Back!

I am back! My not-awful-but-still-not-great travel luck has held, and my flight back was delayed by about an hour, which meant I missed the BART again. This time around, I figured out why my taxi driver last time acted so oddly -- there's $2 charge added to the fare on the meter that I didn't know about. I still do not understand why my taxi driver last time didn't just say that the fare was higher than I thought though, given that I wasn't even paying the full fare.

Oh well.

I got to watch last night's Heroes on the plane, thanks to JetBlue's TV thingum. I will write it up later. It is probably good I watched on the plane, as I was unable to scream at the TV and therefore compensated for the lack of emotional outlet by making myself care less.

I came home to find Bya stepping onto the open rat cage door and promptly freaked out. I saw Ren run under the table to the couch, and I began checking the wires in the room. Thankfully, Ruki stepped on some things and made noise, otherwise he could have been all the way up the stairs for all I knew. Ren looked somewhat confused by being under the couch and didn't try to get out again. I do not even want to know how long they had been out there! Given that there were no holes chewed in the food bag, it couldn't have been that long.

On the linky side, buymeaclue's got a great post on returning to the things we love, and rachelmanija is posting an excellent series on A User's Guide to PTSD from the POV of a writer and someone who went through it.

Yazawa Ai - Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai, vol. 04-08 (Chi. trans.) (reread)

Oh, series, I had forgotten how much I loved you. While this definitely follows the shoujo template more closely than Yazawa's later series, particularly in the extent to which Midori bends over for Akira's angst, it does some very interesting things with shoujo tropes as well.

( Spoilers )

Anyway, I am SO GLAD this lives up to my memories of it; I was a little afraid that it wouldn't, since I'd tried rereading before and the first volume didn't grab me as much. But it's really the latter volumes where the series finds its strengths, and I love all of the characters so much. They feel like people I wish I were; they are so human and try to be so kind even as they all stumble and make mistakes and hurt people. And the focus on the school reminds me a lot of Honey and Clover -- just that eventual reminder that graduation is always there, that you have to make those big life decisions in the end, that your school friends will eventually scatter and leave, but that that makes the time spent there more precious.

Kara and Lee YunHee - Angel Diary, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

The princess of angels has run away to earth to avoid her betrothal to the king of hell and is now happily disguised as a boy. The four guardians of heaven have to find her, and her male friend at school seems to know a lot more than he lets on...

This is pure fluff, but it's fun fluff, and hey, it's got cross-dressing, heaven, hell, and the king of hell! Dong-Young (orig. Chun-Yoo the angel princess) is naturally clueless about most things, the guardians are probably going to be overprotective, and I am betting at least one develops a crush on her. Bi-Wal (the male friend who I am guessing is the king of hell. Given the way the series is going, that is so not a spoiler) is hot and overprotective and has a smirky smile that he uses to torment pretty much everyone.

I am fairly certain that absolutely nothing that happens will be surprising, but the art is pretty, and did I mention that whole angels and demons thing?