Not strong enough to keep me from running off to Boston

1. asakiyume has just sent me a black-and-white ink painting of my poem "The Description of a Wish," the Arlecchino/Dottore poem which will appear in the next issue of Mythic Delirium. She tells me it falls short of her imaginings, but I still think I will flatten it out—the folded canvas paper has a heavy, official feel—and frame it. And hope she took a picture first, because time_shark needs to see it.

2. Yesterday was . . . surprisingly intense. There had been a flyby of relatives while I was in Providence this weekend and a combination of travel snafu that prevented my now eight-year-old cousin Tristen from seeing me before his family drove up to Portland on Sunday, so he was turned loose into my care for the day while his mother and grandparents visited my grandfather. I took him to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where I think he liked best the Kronosaurus and the new permanent exhibit on New England forests; he asked me questions about the glass flowers and taxidermy and for a gift, he picked a caramel-colored sea urchin out of a bowl of small, polished fossils. And then we left the museum to find him a snack and I think Cambridge happened to us. ( Mama always said Devil'll meet you at the railroad tracks. )

This is a blurry summary, but you get the idea. My aunt Cheryl thinks the MIT students were aliens, but I think that would be too reasonable.

3. I am nonetheless looking forward to the arrival of gaudior and rushthatspeaks later today, partly because we are planning on dinner at Asmara—I think I've been in kitfo withdrawal since about 2006—and mostly because I haven't seen both of them together since last July. It will be nice to get some time to hang out before Readercon hits.

4. I am always interested in which aspects of a book or a film stick with me and which, for their own curious reasons, do not: like the fact that I never remember that Kipling's Kim isn't mixed-race, or that time last spring when I re-read The Grey King (1975) for the first time in years and realized I had completely, bizarrely forgotten Owen Davies. In a similar vein, I don't remember noticing him terribly when we were shown the film in eighth grade, but the last two times I've watched 1776 (1972) I've found myself paying attention to John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania delegate who famously advocated reconciliation with England rather than revolution against her, even to refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence, knowing it would finish him in the Continental Congress. ( Mr. Adams, you have an annoying talent for making such delightful words as 'property' sound quite distasteful. )

I knew I loved William Daniels' John Adams straight off.

5. I should go do some more Nokia. The rest of this week: not going to be conducive to work. I am already so damn tired.