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My love of public libraries knows no bounds.
...Even when they decide to close for the entire weekend despite the power coming back on Friday, and are my only source of internet access, and then they don't open on Mondays til ten, instead of nine, and I have to sit on the steps for twenty minutes, waiting. Even then. I love public libraries. I can check my mail! (~500 messages in two inboxes, since Thursday, but still nothing from IKEA about the furniture I ordered...)
Our power went out Thursday, around four. I was taking a much-needed nap, and woke up and got out of bed in that sleep-drugged staggering way that you do when you've slept two hours in the middle of the day and it wasn't enough. I was facedown on the couch when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iuliamentis came out to say the power had gone out. First she was worried she hadn't paid the bill or transferred the account to the new apartment, and then she tried calling the apartment complex office and/or her boyfriend and, despite the fact that you can see a cell tower from where we were sitting in the living room, her phone wouldn't work. It wasn't til we got into my (blessedly air conditioned) car to go pick up her boyfriend from work that we found out what was going on (all our landline phones are cordless, and cells wouldn't work...), when the radio announcer welcomed us to 'this blackout afternoon in metro Detroit.'
We did okay - Iulia's minidisc player gets radio, we had minimags and some candles (and lots of matches - so sue me, I like matches...) and a book light, and our apartment gets pretty decent cross-ventilation. I read books - finished The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, despite prose that made me want to scream and/or mark up the book in red pen.
Power came back early Friday afternoon, and we celebrated by sitting down and watching six episodes of Sports Night on dvd, which was cool except that for three of those episodes, Danny and Casey were fighting. Turns out thatiuliamentis is as staunch an apologist for Casey as I am for Danny, so we were very nearly fighting ourselves, and it was weird (in eight years, the worst fight we've ever had - in Chicago, March of 2002, over whose fault it was that we had to take a cab instead of getting a ride from someone - lasted about three minutes, so close to an hour of vague hostility was, well, weird). Happily, the boys made up, so we could stop being mad at each other.
Saturday, I got offered the full time job I interviewed for a week ago, which means that starting tomorrow night, I'll be spending five nights a week locked inside an office supply superstore with a few coworkers, opening freight boxes, pricing and shelving office supplies. Wish me luck; I'm going to have to completely flip my circadian rhythm in the next 34 hours.
Sunday, I finished reading a book, Apropos of Nothing by Peter David, that I started reading at last year's WorldCon. Good book, funny, high fantasy satire, but that's how much I've gotten out of the habit of reading books, I guess. I celebrated by going out and buying Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage, and Public Sex (2nd Ed.) by Pat Califia. Nonfiction seems to be the gap in my reading, now that I'm out of school.
This means that I've actually managed to finish all of my books-in-progress except Emma Holly's Catching Midnight, a supernaturalish-themed (the heroine and several secondary characters are 'upyr', more or less vampires, with shape-shifting abilities) romance novel set in the 14th century. I had forgotten, until I picked it up again during the power outage, that one of the reasons I stopped reading was that the 14th century hero said something the heroine was doing was "sort of ... sexy." (Having just read a book on the OED, I checked: the coinage of 'sexy' is dated to the 1920's.) Ordinarily, I'd just chuck the book and forget it, but I really want to like this book. I really liked the 19th Century romance I read by her (Beyond Seduction) and she's in the habit of presenting positively, or at least not negatively, relationship options other than het monogamy. One of the books she wrote before Beyond Seduction was for an erotica series (and now I can't remember the name of the series or the book) about a m/m/f triad. But. Damn. Diction!
Anyway, I'm tired and still at skip=200, so. That's probably quite enough for now.
Our power went out Thursday, around four. I was taking a much-needed nap, and woke up and got out of bed in that sleep-drugged staggering way that you do when you've slept two hours in the middle of the day and it wasn't enough. I was facedown on the couch when
iuliamentis came out to say the power had gone out. First she was worried she hadn't paid the bill or transferred the account to the new apartment, and then she tried calling the apartment complex office and/or her boyfriend and, despite the fact that you can see a cell tower from where we were sitting in the living room, her phone wouldn't work. It wasn't til we got into my (blessedly air conditioned) car to go pick up her boyfriend from work that we found out what was going on (all our landline phones are cordless, and cells wouldn't work...), when the radio announcer welcomed us to 'this blackout afternoon in metro Detroit.' We did okay - Iulia's minidisc player gets radio, we had minimags and some candles (and lots of matches - so sue me, I like matches...) and a book light, and our apartment gets pretty decent cross-ventilation. I read books - finished The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, despite prose that made me want to scream and/or mark up the book in red pen.
Power came back early Friday afternoon, and we celebrated by sitting down and watching six episodes of Sports Night on dvd, which was cool except that for three of those episodes, Danny and Casey were fighting. Turns out that
iuliamentis is as staunch an apologist for Casey as I am for Danny, so we were very nearly fighting ourselves, and it was weird (in eight years, the worst fight we've ever had - in Chicago, March of 2002, over whose fault it was that we had to take a cab instead of getting a ride from someone - lasted about three minutes, so close to an hour of vague hostility was, well, weird). Happily, the boys made up, so we could stop being mad at each other. Saturday, I got offered the full time job I interviewed for a week ago, which means that starting tomorrow night, I'll be spending five nights a week locked inside an office supply superstore with a few coworkers, opening freight boxes, pricing and shelving office supplies. Wish me luck; I'm going to have to completely flip my circadian rhythm in the next 34 hours.
Sunday, I finished reading a book, Apropos of Nothing by Peter David, that I started reading at last year's WorldCon. Good book, funny, high fantasy satire, but that's how much I've gotten out of the habit of reading books, I guess. I celebrated by going out and buying Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage, and Public Sex (2nd Ed.) by Pat Califia. Nonfiction seems to be the gap in my reading, now that I'm out of school.
This means that I've actually managed to finish all of my books-in-progress except Emma Holly's Catching Midnight, a supernaturalish-themed (the heroine and several secondary characters are 'upyr', more or less vampires, with shape-shifting abilities) romance novel set in the 14th century. I had forgotten, until I picked it up again during the power outage, that one of the reasons I stopped reading was that the 14th century hero said something the heroine was doing was "sort of ... sexy." (Having just read a book on the OED, I checked: the coinage of 'sexy' is dated to the 1920's.) Ordinarily, I'd just chuck the book and forget it, but I really want to like this book. I really liked the 19th Century romance I read by her (Beyond Seduction) and she's in the habit of presenting positively, or at least not negatively, relationship options other than het monogamy. One of the books she wrote before Beyond Seduction was for an erotica series (and now I can't remember the name of the series or the book) about a m/m/f triad. But. Damn. Diction!
Anyway, I'm tired and still at skip=200, so. That's probably quite enough for now.