Yesterday was a gorgeous, sunny spring day, and I had a great time driving around with the top open. I stopped for a frozen yogurt and ate it sitting in the car in the parking lot, sun streaming down through the moon roof.

I went to the bookstore and wandered around, finding a couple of gems on the clearance table, including a copy of Kage Baker's Mendoza in Hollywood, the third volume in her series about "The Company:" difficult to explain in a few words, but far in the future, time travel and, not incidentally, immortality, is discovered. The hitch is that you can only go back, not forward past your own time, although you can return to where you started.

So operatives are sent back to prehistoric times where they select promising children who are then made immortal--and mostly cyborg--and trained to train the next generation of immortals, and so on. Their quest is to save important things that have been lost through the ages--animals and plants that have become extinct, works of art that have been destroyed, books that disappeared.

Quite an intriguing premise.

Mendoza is saved from the Spanish Inquisition at the age of five, trained as a botanist, made into an immortal cyborg, and put to work saving rare plants from the past. This novel puts her in the mid-1800's in California.

My main purpose in going to the bookstore was to look for more Jonathan Carroll novels. Several weeks ago I ran across a site--I can't remember now what it was--that I liked the design of, and I followed the link of the site designer to their portfolio page, and thus to Jonathan Carroll's website.

I hadn't heard of him before, but I can't imagine why not--his work is exactly the kind of thing I love. His novels start out slowly, gently, lull you into thinking they're ordinary, then quickly become surreal. When I first went looking for his novels, I found a recent reprint of Land of Laughs, then put it on my "to be read" pile and forgot about it for a couple of weeks. I picked it up last week, read it, and immediately started looking for more.

Most of his novels are out of print now, and it didn't occur to me until I was standing in front of the bookshelf in Borders that I might be able to find them in the library. So I made a trip to the library for the first time in months. I used to go all the time, when I was reading more, but when I got so busy with my own websites, and busy at work, and with the long commute, I had less and less time to read, so the weekend trip to the library to bring home a big stack of books to devour over the following week kind of fell by the wayside.

I ended up with five Carroll novels, two of which I've already read, and the third I'm about halfway through.

That's what I spent part of today doing--sitting curled up under my favorite afghan with a succession of cats, reading. I also did laundry, made vegetable soup, and worked on my Flash stuff for a couple of hours. A quiet day.

In order to celebrate the return of my cable modem service, one night early last week I stayed up late and downloaded a bunch of new skins and objects for The Sims. [We've now lost the cable service upstairs, and I've got to stay home on Wednesday morning to wait for a repairman, but that's another story.]

I downloaded a whole bunch of furniture, some cool windows, new wallpaper and floor patterns, an angel, and the Beatles.

I didn't really pay much attention to the house I put them in, it was just a regular ranch-style house--two bedrooms, so I put two beds in each bedroom, and a couple of small bathrooms; I took a room that was probably supposed to be a study or rec room or something and turned it into a music room, and as soon as they saw that, they felt right at home.

I'm thinking now that I need to get them a bigger, cooler house. Maybe a castle or something, but at least something with a nice, big studio.