The good thing about buying a whole smoked chicken is that gives a structure to the next few dinners - you know that, no matter what, you've got to use the chicken before it goes off. The pasta was fairly successful; if I were cooking tonight, I'd probably go for a kedgeree variant, where you replace the fish with smoked chicken. (I probably won't be, since I've got a game at Jenni's to go to.)
Oh, one of the nicest things about the pasta - it basically dirties just one chopping board, one pot, a knife, a wooden spoon, and a serving spoon; and the pot can also be used to serve it in. Hooray for minimal dishes! :)
***
I still haven't managed to transfer my t-shirts to the shiny new rack that my parents gave me for my birthday; my armchair is also still buried under debris from my trip, and my floor has a bunch of boxes that I pulled out from underneath the bed. I have the best of intentions, room-cleaning-wise, but... eh... I'll probably have the same intentions tomorrow, too. :)
***
Reading Robin McKinley is always a relaxing experience - I just read Spindle's End and Rose Daughter. I hadn't realised that she was married to Peter Dickinson (of The Last Unicorn fame), but I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised - if working in the film industry has taught me nothing else, it's that groups like special effects artists (and, one presumes, fantasy writers) are not actually as big as you might think, and people who've been in industries like these for a few years tend to know each other (or at least have acquaintances in common).
For those of you who are interested in the genre - I enjoyed reading the books I mentioned, but I think I enjoyed her first take on the Sleeping Beauty legend (Beauty) more. I particularly liked the folk-details of Spindle's End - the idea that carved spindle ends become something like Welsh loving spoons is pretty neat.
Currently, I'm resisting the urge to reread Vinge's Fire on the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky - there are the kinds of problems that you almost always get with books that have more than one concurrent storyline, but I've reread both several times, and I'm sure I'll reread them again. Speaking of books that do this that I enjoy, if anyone sees a second-hand copy of Sorcery and Cecelia about, then I'd be most interested. As in, if it has all the pages, buy it and I'll pay you back. :)
(Sorcery and Cecelia is written in letter form, with two young ladies in an Edwardian fantasy world corresponding to each other as a mystery unfolds; the first draft was written by the authors in exactly this format, sending letters back and forth. I enjoyed it a lot.)
The title is quoting Cicero, by the way - oh, how cultured I am. ;)
Posted by svend at October 5, 2004 3:35 PMWhy not reread the /Across Realtime/ pair then? They're a lot quicker to reread, being, well, shorter. And they're still Vinge.
Posted by: Michael Robinson at October 5, 2004 4:41 PM/Across Realtime/ is kind of neat (are kind of neat?), but the attraction of Fire/Deepness is the alien race stuff. At least some of niftiness, for me at least, is the way he writes about research and development in these cultures; I think there's a similar hook in many time travel/alternate reality series, like H.Beam Piper's /Gunpowder God/, or S.M. Stirling's Nantucket trilogy.
But I'll probably be putting them on hold while I read either a bunch of Anne Perry murder mysteries, or a whole lot of P.G. Wodehouse. Or possibly a book on prehistoric Denmark - it depends what I pick up at the time. :)
Posted by: Svend at October 6, 2004 9:51 AMIs that the same Peter Dickinson who wrote (and was the main character of) Flight of Dragons?
Or am I getting names mixed up? Google search!
Posted by: Matt at October 6, 2004 10:32 AMNo, I believe that "Flight of Dragons" was based on Gordon R. Dickson's "The Dragon and the George" series - I remember buying them for my brother, many moons ago.
But that does remind me - at some stage, I want to buy "The Reluctant Dragon". Now *that* is a nifty kid's book.
Posted by: Svend at October 6, 2004 12:58 PMMy room is without a soul, and my body is without a book. Is this coincidence, synchronicity, or a Capitalist plot?
Posted by: Pearce at October 11, 2004 4:51 PM