Too Much To Dream

Stuff and Nonsense

Wholly unimportant personal detritus follows. Feel free to skip this post.

I had some good news in my university account today -- they have approved my (groveling, humiliating) appeal and will let me receive the money I had already borrowed so I can pay for my next semester of classes, which starts next Monday. I am glad, because I am so friggin' bored. Classes will at least be a diversion.

I am in one of my moods. I decided to eat at the Chinese restaurant next to my job, where the food is dependable if not spectacular (and more important, it is cheap). They were playing Chinese pop music for a change instead of that awful New Age Muzak station they usually play, which was not the greatest relief (I find Chinese pop music to be a bland as any other country's pop music), but at least I didn't have to listen to the awful "self-help" therapy show the Muzak station plays at that hour. Then I went off to the bookstore to find a calendar. I was not pleased with any of the Lord of the Rings ones still available; for one thing, only desk calendars were still to be had, and I wanted one for the wall; for another thing, the ones with photos from the films did not have the best shots (IMHO) and the art ones were Ted Nasmith's, whose artwork I don't much care for. (His trees and Ents are good, but his people rather less attractive to me. I prefer the Brothers Hildebrandt's or Alan Lee's renderings of Tolkien scenes.) So I scrapped the idea of buying an LOTR calendar and looked at the others, but all Borders had left were insipid folk art ("American Quilt," and the like), cars, Harry Potter, and cheescake. I wandered around looking at books for a while but I wasn't very interested, and they were starting to do the annoying we're-about-to-close announcements. I looked at a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Kindly Ones from his Sandman series, but though I like the story I didn't care for the artwork in that particular volume. (The most beautifully illustrated volume in that series is The Wake, which I already own.) I picked around the cd bins, and got to hear a couple being told by the loud clerk that Nick Drake could be found "in opera."

When I am in one of my moods and I can't get some trifling thing that I have been looking for, I am not happy, so after I left Borders I stopped at the Books-A-Million store that is in my neighborhood. They had a much larger selection of half-price 2003 calendars, and I finally settled on one with black-and-white Aubrey Beardsley illustrations. Happiness. I brought it home and tacked it on my wall. Now I can ignore the date like I usually do.

Right now I am listening to the Lisa Gerrard-Peter Bourke cd Duality. Buying all her latest output is in my plans, but that waits, of course for the "spare money," which I never seem to have.

I really need to do something about the pathetically neglected and out-of-date "Library" portion of my site. One thing I will probably do is dispense with the frames, which are so 1997. It is the only site I have ever successfully set up with frames that is still around, which is one reason I haven't redesigned it. In any case, I have left the characters in my two major stories hanging, and I suppose I should get around to rescuing them from the fix they are in.

Posted by Andrea Harris at January 3, 2003 01:15 AM