Remember my theory about flick going down every time I try to do a journal entry? It happened while I was working on yesterday's, which is why the poor thing ends so abruptly. The evidence in favour of my hypothesis continues to pile up.

Today has been blessedly lazy. I didn't get out of bed until about 1345, and then I laid on the couch and read The House With a Clock in Its Walls and then Thrones, Dominations, while Kevin and Pam (who got in around 3am) switched off between napping and watching Gabrielle. Gabrielle is beautiful and blonde and much bigger than when I saw her at Thanksgiving, although apparently still small for her age. She's now cruising, which is to say walking with something to hold on to. She's also very verbal, and for some reason I keep interpreting her attempts at speech as Japanese. I'm not sure if this is because watching Sailor Moon in Japanese is my only real exposure to language I can't understand, or if the sounds she uses a lot occur most frequently in Japanese, or something else entirely. It's neat, though.

The books were both pretty good; The House With a Clock in Its Walls is excellent YA fantasy with the bonus of illustrations by Edward Gorey. The story itself is entertaining, although it suffers a very little from the need of the hero to Learn Things -- by which I mean that it has the sort of typical underplot of the hero realising things about friendship, and this I found uninteresting. The main story though is filled with fantastical wonderment and I do think everyone should read it.

Thrones, Dominations is a novel started by Dorothy Sayers and finished by Jill Paton Walsh. I'm not sure how it holds up as a Sayers novel -- there are pieces which feel completely wrong (such as the coherency of the Dowager Duchess) -- but I think it stands on its own as a good book. Instead of having the richness I associate with Sayers or the layers of my favourite Walsh novel ( Torch) it's rather crisp and cool, almost austere. I think I might have loved it if there'd been a hint of the strong emotions which run through Gaudy Night and drive Busman's Honeymoon, but perhaps that's not territory Walsh is comfortable in. Still, there are some good thoughts about reasons for writing and keeping ones intellectual integrity in marriage, which fit nicely with a lot of Sayers ideas from her earlier books.

After all this intensive lazy reading we went to dinner at Chili's, where I got spinach & artichoke quesadillas which were medicore, and then back home. Kevin watched television while Pam read; I toyed briefly with the thought of starting another book and then ended up in here. I think now I'll go play some more Might and Magic VII, which is an awfully complex game -- I'm about twenty levels in and there've been three plot twists already. It's still not up to the standard set by Final Fantasy VII, but I'm not sure what could be.