weekend!

I loooooove these hot sunny weekends. This is fantastic!

Saturday afternoon I finished my shelves, for the value of ‘finished’ which means ‘they are now all sanded and need to be stained, laquered and mounted’, went to see Holes, which was really quite charming, read a bunch of a book, walked 3 biked 10 miles, and… that was mostly it.

I finished the book — Fly By Night, by Jenny Jones — on Sunday morning, between making bread and a cake. It’s a book I bought in England 10 years ago and I really loved it then, and I wanted to re-read it to see if it stood up to the test of time.

Eh.

I’d forgotten (or hadn’t noticed) how entirely unsympathetic the main character is. Writing that I suspect I thought was elegant and clever prose ten years ago now annoys me;there is a character in the book whom I shall call Amaryllis, just on the amazingly off-hand chance that someone reading this should want to not be spoiled by the book. Amaryllis dies. When her death is referred to, it is often as “the death of Amaryllis”, rather than “Amaryllis’ death”, as if the writer wasn’t sure what to do about that apostrophe at the end there. A lot of that kind of thing, and also a lot of passive voice that I hadn’t noticed/hadn’t been bothered by before. I finished the book and I’ll finish re-reading the trilogy, to see… well, to see if it improves, I suppose, but so far it’s not standing up to the test of time all that well. Too bad, too.

Later Sunday morning Dad and I went up and tromped around Eklutna Lake for a bit, discovered they rent kayaks for $30/4 hours, and determined we’d have to come back up there with Mom and Ted and some money, and rent kayaks. :)

Came home, made frosting and put the cake together, then walked the dog. SWELTERING HOT. Spent most of the rest of the day in a stupor.

Well, no, that’s not true. I did a little laundry and tried to write (300 words), but it was just too damned hot out to think. And Ted made an *amazingly* good grilled salmon dinner, with steak-and-mushroom shishkabobs, and fresh brocolli and (not fresh) rice, and Mom and Dad came over and we all ate this REALLY GOOD meal and sat around saying, “And just think, he’s going to go to culinary school and learn how to cook!” Wow, it was really good. Then cake for dessert, and we sat around talking for a while, and after Mom and Dad went home we watched A Knight’s Tale, because it was too hot to do anything else. :)

Went to bed, my brain started percolating on an X3 idea (Ted’s fault, he said he’d like to see the chick who played the female lead in Knight’s Tale play Psylocke), got up, wrote 3 pages of notes, went back to bed, and slept like a very sleepy thing until this morning. Now I’m going to go buy Final Draft, because if I’m going to try to write an X3 script it seems like I ought to line up the karma a bit by at least purchasing the screenwriting software. :)

miles to Rivendell: 141
miles to Mordor: 521.4
ytd wordcount: 151,500