Birthday!

Yay! Got flowers from the boy, along with my hangers, a USB hub and a cable, so now I can use my new printer. And then (my mail day continues) Golden Fool from thewildmole arrived!!! Very exciting.

I devoured Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch yesterday night, and I loved it. It's a collection of retold fairy tales, with most of the fantasy taken out. Each tale is very short and leads to the next tale through one protagonist questioning another. It's also extremely female -- all the protagonists are female, and most of the secondary characters that matter are as well. Princes are very much pushed to the side. The prose is very straightforward, yet peppered with metaphors that make which fairy tale one is reading apparent from the first page. Part of the joy for me was seeing how Donoghue took the fairy and the fantasy out of each tale and yet had them remain completely true to character. Sometimes there's a twist at the end of them, sometimes not, but she manages to make the archetypes into very real women, removed from the "once upon a time."

I also started Thomas the Rhymer (trying to get library books out of the way before starting GF), and I definitely like it much better than I did before. I also first read it sometime in ninth or tenth grade, and wasn't too good with the slowness back then.

So in the past two days I've gotten two flowers/plant things from the mail. I find it very funny how we can actually ship these kinds of things. And it's just a very strange experience opening a cardboard box and finding something alive in there!

Speaking of plants, I've been thinking of getting potted roses for my balcony... anyone know if this is a viable idea? My window faces the inside of the apartment complex and is shaded over by trees. It's sort of west-ish, doesn't get much direct sunlight.

Baking applesauce bars now...