And I'll dig a hole to China in the hopes that we fall through

I am returned to New Haven, after a lovely week at my parents' house where I slept, read, generally vegetated, and finished my first full-length story all this semester. (These last few months have been lethal to my writing. Even if I must now plunge back into Latin grading, at least I feel like my brain works again.) Now I have to figure out what to do with 6300 words of science fiction erotica—two genres in which I do not usually work. Blame hans_the_bold, who knows why.*

Thanksgiving started off with a bang this year. No, really: around ten in the morning, a glass pie-plate exploded in the oven, rendering our homemade apple pies inedible. (The glittering and spiky bits? Not so good to eat.) Fortunately, Wilson Farms is our friend, and storebought apple pies are all right too. Most enjoyably, two of my friends from Yale came up for Thursday and Friday (and we met up with a third in Cambridge), and there was much hanging out and ransacking of the bookstores of Harvard Square. Schönhof's is truly going to own my soul one of these days. Only through a great effort of will did I refrain from purchasing Rykle Borger's brick-thick sign-list,** and I still own much more Ovid than I had expected. We really should make books the national currency. All my money converts into them sooner or later anyway.

Unexpectedly and with great delight, I saw both rushthatspeaks and gaudior this week. And now I have them and nineweaving to thank for what promises to be a splendid film about the work of Andy Goldsworthy. Also, their cats are diabolically cute.

And now I have to go fix my bathtub.

*Now I can get back to all the stories that I actually owe people, such as elisem, who really can't be blamed for the fact that the story for "Remember What You Say in Dreams" has hit novella length and shows no signs of stopping, and lesser_celery, who should be a band. And time_shark, to whom I owe poetry. And I'm sure there are others that I have conveniently forgotten . . .

**For the same price, I could have purchased—as I eventually did—Lucan's Pharsalia (Bellum Civile) in a very pleasant hardcover edition. I have far more use for Lucan at the moment than for another sign-list, especially since I already own Labat's. Nevertheless, it sat there next to Huehnergard's A Grammar of Akkadian and some texts on Hittite and Ugaritic, weighing about the same as the phonebook of an entire small country, and I felt very bad to leave it.