HSU IT Department

I actually had no plans to read this but got it for Christmas by accident, as Spouse bought it for someone who turned out to already have it. It was OK but different from King's usual product in that there were zero supernatural elements in three of the four stories (the exception was the Devil); the slightly not-normal element in one of the others (rats, again -- he does have a thing for rats) might have simply been hallucinations. The first story, "1922," was just deeply, deeply sad (and a little heavy on grossness/gore), although I was expecting a very different ending for the son so props for the unexpected there. "Big Driver" I thought could have been about 30% shorter (many many pages on her crawling through the woods and down the road, and the excuse given for her not reporting the rape was pretty thin). But "Fair Extension" was great -- a traditional deal-with-the-devil story, with the twist that the man doesn't end up regretting it at all; what he bargained for turns out to be exactly what he wanted and he enjoys it thoroughly (though it isn't nice at all). And the last one, "A Good Marriage," was fantastic -- old-fashioned tension cranked up wire-tight in the best Hitchcock tradition, reminiscent of Gaslight, perhaps. Ten of ten for that one.

This was interspersed with a long, long, LONG overdue re-read of the Fionavar Tapestry. Every time I fall into those books I'm more in awe of his skill in story-telling, world-building, character development, and evocation of raw emotion. He's like Tolkien in the grand sweep of the story, but totally unlike him in that Tolkien's main characters are primarily "little people" both physically and in terms of power (apart from Gandalf and Aragorn, of course), while the Fionavar books are crammed with kings, gods, half-gods, legendary and mythic beings, larger-than-life men and women. I mean, King Arthur and Lancelot -- come on! And yet they're all so human, so vulnerable, so bound up with our most human elements: bitterness, hatred, despair, fear; love, hope, courage and trust. And freedom -- cutting across it all is the randomness of free choice, the knowledge that above and beyond anything else, we still have a say in our fates.

Exponentially different as King and Kay are, I envy both of them their sheer productiveness and their mastery of their chosen forms of the craft.

Up next: Sandman, The Wake. And possibly a re-read of the awesome and heavily-fictionally-footnoted Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Yay for vacations and massive stretches of unallocated time!!

According to the local news, which is attempting to be a) witty and b) topical, we have had one Bieber of snow so far this month. Yes, that's correct: they have chosen to measure the snow in Biebers. Actually that's out of date, because we've now had 70", so if little 5'5" Justin were to stand in it he would be totally buried.

Perhaps not a bad thing. Justin, would you care to step over here for a moment?

And they've published a helpful little graph showing snowfall for previous Decembers. There's the average snowfall (a gentle orange curve up to about 2' over the whole month); the least snow (a lean green line that clings to the bottom of the graph); the most snow (a blue line that goes upward in three or four hiccups to about 6' over the course of the entire month). And then there's this year: a purple line that shoots vertically up on the 6th and then just...stays there, smushed against the top like a helium balloon bobbing against the ceiling. Argh. Apparently the only worse events were the notorious Blizzard of '66 and the infamous Blizzard of '93 (42" in 48 hours!!).

On the plus side, all the Christmas shopping for out-of-staters is done and shipped (go me!). Now I can sit back and look forward to the annual Christmas Eve White Elephant party in which someone always gets the following a) a chia pet, b) something obscene from Spencers, and c) that really ugly mirror that keeps getting regifted. I do not enjoy this sort of thing (I don't even need any ACTUAL stuff, why would I want to acquire gag stuff??), but it's part of my (step)mother-in-law's family tradition, so there you go. There's usually nothing for me to eat other than the rye bread dip and deviled eggs, everything else being meat-based products. Ah well, there's always the vodka jello shots in the ice cube trays...

Ooh, it's 11 degrees out. Time for tea.

Finished Word Freak last night, about the author's investigation of -- and unwilling assimilation by -- the world of competitive Scrabble. I could have done without the detailed descriptions of the fringe personalities' drug and personal hygiene habits, but other than that I enjoyed the book quite a bit. Learned a lot I never knew about the history of the game (such as the fact that the inventor's total profit on the game was about $800,000 -- poor Mr. Butts). Very much agree it would be excellent if they televised the championships as they do with poker, billiards, etc. ("Too cerebral" ha ha.) Am amazed that a 600 or 700+ game is even theoretically possible, not to mention having been actually achieved more than once. A great game for me is if I break 300; my mom (English teacher turned lawyer, a tough combo) broke 400 once with ESTOPPAL on a triple-triple. Most impressive play mentioned in the book: AUBERGINES on split B, R and N. Mind-boggling. Who even thinks of things like that??

