Oh ... hello!

Yes, I've been ignoring even the most basic promises I made to write in this blog (three times a week) - haven't blogged in two weeks. My excuse? Not wanting to complain about the absolute evil downward dive I've done living in this weird limbo of no-home.
Today the sun is shining through fluffy grey clouds making the view glorious from my office (living- kitchen-dining- room), the dog is moaning for a walk, I've washed some of the dishes and thrown seed about for the birds. Today I'm going to finish my read of Bright Angel and then begin the first revision. I'm liking it.
I have a free day as four clients I was planning on seeing today all bowed out for one reason or another. This is much better than driving in for one or two and I'm not about to look this gift-day in the mouth. I'll just accept it, rotten teeth be damned!
One of the reasons I feel more cheerful is that I'm in the middle of Marina Endicott's wondrous, lovely lovely book Good to a Fault. It was up for the most prestigious Canadian literary award (the Giller) a few years ago but didn't win. I remember hearing about it and liking the premise. The premise is fully matched by the exquisite writing, the careful and transcendentally unfolding plot, the characters that I have grown to love and hope for (even the awful ones) - in short, just the sort of book I like. Let me give you a paragraph that I would die happy if I'd written:

As they made love Clary thought of lines she had not believed, of images in art. She saw a rose window, and understood, in some translation of spirit, why cathedrals had them -- that arching, redoubling, million-faceted rose-wide opening, that springing, flooding light. The reason of the rose, in the first place.                                                              Marina Endicott, Good to a Fault

I've been on a real reading binge the last few weeks. I've read almost all of Hilary Mantell's books - all excellent but with a strong sense of the evil in the world that caused me to stop in the last one I was reading and realize I needed something different. I read The Bride of New France by Susan Desrochers. Here's a bit of the review in the Globe & Mail about the story:

As a graduate student at Toronto's York University, Desrochers chose to study the well-known but little-investigated story of the filles du roi, women of uncertain origin exported by royal decree into the faltering, almost wholly male colony in the late 17th century to serve as breeding stock for a new European population. Over the course of some virtuous process, her thesis blossomed into a fully imagined but deeply grounded novel about Laure Beausejour, the fictionalized daughter of Parisian street people who is swept up by police and incarcerated for years in the nightmarish Salpêtrière Hospital, a prison housing thousands of indigent, ill and insane women, before resigning herself to an even more appalling fate: exile in Canada.

here's a critter I saw at the Oaklawn Zoo a week ago. I'll put more on my other site.

It was a fascinating if harrowing read and I highly recommend it for those who enjoy well-written historical fiction.

So ... all of these things are why I feel good enough to revisit my blog today - the sun, the free day, excitement about my wip, the books I'm reading. Tomorrow I hope to take my step-dot to the market and who knows - we might get back into our old home before 2013. There's no saying what might happen.

What is rocking your world these days?