Oh, you were a vampire and baby, I'm the walking dead

Yesterday I gave blood for the first time in my life. Much as I expected, it was very little trouble at all; I walked down to the chapter house on Whitney Street with hans_the_bold, demonstrated to the nurse that I had not spent more than three months in England or five years in Italy since 1980, and that to the best of my knowledge I didn’t have AIDS, syphilis, or Lyme disease, and donated. And that was that. The young man who handled the needles was both friendly and skilled, and for about five minutes I lay there on a hospital bed (metal frames, padded the color of blue play-doh; reasonably industrial) with a line of my blood looping down off into a pint bag, feeling and probably looking rather like a Simon Logan protagonist. I didn't faint. I didn't throw up. They did keep me lying down for an extra fifteen minutes, in case I was going to do either one of these things, but I would have been very surprised. I have bloodwork done regularly; I've been under full anesthesia multiple times; needles don't bother me.* I am told that I have good veins. The worst part of the entire process was the initial finger-prick to determine whether I had enough iron in my blood to donate or not, because that hurt like a mother. But I got free orange juice and cookies afterward, and a little sticker that said Be Nice To Me, I Gave Blood Today—who can deny the snazzy of that? Now I can feel virtuous and useful. And the next time I forget that I've given blood and decide to climb twelve flights of stairs in HGS tower, I will remember that this is a bad idea before I reach the seventh floor and have my vision white out.

In other news, nineweaving asked me about astronomical associations for the god Pluto before the planet was discovered. I didn't come up with anything, but I now have Wikipedia to thank for the following information:

The name retained for the planet is that of the Roman god Pluto, and it is also intended to evoke the initials of the astronomer Percival Lowell, who predicted that a planet would be found beyond Neptune. The name was first suggested by Venetia Burney, at the time an eleven-year-old girl from Oxford, England. Over the breakfast table, one morning her grandfather, who worked at Oxford University's Bodleian Library, was reading about the discovery of the new planet in the Times newspaper. He asked his granddaughter what she thought would be good name for it. Venetia thought that as it was so cold and so distant it should be named after the Roman God of the underworld. Professor Herbert Hall Turner cabled his colleagues in America with this suggestion, and after favourable consideration which was almost unanimous, the name Pluto was officially adopted and an announcement made by Slipher on May 1, 1930.

First of all, that's plain and simply a terrific story. Secondly, I love the name Venetia Burney.** And thirdly, there should be more eleven-year-old girls so conversant with classical myth that they can name planets. We do live these days in a lesser age.

*Admittedly, the last two times I needed an IV, the process still finished up with blood all over the place. No permanent damage, don't worry. No temporary damage, even; I think the needle slipped or God knows what. Mostly I felt sorry for the person in the next bed, who couldn't even see what was going on—just one minute there's conversation, the next minute somebody says "Whoops!" and there's blood spattered all over the floor. Right; I feel reassured about the medical profession now . . .

**Even if I now feel a little dull. The viewpoint character of "Chez Vous Soon" is named Vetiver Lawrey, which I thought was pleasingly individual; but clearly I should have hung around Oxford in the 1930's. Venetia's grandfather was named Falconer Madan. We laugh at your commonplace nomenclature.

There's a low moon caught in your tangles

On the drive up from New Haven to Boston, the moon was a true harvest moon, if a few months late and a slice off full: as burnt-gold as Bradbury pumpkins and the size of a new penny, and it took a moment for me to distinguish it from the sodium streetlights along the exit ramp at the rest stop. (My brain on lunar phenomena: Is that the moon? Wow. My God. That's the moon.) I watched a lunar eclipse once as a child, from the hillside of Robbins Farm, as the moon turned copper against smoke-blue evening over the skyline of downtown Boston. I watched another through a telescope on Cross-Campus, last fall, with a cellphone full of fanatic Red Sox fan to my ear and my eyes on the shadow slowly clouding over the moon. World Series, hey, I'm watching a dragon devour the moon here! I talked with a white-haired astronomer with a tweed jacket and a bicycle, who might have walked out of one of the stories I love; and the crowd came and went, studying the sky. I love nights like that. This wasn't so bad either.

My limited-edition copy of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Frog Toes and Tentacles arrived today, and it's almost too beautiful to read; bound in black and stamped with crimson foil, neat as a candy box. I read the False Starts chapbook first, by way of revving the engine. The illustration for "Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller" is very promising.

I have sold another poem to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, "The Wandering Ghosts." Those curious about its origins should see the photographs posted by erzebet, particularly "A Stream in the Wood" and "Mother's Mirror." Meanwhile, lesser_celery geeks out academically: I can think of no one more suited to write an end-of-life chapter than he.

I have final grades to input, and then it's reading till February. For once in its life, the Christmas cactus is blooming on time.