Don't get me wrong. I am edified, entertained, and even enchanted by Keith West's How to Draw Plants. But. Here is the path I followed when I looked up Achene in his Glossary:

Achene: A simple dry one-seeded indehiscent fruit.

Indehiscent: See Dehiscence.

Dehiscence: The process of opening in an anther or fruit.

Anther: The pollen-bearing part of the stamen.

Stamen: The unit of the androecium; comprised of anther and filament, though sometimes the latter is lacking.

Androecium: The male elements collectively, the stamens.

Hey, I knew that.

A friend read the three blogs generated by my immediate family and said (according to rumor), "You guys reveal everything!"

I couldn't if I tried, and in fact, I try not to. My days seem so difficult to pin down. I look back on them, and depending on my mood or where I'm sitting at the time, different qjulias are revealed. Some of them would probably break the Internet. Others are boooooooooooooooooooooooring. Most are kind of confusing. Now and then one catches my eye as she darts by and I trip her up and write her up and if we are both lucky, you are entertained.

Also entertaining, and equally revealing, are the jetlag guidebooks.

I've almost gotten the cabin ready for students. There's a stack of Rubbermaid tubs full of crafts supplies outside, and the only stuff left to move out of that room are several cubic yards of canvases. I think they're going in Vruba's old room. Boy, will he be surprised when he comes home for a visit!

Klezmer night. The kid who came with the accordion player watched Spirited Away outside in the unroofed addtion. The computer with its DVD player was perched on a stack of 2 x 6's and the garden bench was parked on a major puddle. The pile of blankets we put on it is wicking up puddle even as I write this. Later, the klezmorim went outside and watched the part where Sen cleans up the River God with extra herbal showers.

Mom said that when she was a refugee in Bad Mergentheim during and after WWII, her landlady was a staunch supporter of the Nazis. "How the heck can you still support those guys, especially now that all the stuff they did is becoming public knowledge?" asked my Mom.

"I lost a husband and four sons in the war," she said. "If I didn't believe in the cause, then I'd have lost them for nothing."

And that is how I read this.

Went to the mainland with The Spink.

11:00 Fred Meyers.

11:45 Value Village.

12:25. Payless Shoes

12:55 El Gitano Restaurante

1:40 Costco

2:40 Hugo Helmer's Music Store

3:14 ferry line.

7:00 Deer Harbor.

9:00 home.

Spent the week in meetings related to starting school. There's something delicious about getting ready for classes. All the potentials. The hard work of actually teaching is another, entirely differently flavored pleasure.

My organization system starts with a planner. And is sabotaged by the teetering stacks of "I could use these, maybe" books that are collecting here and there. Tomorrow I'll probably go on a supply run to get The Spink some school clothes and a bunch of those Rubbermaid tubs so that I can store the contents of my house outside until the addition is weathered in. That way, we'll have a classroom with a stove and a bookshelf and maybe even chairs and a table.

Sweet.

Inspiration strikes.

As does vicarious frustration and embarassment.

I was peacefully getting ready to do lesson plans when David burst in the door, shouting "Hello!"

Behind him trailed a family of five he's befriended in the course of his waterlogged career, and a fiddler. They made dinner while the fiddler practiced, and then we all trooped up to the school to do a contradance.

Afterwards, the adults slept in our various extra beds, and nine kids hung around to play Pounce. Some left, and the remainder watched Pirates of the Caribbean on our balcony so as not to disturb the snoring fiddler.

Finally realized that having an organized mind is a thing of the past. Instead of relying on internal organization, I'll have to develop a system of external organizers.

A calendar and a habit of checking it. Files for stuff. A set place to put things with no cheating. I used to just keep it in my head. More recently, it was locational, and I'd remember stuff when I caught sight of the relevant paper. But work on the house means that all my usual places to put things are somewhere else, and can't really be logical because things keep shifting as different parts of the house get taken apart. So, I actually have to sit down and work out a system.

This is doubly necessary because the high school is filling up with prospective students. It coalesced around my niece, and has taken on a rubbery life of its own. Two more expressed interest today, bringing the total up to 8 and the grade levels from 9 to 12. It should be crackling with energy and all kinds of wildly educational stuff. If I could only be sure of reliably locating my own head, I think it will be a rewarding year for one and all.

