5 things

[truepenny]

1. Ten months and two days out, I have had my last orthopedist appointment. (This is the ten-month anniversary of my ankle surgery, which was two days after I broke it.) The orthopedist is very very pleased. There's no sign of the fracture, the joint is symmetrical, the talus is nicely contained by the tibia and fibula. (He pulled up the original ER X-rays, in which, yeah, the tibia has ceased to contain anything and the talus is kind of drifting off out of the joint in a way I find even more horrifying now than I did at the time. In some circumstances, opiates really ARE your friends.) Unless the metal in my ankle starts to cause me pain, they don't need to see me again. Three loud cheers.

2. kate_nepveu pointed me to this lovely review by rushthatspeaks of The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow (written by Opal Whiteley, edited by Benjamin Hoff). Reading the review is its own reward, but I need to quote the first paragraph, which is what made Kate think of me:

The best way to describe the reading experience I had with this book is to say that it resembled what might happen to a perfectly innocent person who does not know much about history while looking up newspaper headlines from 1880s London. Which is to say, there you are researching away, doing nothing particularly ominous, and suddenly all of the scholarship on Jack the Ripper lurches out of its cabinet and starts gnawing on your leg. Up becomes down, dogs and cats start living together, the definitive works on the subject are written by people who do not have a personal interest so much as a personal ideological obsession, and otherwise perfectly rational researchers start yelling at one another "WHAT PART OF PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH WGAH'NAGHL CTHULHU FHTAGN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?"

Of course, what it says about me that this paragraph evokes me to my friends is . . . perfectly deserved.

3. The Lindorm is still at the Saab place, but they promise I will be able to pick it up today.

4. Menstrual cramps continue to blow dead bears.

5. The Drabblecast has sent me an engraved brandy snifter and a murder weapon blunt instrument MASSIVE PLAQUE to commemorate "Mongoose" (written by matociquala and me) being their Story of the Year for 2010. (matociquala will be getting her own PLAQUE and snifter because The Drabblecast is a class act like that.) I love only slightly more than the fact that this plaque looks like it belongs in a Clue-for-Writers game (Miss Scarlet*, in the Conservatory, WITH THE PLAQUE!) the fact that both snifter and PLAQUE are engraved with a tentacle not unlike this one:

Honestly, I think sffh has the best awards: rocket ships, tentacles, H. P. Lovecrafts, the Jackson Awards' rocks . . .

---
*Did anyone else, as a child, suspect a secret affinity between Miss Scarlet and Scarlett O'Hara?

Comments

Aunt Flo

[delazan.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, yes. Aunt Flo was visiting me this week, too, and seemed to have my ovaries in vice clamps.

Glad she's left for a month.
-L.

[avidreadergirl.livejournal.com]

*Did anyone else, as a child, suspect a secret affinity between Miss Scarlet and Scarlett O'Hara?

:::::raises hand::::::

to the point where I questioned my parents about why the lady on the card was a different ethnicity and wearing the wrong kind of dress.

(30 years from the first time I saw Gone With The Wind and I still just really want the clothes)

[kate_nepveu]

2. Hee. I'm glad you liked. (Though I didn't mean to ID you as one of the otherwise perfectly rational researchers, just someone who'd encountered them! Also I would love to hear what you think of the book too.)

1./4. Yay/boo.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

When I read that paragraph about the ripperology I thought "Oh, that's what's happened to Sarah!"

And as for Miss Scarlet, yes, in fact not having played it for some time I still thought that. "Miss Scarlett you done killed Ashley Wilkes in the library with the lead pipe! How we ever going to get that blood stain out of the carpet?"

[papersky.livejournal.com]

And congratulations on that awesome plaque!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

So that paragraph... may have been written because I read your reviews of books about Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden and the Salem witch trials and so on. Which is why it came into my mind because you are always very sane in what appears to be a howling wilderness of terrifying not-quite-scholarship.

Which means that yes, that was actually written because I was thinking 'I have seen that happen to Sarah', so I am amused that other people noticed that.