William Gibson has decided to abandon his blog. He'd predicted this months ago when he wrote that the blog was likely to interfere with his fiction writing when he started on a new book. It's rather strange, because he never seemed to write much in the journal, many times noting short comments about other items he linked to. I've always thought I should like his books more than I do. They're somewhat memorable, Idoru and Pattern Recognition more so than the others, but they all seem self-consciously self-aware.

Signs of fall:
1. The honking of the geese who travel at all hours of the day and night, heading to every point of the compass, never stopping to ask directions. There's an observation in there about male geese leading the flocks, but I certainly won't be the one to point that out.
2. Leaves beginning to shed their green masks and display their true colors. This allegedly requires cold temperatures, but that's apparently another lesson learned in childhood that's not holding up very well.
3. Butt warmer usage in the car in the morning. Referred to as seat heaters in more polite company, these are the one feature destined to fail in every car. In the despised German car they go kaput every year, which was merely annoying when they were under warranty, but is now a financial fiasco at $1,000 per seat to fix. Needless to say, butts remain unwarmed in that disaster-on-wheels.

Books: Finished Green Angel, which is Alice Hoffman's latest young adult novel. A parable that weaves the story of a teenage girl who is orphaned by a 9/11-type disaster. The language was beautiful, as always in her stories, but the ending was unsatisfyingly abrupt. But then perhaps that was part of the point. Song Reader is moving along slowly. I bought the Witching Hour by Anne Rice today, when I found that the library will be closed for another few days and I didn't have the patience to wait for the request I had made for it.

Movies: Many.
1. The end of the Spanish Prisoner. Again. Second time in the last few weeks. This is a movie I will watch almost any time I run across it on TV, although I never seem to see it from the beginning.
2. Two thirds of the Glass House. Not a very good story, but the house itself is fascinating in a cold, hard-edged way. And the light in the house at night is all watery and shimmery blue.
3. Dead Like Me, episode 12. Mandy Patinkin is such a wonderful hard ass with a heart of gold-like material.
4. Matchstick Men. Not at all what I imagined it would be from the previews or the TV ads. I expected a comedy of broad proportions, and instead found myself smiling throughout the entire movie, but only laughing once or twice. It devotes a good deal of time to the enormous challenges faced by a man who is consumed by his obsessive-compulsive behavior, who struggles with his job, which just happens to be that of a con man, and with facing a teenage daughter he never knew he had. There is more to this movie than the twisted confidence game that plays out around Nicholas Cage's character, all of which is summed up in the slightly-too-tidy ending.
5. Waiting for Guffman. Wickedly funny skewering of small town life and community theater.
6. The Fifth Element. Only a few minutes. This has been in heavy rotation lately on Showtime and I've seen it way too often.
7. Tron. Maybe 10 minutes. I've tried to watch this any number of times and to imagine how revolutionary it must have seemed 21 years ago, but cannot seem to set the Way-back machine to that time period.
Yes, that was a lot of watching over the past few days, but work has left me exhausted and my brain mush-like over the past week, and even absorbing video entertainment tests the limits of my mind.

Dreams: There was a windstorm, it could have been a tornado, and I was caught outside. I ended up hanging onto a small lantern like those that we have out front lighting the walkway. The wind was blowing so hard I was hanging on parallel to the ground, afraid I'd be swept away to oblivion. Influenced by chaos at work?