Recently, I've been using photos to paint from. I'm not sure what catches my eye, but there seems to be a definite "zing" about photos I know I can paint (and no, they're not usually the ones I like as photos and post here). The problem is that, as time passes, what intrigues me shifts.

A while back, I printed out six photos to paint from. By the time I got to the last image, it had lost its fascination. But, since it takes around $200 to entirely recharge my printer, and since the indicator light tells me that the ink's almost out, I'm reluctant to take the plunge and find some more photos to work from.

Instead, I began work on a painting from the last photo, telling myself that it would be a good practice to do my best even if I wasn't inspired. Maybe, but the painting ended up uninspired as well.

I'm always looking at that tension between sticking to things and giving up. As a classroom teacher, I see that it is the kids who keep plugging away rather than the kids who are "talented" and get instant positive feedback who get the furthest in any subject, including music, math, and art. But as a member of my culture, I'm surrounded by people who strongly believe that if something is hard or unpleasant to do, that's a sign that you shouldn't do it.

I think that I've found the most personal satisfaction from mastering things that were difficult for me. Maybe because I'm female and hence attuned to the opinions of others, especially of my husband, the biggest difficulty has always been in the deliberate and conscious rejection of that toxic idea that struggling with a task means "the time isn't right."

As for that uninspired painting, I'll stare at it for a while, set it in the "paint over" pile, and carry on.

Went to Friday Harbor today to talk to my bank. I needed a phone and Internet access. Borrowed a phone at the Internet cafe, but apparantly my contact person was in Outer Mongolia or something. Came back home. $6 for Internet access, $5 for two ice cream cones, $29 for five books on fish biology from Serendipity, five hours. I'll try again next week.

Intelligent design? Check this out.

As my techno-advisor, Tycho urged me to help out all of you with antique steam- or pedal-powered computers by only having about ten posts on the current blog page. I did that. The rest of August can be had through the Blog Archives or you can go directly to the archived August posts. Hope that helps.

Happy birthday Tyko! I whittled him a couple of chopsticks from our woodpile.

Regarding yesterday's blog, as I was uploading it (with our satellite connection, that takes a while), I opened an e-mail from a dear friend who reminded me of Roger Zelazny's Today We Choose Faces about being able to delete personality traits as desired. I don't know about you, but I'm finding these coincidences to be kind of like a brick to the head. But what I'm supposed to be realizing is not coming clear.

Check out this article in The Onion.

Read the last chapters of Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future over a glass of Lapsang Souchung spiked with lavender flowers. Maybe it was the lavender, but I could swear he dropped the cartoonist persona and went all mystical in that last chapter. He said that he's been writing affirmations like, "Scott Adams is a best-selling cartoonist" and they come true.

Okay, all well and good.

This evening we all watched What the Bleep Do We Know, which I thought would be about quantum physics. Sort of. It extrapolates from the ideas of quantum physics to say that we can change our reality through changing our consciousness. Tycho called it pseudoscience, I called it mysticism, The Spink called it dumb. Later Tycho said smugly that three of the directors are believers in Ramtha, a 10,000 year old entity channelled by ... well, who cares?

Is having those two sources talk about the same idea today a meaningful synchronicity? It happened this week in another context, too. I read Trader by Charles DeLint, about two guys who switch bodies. Then the kids and I watched Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, about criminals who dub human souls into robot brains. And Altered Carbon dealt with what happens when people can be uploaded into any body.

When such synchronicities appear in my life, I pay extra attention. Whether or not there is an objective order to the universe, personally, I personally do order my personal universe. When I notice the same message coming from disparate sources, regardless of whether there was an external, divine reason for the repetition, I figure that I might be trying to tell myself something. Like in a dream.

The message about changing reality through changing consciousness seems pretty easy to integrate. Maybe the Ramtha trappings are offensive to me but the message is not. The one about the separation of body and soul, however, is a puzzler.

Read Altered Carbon, a cybermystery by Richard K. Morgan. The premise is that you can download your personality into computer memory. When you age or die, if you can afford it you upload into another body.

What would you do differently if you knew you had all the time in the world?

Maybe you'd just poot along, muddlin' through, just as we tend to do nowadays. But if you were paying attention?

Morgan's characters accumulate power and memory; it's a noir book. My first thought was that I would accumulate education. But why? I mean, aside from the coolness of knowing everything. Why? Well, that's a very good question. Seems like you would want to deploy yourself in some kind of cause, but what cause? I can think of a number of them; universal education, an end to poverty, good public architecture, global refreshment of our ecosystems, lots of stuff. But we all can think of examples of people who espouse excellent causes but just don't seem to function well.

