Really Random Stuff

1) Over the weekend at the bookstore, in which I was lingering partly to avoid the 100-degree heat here, I finally remembered to look at the ending of Ian McEwan's Atonement to see what all of the fuss was about. Now I know, and what's more, I've got my dose of literary fiction for the year without having to have actually read the whole book. A nice day's work, if you ask me.

2. Since receiving some research materials earlier this spring bound in pressboard binders, I have become increasingly addicted to pressboard binders. On Monday night Hubby came home from the office supply store with a package of shiny new ones for me, and last night I started punching holes in some of my research material so I could put them in the binders. They're beautiful. Now all I need is one of those hole punchers that can do fifty pages at a time.

This may partially explain why my daughter never tells her friends, "My mother is cool."

3. I have fifty dollars in my wallet. There are fifty dollars worth of new books I want from the bookstore, including Sandra Gulland's new novel. Coincidence? I think not.

4. Since the end of May, I have walked out to the mailbox with a spring in my step, eagerly anticipating the arrival of the four-volume Harleian 433 manuscript, which is published by the Richard III Society and which has all sorts of useful information in it for someone doing research in the period. (That hammering you hear is another nail in my coffin of uncoolness.) Each day, I have trudged back with sagging shoulders, hands full of bills but not with the Harleian 433. One would think that the Richard III Society, devoted as it is to a man who could condemn and execute a man within a space of a couple of hours (the subject of my next post), would be a tad more efficient. I have arrived at several explanations for this delay:

a. The people in the UK responsible for posting the manuscript have all gone on one of those long vacations to wonderful locales that no one in the United States can afford except for the parents of my daughter's friends.

b. The Richard III Society has been secretly infiltrated by devotees of Henry Tudor, and this is all part of a sinister master plot to take it over by breeding discontent.

c. The fault lies not at all in the UK, but with agents of the Bush administration who have intercepted the package on the premise that anyone receiving four books from overseas with a weird title when they could be buying ghostwritten books by members of the Bush family at Wal-Mart is up to something sinister.

I'll keep you posted.