The sky is falling!

I was thinking last night that I've been having a pretty lazy week. I'm going to work, of course, but I haven't done much of anything else the rest of the week. I come home in the evening and fix something simple for dinner (something really simple, since I'm back on the diet--last night it was two hotdogs with cheese on top, some pistachios and some green olives), then sit in my chair and read with a cat on my lap. I get up around 10:00 and go up to bed, assuming I haven't already fallen asleep in my chair. And I try to ignore the fact that there are lots of things around the house that need doing. I just think I need to rest this week, for whatever reason, and I've been enjoying it.

I believe it was Saturday night when Bob was out--he went to Phil's daughter's basketball game. I was sitting at the computer doing email after having eaten my ritual Friday night Chinese food, and waiting for it to be time to watch Monk, when I heard something behind me. I turned around and saw Dinah sitting on the lamp table. She didn't appear to be doing anything, but I thought she must have been playing with something on the table, or something hanging on the wall behind her.

I heard it again a few minutes later, and turned around again, but she wasn't there. Neither of the cats were around, so I got up to see if I could figure out what the sound was, and got dripped on!

There was water coming in at the top of the window, through the window trim, dripping onto the windowsill, then plopping onto the floor. I ran upstairs and got some towels to drape on the windowsill and to soak up the water on the carpet, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. I was having an email conversation with a friend at the time, and I said, "Yikes! The house is leaking!"

I know, intellectually, that a house isn't, and can't be, air and water-tight. But it's disconcerting, at the very least, to have water coming inside, and from someplace so odd. My friend said he was sure the house was fine, that sometimes snow or ice gets above the gutterline and will seep in, and that if we had a real leak, we would have noticed it when it rained, not just now, with all the snow.

Bob called a little while later, and I told him, and he wasn't concerned. He said basically the same thing, that there was probably ice in the gutters, and the melting snow didn't have anywhere else to go. Again, intellectually, I know that a leak isn't the end of the world, and the house isn't going to fall down or float away or anything, but I've got some kind of psychological problem about leaks.

I trace it all back to when Bob and I would go tent camping. He instilled in me a fear of touching the inside of the tent when it's raining, because that will break the tension and make it leak. Even if it's not raining, I think, even condensation in the early morning will do that. I remember waking up in the night when it was raining, or early in the morning, and lie there as still as I could, afraid that I would touch the wall of the tent and make it leak.

I believe that's why I can't sleep when it's raining, either. Bob loves to sleep during the rain, he says that's the best time. I'm not blaming him for the fact that I can't sleep when it's raining, but for whatever reason, it makes me really tense and uneasy. I can never enjoy it. I'm always worried that something will leak.

During my self-enforced week of evening leisure, I've been reading a lot. When I went to the library several weeks ago, I ran across a new book in a series by William Tapply. I had been aware of the series, starring an attorney named Brady Coyne, but I had never read any of them. I had a vague notion that there was a reason that I hadn't read them, but I couldn't remember what it was. I just sort of remembered taking one or two of them down from the library shelves, looking at them, and putting them back.

But since it's the library, i.e., I'm not risking any actual money, only time, I went ahead and checked it out--Shadow of Death, loved it, and the next time I went to the library, I checked out more of them. Shadow of Death was the 20th in the series, and I'm working my way through all of them, although not in order. It's actually kind of cool to do them out of order, because I know who the characters are (especially girlfriends), so it's kind of fun when I recognize a name, and think, "Oh! Alex!")

So, I've read ten of them by now, and I'm reading another one at the moment, so I guess I've got nine to go. It's lots of fun to discover a new series that I haven't read, particularly one that has so many books in it. I had a big stack of paperbacks that I had planned to work my way through while I was home, but I don't think I even touched it. I didn't want to count on library books, but the day I came home from the hospital, a bunch of books that I had requested came in at the library, and Bob picked them up for me.

And I've been lucky since then, to find a lot of things I want to read. The stack of paperbacks is still there, waiting for a day when I come back from the library emptyhanded.

Right before I went into the hospital, I started Spirits in the Wires, and I've read about a quarter of it, but for some reason I just can't get into it as much as I have other De Lint books. He's one of my favorite writers, and I thought this book would be wonderful, being about the internet. And it's good, but won't end up being one of my favorites, I don't think. I probably just need to immerse myself in it again.

The other book on the "Reading" list in the sidebar (I've been reading the Tapply books too quickly for them to even get listed over there) is Space Inc., edited by Julie Czerneda. A friend sent that to me as part of a pile of books to celebrate the fact that I came through the surgery so well, and that there were no complications and no cancer.

The book is about the "normal" jobs that people might have in space. Not the big things that you might think of, not astronauts or space explorers, but librarians on space stations, or janitors, or mechanics, or pullman "porters" on space trains. I love that kind of thing.