Cimorene

wax made a tosca's cake for my birthday, belatedly. i have to force myself to eat small rather than gigantic pieces of it because it is too too delicious. although then i realised that since friday is the first night of channukah it would be appropriate to have new, not leftover desserts, which means we should definitely finish the other half of the birthday cake tomorrow, leaving me free and clear to bake brownies (or something).

i was encouraged many times to go to the public lucia celebration today at the cathedral, but i was napping on the couch and then wax said she was too tired to go with me, and because i am a sad, sad antisocial delicate flower i declined to go alone, and i still have not seen a lucia since coming to finland.

i recently acquired (and then quickly tore through) this cute little book: jane austen's guide to good manners,  which is written as a practical guide for austen's contemporaries, but not really entirely. it's very entertaining and readable, but not actually as awesome as i had thought it might be from a preliminary look. but i also acquired my favourite heyer mystery, behold, here's poison, whose male hero was even more brilliant than i had remembered, and it proved to contain several other staggeringly wonderful characters and some hilarious scenes (though i feel it suffers slightly from being told in multiple points of view including an omniscient or mostly-omniscient one).