"Your hands! They're like biscuits with sticks jammed in 'em!"

I haven't posted in over a week (Apologies, as I'm sure you are all sitting around waiting for me). It's been a strange week or so; I've been intermittently grumpy, and who wants to read the grumblings of a grumpy me? I don't even want to write them.

That doesn't mean the week was terrible--there were plenty of good times, lots of friends, and countless things I wish I had written down but didn't. So, here's a couple highlights, if they can be called that:

Ben came and hung out this weekend, and we were at Powell's at Hawthorne, and I was searching for a book (there's a story there, but first...). Ben was talking to me, and this guy came up behind him, trying to go down the aisle. He was probably in his early 20's. But here's the thing. The guy was wearing a bowler hat. Like a proper, It's-1901-and-it's-time-to-hitch-my-horse-in-town-or-whatever-guys-in-bowler-hats-did-back-then hat. And then, when Ben moved aside to let him pass, the guy gave us the tiniest of bows, complete with one of those weird rolly-hand waves, and said, "Pardon me," in a voice that I honestly couldn't tell if it was silly, or just his normal voice.

It was my favorite moment of that day.

Here's the thing about the books: Eric's books hate me. I think they've all talked to one another, and signed a suicide pact. If they get sent to my house, they know the kamikaze mission is on. Last summer, I sent him a text that said, "I have to buy you a new copy of Cloud Atlas because I just smashed a bug in it."

Seriously. I was minding my own business, reading, and a GIANT bug of unknown origin landed on the page. I shrieked, slammed the book shut, and then...blech. Bug guts all over the page, luckily on a paragraph I had finished. So I own that copy now, and I'm pretty sure there's still some kind of brown spot somewhere around the middle.

I don't think these things happen to normal people. Case in point, the death wish that had me in Powell's in the first place:

I've been reading his copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. The other day. I set the book down on my bed, and when I sat down, I bumped it, and it fell. Could have happened to anyone, except that this book is clearly part of the suicidal insurgency. So rather than falling gracefully to the floor, it tumbled partway, and then allowed pages 41-51 (and only those pages. I smell a plot afoot) to catch on my bedframe, ripping them three-quarters of the way down the page. I am pretty sure I said, "You're kidding me," out loud. So that copy's mine now. Eric gets a new one.

I'll probably, hopefully be blogging more regularly from here on out. At the moment, I have had too much coffee, and it's making me jittery and I kind of feel like my brain is clicking too fast. Please tell me someone else has felt that way. :)

And before I go, a friend of a friend saw these restroom signs in Vermont. I think they should be universal:

and then...