Can't believe I spent hours mopping the floor yesterday though...

My charity is part of a cooperative group of organizations incorporated as a volunteer search and rescue organ that responds to calls for help from the police and government. The organizations include all kinds of different specialties like hunters, competitive orienteering teams, rescue dog trainers, the volunteer fire department, and a bunch of boating and sea-related organisations because we're in the islands of the archipelago. This morning there was a missing person alarm at six... or something? And the volunteer searchers were coordinated out of my office, so I got to work at eleven to find the floor covered in gravel, the big marker flip pad on the stand in the middle of the room, and two trash cans full of crumbs and paper cups and napkins and coffee grounds. (I heard this afternoon that the police found the missing person after a couple hours.)

I spent quite a while tidying up and doing dishes and taking out trash, and I didn't manage to find the time to go talk to my next-door neighbor in the strip mall until after lunch. I had built up quite a head of social anxiety by that time and had to take half a benzo first, even though I didn't realistically expect her to be anything other than friendly and accepting. We nod and wave at each other regularly, since we finish work and lock up at the same time usually, but I didn't know her name before. She has been in that shop longer than I've been working here, and she said she's never heard of a drunk person coming into a shop in Pargas before, which is reassuring! (Although I do think my office is in more danger than the shops are, simply because of all the people who for some reason think it's a representative of the local government and therefore the proper place to direct complaints about the government. That seems to be what was behind my visitor yesterday.) But anyway, at my boss's recommendation, we have agreed we can each call the other if something like that happens, and I've saved her phone number with my bosses' numbers to the work phone's home screen.

I only managed to dedicate about an hour and a half to my current project, which is trying to make a brief introduction to all our volunteer groups that will fit on both sides of an A4 paper, folded into a little A5 booklet. And now I have a headache. It's raining today, which is a bit sad because it's gray and damp instead of sunny, but I do hope this will help melt more of the snow and ice away. And Wax has today and tomorrow off, and works the weekend instead. I hate when that happens, because we already get so little time together; she's off at the movies now (I didn't want to go).

Currently reading:

1. Bennet, Arnold. The Grand Babylon Hotel. 1902. 19%. This is a thriller that was made into two different silent films, neither of which I have seen. The titular hotel was apparently based on the Savoy, and the action is about a mysterious disappearance (kidnapping?) which hasn't happened yet. It was very popular in its day, when originally published as a serial.



2. Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes. 2004. (Kibler and Carroll, trans.) (Original date of publication... lol... 1181.) 16%. The poems of Chrétien de Troyes are the first real fictional incarnation of Arthurian romance. I am a big fan of the prose style of William Morris's "Medieval romances", proto-fantasy novels which I am given to understand get their style largely from medieval romances. Having run out of them and failed to really find anything similar among his contemporaries in early fantasy writers, I decided to check out the medieval romances themselves. I intend to read Robert de Boron's Merlin, some of the Lais of Marie de France and perhaps some of the widely available excerpts of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, also known as the prose Vulgate (though my most recent research indicates that people are recommended not to read it because it's boring, and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur is generally regarded as a good and much more exciting summary of it. I DNFed Malory as a teenager, but I suppose I might give it another try instead.) Also Perzival, if I can find a translation - I haven't yet.



3. Benson, E.F. Queen Lucia. 1920. 44%. The first of the Mapp and Lucia novels, about middle class social climbing ladies and their desire to rule over the society of their little coastal towns in 1920s England. This one is all about Lucia, and Mapp is introduced in a different novel and in a different town, before they are brought together in another book. So far, this is pretty entertaining comedy of manners, and the setting seems familiar from all the mysteries I've read over the years.



4. Wells, Martha. All Systems Red. 2017. 23%. Rereading the first Murderbot book. I haven't got that far yet. It's lovely to read.