed, see if that makes a difference. Who knows, it might even help me sleep.