Well, the first couple days back from Miami I spent walking around East Lansing thinking, "is it always this gray and I just didn't remember?"

Now, having adjusted back to the normal fabric of life, I'm starting to wonder if I just imagined Miami, a beautiful escapist fantasy played out in my head as I sat in Michigan. It just seems so unreal. It's hard to remember what it was like. (My brother suggests that delirious with cold, I probably saw a coconut or something and my imagination extrapolated everything else from there.)

Be that as it may, things have been looking up. I finally finished up "Acid Poker," which is good. (I'm keeping up the one-short-story-a-month quota, albeit that's counting one flash-fiction piece.) Also, after a week of nothing (at least nothing that I was willing to do...i.e. that didn't involve special ed-emotionally impaired or return to the charter school from hell from a couple weeks ago, neither of which I'm desperate enough to jump at just yet) I finally got a subbing assignment on Friday. It was a split 1st/2nd grade class (strange enough after mostly doing Middle School or the ocassional day of High School) at the Okemos Public Montessori School. (Montessori schools being about self-directed learning and relatively non-authoritarian ways of getting kids to do what you want, surprise surprise kids aren't as repressed and hyper and you don't have the sort of behavior problems you'd expect at a more traditional school. Also more learning.)

Anyway, the instructions said to "bring a picture book to read during story time" (again, a different world from subbing for older grades) so I procured some old Mercer Mayer books--"One Monster After Another" and "Professor Wormbog and the Search for the ZImperumpazoo"--at my parents' house (are they even still in print?) Anyway, I remember being read them as a wee thing, and loving them, so it was good for nostalgia value anyway. As a bonus, the kids loved them and were of course a great audience (making relevant comments of awe and amazement at appropriate intervals. As they broke up to go work on their individual workplans for the day, I heard some of them talking among themselves about the books..."that was so cool..."

In any case, I also notice an interesting resemblance between the illustrations in those books and the cover art you always see on anthologies of Lovecraft and pseudo-Lovecraft stories. It makes you wonder if there's some kind of conscious or unconscious influence there, and if so which direction it runs in.