Also surprising: the upper echelons of competitive Scrabble are almost entirely male-dominated. This seems odd, until you read about how utterly obsessive one has to be to get to that level -- memorizing lists of thousands of words, inventing mnemonic tricks to remember all the letters that go with a given seven-letter rack for an eight-letter bingo, etc. That seems a more male attitude. The women he mentions in the book seem to play because they enjoy it; they have functional jobs, lives, families, and don't spend all their free time replaying games to see where they could have done better. (The author does mention in passing that there are well-adjusted male championship players as well, but he doesn't show you many of them!)

The book also includes an interesting digression, during the World Championships in Melbourne, on the differences between American and non-American players: Americans are self-absorbed, aggressive, and obsessed with winning. Pretty much the same as the difference between American and non-American anythings. Us Yanks, we are so Yank-ish.

Three feet since Saturday. Three FEET. That's more snow this week than we had in the entire month of December last year.

The 5-day forecast in the paper this morning said "Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow."

I'm not only walking in a winter wonderland, I'm slithering, sliding, shoveling and damn near swimming in the thing. At this rate we may soon be eating it. I hear it's tasty with maple syrup, but I prefer filling a nice big mug and then pouring peppermint schnapps over it. Minty fresh breath AND a nice buzz.

I'm all for a white Christmas but this is ridiculous. Perhaps my Icon o'Fire will keep me warm. Of course it's balanced out by my "How am I?" icon LOL! Oh well...puts me in the holiday mood, so it's all good. I guess. Brrrrr.

Can I just say that the lack of posts from people on my friends list pleases me no end, as it means they have a family and/or a life and are doing lovely family things this week?

Hugs to all of y'all ♥ ♥ ♥

First, the good news. The MARAC conference this past weekend went very well, my bit was well-attended and (I think) effective in getting the basic groundwork of its subject across. Did a little schmoozing and networking. Met an archivist from the Woody Guthrie Archives and one from the Rockefeller Foundation, which was cool. Archivists are found in such interesting places, places you'd never think about. I mean, who wouldn't want to be the archivist for the Metropolitan Opera or Blue Man Group, or the reference librarian for NPR?? There we are, working away in the background, making sure things are where they're supposed to be and questions can be answered. Go us :)

Also -- bonus! -- I had the opportunity for a lovely long chat over wine with the very talented and intelligent ennyousai. We swapped book recommendations, theorized about why so many librarians and archivists write fanfic, and agreed that Patrick Stewart and Derek Jacobi could read, oh, the telephone book and we would still be giddily enthralled. We also shared our puzzlement over why libraries all seem to feel they must be on Facebook. I mean, if you're a fan of the library, you're already a fan of the library, right? A Facebook page is unlikely to persuade throngs of library non-fans to come to Jesus, as it were, so what's the point? It just becomes a time-suck and yet another place that has to be kept up to date and interesting. Like we don't all have enough work to do, what with backlogs and reference requests and so on and so forth.

The bad news was family: my grandfather died on Friday. He was in his 90s, very frail and in hospice, so it wasn't unexpected, but still...he and my grandmother were married almost 70 years and I don't think they've spent a night apart in, well, ever. So we're leaving Thanksgiving day to go back to my home town to spend a few days with her, and for the memorial service on the 30th.

I have wonderful memories of him -- he was a huge fan of the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Show and of Hogan's Heroes (he was a pilot in WWII), and I remember sitting on his lap as a child watching them with him. I still think of him when I hear the Hogan's Heroes theme song :) When I was little and staying with them, my grandmother would let me bring him his coffee in the mornings. I remember myself at maybe seven years old, carrying the coffee mug ve-e-e-ery carefully, setting it on the bedside table, and carefully prodding the big mound under the covers that was my grandfather. He would be all covered up with just his wild hair showing, all sticking up like porcupine quills, and he would open one squinty eye (he was NOT a morning person LOL!) and one hand would snake slo-o-o-owly out to get the mug and pull it in. Then in about half an hour he'd finally be awake, and if it was Saturday, we'd pile into his big lounger chair and watch cartoons together. Once when my brother came to visit, he complained about Mom forcing him to eat veggies and my grandfather sent him home with a signed certificate saying he didn't have to eat broccoli LOL! And then there were his sneezes. They started somewhere around his toes and you could hear them rumbling upwards until they arrived with something like Force 5 on the Richter scale :)

He was smart and funny and kind and generous and very, very dignified, and I will ♥ miss him ♥...