So I guess the first thing I'd do would be to gird my loins and settle down to do some serious contemplative work. Maybe join a zen monastary and stick with it until I reeled through every single dingle koan. The zen tradition has a named payoff, but I think most mystical traditions lead towards some facet of wisdom. There is no point in spending forever alive, if you can't do it right.

Why don't I do that anyway?

You mean, apart from basic laziness? The reason is that things are ephemeral. The Spink will never be 12 again. The cats. The way the beach looked yesterday.

And also, because I already get what enlightenment is about. You have one chance at each second that goes by. Soak it up, do your best by it, notice everything about it. Then let it go because here comes the next second!

Sawed and sanded building scraps to make painting surfaces. COASST walk in the afternoon. The Spink came home from her junket to California in the evening, and says it was great. Her new vocabulary word(s) is TMI, meaning "too much information," to be said when you discover yourself rambling into boring or too-personal side paths.

Cabaret Night.

Painted all morning, rehearsed all afternoon.

One of the stories told at choir was about a bequest made to the USC music library. Skip and a friend motored up through the pristeen Yosemite country, ending up at the brash Chukchansi Casino. This guy's eccentric uncle had been a postman and a collector. There were some wonderful first editions of scores and suchlike. But then Skip caught sight of an oversized brick of books in another section. To make a long story short, the postman had slept with these near his pillow. It was a polyglot Walton's Bible, published in England by subscription in the 1650's. The polyglot part is in all kinds of happenin' languages like Chadean and Ethiopian.

Polished off the evening with a visit to one of the Bobs, who commissioned a tune for his Cabaret Night piece about gossip. We sat at a card table and sang it, while his stub-legged dog Dogma brought me mooring buoys to throw for him and the mosquitoes sucked.

David woke me at dawn to help refence the sheep. They were pathetically grateful to be told where to go. Wandering around outside of their pen was distressing to them; the boundaries were unclear and there was nothing to do besides strip apple saplings.

Watched A Very Long Engagement yesterday, which is a Very French Movie. The limited palette and the oddball plot were satisfying.

Marcy Dermansky says, "His trademark stylized whimsy is acceptable in a romantic comedy, but borderlines on offensive in a story about war." Nope. In a short documentary, you might insist on everything being of a piece, but in this longer work, I think the disconnect between the beauty of the cinematography and the oppressive boredom punctuated by terror of life in the trenches gave the movie depth. Seduced by the pretty arrangement of soggy soldiers arrayed in the trench, I never raised my automatic defenses that I usually deploy against "horrors of war" movies, and the effect ended up as emotionally intense as any reviewer might require. One of the horrors of war is that the universe does not stop in its tracks as evil occurs. Things just keep jogging along, beauty keeps shining, and so does silliness and petty corruption and all the rest of it.

Watched Ghost in the Shell: Innocence today. Now that is great anime! There is a mythic sequence near the climax, where they move through a ... I hate to say it ... a rich tapestry ... there, I said it ... a rich tapestry of masked figures, a cathedral and a flock of calling birds and a gargantuan statue and a mechanical elephant and ... well, you have to watch it. The basset hound and his dry dog food is crucial to the message of the movie.

Painted during daylight, played klezmer as dusk fell.

Twenty-eighth wedding anniversary today. Even I think that's a long time.

Spent the morning painting a picture of The Widow. Mid-afternoon making belly dancing costumes out of trash bags and smashed beer cans. Afternoon on Orcas Island hanging out with David. Evening rehearsing "Dirait-on." Night hanging out with some Germans at the beach, making multilingual jokes.

In order to prepare for the rehearsal this evening, I listened to Skip's CD, Northwest Journey, which has "Dirait-On" in Eb, several times. Then, we sang it in D at his house. I had thought that, since I don't have perfect pitch, that I wouldn't even notice the transposition. But every time I had a long rest and then was supposed to start singing again, I sang the note I heard on the CD, and not the one in the new key. The human voice has more overtones in the lower registers, and I have to strain a bit to hit the higher tones. All this creates a body memory, which for me was stronger than the sense of the tune that I was hearing.

