BUT FIRST, BEFORE I FORGET:  YO, YOU AMERICANS, PETER’S DEATH OF A UNICORN IS A NOOK DAILY SPECIAL [or something like that] FOR TODAY ONLY.  ORDER AT ONCE OR BE ETERNALLY DAMNED BY THE HELLGODDESS TO A FUTURE OF THE LIBRARY HAVING JUST LOANED THE BOOK YOU WANTED FIVE MINUTES BEFORE YOU GOT THERE/ THE BOOKSHOP JUST SOLD THE LAST COPY OF THE BOOK DITTO**   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/death-of-a-unicorn-peter-dickinson/1000971256?ean=9781618730411

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. . . In fact a ratbag sucking pukefest of a day.  It’s probably just as well that poor Nadia is suffering what is probably her first school-soup*** experience† and cancelled everyone’s voice lessons today;  I would have had trouble driving that far or standing up for an hour.  Thank you so much unnamed off-the-planet ex-colleague;  I’m pretty sure there’s a germ involved in my present circumstances of feeling like six kinds of death† but as I whined to Merrilee it’s getting stomped with extreme prejudice by Ms Off the Planet that’s brought the ME back in full gruesome force.

There are at least certain advantages to two middle-aged hellhounds and a hellterror.  The hellhounds will forgive me less exuberant hurtling in exchange for extra time on the sofa, and the hellterror will, in her manic, perpetual-motion way, do a fair bit toward keeping herself amused so long as I have enough physical and moral strength to scrape her off the ceiling and drag her out of the hellhounds’ bed occasionally.  No, make that often.  She liiiiiiiiiiiiiiives to torture the hellhounds.  When she’s loose they lie in their bed staring at me reproachfully/ balefully/ accusingly.  Darkness tries to hug the shadows and keep a low profile—with less than satisfactory results—Chaos emerges occasionally to pretend to not play with her and also, especially at the cottage where the hellhound crate is around the kitchen-island from where I usually sit, to get a better angle on his hellgoddess glare.  I can ignore hellhounds quite successfully if I have my head down over computer/iPad, until—usually just after I’ve registered that it’s been too silent for the last twenty seconds or so—there is a GIGANTIC ERUPTION from the hellhound crate and I am obliged to go enforce some slippery and unstable semblance of order.

It was a beautiful day today—I would have liked to get some gardening done†††, but minimal hurtling was as much as I was capable of.  The extra sofa time was performed with dispatch however.  I read THE TALE OF GENJI in the original . . . er.  Actually I played one of these computer-Boggle-with-minor-variations games on Astarte.  There are several of them and the one I like best‡ has an assortment of background screen colours . . . all of them way too frelling dark.  What’s the deal?  What’s wrong with a WHITE choice?‡‡  Playing this idiot game gives me eyestrain.

I’m going to bed early.  And I’m not taking Astarte with me.‡‡‡

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* When you turn the title of the post into a live shortcut, if you’ve used exactly the same title before there’s a little number that appears at the end of the live-shortcut title telling you how unoriginal you are.  I’m expecting this one to be Not a Good Day 1,000,000 ^

^ It has been such a bad day I’m sitting here staring into space and considering putting ‘Not a Good Day’ in the title-space in a new-post window, and hanging it publicly long enough to get a live shortcut off it to see what my number is.  And then delete the freller.

I think I’ll just let it be a surprise.+

+ The ‘*’ may make it original however.  Unless I’ve done that before too.

** Except mine, of course.  I need the sales.^

^ I know—I think I know—that libraries that loan ebooks are strictly controlled about copies and number of times let out.  What about e-shops?  Can they always just press a button and sell another copy of a book in their ‘warehouse’?  Until their contract or whatever it is runs to an end?

*** That is school germ/virus miasma:  the kids all bring their individual runny noses and coughs and stir them around in the halls, classrooms and playgrounds and soon there is a fug no mere mortal can withstand.   Several generations of Dickinsons call it school soup.

† Stella started school this term

†† Approximately.

Bubonic plague
Rabies
Terminal Crankiness
Mad Hedgehog Disease
Colour Out of Space-itis
The Shock of Discovering that the World As I Knew It Is Ending:  Green & Black’s is ceasing production of their mint chocolate which is the rock on which my life is founded.^  This is SERIOUS.  I could go into a DECLINE.  Yes, G&B makes some very pleasant other kinds of chocolate, and I do eat them occasionally, in a casual and condescending way.  BUT it’s the mint that is the nonpareil, the paragon.^^  You need to worry about this.  If I decline too fast and too dramatically I might not get PEG III finished.  I might lose heart, pack it all in and become a piano tuner.^^^

^ Yes, yes, I know, God and all that.  God and mint fondant dark chocolate.

^^ And may I just say that I abominate and abhor that cheezy workaround that some chocolatiers employ, of adding a few drops of peppermint oil to their basic chocolate and calling it mint chocolate.  That is like calling Canada Dry Ginger Ale Veuve Cliquot Champagne.  It is not.  They both have something to do with mint flavouring/fizzy liquid.  THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

^^^ I have told you that the end of PEG II is arguably worse than the end of PEG?

††† My winter pansies are all sitting around tapping the tips of their leaves and going, Well?  Well?

‡ Despite an EXTRAORDINARILY whimsical list of acceptable words.

‡‡ Or pale pink, of course.

‡‡‡ Oh yes I am.  She’s not all evil eye-bashing time-wasters.  Aloysius sent me a fascinating, if mostly rather beyond me, pdf book on a sort of arc of Bible interpretation and I’m going, Really?  Really?, a lot.  I think Aloysius finds me fun to watch.  The problem with this late-conversion thing is trying to integrate it into the basic fact that I have almost sixty-one years of experience as a human being.  Remember I said 12 September last year that everything changes?  Everything?  Yeah.  And it takes more than thirteen months to catch up.