I'm sitting at my desk, fixing bugs and really listening to Music For Airports for the first time. It's really beautiful, very calm and floaty and non-intrusive without being bland. Good bug-fixing music.

The weekend happened. Friday I played Dungeonkeeper and watched the second episode of Felicity -- I've been taping it ever since the pilot, but I never want to spend time watching it. The second episode was moderately enjoyable, and I have hopes that it continues to improve. Right now my main problem with it is that it's trying too hard to be like a Sarah McLachlan song.

Saturday was a lot of sleep, followed by laying on the couch reading peacefully. Out of nowhere I decided to finally read A Sorcerer and a Gentleman by Elizabeth Willey -- I read her first book (The Well-Favored Man, set many centuries after her more recent books) and liked it a lot, but that was about four years ago. Anyway, I picked up A Sorcerer and a Gentleman Friday and was immediately hooked. I finished it Saturday and started its direct sequel (The Price of Blood and Honor), which I finished mere hours ago. These are yummy fantasy books, with occasional moments of beautiful Elizabethan dialogue, well-thought magic, and a huge scheming family with more backstory than you can shake a stick at. Zelazny's Amber written by ... who? Not Jane Austen. Perhaps written by John Ford, but I'm not sure if I mean the Elizabethan one or the modern one. My only difficulty in enjoying the books is that there's a rape fairly early on; the act itself is glossed over, but the mental anguish of the victim is gone into in great detail over time. Consider yourself warned.

Having said all that, I'm not sure the books were good. I had a lot of fun reading them, and would reccomend them to people who like that sort of thing, and there were cool characters living in a world I wanted to know more about -- but oh they were slow, and the long drawn-out period of people wandering around trying to catch up with each other -- it was very Shakespearean (the 'comedy of errors' turned to tragedy, as in Romeo and Juliet), but I wouldn't have minded it happening faster.

Hmn. I wonder if the pacing is similar in The Well-Favored Man and at the time it just didn't bother me? I'll have to notice that; I plan to reread it starting tonight. It should be very interesting; this book takes place centuries (at least) later, with the main characters mostly being the children & grandchildren of the people focused on in the first two books. Seeing the older generation through the eyes of the younger, their backgrounds that are immediate to me now shrouded in myth -- I'll enjoy that. I love putting together the puzzle of how one story becomes another in later times. I hope Willey put it all together well.

I've fixed more bugs. They did a release without me noticing, so I failed to check in many of my fixes. Sigh. There'll be another release on Wednesday, and I doubt it'll hurt anything if my stuff waits until then, but it does mean QA can't retest my code until Thursday. Let us hope they don't find more bugs in it. If they do it could be a very long Friday indeed.

Tonight -- very soon now, in fact -- I am going out to dinner with Marith & Keely, the latter of whom is visiting from Baltimore. We're going to Kabul, which is yummy afghan food, and if I'm very lucky Jim will escape work early enough to meet us there. I will drink tons of cardamom tea, and eat weird beef (in red sauce with bell peppers) on rice, and if I am feeling extravagantly hungry I'll get the rosewater pudding for dessert. I love living somewhere with so much wonderful food nearby.

Well, at least in theory. In practise I'm finding it hard to care about food lately, which bothers me. Food is usually extremely important; where does this disinterest come from? Why does nothing sounds good? I worry. Also, ever since my mom visited I've been exhausted most of the time, which isn't like me. I thought I was just behind on sleep, but I slept a lot this weekend to no avail. Am I coming down with something? I said in group I'd call a doctor this week, but my hatred of doctors (disguised as laziness) makes that seem unlikely.

Right now, though, I'm hungry and looking forward to the evening.