In which I kind of want to bite everything

Today's good news: I am boiling rice. And I have remembered to set the timer which m'lovely wife bought for me. It is sitting here beside the keyboard, ticking down the seconds.

At any moment, I expect to get up and wander off to some other part of the house, so that in seven minutes and twenty-one seconds [mark] it will sound its warning chimes and I will be far away and never hear it. It is being that kind of a day.

I was full of hope, once upon a time. It could be a good day. It started with my remembering to send Karen away with strawberries (they are a symbol of my love, or something), and then remembering to go to the coffee shop to meet our friends, and all of that was good.

Then I came home, and um. I dunno. I kept meaning to be fruitful and work on my story and stuff. But it's Tuesday, which means it's a cooking-for-the-yogi day, which means I needed to decide what to cook and then go shop it; and that actually meant two shopping trips and neither of them worked very well, and there was difficulty and growling at both of them, and in between I kind of forgot to go to SETI, which has shifted its day from Wednesday to now. Or rather to then.

So what with one thing and another there has been disgruntled cookingness and no working at all, and heaven only knows how I am to explain that to Karen when she comes home after a hard day in the city; and I should really tidy my room, but ugh. I still have to fix the other half of dinner, and it'll all be horrible anyway, and yeah. Really all I want to do is open a bottle and w(h)ine. And nobody else ever feels like this, y'know? For I am particularly sensitive and special. I'm sorry you made me say that, but it's true.

To avoid being serious for a moment...

In other newses, twice already today a casual comment has (at)tempted to lead me into deeper thinkings, but I am having none of it. Lord knows, I'm not letting this blog turn into a thoughtful consideration of literary issues. I have actual clever people reading this, and they would see through me in a moment. (Is it sad, I wonder, that I am intimidated by my own readership...?)

But in a response to a post made by shewhomust, musing on the inlandiness, the resolutely uncoastal nature of Tolkien's better-known fiction, I found myself saying "something in me wants to embark on a whole thesis that he has no sense of the liminal, that everything in Tolkien sits at the heart of what it is" - and I've been kind of defending that to myself half the day now. I still don't want to write the essay, but I think it might be true.

And just now, in a comment on m'friend Juliette Wade's blog, I went all epigrammatical and said "Character is worldbuilding, and worldbuilding is character" - which is indeed shockingly glib, but I think I stand by that too. And it's the kind of thing I really don't write posts about, so let's just let it go, shall we? I have to go and do bizarre things to a chicken...

My food looks funny

Huh. Beetroot raita. Pink'n'purple. Who'd'a thought it?

It's really rather nice.