Flutterings

Feeling distinctly grotty instead of the slightly unwell that's plagued me the past week-and-a-bit, so it's tea and Robitussin and naps this weekend. Overall, though, it was a pretty good week -- sold a poem, attended a fun cocktail party (with really good crabcakes -- almost no breading and a perfect mustard sauce -- and good conversation, too), and finished drafting a six-page outline. The betas were very kind to the unholy holiday fic, so that's all sorted and submitted, which frees me to focus on revising poems as soon as I finish the Advent sermon...

There's also the BBC Alphabetical Checklist, a repository of snark, despair, and pragmatism that sent me into stitches (as well as being quite informative about distinctions such as the proper prepositions for Anglican bodies (the Church OF England, the Church OF Ireland, the Episcopal Church IN Scotland, the Church IN Wales)). [ETA from an anonymous commenter: "Unfortunately the BBC is mistaken, which is unusual. There is no 'Episcopal Church in Scotland', though there used to be. It is now called the Scottish Episcopal Church."]

( Some of the highlights )

Color me startled: my copy of Word doesn't recognize "universalism" (although it suggests "Universalism" when prompted), but it does have "Schwarzenegger." Oy.

If my software makes little sense, however, my brain makes even less. I seem to be afflicted with both a bout of the stupids and a peculiar cloudburst of nostalgia, the latter triggered primarily by two pieces of music. The first is Richard Shindell's A Summer Wind, A Cotton Dress, which shot right up next to Dar Williams's "Iowa" and Peter Gabriel's "Secret World" the instant I played it on my car stereo, it being very much a song of someone who knows both of safety and burning, and there being a wild sweetness in the arrangement that has me playing it over and over again, sometimes singing along with the melody and sometimes piecing in bits of harmony, and missing moments that were never mine to miss...

...and the second is "Sweetly Sings the Donkey." I completely do not understand my reaction to this one. Yes, I sang it when I was a kid, and yes, it's a catchy tune, but it was never a favorite, and I don't have any specific memories attached to it, good or bad -- I can't even remember which grade it would have been -- so why did I melt into a puddle of goo upon seeing a songbook at the library today with that very title? All of a sudden I'm back to being nine years old, singing round after round with imaginary friends...

*shakes head*

And you? Which songs (or other sense-triggers) are distracting you these days?