Against all odds and good sense, I am at work today. Yesterday I was not, having contracted some kind of Spring-type bug that, vampire-like, sapped my strength and will to be a productive member of society. Feh. So here I am, listening to Current 93's Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God, pondering what kind of minimal productivity I can get away with and call the day a marginal success.

Stacy, however, is home today, it being her turn in the game of Invalid Tag. Though the truth is we've both been feeling iffy since the weekend, not that that stopped us from having our long-awaited pajama cocktail party with Caren and the Marthas and Matt and the Mysterious T---. Which goes to show you just how much we won't let good old-fashioned sense get in the way of having a fabulous time with some vodka and brie.

(As an aside, it's more fun than I'd suspected to have an anonymous new member of our circle; being able to drop a half-veiled reference to T--- makes me feel all Victorian, like a chronicler of some properly spooky Sheridan le Fanu weirdness. I may continue to do so even should the necessity disappear. It seems a fitting welcome to Matt's lovely consort, who is also, in his own right, delightful. [/James Lipton])

Frighteningly enough, "The Ballad of Bobby Sunshine" is almost exactly capturing my current mood. Beausoleil, soleil soleil soleil Beausoleil, Beausoleil... Like a Woodstock revival staged on the outskirts of Hell. Brilliant.

Don't mind me, folks.

I ought to buckle down again tonight and do some serious work on the second part of "The Pagurus Game," since Part the First met with such acclaim on the List, even among those who balked at the bits that earned it a full-on PG-13 rating. (I may have to take that ball and run. These young pups have no idea how much I was holding back, not having had the pleasure of the dubiously-tasteful softcore in A Thousand Thrones. Sigh. It's probably sick of me to take such delight in pushing the buttons of such folk, but, y'know, someone's got to set to cleaning up the damn mess that sanctimonious reformed-whore C.S. Lewis made. Or maybe it's just that my inner Spider Jerusalem has been awakened and is even now clamoring for cigarettes and a bucket of Long Pig. Whatever; I'm having too much fun to care.) It's been interesting turning back the clock from the time of 1KT and seeing what kind of trouble Jenny got up to with hunting down qlippoth back in the day, and it's very cool to have Murdoch playing a part in things again. Not to mention that it's just hard to go too wrong with nasty toothy monsters from the Abyss, which is certainly a suitable in-genre substitute for the "two men with guns" formula for those when-in-doubt moments that threaten to hang up the plot on some convoluted conversation or other. (And for all those who I haven't completely lost yet, Pagurus, in case you were wondering, is the name of the genus of arthropods to which hermit crabs belong; "qlippoth" is Hebrew for "shells." And that's all I'll say at this point.)

Not much else to say. It was a good weekend aside from all the getting-sick nonsense; Jim's Big Ego gave good show, as usual, on Friday night (and Jim said afterwards that the crowd at Jammin' Java was bigger than they'd expected, which is certainly potential good news for us Beltway Egomaniacs); I hope they made it okay to Tennessee or whatever godsforsaken place they were off to the next day. And Spyder and Vishal and I managed our first IM menage-a-trois on Sunday morning, which was about as surreal as you'd expect; Elephant Porn was sort of the top of the downward spiral, if that gives you any indication. 'S good to have friends who are at least in the same ballpark of fucked-up as you are.

Urk. Buffalo Chicken Wrap for lunch was possibly not a choice made in wisdom. Some disagreement going on in there even now. I'll sign off on that note, and let you all know how it works out.