Spent the cup-of-coffee part of the morning reading Jasper Ridley's The Freemasons, a ramble through European history from the viewpoint of the masons. Every time I got bored enough to think about putting it down, he'd zap me with another off-beat story.

The best way to smudge paint is with my fingers. So when David suddenly invited me and some summer people to go visit a longhouse Bill Holm is building on John's Island, I ended up calmly interacting with Important People with a purple smudge on my face and some significant smears on my arms.

Afterwards, we saw boats clustered out in the strait towards Canada and motored over. A couple of orcas surfaced next to the boat. We hovered there over the sea bottom, unable to pierce the reflective surface of the water with our eyeball rays. Now and then something huge would burst up and out and then vanish again.

Actually, that happens to me all the time.

Surfing the web. Kirsten's blog, if it weren't white text on black background, would be my favorite. It's engagingly writen.

Does your brain get that feeling of a sudden splash of cool water on a hot day when you run into good thinking? That's how I know to look again at stuff. Either that, or a more body-located sense of discomfort that tells me a radioactive spot is close.

My neighbor took this photo of his hippie scumbag friends at an antiwar demonstration in the 1960's. Good for them!

Spent the morning on a picture of David. It was kind of disconcerting, seeing him take shape there under the brush.

Watched Yojimbo, another Kurosawa film. Comedic in the first part and very much like a dramatic Western at the end.

I was whining to a friend about wanting more effective feedback for my work. Somebody had just told me that they didn't like the August 4 painting because they don't like green. I can't use that. Not that people are obligated to give me painting lessons, of course. Just that I hope for some kind of unfolding.

"Can you give me an example of good feedback?" asked the friend.

"Yeah," I said after thinking a bit. "The other day The Piano Player came for a visit from off-island. He played part of a piece he'd composed and asked me for feedback. I said it sounded as though he'd composed it while sitting on the bow of The Adventuress. His face lit up and he said 'YES!'."

"It's that he knew he'd communicated what he meant to," I said.

"Okay," said my helpful friend. "What do you want to communicate?"

An old friend came over to make costumes for a performance she's planning of "Haute Trash." We had a hot glue gun and my treadle Singer. By the end of the day, I had a flounced skirt sewn from feed sacks and a leaky blue tarp, she had a set of bottlecap headbands, I had a torn t-shirt with CDs and an old computer mouse glued to it, and she had a set of headbands made of those black plastic garden pots with chicken feathers glued to them. Also a very nice belly dancing butt scarf made out of a fringed black trash bag with genuine beercan jingles.

Speaking of day before yesterday, it seems to me that there are two common ways that adults shirk responsibility.

One is by claiming victim status. (I recognize that sometimes calling yourself a victim is accurate. But it almost never is psychologically useful.) Because the world is out to get you, because your parents mistreated you, because the liberals are destroying the moral fabric of the country, because you drank too much, you cannot be held accountable for whatever it is you did. By this reasoning, it is other people who have to be restrained or fixed in order for you to get on with your life. Women have to dress modestly because men cannot be held responsible for their actions once they are provoked. Your ex has to be lawyered at because they are making you crazy. (And of course, your lawyer is crooked.) When other people say stuff like that, you can clearly see that there's stuff they could do, even if they are supposedly hampered by all the horrible things that the universe is doing to them. But when you yourself have an internal script like that, what do you do?

The other common way to shirk responsibiity is by claiming entitlement. You don't have to scrub the toilet, sort the recyclables, drive a high mileage car, because your time is too valuable, your status is too high, you moved into the neighborhood first. Worrying about stuff like that is what mothers and underlings are for, anyway.

A summer friend came over today to play Scrabble. We discussed our dealings with elderly loved ones. There seem to be some characteristics in common:

Things happen much more slowly. Don't expect a visit to the grocery store to go zip-zap. It's a chance for us younger, swifter folk to turn the speed dial down and enjoy the details.

There really is such a thing as wisdom. It usually doesn't come in user-friendly packaging, though. Watch for it and be patient in the meanwhile. Most of us, especially when confronted with unskilled conversation, just wait for an opening to insert our own opinions into the mix. Better to trust in humility.