Top Chef Just Desserts. I actually watched it twice last night just to see Seth do his huffy pouty meltdown thing. Spouse also observed that while on Iron Chef (which I'm not ashamed to admit I watch) some of them may in fact be gay, you'd never know it, whereas here it seems to be a casting requirement to have one in every season. (Sidebar: Iron Chef Cat Cora is in fact gay; she recently spoke out on that so-heartbreaking Tyler Clementi suicide.)

Sister Wives. Maybe because I've never been good at having female friends, I'm fascinated by these women who are such good buddies they manage to SHARE A MAN. What's that all about??

Teen Mom. Just for Macy. The rest of them are train wrecks but that girl seems to have her head on straight.

I really should cancel my cable. It's rotting my brain, and it's not like I have enough brain cells to be able to spare that many. (NB: The theory that killing off the weak brain cells makes you smarter turns out, sadly, to be flawed.)

Now that I've owned up to habits so disgraceful that none of my friends (either real life or virtual) will respect me ever again, I'm going back to my medieval history, comparative religion and Neil Gaiman. Just to prove that one can enjoy both ends of the intellectual spectrum without spontaneously combusting. Though I do feel a little flushed...

Q: How many hours of LoTR can one television station show in one weekend?

A: All 72 of them, apparently.

Spent the holiday weekend doing THINGS I WANTED for a change. Go me :)

♥ Worked on first SSIAW* for my writers' group; story has a beginning and an end but way too much middle, and the far end of the middle doesn't yet connect with the end. Not sure how to rein this in, and I only have until midnight tomorrow night to sort it out.

♥ Got all my fic posted to Archive of Our Own. I'm impressed with the site thus far -- design, functionality, features, layout, everything.

♥ Spent a radiant half an hour laughing myself into hiccups over Hyperbole and a Half's latest gem, on the Four Levels of Social Entrapment ("Trying to end a conversation in the grocery store is like battling a sea monster that has an infinite capacity to revive itself..."). Go. See. Giggle.

♥ Positively devoured more books than any human being should in three days, as follows:

- Sister Emily's Lightship, a terrific collection of retold/reimagined fairy tales by Jane Yolen. Since it's SSIAW in my writers' group I'm trying to soak up all the tips and tricks I can on short stories, but beyond that she's a great writer. Some of the stories were in the Ellen Datlow/Terry Windling fairy tale collections (e.g. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears) but most were completely new to me. The title story turned me off -- just a bit too off-beat -- but the rest were excellent.

- The Book of Lost Things, an excellent story that includes remaginings/retellings of fairy tales, by John Connolly. Reminded me in many ways of a darker, more mature version of The Poor Little Rich Girl. His version of the seven dwarves is positive genius! Get the later edition that includes his notes at the end on the various fairy tales, plus the original Grimm versions.

- Faithless, by Joyce Carol Oates. I'm trying Oates yet again, having failed with two of her other novels (them and I forget the other one) and been left permanently scarred by one of her short stories ("Where are you going, where have you been"). So far it's not looking promising. She's an excellent writer, that's clear, but the characters are all so unlovable and unlovely, so damaged or stupid or just plain unpleasant, that it's hard to enjoy spending time with them.

- The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Doris is another one that I sometimes have trouble with. I disliked The Golden Notebook, was moderately impressed with A Survivor's Tale, and was captivated by her Shikasta series (which I still haven't finished). With this one I can't tell if it's meant to be a metaphor for the compromises one makes as one gets older, and the pain that results, or if it's meant to be literally about an evil changeling child. Either way, it's gripping, horrifying, and very, very desolate at the end.

Sadly, tomorrow it's back to work and flailing madly in a sea of emails and meetings. Blech.

*SSIAW = Short Story In A Week

I like this article about Law & Order because it manages to work in the word Thersites; I can't decide if that's a tribute to the NYT or L&O, but either way, I give props to them.

This week was what I like to call a Sprinkler Week. You know those automated sprinklers with the little lever that goes chk...chk...chk...chk each time whacking the sprayer into a slightly different direction, and then eventually it gets to the end of its rotation and goes chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga back to its original starting point? These things.

My entire week was like that. chk...an email comes in, I fire off a paragraph about this...chk...another one comes in, I send off an approval of that...chk...another one, I shoot off my best effort at a list of the other things...

By the end of the day I'm my brain is spinning round and round going "chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga!!"

Wine....where is my wine...