stop looking for the next secret door

I was going to post some photos of possible wedding dresses, to get feedback. Oh, wait, not "wedding dresses," but dress-to-wear-to-a-wedding possibilities. Wow, I hope no one took that seriously. Anyway, I'm going to a wedding in May that's A Big Deal, and need a dress to acquit myself. It's a little rough deciding, though, because it's very much winter right now, but by that time and in that place it'll be well into summer. Average daytime temperatures in May/June are around 80°, and that's really hard to plan for when there's a 5' heap of snow outside the window right now. I'm also invited to the rehearsal dinner, so there's a separate outfit needed for that. And all of this (obviously) needs to fly its way out there and back. The moral of this story is that I don't have a list of dress candidates yet. When I do, expect them to show up here, and expect to be casting your vote.

As other serious readers know, every now and then, you come upon a book that reads slowly, for a variety of reasons. It might be thick and ponderous, which for some is a reason to put it down and never pick it back up again, and for others it's just a reason to go slow and savor. Or it might be so good that you literally don't want it to end, so you're forcing yourself to read slowly so that you can make it last as long as possible. This is particularly true when the book is part of a series and the next entry won't be released for a while, so you want to s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the joy. Or, as is the case with the book I've been reading, you might get really, really into it because it's so imaginatively and cohesively written that you either tend to lose sleep because you're thinking about it, or dream weird, borderline nightmarish dreams in which you inhabit the world of the book itself. Actually, what I've been reading fills all those categories. It is epic fantasy, and though I'm reading it on an e-reader, the original hardback is 993 pages which certainly qualifies as "thick and ponderous." And it is terrifically good, one of the best I've ever read. I both laughed out loud and cried enough to wet my shirt collar while reading yesterday. And even though I read the book voraciously, I do find myself putting it down, sometimes for even weeks at a time--because I don't want it to end, and to make it last a little closer to the release of the third book in the series. Finally, when I do read a lot of it at once, I almost inevitably am either kept up for hours, tossing & turning, mulling over the hows & whys of the story, or I dream as if I'm a character in the book, which is in some ways even worse. Last night it was both; I don't think I was asleep until well after 2:00 (or 3:00, considering the time change?), and after that I was struggling to open a thrice-locked chest with no hinges - after eating warm apple pie and playing Tak with my mates.

I discovered yesterday, to my very profound annoyance (and only after what amounted to disassembling and reassembling the complex organization of the entire bedroom) that my 2012 tax information (including necessarily data for computing 2013 taxes) is not here. Which means it's packed. Which means it's in a box among many boxes (mostly looking exactly alike) in my friend's basement, one county to the east. Thanks to the ongoing good-natured benevolence of that friend, I've made arrangements to meet her mid-week for dinner and a snipe hunt through the stacks of cardboard.

Funny, too, since this was the year I was just gonna do my taxes and get it over with early. Good thing I didn't, though, since my place-at-which-I-spend-my-days had to issue amended W-2s this year. I get the feeling that they should have been amended more than the one time (or in more than the one way), but I guess I'll take what I've got. And once I've got the data that I need, I'll get those taxes figured--maybe a month earlier than usual. That's something, right?

Baby changing stations are creepy.

I'm working on another entry in The SAMs: Subjective Awards for Movies series (the first and second have already been posted). I've seen a lot of movies in a lot of diverse areas, but it's surprisingly difficult for me to put these compilations together. Difficult, but satisfying. It's worth it to me.


[the title quotation is by Lev Grossman, from The Magicians, and reads in its entirety: "For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."]