Personal Note: The sun is shining!

Yes, and the sky is blue and water is wet. Moving on ...

Things are looking up. A replacement round of umpty-tumpty dollars worth of Christmas presents was successfully delivered yesterday and, buoyed by this, I was able to clean the small bedroom and the living room in anticipation of guests for this weekend and next. Only the bathroom and kitchen are left. I can do this! I even have theme music! (Sort of ... a random assortment of singles collected on my computer, from They Might Be Giants' rendition of "Istanbul" to Melody Gardot's "Who Will Comfort Me?" via ReliantK's remix of "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" and "Title of the Song" by Da Vinci's Notebook. I'm not sure what I'd play for myself as a leitmotif -- any suggestions?)

Ongoing comment-rp is still ongoing. And I finished Venetia and moved on to a reread of The Masqueraders (which I then promptly bequeathed to Winry in the rp, because every continuum needs a Georgette Heyer-equivalent. Also, the hero is short, blond, handsome, a master swordsman ... and spends the bulk of the story cross-dressing. So does the tall, intelligent, calm heroine. It's a masterpiece, really.). Having finished that, I took up Polly Shulman's Grimm Legacy, a YA about a page at the New York Circulating Materials Repository, a library for artifacts both mundane and magical. The page has just left her sense of direction as a security deposit in order to borrow a mermaid's comb and is having the expected difficulties. Also, someone is absconding with magical items from the Grimm Collection and the pages have been warned to be on the lookout for suspicious activity ... Amusing so far; I may pick up Shulman's earlier high-school Jane Austen homage, too.

Random: The typo as springboard for Regency romance

Yesterday we received the following message from facilities maintenance:

Over the next two hours facilities will be testing the elevators. They will be shutting them down periodically for a few minuets at a time. Then they will be back running for 5 to 10 minuets.

To which I responded:

I think it's sweet that we're giving the elevators dancing lessons. Will they be performing at the Holiday Party?

The facilities manager, a good sport who no doubt got fifty similar emails, wrote back at the end of the maintenance period:

All, the elevators had a nice minuet and now they are back up and running.

I have not yet ridden the elevators since their preparation for entry into the Polite World. Given their chequered history, the results will no doubt prove startling, but at least there won't be waltzing!