Thursday

Still dragged out, but since I figure it's my blood pressure falling, I know it'll get better in another week, maybe less. I'm feeling a bit more chipper today, really.

Thursday I was still pretty low in energy. I did some pottering. David made baked sole and steamed Brussels sprouts for dinner. There was only enough sole for two people, really, but I don't like sole anyway, and Raphael kindly made me a sandwich ("I've made smushed salmon and salad dressing; would you like a sandwich?" and with a good handful of mixed salad it was absolutely lovely), so I came and sat and ate Brussels sprouts with David and Lydy. Eric called just as we were finishing and we had a delightful conversation. Raphael and I watched "Buffy." Sigh. We had a nice gossip about the characters at their best, however. Raphael is lovely to have such conversations with, and it gets my book-writing energies moving around.

I paid some bills and did a bit of laundry and took out vast amounts of recycling and trash, sensibly doing the latter in the middle of the day while the weather was what one might call at its warmest. I quit when my hands, in good gloves, got numb. We need more snow. It's all wrong for such bitter cold to be able to batter the plant world when the usual defenses are down.

Pamela

Caught up!

Well, except for writing about STEALING THE ELF-KING'S ROSES. I'm still thinking about it.

Felt brisker today. Raphael had a 4:15 appointment for all three of her cats to get their shots. One carrier was still in the library from when I took Ari to the vet on Tuesday. Around three-thirty I noted that Beryl and Minou were peaceably asleep on my bed, and that Jordan was in Raphael's bedroom. I brought the other two carriers in from the staircase where they are kept. The next time I checked on cat locations, Raphael had sensibly shut the door to his bedroom, and Minou had disappeared. Beryl was looking rumpled and suspicious.

I asked Raphael which order we should pursue them in, and she said that since Minou was hiding in a box of T-shirts in my room, and probably fondly believed himself hidden despite the fact that his tail was sticking out, we should start with Beryl. I got the littlest carrier, and Raphael picked her up just before I hove into sight with it. She would not go in headfirst, developing about fifty feet and hanging onto the edges with them. Raphael was worried about hurting her. I upended the carrier and told Raphael to put her in hindquarters first. This produced a brief hilarious view of a round white belly and four white feet waving madly, and a very indignant calico face. But she didn't seem to understand that she was going into the carrier until it was too late, and we latched the door and I carefully and slowly turned it the right way around.

Minou had taken a dislike to this entire display and gone to hide under an armchair in the cat-sitting room. I tipped the armchair up, Raphael picked up the cat and put him tidily into the carrier. He emitted many displeased noises.

Raphael felt that picking up Jordan would be bad for zir back, so I went in and scooped her up.
She is certainly huge. She was unexpectedly meek. She wouldn't walk into the carrier, but she didn't use her feet to brace herself, so I gave her a small shove and she went in. She made more displeased noises. Beryl joined in.

Raphael went and got her car out of the garage and brought it around to the front of the house while I brought the carriers downstairs.

I hate the traffic on Blaisdell Avenue. I'd like to make all those drivers meet awful fates. They speed through as if they were on a highway, and it's all so stupid. Blaisdell empties into 40th Street just two blocks from our house and there's a stop sign and all their acceleration is for nothing. In the meantime they scare the hell out of me, make noise, and kill the cats of people who are stupid enough to let them out.

The bad behavior of the drivers and the fact that it was rush hour made getting the cats into the car more difficult than it should have been, but eventually we got the two large carriers with Minou and Jordan in them into the back, and I got into the passenger seat with Beryl in her miniature carrier on my lap. They all made various uncomplimentary remarks.

