I want it to be summer already.

Usually I love this time of year, but right now I can't remember the last time I was warm all the way through that didn't involve at least three blankets, and I'm really not looking forward to the train station at 7:00 tomorrow. I want to be hot. I want to strip down to one layer of clothing and still be too hot. I want to curl up under those three blankets with a half-dozen ice packs between the layers, like I did last summer. I want to move to Alexandria or Tel Aviv and feel sun-baked mud brick under my bare feet and feel the hot dry wind against my face while I drink sherbet and soak my head-scarf in cold water. (possibly I shouldn't have watched Digging for the Truth again.)

Come, spring, warm up!

Meanwhile I'm going to curl up under those three blankets and read Bible stories until my toes are warm and I can sleep.

I now own my very own copy of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency! I am so happy that I could ... well, do something appropriately Pinkwaterian, like spending the whole day wearing deelyboppers and then denying it if somebody asks why.

It's a lovely old yellowed Scholastic paperback, too. I am aware of the ugly omnibus reissues they've been putting out over the last few years - but Pinkwater books should not be bought in a Barnes&Noble; they should be found, after much effort, in a creepy, dusty, used bookstore, or a box in the attic, or the hidden back room of a thrift store; or perhaps picked out of a sale bin at an overly-bright discount store in a completely generic strip mall - the sort of places where Pinkwater characters hang out.

(Pinkwater is like the converse of the ideal Bobbsey Twins childhood - his world is screwed up, fundamentally idiotic, illogical, full of shades of gray, and occasionally just plain mean, but like his characters, you love it anyway because it's yours. It would slot right in with Gaiman's Neverwhere, or with The Cucumber King.)

I also bought a Coville novel that I read ages ago at the library but never owned, and The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday, because it looked fun and the deal was 3/$1. It seems to be a tie-in novel to ... something, but neither Google nor I have any idea *what*. I suppose I should read it and find out. *g*

And speaking of loving a place because it's yours, I spent the morning at the Kuethe Library in Glen Burnie with the excuse that I was researching for a paper. They still use a card catalog! I fell in love the minute I saw the lovely old cabinet standing there, and that was *before* I got to spend three hours going through filing cabinets full of newspaper clipping. Ah, it was wonderful. Not a computer in the entire building, just shelves and shelves of books and drawers and drawers of paper. All you have to do is point me at a library and wind me up, and I keep going and going and going...

Of course, they didn't have a lot of what I was hoping they'd have, but that just gives me an excuse to get up and finally go explore all the other tiny local libraries and museums and historical societies, right? Not to mention pulling out everything that's stuffed up to the rafters in this house. (No, literally - the plat I need to find this evening is, I believe, stuffed up under a rafter in the attic. I wonder how you cite that in APA style? *g*) And the minute we get a nice Saturday, an excuse to go exploring through the woods with a notebook and a camera and an archealogical outlook. This should be *fun*. (Plus, once the paper's written, the people at the Kuethe Library want a copy for their files. The people at the Odenton Heritage society probably will too. wheee.)

It's so nice to finally have a paper topic that fills me with joy rather than 'eh, okay.' Even if I'm still procrastinating like mad on it whenever I get a chance.

I was shanghaied at the last minute into going to the BRIDGE annual fundraising banquet (and oh my stars and garters do they need a better web presence!). I did have betters things I could have been doing with four and a half hours of my time than sitting around eating bad food, but I actually kind of enjoyed myself. I got to have dinner with two of the candidates for our county executive (VIP table yay!), and meet a third one, and I got to find out a lot more about the major public issues our church has been heavily involved in, and the speaker was very good and very inspiring.

And I could see myself getting heavily involved in local politics *terrifyingly* easily. At the age of about twelve, my girl scout troop went to the special visit day at the Maryland Legislature, and sitting in on a committee meeting, I realised that this was the perfect job for me, because it was *exactly* like school: sit around in small stuffy rooms pretending to listen to people nobody else is listening to either, while actually doodling on the notepad that you have hidden under the table, and outcomes that actually have nothing at all to do with facts, or what was being said in the little rooms, and everything to do with whether other people like you or not, and how you managed to manipulate the numbers. Then we went and had a mock-senate vote in the big senate chamber, and the Gazette photographer singled *me*, out of four hundred girl scouts, to photograph speaking to the Senate.

Obviously, it was my natural photogenic quality and my brilliant political charisma.

