Respiration Conflagration

Not much to report. I've got another lousy cold. I think stress may have something to do with this one, but I can't stop coughing, basically. I tried to ignore it all week but yesterday it nailed me good. I spent most of the day semi-comatose, although every once in awhile I'd get a burst of energy and I'd pack another box. Feeling better today, but I've had to cancel my tap dance routine tonight at Chez Minkie.

Hey, wait a minute. I don't tap dance. And I've never been to Chez Minkie. Huh. I didn't realize NyQuil gave you hallucinations.

At least tonight the funniest show on TV will be on: the Travel Channel's Most Haunted. This show is supposed to be spooky--and once in a blue moon they manage something atmospheric--but mostly, it just cracks me the hell up. You see, they go every week to a new haunted location in Britain and "investigate" the hauntings, but they aren't professional likes the guys on SciFi's Ghost Hunters. On Most Haunted. they don't try anything even remotely scientific. Mostly, they just wander around in the dark scaring themselves and screaming like little girls.

There's one guy, Stewart, who panics at least once a show. Once, when he and another guy were going through a haunted forest, the other guy got spooked and started screaming and Stewart actually had the nerve to tell him, "Stop screaming like a girl. You're embarrassing me."

And if things get boring, if there's no "ghostly" activity to make everyone scream like girls, their resident medium, Derek, will suddenly go all "possessed." Which is just about the funniest thing going. Normally soft-spoken and fey, Derek turns quite nasty and violent when possessed. Or sort of mock-violent. About the worst he's done is throw a lamp across the room.

It's a tremendously silly show.

Writing business of the day: I passed 117k words on Wednesday, the last day I did any writing. I think my dream of bringing this in under 120k has pretty much evaporated. I'm going to try for 125 or 130k. And my crystal ball shows me a lot of cutting in my future.

Movie news of the day: Wednesday night while still in denial about being ill, I saw The Corpse Bride with my Deppsomaniac friend. Her husband remarked, "You're going to see a cartoon with Johnny Depp in it? That's just so sad.

The animation was great, the cast was terrific, the visuals and story imaginative in the usual Tim Burton way, but it didn't leave much impact on me. It could have been because I felt lousy, so take that with a grain of...

News item of the day: Okay, the Gulf Coast has the flooding, here in SoCal we've got the fires. Any part of the country volunteering for the plague of locusts or the rain of frogs? Pharoah is not happy.

Notice how I said there wasn't much to report and then managed to blather on quite awhile?

Lessons in not accumulating cr*p

I had a lot of crap when I moved in here 8-1/2 years ago. I've acquired a ton more since. There's a lesson here in not accumulating too much crap--but I doubt I'll learn it on more than a temporary basis. I'll slim down and expunge, but sooner or later the collectocrapmania will start whispering to me again. Perhaps I won't collect quite as much. Or perhaps I will.

So far (and with a million more books to pack), I have gotten rid of one xerox box plus four paper shopping bags full of books. Well, "gotten rid of" is a relative term. The box and bags are still in my possession; that is, still on my living room floor. But they are on their way somewhere else. Eventually. I just haven't decided whether I'm going to hassle with the used book circuit or donate them to the local library. I supposed I could get a resell license and go on Amazon, but...meh.

When I pulled away part of my TBR pile that was stacked sideways in front of the books properly shelved, I discovered a goldmine of books which needed to be moving on. Some of these books have been unopened for two house moves. And that's enough, I think. Certainly, my emotional attachment to them has waned. I held on to my Nabokov set, Annie Dillard, John Fowles. I wasn't ready to not have them yet. Francine Prose is hovering perilously close to the edge. Her early stuff appealed to me but I'm not crazy about where she is now. But my set of Evelyn Waugh books, my set of Pynchon, MFK Fisher, Hotel du Lac, my EM Forrester set--gone! (ish)

I found a bookmark in the Forrester that was a folded up transmittal slip from my days working at GTE Engineering. I haven't worked at GTE in almost seventeen years. So long, in fact, that GTE no longer exists. It's Verizon these days. I know damn well I haven't opened that book since.

Gone!

Not without some regret, but without remorse.