Mom took me yard-sailing this morning and we bought some junk. Yep. Some books - mostly really old hardcover novels, including a 1950s Tom & Huck with illustrations by Norman Rockwell. Also, for $.25, I got a set of Angelic Messenger Cards with book, which is *hilarious* - it averages 1/3 dippy new age buzzwords by *word count*, and is the most useless thing imaginable.

Also, I bought some little tiny miniature pressurized canisters of C0₂, which came with instructions for making any liquid into soda pop. Unfortunately, to do that, you needed the special mixing container. However, I believe (though Mom disagrees with me) that the mysterious Thing which was found in our basement and used in a prop in last fall's high school musical was the mixing nozzle. Which would be awesome. Even if not, though - I now have seven teeny-tiny metal canisters of pressurized CO₂! Imagine the possibilities! Also in the category of random junk, we got a coffee can full of really old buttons. Over three dozen of them were carved shell, probably (by feel, and also this being Maryland) oyster shell; a couple were darker iridescent - Abalone? Mussel? Dunno. Probably not valuable, but still neat.

In other news, it turns out that my new copy of Le Mort Darthur is *missing* some bits - ten scattered pages near the end of Book VIII were mistakenly left blank rather than printed. So I have trotted out my pens and inks and my crabbed hedge-uncial script, and I'm copying out the missing parts from the Project Gutenberg etext onto the blank pages. I'm actually managing a density that's about the same as the printed parts, too, so it may actually *fit*. But it's so *slow* and I have to take a break about every hour in order to prevent severe pain in the back and wrists. If I were a monk, I'd be so glad of having to go sing for one hour out of every three. My illuminated capitals are rather unsightly so far, too.