Argh!

So I was going to post on going salsa dancing for the first time, or on expertise as a measure of effort vs. talent, or a giant squee-full post on The Virtu, which ate my brain yesterday.

And then I woke up to find.... the cage door opened.

Holy fucking shit! I thought, still rather muddled from extreme allergies and waking up.

Bya poked his head out of the hammock and sleepily sniffed at me. At least he was still true to type and in the cage.

And then I looked at the room. Shredded paper and shredded random other things everywhere! GAH! I thought.

GAAAAAAH OMG YOU HORRIBLE EVIL RATS! I thought, as I saw the chewed holes in rachelmanija's bag of tatami kimono yarn, complete with random strands of yarn peeking through and one lonely ball sitting outside the bag, label torn to pieces. (fear not, thankfully the yarn itself is safe, no thanks to the rats)

Despite extreme anger, I managed to actually check the six million electrical cords in the room to discover that there was no fried rat body there, thank god and no thanks to their little rodent teeth.

And then I saw it.

My yarn! My yarn from my stash! My yarn from my stash that hangs in those sweater holder things you hang up in your closet! My yarn ON THE FLOOR IN A MESS!

"RUKI*! I am going to KILL YOU!" I yelled.

There were a few half-shredded labels, but most importantly... my yarn from the very top-most shelf was on the floor. My Claudia's hand-painted pure silk gorgeously dyed laceweight. My ArtFibers silk. My Jaeger Zephyr silk-merino laceweight. My Cherry Tree Hill hand-dyed sock yarn.

I raced over to carefully pet them and coo over them to make sure the evil rat had not mangled them, particularly the Claudia's silk laceweight which I will not even mention how much I paid for because it was just that gorgeous.

Ruki should thank his little ratty stars that my yarn is largely undamaged.

Then I raced around in a mad rush, trying to figure out which rats were still on the loose and if (heaven forbid) Ruki had made it out of the room and was currently terrorizing the rest of the house.

At that, several sleepy ratty heads poked out of the hammock. Ruki didn't even wake up when I poked at him to make sure it was actually him and not some cleverly constructed decoy.


* I am 99% certain that this is Ruki's doing, as a) he habitually and consistently attempts to escape from the bathtub and b) the other times the cage door has "accidentally" popped open (I now suspect Ruki of finessing this escape and others), I have panicked, only to find: Bya still sitting his fat rat butt in the cage, too lazy to even investigate the world outside; Ren huddled on the sofa or under the coffee table, adventurous enough to find places he remembers but then scared beyond measure at the wide world and unable to find his way back to the cage (which, by the way, is about three feet away); and Ruki. Ruki, running down the hallway, not just feet, but meters away from the rat room, much less the cage. Or Ruki, escaped from the rat room to the bathroom, where he plays circus balancing tricks on the edge of my laundry basket.

I knew I shouldn't have named him after Rukia. It is quite clear where his personality comes from. Also, I am certain that he knows he is the cutest of the three rats and takes mad advantage of this whenever he can.

Monette, Sarah - The Virtu

Despite a rather inauspicious beginning with Melusine, I ended up liking it enough to read The Virtu, which I madly adore and possibly read within 24 hours.

I suspect I would have liked it much less if I hadn't been warned that Felix was a total ass and Mildmay gets put through the wringer even more, but as it was, I had plenty of forewarning and enough time to realize that really, this hits a lot of the same buttons for me that manga does.

It makes sense! No, really!

It reminded me of rachelmanija's essay for Project Blue Rose, which has something about manga being written from the heart. She writes, "The manga I love the most isn't ashamed to wear its heart on its sleeve. It doesn't present the passions and pains that are respectable and hide the rest, or feign ignorance of unfashionable kinks and disreputable desires." And then I thought, wow, Mildmay is Tsuzuki. He suffers beautifully. Then he angsts, but unobtrusively. Then he suffers more. Beautifully.

I suspect Felix is some cross between your standard romance alpha bastard and Lymond.

I mean, I seriously doubt that Monette was thinking of this while she wrote it, but once I figured that the book was going to read like my favorite crack manga for me, it was much, much easier and much, much more fun to read.

On a more serious note, everyone who said Melusine and The Virtu should be read as one book is right. Much of Melusine fell flat for me or didn't quite coalesce into a coherent whole largely because I don't think it was intended to. The many random scenes in it, including the seemingly too long beginning in which Mildmay has nearly nothing to do with the plot (all the Ginevra bits, which, while I do like, rather confused me plotwise), make much more sense after reading The Virtu, as that's where all the payoff comes in.

( Spoilers for The Virtu and Melusine )

For the record, if anyone cares, my favorite Mildmay expressions are: "Fuck me sideways 'til I cry" and "Fuck this for the emperor's snotrag."

I'm now faintly baffled by the fact that I have incredible amounts of book-squee for the manga 20th Century Boys and incredible amounts of fannish-squee for this book, as it's usually the opposite for me.

Links:
- rachelmanija's review (possibly spoilery?)
- rilina's review (possibly spoilery)
- mistful's review (spoilery)