The housewarming yesterday was good but exhausting. I met Billie and quickly realised she was not the right kitten for me. This was briefly disappointing, but then I met her sister Ethel, who very much is the right kitten for me; she crawled around my lap and licked my hands, then crawled up on my shoulder and licked my ear and started purring. Once she was satisfied that she'd made a new conquest she went over to Jim and repeated the process, and ended up falling over thump on his shoulder and hanging out there for a while, enjoying her new territory. I looked over at Ambar and said very hopefully, "Is Ethel spoken for?" As it turns out she wasn't, so I quickly spoke, and she's now mine. I'm going to go pick her up when we get back from Chicago. I spent a lot of the party with her, but did free myself long enough to spend some time in the pool, and later to eat chili and chat with a guy named Keith (whom I discovered I actually knew from PernMUSH) for a while. That was good, and Jim drove home so I got a chance to relax.

And oh! Ambar picked up these wonderful 1927 Richard Burton translation f The Thousand Nights and a Night for me a long time ago, and I picked them up at the party. I was too tired to read much when I got home, but I did enjoy just sitting there skimming the first few pages and enjoying the lush language and the feel of older books,

I had lunch with Ray, both for the joy of his company and the chance to acquire some Clairfontaine notebooks, which are like the expensive Circa notebooks that Levenger sells, but much cheaper. I'm planning to use these to write recipes in, so I can make good use of all the cookbooks I got out of the library last week. Lunch itself was at Taxi's, where I had a frighteningly huge baked potato with mushrooms and cheese and butter, and a really nice milkshake. Afterwards Ray, instead of producing notebooks and demanding money as I expected, took me by hand (figuratively) and led me down the street to a stationery store.

"Why are you leading me into stationery?" I asked.

He grinned. "I'm teaching you how to fish."

Such utter, blissful doom. I got out of there with two big notebooks with the movable pages, and one small one with tabbed graph paper that I think I'll use to write down books I'm looking for; the tabs will make it easy to divide things up by genre. I looked at the pens, but didn't see anything I liked enough to spend the money right then. I don't really need new pens anyway; Jim did a huge sorting effort a month or so ago, so now all the non-functional pens have been thrown out and the rest are separated by colour in different cups by the phone. This is I suppose the fundamental difference between Jim and I; when I get bored I read or play computer games, and when he gets bored he cleans and sorts and organises.

Moria and I had an interesting conversation about books this morning; I loaned her Ammonite a while ago and then forgot all about it, only to come into work this morning to find very excited mail from her about the book. She loved it, which was really neat, and we had a nice time talking about it for a while. She brought up the fact that recommending books is partially hard because the way you react to a book the first time you read it is not just a product of where you are in your life, but of what the world around you is doing right then and there. That's a neat thought to me; it helps me understand why, say, Stranger in a Strange Land was a really big deal to a lot of people, but for me it was just a not-very-good book -- because for me it doesn't reflect the social changes going on around me all the time. I've gotten The Forever War from the library and am wondering if that'll be another book that's not powerful for me in the way it was for the readers when it first was published.

I'm finally getting responses on the final version of the release notes, and everyone is saying really wonderful things. It's so nice to get all this positive feedback; it really makes the work worthwhile.