What I did with Labor Day was sleep until almost three in the afternoon and then bake a batch of hermits in the toaster oven we are currently using since the oven proper is defunct. They came out fantastically.
What I did with most of the rest of the long weekend was lie flat on a couch covered in sheep (n.b. household lingo for microwaveable hot packs filled with grains and herbs; the terminology traces back to a sheep-shaped hot-water bottle I had as a child) because I seem to have injured my back in some fashion of unknown etiology which caused worsening ache on and off all through the last week before escalating to excruciating impairment. I didn't appreciate it. I suppose I will have to call someone to make sure my vertebrae are where I last left them.
While prone, I re-read Joan Aiken's Midnight Is a Place (1974) reminding me that I consider![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit's "there was a darkness, call it solitude" functionally canonical. The edition of my childhood is the small red-edged Pocket Books paperback whose much-scuffed cover has been slowly working loose of its spine for years, additionally defaced by a previous owner who scrawled "GRISCOM" in permanent marker across not just the flyleaf but the faces of the protagonists, who you would have thought had enough to contend with already. Also part of the prone re-read was Dorothy J. Heydt's The Witch of Syracuse (2017), the cycle of third-century-BCE classical fantasies which I am incapable of not thinking of as the Cynthiad. It even has a katabasis, and for that matter a nekyia. I never warmed to her treatment of Tanit or the Carthaginians or perhaps even interpretatio romana, but it didn't matter; I wish it had been collected in print in its author's lifetime. I am glad I had the chance to tell her how happy I would be with even a self-published e-book and then find out later that she had done exactly that.
It has been raining all day. I hope it is useful for the water table. I can't believe I didn't know until two days ago that Boston depends on groundwater to keep the pilings of some of its oldest buildings from rotting like the roots of drought-starved trees as the one-time tidal flats overlaid with landfill into which they were driven dry out. I have been calling Boston a city of water for years. I knew about the sea-rise of climate change, not about this sinking of water from the earth. And here we are once again in between, as fragilely balanced as the land-shaping engineers of the nineteenth century would never have credited, and what is it two centuries in the future that we would never credit now?
What I did with most of the rest of the long weekend was lie flat on a couch covered in sheep (n.b. household lingo for microwaveable hot packs filled with grains and herbs; the terminology traces back to a sheep-shaped hot-water bottle I had as a child) because I seem to have injured my back in some fashion of unknown etiology which caused worsening ache on and off all through the last week before escalating to excruciating impairment. I didn't appreciate it. I suppose I will have to call someone to make sure my vertebrae are where I last left them.
While prone, I re-read Joan Aiken's Midnight Is a Place (1974) reminding me that I consider
thisbluespirit's "there was a darkness, call it solitude" functionally canonical. The edition of my childhood is the small red-edged Pocket Books paperback whose much-scuffed cover has been slowly working loose of its spine for years, additionally defaced by a previous owner who scrawled "GRISCOM" in permanent marker across not just the flyleaf but the faces of the protagonists, who you would have thought had enough to contend with already. Also part of the prone re-read was Dorothy J. Heydt's The Witch of Syracuse (2017), the cycle of third-century-BCE classical fantasies which I am incapable of not thinking of as the Cynthiad. It even has a katabasis, and for that matter a nekyia. I never warmed to her treatment of Tanit or the Carthaginians or perhaps even interpretatio romana, but it didn't matter; I wish it had been collected in print in its author's lifetime. I am glad I had the chance to tell her how happy I would be with even a self-published e-book and then find out later that she had done exactly that.It has been raining all day. I hope it is useful for the water table. I can't believe I didn't know until two days ago that Boston depends on groundwater to keep the pilings of some of its oldest buildings from rotting like the roots of drought-starved trees as the one-time tidal flats overlaid with landfill into which they were driven dry out. I have been calling Boston a city of water for years. I knew about the sea-rise of climate change, not about this sinking of water from the earth. And here we are once again in between, as fragilely balanced as the land-shaping engineers of the nineteenth century would never have credited, and what is it two centuries in the future that we would never credit now?
