...it turns out that I absolutely adore Dr. Horrible. (What a surprise, right?) I love the music (Once More With Feeling was always my favorite Buffy episode), I love the humor, I love the sleaziness of Captain Hammer and the vulnerability of poor Dr. Horrible. I love this show so much that instead of watching it for free online, I've bought a season pass on iTunes to download and own all three episodes. Now, if only someone would give Joss Whedon the money to make this into a full-length TV show...

It's been a quiet week, without much to report. Patrick and I went into town today for a cafe writing session, and I took the opportunity to walk over to the Leeds Central Library...where, as usual, I couldn't find much, since both the general fiction and (especially) the F/SF sections are absolutely tiny. Sigh. One thing I do miss about living in America is the great public libraries, full of new and interesting fiction from all genres. I know there must be bad public libraries in America, too, with minimal fiction collections (not to mention f/sf collections), but in all the cities I lived in (East Lansing, Oberlin, and Pittsburgh), the libraries were wonderful. In the same vein, I'm sure there must be some great public libraries in England...but so far, living first in Bristol and then in Leeds, I haven't found them. Oh well...it's not as if I don't enjoy buying books, I'm just trying to be stronger about that!

And we've been doing more baby preparation, going to an information evening run by a local midwife that made everything even more real (and made me realize, after looking at the even-more-pregnant women around me, that for all that I think of my current baby bump as HUGE, it's got a long way left to go over the next 2-1/2 months...). I've started collecting baby books and reading them, often with a combination of fascination and horror. I had no idea just HOW extremely opposed so many of the baby guides are! It's not just that each of them has a completely contradictory method for each area of baby rearing - it's that, in every case, the author asserts that if you don't use their particular method, your baby's LIFE WILL BE RUINED! BECAUSE OF YOU! Aaack????? In the end, along with a few of the more contemporary books, I decided to order a copy of Dr. Spock's baby guide from the 1970s, figuring that I and my friends all turned out OK after being raised on Spock's theories... (Of course, now I feel frighteningly like an old Etonian saying, "We were flogged every day after breakfast, and look how well I turned out!" But I've been promised that at least Dr. Spock didn't tend to threaten your baby with Total Disaster if you ever failed to follow one of his suggestions....)

Now I'm sitting in the nicest arrival of this week - a big padded rocking chair that we ordered as our one big pregnancy splurge. And ohhhh, was it worthwhile...I think I could live in this chair! (Since it reclines, I could sleep in it too.) Maybe I can talk Patrick into just turning me in the chair every few hours to catch the light as I while away the time before tomorrow's Dr. Horrible episode...