My Life and Hard Times
I overslept again. Sigh. The ME is not behaving itself lately plus I have not one, not two but three mss/ARCs to read—that I want to read, I mean. I am not on top lists of potential blurbers first because I am only a medium-sized deal myself, not a big one, and second because my evil-cowishness is pretty well established. If you keep turning things down (I’m also a slow reader, so unless I’m just weeping with longing to read something I am totally capable of refusing the opportunity to, since chances are I won’t like it anyway) or declining to blurb things you did manage to read, people stop sending them to you. But I’ve liked a few recent things recently* so I guess I’m reappearing on a few lists. But THREE things at the same time? No, no, no, I’m not doing this again.**
Anyway I was up way too late last night reading the first in the queue, both because it’s first in the queue and because it’s exciting.*** So I overslept. And we were supposed to have the morning hurtle early because Computer Men were going to Visit Virtually, which is to say you type in an arcane cantillation and a mwa ha ha ha ha emerges from the phone at your ear and then your cursor starts moving around on its own and clicking on dreadful Geeky Things while you watch dazzled and afraid. †
So I was lurching around at some speed, finding plausible items of clothing to put on and trying to make sure that if my earrings didn’t match they didn’t match amusingly rather than because I am a half-awake moron. I had noticed uneasily that when hellhounds emerged from their crate they were unusually subdued, especially Chaos, who doesn’t usually employ ‘subdued’ as an aspect of his personal identity. But I was willing to assume he too had been up late reading . . . hellhounds are supposed to wait at the top of the porch stairs while I lock up, which is a ridiculously complicated proceeding. Chaos started hurtling downstairs immediately, and I in my despotic idiocy stopped him and ordered him to the top again. He turned around, started coming back up the stairs . . . and threw up. On a dahlia. AAAAUGH, I said—AAAAUGH I said as he started to arch his back and squat to—NO! GET OFF THE FRELLING STEPS! I shoved him emphatically back down the steps again, and if he’d had any mind†† left over from his internal misery he might have been beaming I told you so waves at me. He threw up again at the bottom of the steps. I looped the leads over the railing and bolted for the newspapers I keep behind the bookcase beside the door, both for exigencies occurring inside the kitchen but also for untoward events that may occur outside. It’s a very small, private road. . . . He was already rivering from the other end by the time I emerged with the newspapers.
Then he threw up again.
Then he rivered again.
Then I changed my name and moved to another town.
Sigh.
So I have ruined my green footprint for the rest of the year, pouring lots and lots of water over . . . everything. Including my dahlia. And the cut-out rubber stair treads on the porch stairs. Which also got a certain amount of scrubbing. I do draw the line at scrubbing the street. While all this was going on—with, I might add, a somewhat heartfelt commentary††† from yours truly—Chaos stood in the road all humped up and looking profoundly wretched, and Darkness stared off into the middle distance and pretended he didn’t know either of us.
We finally set off on an abbreviated underhurtle, with me looking surreptitiously around and hoping none of the neighbours were present for our little variety show.‡ There were more incidents on the way, which provided me with lots of opportunity to contemplate how much preferable living in the country is, where there are hedgerows and thickets and great open spaces where nobody walks but pheasants, rabbits and squirrels and there is a splendid absence of people’s front gardens bordering the footpath.
Computer Men couldn’t find anything wrong with either computer either. I ran (or was given to run) an evil-looking malware detector which (four hours of slo-mo computer response later) snootily told me both computers were clean.‡‡
And I missed handbells tonight because at 5 pm Chaos was still streaming, although I’m not at all sure what with, and I didn’t dare leave him. There are things you do not expect your husband to cope, or his neighbours to put up, with.‡‡‡
Maybe I’ll go to bed early.§ And read a good ARC. I don’t suppose it’ll suddenly turn bad to match the way the rest of this day has gone, will it? There is a terrible mutability to reality, I have always thought. . . .
* * *
* Old dog = new tricks. It happens. Don’t trust me though. I might still bite the hand that feeds me.
** I’m aware that regular blurbers and big deals receive boxes of books to read through. I dunno. This almost sounds like too much of a good thing. . . . Heresy. I know. Not like I didn’t just order eight more books from the Book Depository having bought three during a hands-on experience at a real street-level Waterstone’s with live warm-blooded clerks yesterday.
*** I’d better not tell you what the ARCs are, just in case I morph into an evil cow during the last chapter(s) and don’t like them after all. But I can tell you that the third thing is the rewrite of a Peter Dickinson story!!! I may have told you about TWICE-BORN before? ‘An ex-fairy story’? He put it aside while he worked on two other things and after much pondering and reflection^ went back to it. YAAAAAAY. It has footnotes!^^
^ and a certain amount of nagging, which of course is entirely useless: other people’s muses like being nagged even less than your own does, but sometimes you can’t help yourself.
^^ Not enough footnotes. Still. There are footnotes.
† Computers = a religious experience. Not in good way.
†† There’s always a slight ‘sic’ quality to this word when applied to Chaos. Even under less, ahem, disruptive conditions.
††† I was going to say running commentary but in the circumstances I decided not to.
‡ Among other things I had a slip from the frelling Royal Post about a frelling parcel that had to be frellingly signed for. So we went round to the Royal Frelling Office—with me standing at the counter holding the outside door open with my foot and claiming this was because it was rather stuffy in here, which it was, but that was not why I was holding the door open and had Chaos blocked from coming in any farther with the leg attached to that foot. I had to sign for fifteen quids’ worth of rubber shoe liners.^ GAAH. ARRGH. This day wasn’t stupid enough already.
^ Well, I don’t want to throw out perfectly good All Stars just because they’ve developed holes in the soles. I would like to know how many people favour incidentally waterproof ‘gel pad cushioning’ because there are holes in the bottoms of their favourite shoes.
‡‡ Wrong. There are dog hair and flecks of salad dressing everywhere. I believe I have previously apostrophised on the trampoline-like qualities of lettuce. And of dog hair.
‡‡‡ Granted husbands and wives usually live together. Never mind. My steep little cul de sac is easier to clean up than Peter’s courtyard. Not that I haven’t poured an awful lot of bleach and Lysol on the tiny hellhound-courtyard outside the cottage’s kitchen door. Oh, what you missed by not meeting my hellhounds in puppyhood. . . .
§ HA HA HA HA HA HA. Define ‘early’.
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