Of course, it’s hard to calculate just how many to say I’ve read: entire series were granted one entry each, and of those, I’ve read:

• One book in the Belgariad
• Four in the Wheel of Time series
• About 12 Xanth books
• The first Dune
• Every damned Vorkosigan book.
• The Fellowship of the Ring

Sometimes I think I’m just contrarian: even The Last Unicorn isn’t my favorite Peter S. Beagle book!

She (thanks to Charlotte’s Web, I tend to assume spiders are female) is ugly, brown, and very industrious. When she draws her legs up to her body, the entire assemblage looks like a very small head of Cthulhu.

She is also tenacious: when I first discovered her on Monday night, I took the car on the interstate in an attempt to shake her off. What I ended up doing was taking my spider on a lovely night tour of my city.

I had planned to squash her the next morning, but she was still in the mirror, hadn’t completely covered my door in web, and, most importantly, would make a real mess on any shoe employed for the task. So instead she gets to be called Helga, and I get to feel imaginary bites all over myself every time I look at her or think about her too much.

Misspent social services funds point to problem

Er…yes?

Dear Bookseller,

I just received my package from you, and I must admit I’m very concerned for your welfare. This book’s condition was listed as “Very Good.” There may even have been some talk about “minor edge wear.” These words, combined with the condition of the book on its arrival, suggest several possibilities:

1. You have recently been through some sort of apocalypse which affects your judgement of such things—maybe the condition of this book, as opposed to the garden ruined by that rain of toads, is indeed “Very Good.”
2. The fancy super-sealed packaging emitted fumes, causing you to hallucinate that this was not, in fact, a creased and spine-cracked travesty of a paperback.
3. You are totally, totally evil.

I’m not averse to a little work on these things, really: I know I’m demanding. My paperbacks are going to be clear-Contact-papered, after all, and sometimes buying a used book means that I take a Sharpie or some paint and touch up little spots here and there before I preserve it.

I preserve it because, in my cockeyed optimism, I assume it will be good.

You sent me this copy of this novel because you, in your cockeyed optimism, assumed that I was either apathetic, mentally blunted, or visually impaired. I’m no more whipping out a Sharpie for this than I am performing CPR on the mummy of Ramses II, and for exactly the same reason.

…I didn’t punt it off my balcony in a rage, either, though, so there is that.

Am I going to mention some of this in my review? Let’s just say the chances are “Very Good.”

Until today, when I realized that I’ve been much more energetic the past few days than I have lately. The difference isn’t temperature at work, or sunshine (real or false): it’s the temperature outside. Yes, just like my indoor cat floofs up for winter even though it never goes below 65º in his immediate environment, I apparently perk up when the temperature I don’t even spend most of my day in goes up. How the heck can I be proactive about that?

”Writer Mira Bartok was 40 years old when a semi-trailer hurled into her car on the New York Thruway.”

The word is hurtled. “Hurl,” used in formal speech, needs an object: “She hurled an eraser at the book reviewer.”

The only reason “hurl,” needs no object in its slang sense is because it’s a euphemism—that is, used specifically to avoid mentioning the substance you, er, hurl when you hurl.

I’m no stranger to this kind of disappointment with NPR—it seems that eventually, apprise vs. appraise will cause me to lose respect for absolutely everybody in the whole world, until one day I flub it myself and the universe goes up in smoke—but I never expected something quite so gross.

What’s his name?

Um…

You named him Jack McKoi, didn’t you?

…Yes?

How ridiculous. Fish don’t even have eyebrows!

I can never get warm at work anyway (to the point that mentioning this to any older female relative leads to cries of “THYROID!!!;” given the family history they may have a point, but my weight is fine and my hair remains insanely thick), and it’s much worse when I can’t even sit in a warm car at lunchtime. Now if only I could show this to anyone who wanders by and wonders why I am wearing a sweater and a jacket, using another sweater as a lap rug, and typing in fingerless gloves…

It was one of those days when I regret being a sensible and circumspect person, because I’d love to tell you what I did at work all day, and how well it interacted with the phrase (in the initial request) “real quick.”
Alas, all I will say is that I got home, did a few chores, and lay down “for a minute” on my bed.

It is now an hour and a half later. I woke from a long, deep, detailed dream, for part of which my dream-self was in a swimming pool. My eyes are wobbly, and for some reason my actual ears hurt. But the rest of me feels much better!

Also, I may need to lay off the David Attenborough documentaries.