Ouch! Yesterday I had an annoying sore throat (not tonsilitis this time - just a really bad, feverish cold). Today it has taken over my life. Luckily, today was one of Patrick's half days at work, so he spent this morning making me endless cups of tea with honey & milk to appease the throat's demands, tucking blankets around me, and generally cosseting me while I croaked and clutched my throat and felt sorry for myself. Now that he's at work, I'm making my own honey-laced tea, but luckily all that cosseting bucked me up enough that I can do it without totally collapsing into a morass of self-pity. ;) Colds are definitely the downside of autumn!

However, there are lots of good things going on. I've dived back into Kat by Starlight! I'd written 37 pages before I took my long break to revise Kat by Moonlight, so I spent this morning first reading the printed pages and reminding myself of what had happened so far (while drinking honeyed tea, of course), then baptising my new Moleskine by scribbling pages of notes on what could happen next. Notorious rakes, mad astronomers, inappropriate flirtations...I'm having so much fun! And I got to pretend I was Elizabeth Barrett Browning as I wrote - there I was reclining on a couch in the best Victorian-invalid manner, with a dog cuddled up against my legs (like her dog Flush - but cuter, of course!), drinking tea & scribbling away in an old-fashioned bound notebook with a fountain pen...Patrick, of course, was playing the part of Robert Browning, but I didn't actually tell him that. (He was writing at the time, so I thought it was better not to interrupt him just for that enlightenment.)

And I forgot to mention this last week, but I'm loving the new BBC radio adaptation of Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency! Harry Enfield plays Dirk Gently, and Billy Boyd (AKA Pippin in LoTR) plays Richard MacDuff. As a radio show, it doesn't hit Hitchhiker's level of pure genius, but that makes sense - unlike The Hitchhiker's Guide..., it was conceived as a novel, not a radio play. Still, the show is enormously fun and surprisingly faithful to the book. The first episode isn't online anymore, but you can still read a summary of the first episode and listen to the 2nd episode, which I really enjoyed.

Meanwhile, Maya is showing her usual level of good-natured adaptability to our weird ways. She's always loved hanging out at the top of our stairs, so much so that we now call it "Wolf Rock" - she regularly drags her toys up there and sits surrounded by them, gazing down across the living room in a noble, wolflike manner. Unfortunately, when we came back from Edinburgh, we dragged one of our big suitcases up to Wolf Rock and - being us - forgot to move it after we emptied it. So, last time I went upstairs, this is what I found:


She is infinitely adaptable. :)