Certain neural pathways seem to get worn into ruts. I call them "tape loops." Mention of a particular person or event will trigger the same story or comment that it triggered yesterday, or even ten minutes ago. For some reason, most younger people find this almost overwhelmingly irritating if we're not careful. Some strategies to deal with it are: ignore the stories as best you can. I personally don't recommend this one. I find that behaving disrespectfully sometimes makes me feel disrespectful as well. I don't want to go there. Another strategy is to genuinely listen to them as though they are new and respond to them with the same care that you would want someone to respond to your own stories. Sometimes you can listen to them as metaphor. What's the overall theme of it? Is there something you can do to mitigate an ongoing concern? Probably you share their concern, just in a more hip & cool way.

Complaining is common but difficult to assess. Some complaints are old friends. It would be disorienting to "fix" them. Other complaints are genuine wrongs that would be better righted as soon as possible. How you tell the difference is a puzzler. My own strategy is to look for a larger picture. For example, my grandma-in-law kept up a low-grade whine for years about all kinds of different stuff. Then I read an article about how people in old-age homes have a much higher incidence of depression than the general population, and that the usual anti-depressants can be efficacious. Aha! We were too busy believing that she was wrong to realize she was responding to a genuine physiological condition.

Whatever characteristics the person had ten years ago are accentuated now. If they were a bit testy before, they're cranky now. If they were a bit absentminded before, they're a space cookie now. If they were admirable before, they're an enlightened being now. You really do build your character over the years. No pressure.

Young Tycho has tackled the problem of "Mom's execrable taste in blog design" with courage and verve. Anything that might be yellow or otherwise tasteless here, you may be assured is Not Due to Any Lack of Effort on His Part.

Now that much of the upstairs part of the house has been moved into the downstairs cabin room, I seem to be painting almost daily. I had thought it was the crowded conditions in the house that prevented this in the past, but it seems to have been mental rather than physical crampedness. Or maybe I actually thrive on not being able to move without cracking a toe on a box of frame glass or mat board.

Tycho and I polished off the day with two movies. Rashomon is that famous Kurosawa film where each character has their own, sordid, version of a murder. Kurosawa specializes in wide shots, most of which I would be happy to hang on my wall. Ruined temples, stark courtyard scenes, a lady veiled in white on a white horse. The plot, however, is difficult for me to assess. Are you supposed to accept the basic assumption shared by every one of the characters, that a wife raped in front of her husband is so shamed that she might as well be dead? Or was that in doubt by Kurosawa's time? (Frankly, I think such things are always in doubt. There are conspicuous outriders in every village who push the envelope. But that's contrary to the myth of Japanese culture ... that we have formed based on experience? ... that they wish was true? I don't know.) And is the fact that each version of the murder made each narrator look like a childish victim and all of the other people look like cynical manipulators a cultural overlay that I'm putting on it, or did Kurosawa intend it?

Hotel Rwanda, despite its didactic and romantic presentation of a Rwandan hotelier who saved over 1,000 refugees from the 1994 Hutu massacre, seemed much more nuanced. I think the power of the nuance came because the filmmakers were pretty heavy-handed in their points, just like Kurasawa. It was just that, as a member of the same culture as the filmmakers, I could see loud and clear what they were not saying and be able to trust that they meant that too.

For example, one of the biggest reasons that the world community didn't stop the genocide was the perception that Africa is a hell pit anyway, and anything those guys do to each other is of a piece with the rest of it, not possible to fix. So, without comment, we saw scenes of Paul's home life, with the kids, despite being native Africans, all clean and cute jumping rope or coloring with their crayons, and the adults gathered around for cocktail hour with wine glasses and white linen napkins. There were lots of scenes of Paul looking dapper but not incongruous in his suit and tie, deftly making the hotel guests feel at ease. You got the idea that he was equally fluent, tactful, and adroit in English, French, and whatever the Rwandans speak. And, for me, a big surprise was the very soft speaking tones of Rwandans. Except when actually being kicked in the face, everyone murmered everything. Arguments were sotto voce, and very restrained in language. Terrifying dealings with murdering war criminals were also relatively polite on both sides. I looked for this in the supplementary footage afterwards, and noticed that it is indeed a cultural characteristic, not just the filmmaker's choice.

In an American film, I know that I am supposed to notice this stuff and learn from it. In the Kurasawa film, I don't know what I'm noticing as an outsider to his culture and what he put there on purpose.

One of the unsaid themes that I saw in both films was the ever-present choice to accept personal responsibility. Of course, Paul in Hotel Rwanda was an overt embodiment of this maturity. Instead of joining his fellow Hutus in genocide, or at least trying to sit it out under the radar, he accepted more and more refugees into the hotel, bribing, cajoling, and threatening the soldiers who wanted to wipe them off the map. It was never clear if he would live through the day because of this. Okay, that's heroism.

