Thank god for the fog. Things are getting back to normal finally with the cooler weather.

Still reading The Name of the Rose because I have to keep stopping to read other things. Actually glad I'm reading this after taking the manuscripts and incunabula class last fall so I know all about monkish ways and scriptoria. The other night on the MUA frag board someone posted a poll asking a) what are you reading, b) what fragrace would compliment it, and c) what fragrace would you associate with a main character? My answers got a few laughs:

a) The Name of the Rose
b) Comme des Garcons Avignon (wearing it at the time, too)
c) I think Father William would smell of lavender, peppermint, dirt and sweat. Looking up those particular notes gives me... A*Men.

Um, it's really hot.



Current reading: The Name of the Rose, because I figured it was about time.

Things to be grateful for: I'm not at Comicon leading a giant frog around by the elbow.

I caught this little beauty in my bedroom last night. It's a wolf spider, ostensibly harmless, but I'm told the bite can be painful (like I would not guess that on my own). I did not bother to follow the prescribed guidelines on sexing and determining maturity. This is the third one I've found in my room over the past several years; never seen one in any other part of the house, oddly enough. After spraying Raid all over my room it was too toxic to sleep in there so I spent an extremely uncomfortable and warm night on the couch. Which worked out well because I spent and extremely uncomfortable and warm day at the office today as the A/C there is still not really working and our clients are all nincompoops.

Sorry, but several days of 100+ temps makes me a little cranky.

I thought Fabien Barthez was the biggest idiot on the French team, but no, it turns out to be Zinedine Zidane. What a stupid, senseless way to end a career. I missed most of the action because my godson had the appalling disregard to be born on the same day as a future World Cup final match (after putting his mom through 36 hours of painful labor) and so I had to listen to the first half on Spanish radio en route to his 5th birthday party. My Spanish is not all that great, but you don't need much linguistic sophistication to understand, "Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooolll! ZidaneZidane ZidaneZidaneZidaneZidaneZidaneZidaneZidaneZidane!"

Chris was kind enough to pass along the first two seasons of Deadwood so I can watch them all in order and I've invented a Deadwood drinking game: take a swig whenever anyone says "c---
-----r" (the f-word is uttered far too frequently to keep track), and bottoms up whenever anyone dies.

In other news, it has become a kind of Killing Fields Rodentia around here. I've lost count of the number of mice Koosh has consumed in the past several days. She even ate two in one day last week. This is a tiny fluffy cat that looks like some kid's stuffed toy, not a kitty terminator.

Safeway never has lime and black pepper potato chips anymore. I am sad about this.

Got back from Oregon late Wednesday. Four days of amazing food, beautiful weather, and playing in the river with the dogs. Portland is really nice, and Cathy's dad has a great setup right on the river in Siletz. (That's Sil-ETZ... don't ever say SI-letz. The Oregonians are worse than the French about pretending they can't understand you if you pronounce something even slightly wrong. They don't let you pump your own gas, either. Weirdos.)

In one of those freaky odd coincidences, a pair of refugees from the gaming industry live right up the road from Cathy's dad and know everybody I know. We spent the 4th on their boat in Newport (that's NEW-port) watching fireworks and gossiping. In addition to running an executive search firm with her husband, Barb makes cute flip flops hand-studded with tiny Swarovsky crystals and cooks up all kinds of organic bath and body creams. The nights can be long and rainy up there in the Oregon mountains.