Some thoughts while avoiding bed

Lo, the Blessed Surprising Pencil arrived today and it was not at all surprising. It looked just as it had in the efficiency catalog and wrote, not at all surprisingly, like a pencil. A mechanical pencil. But a pencil nonetheless.

I'm avoiding bed right now. There are periods in my life when I sleep the sleep of the just and righteous. This isn't one of them. In fact, now I am sleeping the sleep of the obsessed and unwell. I would rather be just and righteous.

Biscuit thinks the up-late locked in the office thing is ok. She's locked in the office, I'm not. If she doesn't stay locked in the office, she goes fishing for snacks in the litter box. It's a hobby I don't condone. I like it better than her vigorous play with "dead bird friend." But that hobby had a time limit. Once dead bird friend was too decomposed to play with, the game, was, well, over. Litter box surfing goes on and on.

She's ok now, though. She's probably just as relieved as I am to have checked the daily woot and found it wanting. My blog doesn't show up if you google "whateveronfire." What does show up is the night when I bought the last item woot had to sell Whatevernfire is my woot user name). I'm listed as the "member to blame." Yea me. It was far a watch too small for my uber-chunky wrist. Honey wears it a lot. It looks good on her.

I'm listening to the newish Michael Cunningham book on CD right now. I loved The Hours. This one may have gone a step or two off the weird dock for my tastes. We'll see. I've just gotten to the part about the lizard people. Lizard people? Yes, lizard people.

I know, I know, books on CD are so, so, lazy? Anti-intellectual? Indeed. And let me add that my favorites, those for which I will pay full-pop retail, are the 'Series of Unfortunate Events" young adult novels written by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) and performed with great aplomb by Tim Curry. Last November I harassed a Border's employee for 45 minutes to find a copy of the CDs on the day the novel was released. By the end, she started to feebly gesture at the stacks and stacks of hardcovers of the same book. I found the audio version myself, misfiled and tucked away. She didn't smile in triumph as I left, rather in relief.

My folks like books on tape too. When they made their flee from Chicago, my mother discovered that her new car didn't have a tape player and that she had bought cassettes. They stopped in Gary at a Radio Shack to buy one of those old-fashioned flat cassette players and a car adaptor. How desperate were they to leave Chicago? She drives around in a BMW with a $12 tape player lying on the front seat.

Last summer, when we went to the beach (she and Dad in one car, Honey and I in the other), she kept the tapes of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (oh damn) while Honey and I were given the bloody thriller to listen to. Honey thought the bloody thriller stupid, but we'd have been dead in ditch having fallen asleep listening to some random BBC actor perform Decline and Fall. Did I mention that Mother had part 2 and not part 1? I'll take Caesar over Constantine EVERY TIME. And Rene Auberjonois performing an overblown thriller with lots of deaths over either.

That said, in my continuing obsession with tv, I want to give a shout out to ROME, the HBO series this fall. Loved it. I was sad when Caesar died, but as Dad pointed out, you get to 44 B.C. and March and all and what are you gonna do?

Ok, maybe bed now. Probably not, but I'll give it a shot.