Crazy day today -- one person in my office got fired, and another is out with kidney stones, so everything's frantic. Nonetheless, I managed to steal a few minutes to babble here. :-) Acting on a suggestion from someone who wrote in (I wish I'd noted his name, but I don't remember it now), I've reversed the order of these, so the most recent is first. This will hopefully make it easier to read -- it'll also make it a little easier to write.
Only interesting thing that's happened recently is that last night I started re-reading an old favorite of mine, Busman's Honeymoon," the 4th book in the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane series by Dorothy Sayers. If you enjoy mysteries, the English, and understated romance, you *must* read this series (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night precede this (and a few short stories follow it)). I'm indulging in an orgy of Britishness and having a marvelous time (I admit it, I'm an anglophile). My only complaint is that Sayers has a tendency to scatter French and Latin phrases throughout her novels (perhaps assuming that all of her readers can read those languages) -- sadly, the only language other than English that I can read is Spanish, and so I stumble through those passages, intensely frustrated. What I wouldn't give for footnotes!