Well, today I did All The Things what I have been putting off forever. Put through a laundry and got it on the line, not that it dried completely because humid cloudy Septembers don't do that, even with intermittent sunshine and a breeze. But mostly, and the trousers can go over the upstairs railing until the elastic dries. Cooked up a bunch of ( Read more... )

Weird Chinese tales are still weird, though the chapter on the netherworld is very homelike, as in, these guys who have near death experiences don't see tunnels and glowing lights. No, it's all bureaucrats and government office buildings, which may just be that the dying brain sees what it expects to see. And when people do see their relatives, ( Read more... )

It's a pleasant enough life I lead these days‐ squaredle every morning, Questionable Content every (weekday) evening, tiktok videos of sheep herding dogs (from which I learn that 'Come by' tells the dogs to go clockwise and 'Away' means 'go counter-clockwise', which Pratchett failed to inform me in the Tiffany Aching books.) Also Chinese ( Read more... )

Two nights of disturbed sleep for no reason I know of. It's very disconcerting for me to wake up to darkness several times. Once yes, but three times? Anyway, last night got me two literary dreams: the first was a Dick Francis novel which sleeping brain thought was one of his real ones, just in technicolour. Details gone so I don't know if it was ( Read more... )

Being late as ever to current trends, and having a resistance to actually watching things, I passed by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's oeuvre, whether novels or anime, after a very brief dip ito both. But a tumblr post about Heaven Official's Blessing led me to believe there was a manhwa about that so I checked out our library system and put holds on the first ( Read more... )

Snow incoming tomorrow evening, again, which I hope explains the annoying click-catch-ow of my elbows all day. The knees are partly down to no massage last week, so when I had one yesterday she had the devil's own time getting the quads to stop being a solid muscle mass. And the right knee is still as unhappy as it has been for a fortnight. Maybe ( Read more... )

Someone on the FFL was reading Dick Francis' To the Hilt of which I had only vague memories and, by the look of it, no copy of my own, even though I could see its cover clearly sitting in the pile on the shelf. Got a library copy and polished it off in a day or so. In fact I'd forgotten virtually everything of the plot except for the gay-I-assumed ( Read more... )

Because my reflex when things go wrong is to throw money at it, when my doctor said I had to get more exercise to lower my cholesterol I immediately went online and ordered an under the table pedal machine, something I'll need anyway if I ever get my knee fixed. It came yesterday, and while I'm hoping the cholesterol stats are another lucky ( Read more... )

Finished?

Karen Lord, Unraveling-- reminiscent of Henry James ie the author knows what happened, a reader on the author's wavelength knows what happened, and the rest of us are simply confused. More fun than James at least, in that it has straight from Ezekiel angels, what might be a Demiurge, and a couple of archetypes backing up its murder ( Read more... )

 Oh, here it is. Rather where I expected it to be, in the Chinese poetry collection Huajian ji xu (among the flowers), edited by Ouyang Jiong. This one is by Wen Tingyun.

The moon rises on high, shining in the sky at midnight
It is quiet in the screens, there is no one to talk to
In the deep recesses, incense still lingers
As she sleeps, she ( Read more... )