Oof. Well, I have been getting better...but maybe not as quickly as I'd hoped.

This morning Patrick and I decided to throw caution to the winds and take the train out to Hebden Bridge, our very favorite place to go. After all, we wouldn't need to exercise much for that--just take the bus to the train station, the train to the village, and then slowly ramble over to the Best Lunch Restaurant Ever. So we looked up bus times, saw that one was due to leave in just 4 minutes, raced around the house getting ready, tore out to the bus stop, leaped onto the bus...

...and less than five minutes later, I staggered off the bus, sick beyond words, and stumbled back home.

Turns out buses aren't so good for me right now. And neither is rushing around.

I can't even express how frustrating this was.

Gaah.

On the bright side, I'm listening to Hayley Westenra's Odyssey--wonderfully cheesy comfort music par excellence--and yesterday I read an absolutely perfect fantasy novel: Patricia McKillip's Ombria in Shadow. I loved this book so much that it almost made up for my intense envy as I read it. Damn, but I wish that I'd written it! Shivery magic, gorgeous prose, sinister, layered dialogue and shady political maneuverings... ooooohhh, I loved it. Just my kind of book. Oddly enough, it's been released in the UK as a YA novel after being released in the US as an adult novel, but it works beautifully either way.

The frost here this morning was layered so thickly on the frozen grass that it looked like snow and crunched satisfyingly under Nika's paws as she raced along it, sniffing for trails of birds, small animals and the local fox. I love sharing winter with her.