you might find this gross.

I've been coughing up sputum, but that's not the point. The point is I was sitting in the tub with a strand of it between finger and thumb thinking "this is beautiful." It was the frothy kind, white and translucent, with bright bubbles of various sizes suspended in it, and the way the light comes in my large bathroom window it caught an edge of the thing and made it really shine. And the stuff is really quite tough: I couldn't break the strand with impact or shear. The only way it broke was being stretched almost as far as my finger and thumb could part. I was thinking, this is the stuff of life, isn't it? It's basically what's inside of cells, and what coats tissues, and it serves as a barrier and as a conduit both. It's really amazing stuff. No wonder we make more of it when we're sick.

Also, through the window, I could see that my neighbor's garage has developed a baby sunflower in the rain gutter. How cool is that?

Is this sentence intolerable?

I produced this sentence, and I'm inclined to leave it alone until I'm in revision stage. What do you think?


On the other side of the room, at the window overlooking the garden where a particularly well-muscled gardener, his shirt tied round his waist, was doing something heroic looking with a curved saw, Count Peter, the quiet one, could almost be heard to say the whole subject could have been neatly avoided if Vladi had married a virgin in the first place as he had suggested (which in fact he did not, but there's no arguing with twenty-twenty hindsight).

I'm afraid the book will be boring, because there's so much told stuff and so much faffing about with kinship and inheritance rights and technological progress at a time sort of like about 1900 but of course it is in a fantasy world where there are magical animals and an unnamed moribund two-bit Empire that's reduced to a winter social season in the capital and endless litigation on the part of the Electors and, of course, secret police.

On a related note, Frank drew a diagram about the fact that it is snowing in Prague this week, and his determination that this is "bullshit."

And on a completely different front, I am on Tamiflu and taking two days off so I don't re-infect the dears who gave me the flu. The delicious thing about Tamiflu? Not the fact that a relatively common side effect is dizziness -- I figure everything I put in my body that isn't a green vegetable has the potential to make me woozy -- but that another relatively common side effect is coughing. I should have Frank draw a diagram about that, too.