t'weather's good and I feel happy

T'h just rang up to say he got the Readership he applied for! Yippee! We will get a babysitter next week and celebrate. This is such good news! It also buoys me up in my own Readership application which I am in the process of formulating at this very moment. (Well, not at this very moment, obviously, but I trust you understand what the rhetorical flourish...*g*)

Also: the sun, the sun, the sun! The warmth! The lolling on recliners, moving leisurely around the garden to follow the shade!

Also: last night we had two men to dinner and to stay the night because they hd to be at the airport very early this morning (and we live near the airport). One of the men is a very good, old friend; I once shared a house with him and it is at his place that, in January of 2002, I had the fateful dream of Sam kissing Frodo in Mordor that propelled me into the weird and wonderful world of slash via google. The other man is his friend and someone we didn't know but he was very sexy. When I first entered the room, I just thought 'bzuh, what, double-take, um' because he seemed so tall and there and not what I had expected, with a rich voice. Then, at dinner in the garden, he started talking about mushrooms, and he used Latin names for them, and he is half-Polish and knows all their Polish names, and he can recognise them in the woods, and he knows how to dry them on a special rack and how to marinate them, and I brought out my German encyclopaedia with one of those marvellous old-fashioned fold-outs of hand-painted labelled mushrooms and he identified them all, and I read out their German names, and I was in lexical heaven. (Those of you who know me will also know that lexical heaven is one of my top-three heavens of all time!)

So by the end of the evening, I was pretty much moosh. He then hovered over my ibook as he 'taught' me how to enter haceks and Polish acutes on my keyboard. (I still don't know how to do them in html so I can't reproduce them here.) Hoho. It's been a while since I've hung around a really charming loin-warming man.

Also: this lunchtime I went to a free gamelan concert. I used to be a member of the gamelan society of the town I live in but personnel has changed in the last 12 years so I didn't recognise a single face. But the music made me choke up all over again, and then the singing (it wasn't even very good singing but it choked me up), and then the dancer came out; she was wonderful, with a face as artificial as a mask and gorgeous hand movements, and my stomach heaved with emotion. For those who don't know: I lived in Indonesia as a child and I learned Balinese dancing; and in the early 1990s I played in the Javanese gamelan orchestra for about 2 1/2 years. I am going to start classes again in October!

Also: my Chapter One is at the 7,000 word mark, and that's good, too. I aim to finish it within the next ten days. It is on 'clues'. I am reading Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle!

Somehow, life is good when the weather's bright. :-)

*waves at sheldrake and lazlet, back from vacation* I've missed you!!

frayed fingers

*falls down exhausted*

I have just finished replying to the very last commentrix on my first person and present tense post. I got 30 odd comments! I got threads wriggling down into that little linky thing! My comments counter says '60 sweet nothings!' It is weird: every few weeks or so I seem to get one of those posts that attract metafandom, and this one also attracted something called Hogwarts Today.

The first time this happened I got into a state. Remember that? The second time I was already more philosophical, though still flustered and put out (how dare someone link me?!). This time, the third, I have much mellowed. I have, however, this strange etiquette driving me that means I must reply to every single comment.

Now the thing is this post hardly attracted any comments from the friendly faces on my flist. All of these people were unknowns to me! So, although some were very nice and some interesting, it was still exhausting replying to them all, like moving around a cocktail party full of strangers, making smalltalk or holding forth, and having to introduce yourself over and over again. I found myself copying and pasting replies because I just couldn't be bothered typing the same thing over and over, and commentrixes did tend to say the same thing over and over, meaning they hadn't read the others' comments first (I guess).

When I write fic, I love and crave every single comment. I gather them all in, the trite ones, the gushing ones, the intellectual ones, the critical ones, the friendly ones. But with this sort of musing-post, it exhausts me and I wish there were fewer of them!