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Horoscope of Intriguing Ideas:

Quickie: Today, follow your instinct for music and art. They hold answers you're looking for.

Overview: If you don't have plans to travel, you probably will soon enough. Someone new, interesting and skilled at taking chances will entice you to take off for an exotic locale you've always wanted to see.

Daily extended (by Astrology.com)
Get out your list of places to see in this lifetime and add those new ones you keep thinking about -- the ones in your personal zeitgeist, which keep coming up over and over and sound just amazing. Now maybe it's time to reprioritize. If you could go right this instant, which one would win out? Move it to the top. Then maybe there are some others nearby you could hit. Now on to finding the time -- as soon as possible.


I love December. In fact, I love it so much that I had to go look over last year's entries to make sure I didn't repeat myself. We were going to decorate the tree tonight, which is my FAVORITE PART EVER except for maybe the part with the presents, but I think we're holding off until tomorrow night. Which is a bit problematic, as the Lovely Emily and I had planned to go see Aeon Flux tomorrow night, and even if we did try to cram the tree in tonight, I still have miscellaneous paperage due tomorrow. Also a pound cake. It's our last day of non-exam class, and so we're bringing food, which... does not really make it any different from any other class we've had this semester, but this time the food has to have appeared in one of the books. So I'm frantically flipping through The Morgesons muttering about pound cake, because I am not in the mood to take a stab at apple fritters or sponge cake or "Indian bannock," whatever in five hells that is. ("Thin cornbread baked on a griddle," apparently.) I could fire up the wafflemaker and make a pile of Belgians, since the Morgesons do serve waffles at tea, but... I'm not thinking they're going to keep too well. Actually, it would be hilarious if I brought the batter and the wafflemaker with me and made them to order during class, but... I don't know that I have the energy for that right now. 

That's the problem with December--the first part of it, you're too tired to do anything fun. I do sort of dread the first couple of weeks a little, because they usually mean feverish procrastination and the desperate burning of midnight oil, but fortunately most of that is over before my birthday. It's usually pretty tight, though, and I've had a few exams on my birthday before. So December is usually a very busy month--term papers, nervous breakdowns, my birthday, my sister's birthday three days later, frantic powershopping, last-minute wrapping (ALL the wrapping is last-minute, quite honestly. Well, 70% of it. Mom likes to wrap a few things early and have them under the tree to look pretty. She got in trouble over this last year because she accidentally put out a few packages marked "From Santa," and Sister Girl never let her hear the end of it. "THANKS FOR STABBING MY CHILDHOOD IN THE HEART, MOM!"), 783 viewings of A Christmas Story (although last year we substituted Monty Python and the Holy Grail for midnight wrapping--first time I'd actually seen it, if you can believe it), a round of Christmas parties and, if we're lucky, three or four of those corporate gifty-foody baskets. I love those baskets, man. They're always full of things you would never have occasion to buy for yourself, like strange cheeses and summer sausage and weird honey-butter-mustard-jams and tins of Danish butter cookies (and tea and chocolate, if you get the really fancy baskets). Speaking of cookies, I think Sister Girl's making Christmas sugar cookies tonight--she even has fresh lemons for the icing, which seems a bit Martha to me, but hey, she's the one in cooking school.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of Christmas, Sister Girl has decided that she only really wants three things between that and her birthday, and they're all killers. Like, the Vosges truffles aren't hard to find, but we're not giving her a $500 subscription to the Chocolate of the Month Club, so I'm weighing my Haut Chocolat options for something less, uh, haut. I think I know what I'm getting, but I'm not divulging that here.

The other two things she wants are a little harder to find. She wants a set of Oz books--they're apparently written by Baum and then a woman after his death--but they need to be a matched set. The best I could find was the fifteen Baum books in a single volume, and she didn't like that, so... I don't really know what to do about that one.

The third thing? A pair of ruby slippers.

You can get them, you know. There's a guy who makes $250 custom replicas, but even if you blow off the price (which I can't), he'd need six weeks to make them and six weeks until Christmas there ain't. So I'm looking at more down-market replicas (which Sister Girl said would be fine) in size 9-1/2 (what? We [Jones] women, as it were, have hobbit feet). So... I'm on the lookout for that.

Meanwhile, I've spent the day cataloguing every. single. reference. to clothing in The Morgesons. It feels a bit futile, because even I know I won't have room to use them all in the paper even if I could figure out a way to do so, but it has been fun to make connections I hadn't noticed before (both Veronica and Cassandra wear merino dresses when they're in love). I can probably squeeze out a quick five-page version for the workshop tomorrow, and then I have a solid week to see midnight Narnia zomg write the full 15-pager and review the other books for the exam. And I am not allowed to play Neoquest II until I have done it, and I have even managed to hold off all day, less ye have little faith in my resolve to not have a nervous breakdown starting the paper the day it's due.

(By the way: I'm a dumbass, you guys. The point of posting the White Witch icons the other day was that I have a whole folder of them for y'all.)