If you ignore the food poisoning, there's one great thing I can say about the last week and a half: I have been sleeping like a rock. Actually, I even slept great in Italy, probably because I was walking myself to a state of exhaustion daily, but there was only one day when I spent my night worrying about us not getting somewhere on time and lost sleep because of this. So every day I've felt in good shape in regards to my sleep level - a nice change from normal.

I've also been drinking a lot of red wine during this period of time. I wonder if there's a connection?

Proust is at page 309 - in good shape for me to complete the book(s) before the end of the month, I think. I just finished a section about a famous actress (sort of a Sarah Bernhardt) having a tea party that no one could bother to attend because they were off to see The Next Big Thing. The actress herself is dying and working herself into a quicker grave to take care of her daughter, who doesn't appreciate it. The whole thing seemed like a kind of death watch for the entire social order he's documented in his series of books, and I found it kind of funny to read, almost as much as reading about the granny who took the deaths of any of her aquaintances as being sort of a win for her. "Hah! Outlives old Solange after all. That'll show her!"

For fun I've been reading Stross' The Jennifer Morgue (at home, a gift from topbit) and Fforde's The Fourth Bear (at the gym), where the lead character has just bought a horrible car from Dorian Grey - it has a portrait of itself in the trunk. Stross is into heavy James Bond paralleling right now, so I'll probably recommend this to J when I'm done.

I had my friends Josela and Cate (from work) over for dinner tonight. Menu was stacked sour cream green chile chicken enchiladas, only without as much green chiles as I would have liked (read: none). Afterwards I made "fakearitas" (no lime juice or sweet and sour, but the Sicilian lemonade seemed to cut the mustard) and we bsed until I had to kick people out.

I'm having a peek at my Pinter book now that I've finished Fforde's The Big Over Easy. Truly, I would have never guessed what horrible fate ultimately befell Humpty Dumpty, but I should have realized the mad scientist (genetic engineer) and the beanstalk were going to come into play at some point in the book.

So, I was feeling grumpy on my way home about the whole phone thing. I mean, really, in the space of a week, my phone shits out and a bank machine eats my cash card (and then the bank wouldn't give it back). I was just reading Jasper Fforde's first "Nursery Crime" book this afternoon, and the detective was explaining (in the midst of solving the mystery of Did Humpty Jump or Was He Pushed) how things are different in their bailiwick, such as the law of threes, and I thought, thank goodness I'm not superstitious, or I'd think I had another one coming!

I got home to my flat with the cat (whom I'd carried in her box all the way from Wechsler's flat), pulled out the key, and discovered ... when the exterminators had come by, they had locked the bottom lock.

The one with the skeleton key, the key I don't have.

And there I was without a phone and no money.

Anyway, though a miracle I managed to get ahold of shadowdaddy, who was about to start his French class. He has just now let me in the flat, only about 2 1/2 hours later.

Next up, something about magic beans, and I'm going to be looking for sacks of wool and possibly a set of pigs, or bears, in "small/medium/large." And a woodcutter. Nothing bad ever happens to woodcutters.

I had a great time at the Carlos Acosta show at the Coliseum, even though we had crap overpriced balcony seats. The review is up and I'm calling it a night.

Also, in my Thursday Next novel, as she was rescuing a William Shakespeare clone, she was attacked by a bunch of genetic experiments, followed by an army of cloned Napoleons, only to be saved by an army of, er, Wellingtons. Now she's going to play competition croquet with a team half composed of Neanderthals, and somehow this all makes sense.