Dichroic Reflections

yesterday I bought a stick

Oh, my goodness. Go read this.(Especially you.) And then, once you're warmed up, read this, an essay on the fate of Susan in the Narnia books that will bowl you over. It's from the point of view of a brilliant, thoughtful conservative Christian. (I confess I don't string those four words together often, but they're appropriate here.)

Edited to add: Read the commentary, too.

After the adventures of the weekend, I took yesterday off to recuperate. The biggest excitement of the day was that I bought a stick. (A nostepinne, to be precise.) That's my life in a nutshell: some days I fly 800 miles in a tiny airplane, some days I buy a stick.

I'm back on schedule with the training now: 15km on the erg yesterday, 10km on the water today. I'd been sleepig in a little on the long weekend, but had to get up at 4 this morning, with the result that I woke in the middle of a dream. Sometimes the oddest thing about my dreams is not what happens in them but what happens after them. In this one, I had been introduced to a woman I liked very much, and we were going someplace on a train. She absently sang a snatch of a Richard Thompson song and, pleased that we had something in common, I sang a bit of another one to see if she'd pick up on it. (This is a perfectly normal thing to do in my world.) Her eyes widened in recognition, and we sang together, trying to top each other and remember lyrics. I woke up trying to remember the words to a song of his I liked that began, "She was seventeen..." but I kept getting sidetracked onto the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There." It wasn't until I had woken up much more thoroughly that I realized this was because Richard Thompson does not, in fact, have a song that begins with those words, at least not one I know. Pity: it was a good song. ("Beeswing", one of my favorites of his, does begin "I was nineteen when I came to town.")