I measure time in terms of audio books listened to.

So effing tired it's difficult to think beyond that, but I have managed to get things done. Lab work proceeds, which is just about all one can expect from lab work, and I may have something approaching data. Yesterday during the two-hour break I had while my Northern was transferring I walked down to Dawn Treader Books and picked up several volumes of poetry, which can count as my parents' birthday present to me. I got a volume of Keats, an Anthology of Poetry from the English Renaissance which contains Donne and a bunch of others but no Shakespeare (apparently they think you can get your damn Shakespeare from somewhere else, if you want it that badly), and, best of all, an extremely old and beat up Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling. Not only do I love Kipling (which I think makes me unsophisticated, but screw the people who decide these things; they probably think I should like Frost and Walt fucking Whitman), but the book is so battered it is completely unreadable, which means I have to rebind it. How spectacular! A nicely rebound book of Kipling's verse will make me a very happy bibliophile.


In football news, Schalke made it through to the quarter-finals on penalties. I don't quite know how to feel about this -- on the one hand I am glad that there is one Bundesliga representative proving that German football is worth something on the European stage, but on the other had I hate Schalke with an intensity bordering on loathing. So I hate that the representative of German football is the one team in Germany that I hate, and I hate that I have to -- and I have to -- support them, and I hate that this will make their incredibly obnoxious fan base just that much more incredibly obnoxious. And of course it's highly likely that the only representative of Serie A will be Roma, because it will really take a pure, Athens-style miracle to send Inter through, but that's of less concern because I have no loyalty to Serie A as a whole, as I have to the Bundesliga. So I do not have to support the one Italian team left in the CL as I have to support the one German team left.

And, of course, there is still little adorable Arsenal.

So, we lost.

And for some strange reason I am calm about it. Now, this may be because I'm busy trying to deal with the Side Effects from Hell I've gotten from my new medication (now discontinued) prescribed to treat the gastroparesis, but I get the feeling I'd feel like this anyway. There comes a point where expectation descends to reality, and I've always been a pessimistic bitch. I'll be rooting for Inter now, should they (miracle of all miracles) manage to whup Liverpool's arse come next Tuesday, and that strange twist of fate aside, I'll be cheering on Arsenal. Whom, despite how much I wanted them to lose tonight, I cannot begrudge the win. Not with Cesc's little fox ears up in glee, and Phil's bald, bald Swiss head shinning in the light of victory.

I weep only because this was Paolo's last night in Europe, and it reminds us that we are just that much closer to his Last Night of All. (Which will be, ironically enough, the derby. Oh football, how narrative necessity controls you.)

Still need to vacuum up all the plaster dust

So tell me, oh vaunted readership of which I have none because I haven't yet told anyone this blog exists, is titling this blog after a line from Keats pretentious? Because frankly, I was mostly thinking of my father's well-worn joke: "I want to get a Pekingese!" "Why?" "So I could name it Darien!" *cue groan from any well-read listener, which of course are the only people my father makes this joke to*

...Yeah, my family's kind of weird. But it was either this or a line from Sidney Keyes, and that would probably be more pretentious because he's more obscure. Besides, warpoet.blogspot.com was already taken.


Today was relatively productive, as I finally got my curtains up. These curtains, I might point out, have been sitting in their Penney's bag on the floor of my living room since I bought them, which about two weeks after I moved into this flat last September. Said installation was a bit tricky as I went to Home Depot to get special heavy duty screws with little springs on them specially designed for hollow plaster walls of the type you find in badly built apartment buildings, only to discover that the drill I own, commonly known as The Cheapest Drill Ever Made, did not have a drill bit large enough to create a hole that could accommodate both the screw and its little spring. And to top it all off, even if I could have made a hole big enough, the actual hollow portion of the wall was too narrow for the spring to, well, spring as it's supposed to, anyway. All in all, futile, so I just used the little plastic protectors that came with the mounting hardware and am hoping for the best. Fortunately my curtains are light.

Also when I was out, I picked up my Mac laptop (which this post is being written on) from the Apple store, as they had informed me it was repaired. Indeed it seems to be, and I am much calmer now that I have portable internet. Really, it was getting bad. Using the common lab computer at work and having to sit at my desk every time I needed a computer at home was resulting in me turning twitchy and irritable (although since that's my normal state of being, I don't think anyone noticed). And I have my financial software back, meaning I can obsessively-compulsively keep daily track of how poor I am. How I've missed that!

In the afternoon Ashley came over and we watched Milan draw, which was painful for all concerned, and talked a lot about Sandro Nesta's hair. Really, when we get together, it always ends up coming back to someone's hair. I'd worry about us, except that hey, we're Milan fans. We're already so far gone there's no use in worrying.

In actual fact, the only lack of productivity today was my lack of appropriate eating (damn it damn it damn it), and my failure to bestir my arse enough to walk across the street and put my Northerns on to wash, so I'm off now to lab (yes, I know it's quarter to ten in the evening), where I can both get the necessary work done and eat the soup that is currently in the lab fridge. And maybe Ashley will have posted the next part of her totally-not-a-bodice-ripper-at-all historical AU when I return. Ciao, as Milan said to their title hopes about four months ago.