(no subject)

I know I'm trying to do too many things at once when I pour myself a cup of coffee, put it down, and ten minutes later wander past the kitchen and do the same thing again -- only to find the earlier, undrunk cup sitting looking reproachfully at me.

This afternoon's mission is chaos reduction and de-grungification, with particular focus on the bathroom. Now that the tub is no longer filling with other people's dubious waste water on a daily basis, I am somewhat more motivated to try to do a decent job on it. I have also acquired a nice new shower curtain, liner, and mat. The old mat was pretty much past it anyway, the rubber backing having gone the way of all rubber that sits around for long in the desert, but the workmen completed its demise. As soon as the floor and fixtures are clean, the new stuff can go in, and I'll have a respectable bathroom again, albeit still one with a messy book-sized patch on one wall.

Yesterday's big project, which wasn't meant to be, was the backing-up of the newly-Sevened desktop computer. I can't tell now whether my initial hypothesis that Win7 was being pickier about mixed-up permissions than Vista was correct, or whether it started with a bit of corruption on the destination drive; I just know that laboriously making everything in my personal directory inherit the top-level permissions didn't help, and CHKDSKing the drive (which found ONE 32kb spot of trouble) finally let it finish. (The other grump about 7 is that there isn't a working driver for my HP laser printer yet; otherwise it seems to work fine.)

And I can't find my small straight-nose pliers.

Recycling

Necklace 34 Tinted faux pearls from the 1980s, modern luster glass and metal spacers.

I had three rather sad strands of glass pearls from the early 80s, and I saw a necklace in a store that looked exactly like those three strands joined end to end. I fancied the idea up a bit with the luster glass; the hardest part was figuring out how to join an endless loop.

Barbara Hambly: Renfield, Slave of Dracula

Re-weaving of Bram Stoker's Dracula largely from the viewpoint of the lunatic Renfield, incorporating parts of the original but with a lot of new material. I'm not a huge fan of vampires in general, but I make an exception for authors I already enjoy, and I even went to the length of reading the original Dracula in preparation for this one.

( Spoilers for both versions. )

Worth reading if you like Hambly, vampires, or both. I read it in hardcover , but it was small enough for a purse book. (I wouldn't have wanted it for bedtime reading)

Domesticity fail, mostly

Well, the bathroom's better, but I ran out of time and energy before I got to anything else. Like vacuuming ...

And dinner was as much of a disaster as is consistent with feeding myself at all: I put the fish in the oven and the potatoes on the hob, but forgot to turn on the heat under the latter. So I had fish on its own at eight, followed at 8.30 by mushy overcooked (almost burned to the pan) potatoes and veggies, and the second portion of fish got left out on the counter for an hour, so I had to throw it away.