Owwie

If you have arthritis in your chest, and someone makes you laugh so hard for so long that it flares up and causes great pain, I don't suppose there's anything you can really do but take multiple doses of ibuprofen.

I just finished Bujold's A Civil Campaign.

Ow.

How does she do that?

"Ivan choked on his wine."

Ow.

"You're good people."

Omaha and I were down to the last bit of our bottle of Kama Sutra "serenity" massage oil, so I went into one of those mid-scale lingere all-in-one adult toystores scattered throughout the geography of suburbia to buy a new bottle. Lingere, massage oils and gag gifts up front; mainstream sex toys (no manrammers, dragon's eggs or even fleshlights back there) and porn along the back wall. The woman behind the counter, one of those women sufficiently padded so that there was not one bone visible on her, smiled as I walked it. "I like your kilt!"

I thanked her and waved her off; I knew what I was looking for. After a few minutes, I found it and we went started through the transaction process when she said, "Oh, this one's all goopy. Let me get you one that hasn't been fondled by people who've been playing with the tester bottle." She came back a few seconds later with the exchange and said, "We do that for the good people."

"Why do I qualify?" I said. It was a bit of a mystery; it's not as if I go into there more than three or four times a year.

"You treat me like a human being. You look me in the eye."

"As opposed to?"

"As opposed to the ones who scuttle in, grab a movie, throw money at you like you were contaminated, and scuttle out again."

I just couldn't picture that kind of long-coat wearing, hunched-over figure walking through Lover's Package. I mean, it's no Babeland, but it's hardly one of the skeezy bookstores that dot the more rundown corridors of Seattle.

More weekendy stuff.

We went last night to watch two of Kouryou-chan's friends get their black belts. They had to break boards, do all the right katas, and so forth. You could tell which ones were serious, which ones were new, and which ones were just there to show up and have something to do. Kouryou-chan's friends were new but serious. Don't mess with those two little girls; they'll rip your nose off and feed it to you. The performance went on for a while, and I'm afraid that their sensei's outfit of dark beige slacks and vest made me think more of a lounge host than a martial artist. I managed to fill the camera, all 600-odd frames of it, out of which I kept about 35 for the first pass, since their mother had been called away on emergency family business in Florida, of all places.

After that, we retreated to their home for celebratory lasagne and cake. Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan got to hang out with their new black-belted friends as well as a number of others. It was loud, it was fun, I got to meet some very interesting members of their family I'd never seen before (and they'd never seen me) and I managed to not be too embarassing while doing it.

I discovered that if I hang the IV bag from the hook that usually holds the pizza paddle and sit on the floor, it's high enough to get the water into the cat before she gets uncomfortable with the whole process.

I was up too late last night reading Bujold's A Civil Campaign.

This morning, I gave the girls doughnuts. Two friends of theirs came over while I gave their mom a break from kids long enough for her to eat, as she put it, 'mediocre lunch.' I gave them grilled cheese sandwiches and played Katamari Damacy with them.

We really can't wait until Omaha gets home.

Readin' and Writin'

I was such a naughty boy today. With four kids in the house, they were relatively self-entertaining. I wrote 3,000 words in an hour. (Okay, 2,972 words). None of them were for Caprice.

Damn that Muse.

I also put eight more Kanji into my "learned, now memorize, then master" flashcard set. They're words like "myself," "little," "book," and "afterward," words that I've seen a lot. Remember my little rant about 誰 ("who")? Someone who knows a lot more about Japanese than I do pointed out that the 2,230 standard Kanji are for reading a newspaper, not a story. Since I'm reading more fiction than nonfiction, I'm going to encounter a lot more kanji than those in the "standard teaching suite," and I should just get used to using Edict. I'm also going to have to find a good onomatopoeia dictionary, since today I encountered ペキペキ (peki-peki) meaning, uh, "the sound made when spanking someone playfully."