And I actually care about local politics, unlike national politics; I've given up on national politics more-or-less, but there are ways to make a difference here, in the short term and small area, that could build up to big ones, or at least make things better here and now regardless of what's going on at the other end of 295. And I even know what some of them are (Increase public transit and bike/walking routes. Low-income and mixed income housing with transit access, and keep increasing mixed-use zoning. Put people in charge of the public schools who aren't complete idiots and also on the take. Foster a sense of community in all the scattered unincorporated postal districts that pass for towns by creating and emphasizing community identity and pride. And so on and so forth), and have a vague idea of how I could start getting in with the right people and making a reputation for myself, and even turning the connections I already have in the schools and churches into the right kinds of connections. And I *care*; I love this county, as deeply messed-up as it is, and I'd love to see it start to shine the way it still could, and I'd love even more to be a part of making it that way. Especially if I could get into traditional Maryland politics, the way that's all about behind-the-scenes manouevering and very little about grandstanding for the public: too bad that the corrupt old ways are giving way to the corrupt new ones.

Too bad I'm not the sort of person who is energized rather than wiped out by intensive socializing; I can fake extroverted only so long as I can go be alone and recharge for about three hours afterward.

Besides, I'd probably have to start wearing a bra.

Yay, sister blogged so I don't have to!
Two pictures of me from our walk by the river: In Which I am a Dryad; In Which I am a Nazgul.
Other pictures from Saturday are up at her scrapbook, here. Don't follow the link in her entry, it is wrong, wrong, wrong! q-: I have some more pictures from the train ride down to her place; I may get around to putting them up eventually.

Let's see. In other news, I am still three days behind in my Lent reading, and did not entirely succeed in keeping the laptop closed today (although I *mostly* suceeded;) I only got home fifteen minutes ago and have two short essays to write for tomorrow; and on the ride home this afternoon, the sword&sorcery NaNo novel I started for my first time - three years ago - the one where each of the main characters is more gender-confused than the last - suddenly returned and started eating my brain.

And now I apparently have to eat my dinner before it gets cold, go down by the fire where it's warm, and
prepare to watch stellar_dust's imaginary boyfriend. My life is so hard.

ETA: Okay, tonight's Digging for the Truth was actually pretty darn good. It probably helps that I have long had a massive geek-crush on Teotihuacan, though. And I now *desperately* want to find some actual evidence that BSG's Pyramid/Triad is related to the ball game. I have believed this since I first saw a Pyramid court, I just don't have anything to back up my instinctual conviction. Possibly because the continuity of Pyramid is even more bollixed up than the continuity of Sabacc. (Okay, apparently the original game of Triad has some clear resemblance to the post-classical ball game. I should make my sister loan me her tape of that episode, since I already borrowed-without-permission her copy of the Popul Vuh.)

So I haven't been on lj at all since ... wow, ten days ago. We spent a week with my mom's family, doing a great variety of stuff, and then twenty-four hours at Mammoth Cave, during which stellar_dust and I together took something like four hundred digital pictures. Then it was four days or so with various members of my dad's family, including one who was slightly less than three and one who was about four months. My brain is still running in patterns of "Vroom vroom! Car crash!" and "Wow, toes are so fascinating!" and probably will be for the next week.

We are not going to a HBP release party at midnight tonight. Strangely, the town of Sevierville, Tennessee, doesn't seem to be having one. However, they are having a morning-after party tomorrow morning, so we're planning to each get a copy there and then try to whine Mom into dropping us off in some quiet scenic spot in Great Smoky Mountains National Park so we can read all day. We will be wandering back home to Maryland over the next day or two or three. It has been interesting trying to plan an extended road-trip around potterparties.com.

Just for the record, here's my (mostly unspoiled) predictions for the new book: the HBP should be either Peter, Draco, or a new character, and if somebody dies it should be either Peter, Neville, or (cross fingers) one of the Dursleys. But I promise not to post any actual spoilers at all 'till at least Wednesday next week, if you're trying to keep clean.

Now, if you will excuse me, the Sci-Fi season premieres are about to come on, and stellar_dust and I plan to spend the next six hours making fun of people's hair. Probably mostly each other's.

So, I didn't get the mp3s posted-- my computer decided to cop out on me. And I didn't get my pictures up, either (going digital was supposed to make sorting pictures and putting them in albums less of a chore, wasn't it? hah,) but if you *need* a fix, stellar_dust has pictures from trip up and down the New Jersey-Delaware-MD coast up (some of which I took) and dreamsquirrel has pictures from the picnic/barbecue we had Saturday up (some of which I took).

Right now I am on the coast of South Carolina. ( And by coast, I mean that the Atlantic Ocean is right across the street. )

And so I have much better things to do than hang out on the internet, like dozing in a hammock with a book on my lap. This entry will probably have to hold you for the rest of the week.