Unloading them was easier, since the parking lot of the Kitty Klinic (sic) was empty. We were on time and the office was not running too late. Dr. Mac gravely asked for the gentlest cat first, so we gave him Beryl. She is not gentle, but she simply curls up into a crescent shape and goes limp in the vet's office. She and Minou both had to have blood work done, but they were very cooperative about it. Jordan was admired as "a pretty cat," which, as a muted tortoiseshell with white chin and ruff and a beautiful peach blaze, she certainly is. Raphael told me later that usually somebody makes a comment about her gigantic ruffly belly, but this time Dr. Mac just addressed Jordan sternly, reading off her last four or five recorded weights and noting, "An upward trend." She weights 14.6 pounds.

We got them home again with comparatively little fanfare, and collapsed in our respective ways.

Beth came over to get her copy of Minneapa 400 and borrow a book or two. David and I sat around in the living room afterwards and talked about food and books for a while.

Raphael and I watched "Buffy" early. Season Seven is kind of like looking at a good show through a very dirty piece of glass. I can't believe the idiocy of the dialogue and the muddiness of the plots and the haphazardness of the characterization. Something remains, but sheesh.

I called Eric afterwards and we discussed our plans for the weekend and his adventures in the ridiculous bureaucracy of the University of Minnesota. I'd have firebombed the whole place by now. Maybe they would like to switch places with the writers and producers of "Buffy." I doubt either set could screw up more badly in a new and presumably less boring milieu.

I wrote 100 words, which is better than only glaring.

Pamela

Stealing the Elf-King's Roses

(By Diane Duane)

Contains fuzzy spoilers. Contains no drift into other material, no account of the weather or my own writing or whatever -- and that was dismayingly hard to accomplish -- so you can just skip it if you're worried. Contains no cut tags, on request.

I think I did this book a disservice by reading it in so dissociated a fashion. I think I also did it a disservice by reading A WIZARD ALONE first. I suspect AWA has its own problems, but they are not the ones that make me crazy about the author's work, so it left me in a state of high expectation.

There are a lot of very cool things about STEALING THE ELF-KING'S ROSES. Periodically throughout I kept checking the front and back matter of the book to see if it were part of a series of which I had missed the first two or three or four volumes. On reflection I quite like that. There is usually a difference in feel between embedded history in a single volume and references to previous volumes. While I really prefer that an actual series sound as if each book were the only one, the reversal was very interesting and not objectionable.

I liked the characters and the partnership and the way justice is dealt with; I liked the mad mixture of sf and fantasy. I know that that kind of thing drives a lot of people nuts, but I have always had a sneaking fondness for it, and I think Duane does it particularly well.

Daedela had mentioned, when she finished it, that she had been very worried that it would conform to certain conventions of category romances. I had no idea what she meant. Not until page 334 did it dawn on me what was going on that would make anybody have expectations of the plot based on an experience of category romances. At that point I finally got it. Not very much after that point, I felt almost assaulted by vivid recollections of THE BLUE SWORD and THE RIDDLEMASTER OF HED trilogy. That was very strange and I'm still not sure what I think of it.

I am on the fence about the aspect that upset jinian so much. I don't mind so much our universe being the way it is said to be in the book, or even the bait-and-switch, which actually in the purity of its immediate realization made me go "Wow." I do very much resent having almost no clue as to what happened. I'm not sure it is "birth defects," I'm not sure it's that defined. I trawled around looking for clues. Deity has a more feminine aspect in the other universes is all I really came up with. I assumed that the War in Heaven probably had something to do with it, but there is no clue to that other than a certain implied absence around the edges in the universes we do see. I do object to the entire idea of an ethical constant, but I am always having to overcome that kind of objection in order to read Duane and other authors in the first place, so that wasn't some kind of unfamiliar barrier.

I don't know. My emotional reactions to the entire thing were blunted somehow. I don't know if it was by the circumstances under which I read the book, the sudden echoes of other books, or the book itself. I do think the ending was rushed, and I definitely think it would be better to have the brokenness of the one universe explained and put into the plot. I don't like it as a throwaway, that's really my objection to it. This actually makes me wonder if I missed something. I'm going to have to reread it when my mind is more functional.

I retain some very vivid images of sky and landscape. I found the dialogue pretty clunky, though.

Huh.

Pamela