Last night one of my cats was playing kitten-on-the-key with my machine and got it locked up. I rebooted, and it comes up, but I can't switch between desktops and can't run any applications. Unfortunately, my spouse (the
computer guru) is not available and I can't ask him to bail me out. I'm typing this on his system, and still haven't been able to get the mail program to run. Not that it would help me much, since my address book is on the other machine. *sigh*

I decided that it might help my fiction--commercial and fan--if I rounded out the characters a bit. I'm sort of (semi, kind of) active in the HP fic world, and although Rowling has given us sketches of her paper people's personalities, I've noticed that fan writers go a lot further than she ever did in trying to give the characters depth and believability. I already had Jung's autobiography and "Dreams," so I reread those and then bought "Man and His Symbols, "Modern Man in Search of a Soul," and "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious." Then, on the "in for a penny, in for a pound" basis, I bought a copy of "Existential Psychotherapy" by Irvin D. Yalom, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford. Either this stuff will help my writing, or I'll just give up and hang out my shingle. With all this to read, I'm not sure I'll have time for any writing!

It was a surprise when John McCain picked his running mate, and I have heard a lot of women gush, "She's just like me!" If you feel that way, ask yourself whether you feel competent to run the United States, with all of its current budget problems, its wars on two fronts, rampant unemployment, and a hundred more woes that I won't go into. Do you? I sure don't. So, why would I vote for a woman "just like me"?

It makes me fee like I actually exist.  There is a short story--by Bradbury, I think--called "The Vanishing American." It's about a guy who feels like he's starting to sort of fade out of existance and he climbs up on one of the lions in front of the library so that people will notice him and see that he's really alive.  Seeing my listings on Google makes me feel like the guy on the lion.

About three years ago some of my neighbors decided to start a book club and they invited me to join it.  Although book clubs are notorious as places where suburban women get together to swill wine and thumb through the current best seller (or whatever some TV superstar is pushing this week) ours is both small and sober.  We drink tea like proper ladies and read improving works. We have read fiction by Dostoievsky, Salinger, Gibson,  Colette, and a whole host of others that I have (sometimes mercifully) forgotten. We've also tried to accommodate the members who like non-fiction.  After going through a lot of haggling each month over what the next book selection ought to be, we decided that the person who was hosting the meeting at her house that month should pick the next book.  Maud, who is a dear lady and likes books "that I can learn from," picked "The Birth of Pleasure" by Carole Gilligan.  Despite having a title that sounds like it should be shelved next to "Whip Mistress of Warsaw," Maud--who had read it some years previous-- assured us that it was a feminist book about women's necessity for verbal restraint in a patriarchal society. Fine. The only problem turned out to be that Maud had not checked on the availability of this book.  When I searched Amazon I discovered that it was only available through the Amazon Marketplace (third party vendors of used and out of print books) for an *OUCH* price.  I bit the bullet and ordered it from what I thought was a dealer in Oregon. That was about two weeks ago.  The book, a brand new out-sized paperback arrived this morning. With a customs slip.  Now that exorbitant price is explained.  It was shipped from England. Either I seriously misread the dealer description, or book sellers are becoming very desperate to find patrons.