Menage à Trois Bingo

Stiff, sore, and tired. After all the gardening yesterday, I went to a meeting of the Pleasure Activism and Polyamory reading group--the reading for the evening was from Peter McWilliams's book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do", the chapter on Violations of Marriage. We talked about that for a while, specifically about why it is that people don't engage in pleasure activism even at the very individual level of increasing intimacy with strangers (ie looking in people's eyes when you meet them, starting conversations about things that matter rather than the weather, and so on).

Pam was late and missed the whole meeting, but we went to Attitudes for a drink and enjoyed ourselves talking and watching people. It was karaoke night, and some of the singers were very very good. There was a cute couple just getting to know each other and it was fun to watch the flirtation and infatuation developing. The younger girl's ex-boyfriend was there with them just glowing in their radiance. He told us he had dated her for seven years and then realized he was gay. Then there was a woman who I kept watching with a kind of morbid fascination. She was all over some guy, biting his ear and groping his butt and on and on. I found her, and her behavior, rather repulsive. But maybe he liked it.

I've been binging on reading a bit, since it had been such a long time since I've read anything. Last night I picked up Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald. I intended to put the book down after a couple of chapters, since it was already after eleven pm. Every chapter I finished, I told myself "just one more". As you will already have guessed, I stayed up and read the whole thing.

It's a dark and engrossing story set in a bleak place at a very bleak time. Each chapter seemed to reveal something new about the family, until by the end of the book almost nothing was as it had seemed in the beginning. I'm still mulling it over.

Finally finished the book I was reading: The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley. It took me longer than it has taken me to read a novel in many years. I think I have been reading it for at least two weeks, half an hour here or there. It's written in a dense 19th-century style, and I've just been terrifically busy. The story is fascinating, however: it's about Kansas Territory, and the intense fighting there between abolitionists and southern-rights advocates that presaged the Civil War.

Now, though, I'm going to log off and go upstairs with Laurell's Caress of Twilight. I think that will be a much quicker read.

Well, they've been and gone, and the apartment is now a maze of stacked boxes. Only the computer and the plants and a few small things have been left out for me to use until the actual move tomorrow.

I've had a quite peaceful morning, really, answering email and reading a book (Maze of Worlds, by Brian Lumley) while the two men worked. Now I'm hungry and thirsty, and there's nothing in the place that's edible, so I'm going to go and get some food. I'll probably just walk down to Burger King, or perhaps Ponderosa.

Then I'll come back here, relax a bit more, and make a start on the cleaning before I try to find something to wear to Twelfth Night tonight. Hmmm...there are some clean clothes in the dryer at my house, I could get something there. Most everything else is either dirty or packed; I'll be doing laundry tomorrow. In my own washer/dryer.

I read a book tonight, for the first time in far too long. What with working on my house whenever I have a free evening, I haven't picked up a book in several weeks. It was Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper. I really enjoyed it and will have to track down the rest of the series.

Ya gotta love St Louis. The beautiful snow blanket from last night is already thinning and melting to slush. But Rosa and I got to enjoy it for a little while.

This morning we went to IHOP for breakfast (she polished off four sausage links and a slice of bacon as well as most of two eggs and several bites of pancake--she's a big eater!). Then we went to Forest Park and tried to make a snowman. The snow packed beautifully into small snowballs but wouldn't accrue properly so that they could grow into snowman-size balls. (Snowman testicles, yes, but without the snowman to stick them to, what good is that?)

So we threw snowballs at each other and into a half-frozen fountain, where they floated (of course), I helped her make a snow angel and made one myself, and then we gave it up after about 45 minutes since we weren't really properly dressed for snow adventures: she doesn't have any boots, or even sneakers, just open-topped buckle shoes, and her mittens had soaked through.

We went to Sam's and bought some diapers and other exciting stuff: I got the Harry Potter Hogwarts School popup book for myself and Lord of the Rings for my dad.. And now we're home, I just walked her around the block twice to put her down for her nap: she's asleep and I'm online.

My dad had mentioned that he wanted a copy of LotR to reread after having been very impressed by the movie, so I said I'd find him one. He also expressed a wish for some other things to read (books in English being hard to come by in Peru...) so I culled about 25 books from my shelves that I thought they would like and was willing to part with, and offered them to him. They declined six or eight on grounds of having already read them, and the rest I'll box up and send off. In fact maybe I'll go do exactly that right now.

All right, I've had my lovely wonderful binge of conversation, connected with many of the people that are important to me, Jen and Liz and Elissa and BriLee and Jay, and now I must go to bed and tomorrow go back to my own offline world.

I really needed this.

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Jay asked me, on seeing me online tonight, "Does this mean you're back?"

me> No, actually, it means I'm cheating. ;-)

Jay> No you're not; you're poly. :-)

me again>Ya know, when it comes to novels, I'm serially monogamous. One book at a time, until it's finished. I'll occasionally have a fling with a magazine while reading a book, but almost never start a new book until I've finished the preceding one. Non-fiction seems to work differently. I can pick it up and put it down, read a novel or three before actually finishing.

AIM, on the other hand... Four conversations at a time, minimum. ::snicker::

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Today's funny Rosa quote...

She was bitten at daycare a couple weeks ago. Tonight she asked me "Who did that?" pointing to the remnants of the bruise.

I said, "I don't know, who did that?"

She said, "A boy."

I said, "A boy?"

She said, "A nasty boy," and grinned at me.

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The other thing Rosa's been doing lately that's really adorable and melts my heart, is asking me to sing the "Baby Mine" song from Dumbo. We snuggle and cuddle and I sing it to her, and she asks for it again and again.
( Lyrics )

Taking book recommendations...I just placed a library request for Callahan's Lady after hearing Liz rave about it and several other people also tell me I needed to read Robinson. I've never read a single book by Spider Robinson. How did that happen, given that I've read thousands of books, over 50% of them science fiction or fantasy? Maybe none of the libraries I've frequented had any of his works?

Anyway, if anyone wants to suggest me something, go ahead. It doesn't have to be sci-fi or fantasy, I read everything.

I think I'm going to start listing the books I read in here. Today I read Tad Williams' The Mountain of Black Glass, book 3 of Otherland. Yesterday I read Terry Goodkind's The Pillars of Creation, book 7 of The Sword of Truth.