okayWe came across that sentence while reading The Hobbit last night, the scene where Bilbo first gets a good look at Smaug's hoard, and it just floored me. Not only is it a grand sentence in its own right, but it struck a nerve with me, as too often I am writing and come to some marvelous or terrible thing...and the words just are not there. I know they should be. I sense they may once have been. Anyway, nice.
The thing about days off when one is actually expected to rest, they do not make for interesting blog entries. Because, as I have found, resting is generally boring as hell. And there are few things I hate as much as boredom. Republicans, polenta, NASCAR, Christina Aguilera, leafblowers, Stargate SG-1, and boredom. So there was not nearly as much pure and unadulterated rest yesterday as there should have been. I'm just no good at it.
We had a really nice, long walk, though, as it was bright and almost warm. Warm enough the dogwoods are budding, which is, of course, all sorts of wrong. We walked west as far as Inman Park, crossing Austin Avenue down to Euclid, which we followed back towards L5P. We played with Daisy, a very friendly black dog. It was about 3:30 p.m. (CaST), and the moon, one day past first quarter, was already high in the southeastern sky. We spotted a Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens). We saw a mysterious trail of fresh bloody dog prints on the sidewalk.
Back home, instead of resting, I worked at cleaning my messy office. It looks much better today. About 6 p.m., I did finally lie down and read for a while, from Janus and Brashler's The Search for Peking Man (1975), but that's as close as I came to doing nothing. I cannot do nothing. I will do plenty of nothing when I am dead. Later, Spooky made soup for dinner. We watched Anthony Bourdain in Indonesia. I did a Wikipedia entry for the new sauropod clade Turiasauria. Spooky rescued the neighbor's chihuahua, as it had somehow gotten outside without them knowing. Then we read The Hobbit, which is where all this began.
Yesterday, after all the "you're not a kid anymore" crap, a couple of people asked about Kid Night, if we still do Kid Night. Truthfully, things have been so crazy the last six or eight months, that Kid Night has been allowed to fall by the wayside. However, inspired by these questions, we resolved to have a proper frelling Kid Night this evening, and maybe it will help. I think we're going to watch The Descent, which must surely qualify as Kid Night fodder. There will be mac and cheese.
My thanks to Tim Pratt, not only for writing that marvelous review of Daughter of Hounds for Locus, but for sending me the full text yesterday. And that reminds me, Spooky pointed out that if you buy Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster together from Amazon.com, you not only save $10.55 off the cost of the books, you also qualify for FREE Super Saver shipping. And hey, you could always toss in the mmp of Threshold for just $6.99 more! But wait! There's more! Well, actually there isn't. But that what they always say of television, so...
Meanwhile, if today is going to earn a W, I must attend to some editing and get back to Vince Locke about the sketch he sent me last night for "The Voyeur in the House of Glass."