Hot and cold
It isn't hot but it's not cold, meaning that I'm now in a different reality from the last six months, or rather, last week. Warmth has hit the reset button on my personality and consequently erased most memories from my Cold-self period. Can't remember what the last book I finished was, and when I do remember, I forget it again immediately. (It was The Death of the Necromancer.) Granted, I've also been immersed in Freedom and Necessity, compulsively readable and almost 600 pages- but then, I generally find epistolary novels go faster than the other kind. Voice, you know. Something that long creates its own reality, but in heat, most things do. As an example, last night I reread the first few chapters of my recovered Madness of Angels, only to have oogies for the rest of the evening because these really are oogie books, first read in the unseasonably hot May of 2012 and thus nightmare fuel ever after. Brust and Bull provided a good enough antidote, or otherwise I'd have needed more 100Demons or Aaronovitch or Pratchett to exorcise the voice of Matthew Swift. (Or Dick Francis. It says something that three out of four of my touchstones of reality should be white English men.)
In the gratitudes department, took my bike over to the paranoid bike guy, the one who believes the government tracks you through the PA system in national parks. The shop said Open but the door was locked, just like last time. Last time I only had a slow leak that let me peddle to a Bloor St store, but this was a puncture that went flop ten minutes after being pumped. But as I was standing and dou shiyouing he rode up on his bike with a coffee and a newspaper and fixed it then and there. His bete noir, I understand, is people who actually leave their bikes with him because his hole in the wall shop has no storage space at all. Thus he was pleased that I would hang around while he fixed it, pay him cash, and ride away afterward. And I was pleased to have my bike back, but paranoid because between last winter's snow and this spring's construction, my biking routes are littered with gravel, stones, glass, nails, and a lot of sharp-sided and unavoidable crap, all liable to attack at any time and render me a limping walker again.
In the gratitudes department, took my bike over to the paranoid bike guy, the one who believes the government tracks you through the PA system in national parks. The shop said Open but the door was locked, just like last time. Last time I only had a slow leak that let me peddle to a Bloor St store, but this was a puncture that went flop ten minutes after being pumped. But as I was standing and dou shiyouing he rode up on his bike with a coffee and a newspaper and fixed it then and there. His bete noir, I understand, is people who actually leave their bikes with him because his hole in the wall shop has no storage space at all. Thus he was pleased that I would hang around while he fixed it, pay him cash, and ride away afterward. And I was pleased to have my bike back, but paranoid because between last winter's snow and this spring's construction, my biking routes are littered with gravel, stones, glass, nails, and a lot of sharp-sided and unavoidable crap, all liable to attack at any time and render me a limping walker again.