ooo. spooooky.

OK. Do not - DO NOT - read Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy when you are very tired and about to go to sleep. I have been reading it on and off for three years, and finally started the third book last night, and - hooo. OK, so it's kind of like Buffy, minus most of the snappy comebacks and in a high fantasy setting. It's about a kingdom (vaguely geographically like Scotland) where magic works & regular technology just crumbles, and its walled-off southern neighbor (follows to be vaguely geographically like England), where there is no magic but plenty of technology. The northern kingdom has a hereditary job, The Abhorsen, which is roughly like "The Slayer" - someone whose job it is to send reanimated dead spirits back into death. It's not particularly scary, but... I think on a page-per-page basis it has more zombies than any other book I've ever read.

I had weird weird weird dreams last night. The setting was more contemporary than in these books, but similar things were going on - ghosts, zombies, etc. - and the mechanism for getting rid of them was similar (handbells you have to ring a certain way). Dreams which I would not, incidentally, recommend to anyone else. So if you ever read the books - and they are quite good teen fantasy - don't do it when you're suggestible.

Other than that? Today? Well, more of the same crap: I'm going to eat breakfast and commence housework. Later this afternoon I will probably take a couple of bags of stuff down to my favorite local thrift store. It's been requested that I make my bedroom look a little more "normal" (not just clean, but, well, less... arty-punky... take down the Cure and anime posters, that sort of thing).

some floridian observations

So I went out and bought myself a bagel earlier, and noticed, to my bemusement, that the restaurant was absolutely packed with people, but that I was the only one younger than about 60. That's suburban Florida. It led me, as some other things have, to thinking about my grandparents, never spry, never working out, never going out for breakfast with friends. (I can't say "was" or "is", because my grandmother died a year ago and my grandfather is still alive.) All the old people around here, especially the old men (say 75 and up), are so nice. When I had a gym membership, which I had to let lapse because I couldn't afford it anymore, I used to sit around in the hot tub and gossip with the retirees.

Then, as I was driving home, something ended its life on my windshield. Anywhere else in the US this probably would have been, at its size, a small bird. Not here. Here, it was a very large dragonfly. I remember when I first moved here, 16 years ago, phys ed classes were outside (the school didn't even HAVE an indoor gym), and I was absolutely terrified by the huge dragonflies that swooped all over the playground while I was trying to play... oh, I don't know, foursquare or tennis or something. I kept missing the ball because I'd be ducking. I had long hair, was terrified by insects, and was beset with a persistent fear that a bug would get tangled in my hair. (After which point?... I don't know, I suppose I thought I'd lose my mind.) Many years later, my senior year of high school, a large bug finally DID get tangled in my hair between classes. My hair was much longer by then, past my waist. One of my friends had to go into the hallway and pick the struggling insect, not so big as a dragonfly but large enough to make me freak out and do St Vitus's Dance, out of my very fine tangled hair.

Also, I was offered a job today, by a company I used to work for, albeit a different branch (yes, zaxox, the newer bookstore from the same company that we worked for). I turned it down because I know I'm moving very very soon, probably within about a month, and I thought it would be bad for my job record to take a job when I knew I'd likely be giving two weeks' notice right after finishing training. (Cos you know, the NEXT job I applied for, could call them and ask about me, and then they'd have to say, well, she took a job knowing she'd be moving, she left us in the lurch.) Plus, I can't whip my house into shape if I'm working full-time elsewhere. Any other time I would have taken the job, even though it isn't a great company to work for.