A zillion Tutsis were killed that year. In the supplementary material, we saw a volleyball field that the French had built on top of a mass grave that they had also built, for 45,000 people. Why did the world community not accept responsibility for this? The French for arming the Hutus? The Belgians for putting the Tutsi in power then pulling out of the colony without an adequate exit strategy? The UN for refusing to call it genocide because they'd have to do something about it? The US for not walking our talk?

Okay, to put this in a personal context, what about the current genocide in Sudan? We now know about Rwanda and agree that it was a bad thing. Are we going to do one of those after the fact head shaking things about Sudan too? What are you yourself going to do?

Here's a responsibility question on the "other" side. Why would the potential victims in Rwanda put so much faith in the UN saving them? Obviously, one reason is that the massacre wouldn't have happened if the Hutus hadn't been set up in some way, and because things were so shockingly murderous. But even so. It seems to me that one sign of maturity is that you quit worrying about what things ought to be like, or about past mistakes. You take what you have today and you try to fix it from where you are, not where you ought to have been if the world were a kinder place. In some way, the idea that rescue has to come from outside is toxic. It's cargo cult, it's waiting for the Rapture while not making prosperity and heaven here and now. It's not tomorrow that will save you. It's you, today, if anyone or anywhen.

In Rashomon, some of the versions of the murder included the tearful woman insisting that her husband and her rapist duel to the death for her. And they do it. Remember when your mom asked you, "If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?" At a certain point, even in a group-think culture, you have to decide for yourself what the most compassionate course is.

Back in the Pleistocene, before I had kids, my friend Cora took me to the Renaissance Faire in Cajon Pass (later moved to Agoura) outside of Los Angeles. It was magical! There were three weekends of workshops before the 8-weekend show, where we had to come up with a character, authentic costume, life path, and so on.

I had a short career there and at Northern Faire in Marin County, playing recorder or acting as Cora's sycophant. It can't have been many times that I went but the experience was so intense that I keep thinking I was a regular.

Cora writes me that she'll be at the Marin Faire this coming weekend. If any of my daughters should happen to be there, they (The Spink) should look her (Cora) up.

Did a painting of the carpenters from a photo. I think the photo is pretty good but it's not one of my better paintings. Not enough contrast, too much reliance on what works in a photo image but doesn't in a painting. Maybe I'll up the contrast tomorrow. Or repaint it altogether, making the shapes a bit more abstract. Or not.

Finished off the day at Skip Lauridsen's house. Since the early 1990's, when he wrote O Magnum Mysteriosum he's been a famous composer. Five of us are singing one of his songs, "Dirait on" for Cabaret Night. He is an excellent teacher. He's got a clear idea of what he wants us to do but isn't too pissy about us not being opera singers. He's got a baby grand in a Popeye kind of a house, with bat guano on the walls and big gaps between the windows and the walls and a dynamnite view of the bay and the other side of the island. We sipped cabernet as he talked about Rainier Maria Rilke.

Yesterday I flipped pancakes at a fundraiser for the school field trip to Mexico. In the evening we rehearsed for a klezmer bit at Cabaret Night.

Today The Spink left for Novato with a family whose two children comprise a quarter of our school's population. As soon as she left I felt ... not sad, but very very sleepy. It was remarkable to feel such a displacement of emotion whilst knowing exactly what it meant - that I was sad - without actually experiencing the long face, the tears, and the et cetera. Now, writing this, the more usual feelings of sadness are emerging.

I refused to help the carpenter today, not out of spite but because I knew I would be worse than useless schlepping OPB up to the top of the extension ladder and nailing it on. It was possible, however, to perch on the stepladder to sand ceiling beams.

I cut and gessoed five painting surfaces from the scrap OPB, whilst listening to an audio tape version of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or, a Young Lady's Primer. That has to be one of my all-time favorite books, and I resent the abridgement down to only 18 hours of tape. It's a densely written cyberfantasy with Jungian fairy tales and nanotech speculative fiction intertwined with a gripping plot. Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is also really good, but is a little too erudite for casual reading. I'd have to put on my other dress and wash my hands before tackling that one. But the TDA, or, YLP is perfect for a bustling day like today.