• Mood: already nostalgic
• Music: the mindless yack of television, bless'd television

A December of Candles (almost)

Not much to report about today. I attended to a couple of writerly things that could be put off no longer, then helped Spooky with unpacking and picture hanging. We managed to get the big Waterhouse Lady of Shalott up over the living-room mantle. I can tell it's going to take a while to get everything back together, we did such a thorough job of untogethering it. Good news from the used bookstore where we took nine boxes of books last week; they'fre offering a whopping $280 (and change) in cash or $420 in trade. Spooky and Jennifer say take the trade, so we probably will. The remaining two boxes will be taken to another bookstore. Oh, and I managed to lose four pounds during the move. It's probably in a box somewhere. This evening, the Direct TV guy came and gave us the dubious gift of television again. He spied a very realistic wooden snake I'd set on the mantle (a scarlet kingsnake), and wanted to know if it was real snake and informed me (I was cooking chili) that if it was a real snake, we wouldn't be getting TV from him.

I've was looking back through old entries today (I don't really know why; it's sort of like picking a scab), and I found one from June 7th (labled "Overdisclosure" on LJ) that managed to simultaneously amuse and embarrass me. It was back during the brief experiment with letting more personal stuff, the sort of things I usually reserve for my private, paper-and-pen journal, leak into the blog. I think I was probably right when I declared the experiment a failure, but that bit about not hanging myself at Kirkwood, that was funny, regardless.

What else. Oh, yeah. You'd think if someone's just recently read a book — a book by me, for example — they would remember the title. I'm probably gonna sound like an asshole for complaining about this (what else is new), but I ran across a couple of Usenet posts today wherein people discussed having read Murdered Angel and Dry Salvage. I will assume that some people read so frelling many books that silly things like titles just melt away after a few weeks.

And, because moving never gets old, I'll leave you with the following three photos:


Before...


...and After...


...and Afterer still.

It really was pretty weird, exiting that room for the last time (I know I said I was leaving you with the photos, but I lied). It always is, abandoning an office. Last night, when I'd removed the last little bits of me from the place, I lingered a moment, then turned off the light and shut the door. That's the room where I froze, summer and winter, for two years, the room where I spent almost every day, where I did revisions on Low Red Moon and wrote most of Murder of Angels, where I wrote The Dry Salvages, along with "Mercury," "Faces in Revolving Souls," "The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles," "Houses Under the Sea," "Alabaster," "Riding the White Bull," "La Peau Verte," "Bradbury Weather," "The Pearl Diver," "The Dead and the Moonstruck," and various other things. An awful lot of me happened in the long cold room with its peculiar red concrete floors (it used to be part of a restroom in the elementary school). You don't leave places like that easily. Well, I don't.

Okay. Now you can go. No, for real this time. Shoo, before I start crying over a stupid room.