the hue of melancholy

I dreamed about kitten_head and her mother again. That probably makes five times in the last week and a half. My mother was there, too, and there was a lot of driving back and forth looking for some kind of shoes, I think. The night before my sister and I were riding the wrong schoolbuses all over a lot of snow-covered icy streets, trying to get to the school where my mom works.

I've finished rereading Barry Hughart's fantastic fantasy/mystery novels set in a mythology-and-magic-filled Ancient China, Bridge of Birds and Eight Skilled Gentlemen. The last printing was in 1991, but for some reason the latter is still to be found in warehouses, while the middle book, The Story of the Stone, is rare enough that used copies go for about twice the cover price. (I'm going to have to cave and buy one soon though. They probably won't reprint it; it'll just keep going up more.) I'd forgotten exactly how enchanting they are. He's a genius with adventure, magic, and comedy, and was rumoured (?) to have stopped writing after the third book because it didn't pay well enough to recompense the work that went into it. I have a suspicion he lapsed into depression or fanfiction or something myself, but I mourn that we won't get to read any more of his stuff.

The weather sucks. Yesterday there was a solid leaden cloud like a lid on the sky, with our end of town in the bottom of a box. Today there's that druggy pressure-changing feeling in the air and the light is weak and sickly and the wind cold and unpleasant, though cerulean is peeping through gaps in the white clouds. I still feel oppressed, and I've run out of new books, too.

Oh, and also, I need a new processor and motherboard. It's not really fair to bitch about that - this one's about three years old, so it's about time to replace it anyway. Not so fun - the recursive fault and soft lockup errors that are making it freeze in mid bootup and shutdown every single time I turn it on and off now. There goes a few hundred bucks.