From the high desert's walls to the seas red and black

I do have the best cousins. Today started off at a high water mark of suck, but improved markedly once I met up with rushthatspeaks and she fed me spice cake with home-candied orange peel and we walked to the Cambridge Library, where I acquired one book I had been looking for and two I hadn't; we talked a lot about movies and the absolute inexplicability of the music video for Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages." I came home and made myself kelp noodles for dinner. I baked apples with honey and cinnamon, which I hadn't done in several months. And TCM was running a marathon of B-movie monster flicks, which is why I finished my night by watching odds and ends of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) and all of The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), which despite the fact that he's the explanatory supporting scientist and they're supposed to be prehistoric sea snails, I shall continue to think of as Hans Conried vs. the Giant Radioactive Sea Monkeys. Tomorrow I have to be organized, but right now I'm going to curl up and read Kristin Cashore's Fire (2009).