The "Anna is home recovering and therefore bored" random topics post

So I neglected to mention last weekend that spazzkat, solarbird, and I went to go see Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Not as solid a movie as the original Elizabeth, I think. Yet Cate Blanchett was certainly queenly, and oh my yes the Errol-Flynnesque Handsome-and-Dashingness of that Walter Raleigh fellow was a potent force indeed (the Queen had a great eye for his, aheh, "immensities"). Anybody besides Dara and me grin at the "Bess tending her lady in the bath" scene? I mean, damn. Let's just say, after seeing that scene as well as the Queen pitching a massive hissyfit later, it was pretty evident that her royal jealousy was a lot less concerned with Walter. ;)

I also neglected to mention that after Jam this past Sunday, technoshaman and cflute left a coat and the chocolate sauce that had gone on the pumpkin pie behind. So I took them over to their place, which was the first time I'd seen it, and which let me see a few of the winding back streets behind the Murk. In return, they gave me two more Echo's Children CDs as well as the Echo's Children songbook. Yay!

As one might expect my reading rhythm has been mightily thrown off this week, but I hope to maybe finish up reading rachelcaine's Midnight Alley. And it is worth a mention that I have finally purchased a copy of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, as I did not actually have a copy in my library, which seemed a rather criminal lack. You don't get much more Classic Urban Fantasy than that book.

The kittens are steadily growing. In the last week in particular they've both suddenly become mightily aware of the virtues of being petted, which for me has meant that if I'm lying on the couch with my laptop, trying to write, one or the both of them will climb up onto my chest and purr like mad. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, this has been documented for posterity by Dara!

I have but a single episode left in Season 3, Volume 2 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which has some prime silly in it as well as several episodes I remember vividly from when I watched this thing as a kid. No less than six, count 'em, six episodes where Captain Crane gets his head taken over by the Monster of the Week, too. I begin to wonder why the hell he still has security clearance, by this stage of the show. ;) I have not yet acquired any spectacularly crappy movies to watch during my recovery time, but I do not lack for stuff to watch; I've still got the Dresden DVDs as well as the rest of Season 3 of Remington Steele, and the discs from ravyngyngvar as well.

I continue to add to the Buy Anna a Black MacBook Fund, a.k.a. my savings account. I hope to have enough bucks by the end of the year to get that computer--specifically the black one, since Dara and Paul both have white Mac laptops and I want to be able to tell mine apart. I'm pretty sure that once I get said machine, I will be calling it Winnowill--even if by rights any computer named Winnowill ought to be a Windows box. But Winnowill sounds cooler as a computer name than either Venka or Teir, and I've got too many past associations with Rayek to use that as a computer name. ^_^

To those of you who are so inclined, a belated Happy Samhain! I hope your celebrations went well. And belated Happy Halloween as well. We had a fairly quiet one here at MurkNorth; only about ten trick-or-treaters showed up, total. But we did get some interested reactions to the Japanese candy that Dara was handing out--these tasty little chocolate-covered biscuits shaped like mushrooms and acorns. They come in small packages, and you can buy a big bag of said packages at Uwajimaya. Since we had so few trick-or-treaters, we have quite a bit of this candy left. Oh darn, whatever shall we do with it?

And good luck to everybody out there tackling Nanowrimo this year! I will not be doing it officially, though as with last year, I hope to achieve the personal goal of 25,000 words written. Some of these will have to go into the tail end of Queen of Souls, but hopefully the rest of them will go into one of the skiffy novels I'm working on, Child of Ocean, Child of Stars. I'll be posting periodic updates on that to my writing journal as well as to nanonov.

I am now in the Epilogue of Queen of Souls, which means the end is in sight and I should be putting out a call for beta readers on that thing real soon now. I am dubious that I will be able to finish it up this weekend, but we'll see how many braincells the Vicodin leaves me. I still need to send that inquiry postcard to Baen as well, and also review the state I left Lament in and see if there's further tightening up I need to do on its final chapters before I send some queries back out on it.

I have no brain to speak of this morning, thanks to the Vicodin, but have nevertheless been able to putter around and get some things done. I'm very thirsty, thanks to the anesthetic gas they had me breathing during the procedure; they'd warned me it'd leave me with a bit of a sore throat. But all in all, I'm feeling pretty good. And George has now jumped up on me twice demanding pets. Aww. Perhaps a good chunk of this afternoon will be devoted to petting the cats. ^_^

Miles since the 25th: 8.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2442.6
Miles out of Isengard: 649.6
Miles to Minas Tirith: 136.4