alyndra | Lots of whinging

I have not posted in nearly a month.

I may say that there was the week I spent over thirty hours babysitting (sometimes dealing simultaneously with Puppy -- luckily, Baby's Grandpa was there too).

I may say that I am generally a quiet person and only speak or write when it must all come pouring out.

I may say that the last several days I have been dealing with the Very Painful Ear Infection WAH. Although I dealt with it by reading about five books in three days and getting out of housework, so, not all bad.

But these are meagre excuses and leave much time unaccounted for. Whither has all my time gone? A mystery. And it is three o'clock AM and I have just had to skip 90 to catch up on my friendslist, which is not huge, because of all those real books I was busy reading. Which is still no excuse to be speaking pretentiously, even though the books included Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, and the Silmarillion, and the Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Perhaps even moreso then.

I have also been feeling homesick. I was never ever homesick as a child. I was somewhat baffled by the occasional breakdown of my peers on sleepovers or Girl Scout camping trips. But now, having spent more than six weeks away from home and gotten an infection when my mother is not here to coddle me, now I am homesick. Not in a sudden stabbing pain way but in a slower wistful "I would like to go home sometime soon, vacation's been fun but it's time it was over" way. The problem being that I am not on vacation, really.

I miss our well-trained, calm, smart, and wonderful dog, because even though the Puppy is very cute and all, he is also energetic and into everything and must be watched every second and he does not know not to pull pillows off of chairs or that the word NO means he should not be doing that or dragging my shoes all over or jumping up and nipping me. I have heard a bazillion different things to do to stop nipping and I should probably just pick one and get really serious about it, but in the meantime he is still nipping and it's still early but I sometimes feel like I can't do this.

And I miss our bookshelves. Younger sibs once went around and counted all the books (and magazines, but they were a minority mainly consisting of lots of National Geographics) in our house and there were over three thousand. The two main bookshelves in the loft run along the hallway for, I don't know, eight feet, on each side of the staircase, and there are four shelves each, filled with young adult and adult fiction novels. It was not at all unusual for me to hear about a book in English and come home and hear (or find out for myself) "Oh, we have that." And Mom would eventually pick up my favorite books, too, and then there were the books that I would maybe get around to reading someday . . . and I never realized how much I took it all for granted until now, when I DON'T have that.

Damn. Now it all sounds like a valuable learning and growing experience for me. Which was so not the point. The point was feeling sorry for myself because I want my personal library back.

There are books here, too, but not nearly as many and there is, like, NO FANTASY. I am a fantasy person. I love fantasy. I will read animal stories too, which there are a few of, hence the Dog Who Wouldn't Be, and really pretty much anything if I get desperate enough, but I want fantasy. Grandpa is a sci-fi person, but he gets his fix though devoted patronage of the public library, and Grandma is a non-fiction person, which I do not understand at all.

I need to get to the library.

I need to wrap up this post. There are actually a lot of things in here that I wanted to elaborate on, but . . . it's long enough already. If you're curious, comment and I will happily ~~whinge~~ chatter some more.