Sad to hear about Dianna Wynne Jones.

Did she die? I knew she'd been ill for a while.

Her website has a bio she wrote up about growing up during WWII - she and her sisters were part of that generation that was displaced by the Blitz. It's fascinating reading.

My neighbor's band is playing "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" for something like the fifth time today. So sick of this.

edit: twice more since I posted this. Going a bit crazy here.

Now they've moved on to what I think is "Freebird." They keep starting it and messing up after a few measures and starting over.

Timelies all!

Back from the bar mitzvah. Or should I say "bar mitzvah"? What I found out was that my second cousin and two of his friends got bar mitzvahed in Israel in December. The three boys were called to the Torah today, but it wasn't a bar mitzvah. It was nice, and there was food.

Hil,

I believe it is illegal in 15 states to play "Freebird" after 1983.

This quote by Richard Dreyfuss that Wil Wheaton related will stick with me:

We talked about River in the interview, of course, and I think Richard put it best when he said that there is this monster in Hollywood that everyone knows about. It lurks just out of view, and occasionally it reaches up and snatches someone … and it got River.

Hec is a skimmer. Pass it on.

I decided that buzz cuts are just buzz cuts, and I could just go to the nearest barber instead of working out my general anxiety and tracking down my regular barber.

Nuh-huh. In the end it's the same haircut, but the cut itself was an awful tentative push-pull of an experience, and she didn't clean me up like you're supposed to. Unless it's harder to clean up after black folk, or something. I dunno. But I'll find Daytona for next time.

Did she die? I knew she'd been ill for a while.

Yeah, Neil Gaiman went to visit yesterday, and she passed away last night: [link]

When I was a kid, I had one dresser and one small closet, and it was plenty of room for the relatively few items of clothing I had.

Yeah, me too. But we knew we wouldn't be getting any smaller, and our mom's did the purging that we won't do. And in my case (and a few other folks here) we were pretty broke and it was a struggle to have enough clothing at all.

I'm just weak-willed when it comes to cheap or free clothes. When a dress is $5, I feel like it won't matter if I only wear it a couple of times. And at swaps I take home a lot of stuff I *might* wear, and half of it ends up going back to the next swap unworn. So this happens (and that's actually an old picture-- it's stuffed with even more clothes now!)

Does anyone else buy things that don't match anything they own? And then think, oh, I'll find a blouse that goes with this skirt, and you never do, but you can't quite bring yourself to get rid of the skirt just yet. Because something that matches still might come your way.