I'm so completely emotionally worn out by other people's stuff, and right now things just keep coming. I'm trying very hard to make a space for myself and take a real break -- not something that comes naturally. I did manage to avoid any long in-depth conversations for most of the afternoon, which let me rest a little and get some long-needed work done. The release notes are finally finished, all five hundred (including HTML) lines of them. I've now started working on vile Y2K stuff, which is slow and annoying, but rather inevitable.

I had lunch today with Howard, who was sweet and amusing as always. I was pretty angry and upset about getting emotional foo dumped on me first thing this morning, so I ranted some at him and he was calm and reassuring that it was a good thing to be angry about. He also suggested we be decadent, so we got prawns with candied walnuts, a favourite of mine I haven't had since this whole kosher thing started. It was delicious, as always, and being paid attention to in that quiet caring way made the anger and stress just dissolve.

Last night Jim and I watched the first half of Gone with the Wind. It's pretty good so far, both entertaining and with a high level of craftsmanship. The costumes in the early scenes are just delicious; I really want the white-and-green dress Scarlett wears to the barbeque, even though I know I'd never fit into it without a corset and I can't imagine wearing one. I didn't expect to enjoy the story as much as I am, but Rhett Butler is in fact a charmingly mercenary character, and Clark Gable has a voice that for some reason I associate with Aral Vorkosigan from the Bujold books. The one thing I don't get is why Scarlett's supposed to be such a romantic heroine ideal. All I could think, watching her throw tantrum after tantrum, is 'Boy. This girl needs therapy.' I am such a creature of my times.

Dragons in the Waters was not bad at all, despite its prequel. It's a completely different sort of book from The Arm of the Starfish, being being mostly a mystery, and although there's mysticism it's applied to a strange tribe of South American natives and their healing skills rather than asserting that some animal species are inherently evil. That's the key difference, I guess; not a lot of hardcoded morality in the world of this book. It doesn't work well as a sequel to Arm of the Starfish for just that reason, but it's a nice stand-alone.

Looking back I can't believe I forgot to mention that I finished Five Hundred Years After. I enjoyed the book a lot, more than I expected to; it did move a lot more slowly than The Phoenix Guards, which means it was pretty incredibly slow, but I found the various romantic plot threads made up for the lack of buckling swashes. Tonally it's a completely different book from its predecessor; where The Phoenix Guards was about beginnings and hope and idealism this is about pride and disillusionment and something huge and old and beautiful falling apart. Never mind that we know it's all part of how things are intended to work, never mind that we know that a few centuries from now it starts rebuilding itself. Things fall apart, and it's for stupidly inevitable reasons, as all the best tragedies are. I loved it. I want Brust to write more big fantasy, and in the meanwhile I'll have to hunt down copies of Agyar and The Gypsy and anything else of his I haven't read, except I think those are the only ones left.

Time to go home. We need to go grocery shopping but I am endlessly too tired; my sleep schedule has just fallen completely apart the last few weeks and I'm not sure why. Hopefully I'll get it straightened out over the weekend; if not then I'm sure it'll be thwapped into shape by flying to Chicago in a week; having to get up and be social with family is good for that sort of thing.