PineSiskin of Sleet

Still not doing very well on the getting things done front. Somehow the day just zips by. I dreamed my parents were alive, and were at a family gathering in a picnic shelter which mysteriously had a microwave. I was heating up a piece of pizza for my father, trying to pick one without too many onions on it. In awake time, I cleaned up the kitchen, because getting up to an untidy kitchen is depressing. Then I zipped off to get a haircut. My stylist is a fine person and always fun to talk to. I made the bed, put away laundry, watered my plants. Then there was a lot of chatting and stuff. I think his incarceration is beginning to wear on the Sparrowhawk, so it's important to be there for him long distance. Opening my notebook, I reflected glumly that I am becoming "a tea-sponge," an idiom used by Bing, a young woman who was going to appear in an unwritten novel. I thought about Bing and what a cheerful character she was. The underachieving scion of a high-status, high-achievement family, she knows she's considered inadequate, but perseveres on her personal path anyway, shrugging off the disapproval. She has ended up running a telemetry station on the far side of her planet's moon. A tea-sponge means a slacker who just sits around drinking tea and not accomplishing anything. Bing is perfectly happy to occupy this niche. The station never picks up anything, and the national congress is seriously considering abandoning it, which would make Bing an unemployed tea-sponge. She considers the possibility with no particular dread. And then a ghost enters the far range of her sensors, a ghost ship, a relic of a war that has surely been long over, plummeting down the gravity well toward her world in search of something left behind a long time ago. This was the book I was thinking of writing when my editor informed me they didn't want any more stories of that universe, because they weren't selling. Ah well. I still remember Bing fondly. Heaven only knows what would have become of her! She would have met all fates with her chin up, and a packet of tea stashed somewhere in case of emergencies.

I bought some cooked chicken at the grocery store the other day, but it was tough and chewy and not very good. So I decided to turn it into soup. It was pretty basic: onions, celery, broth, cut up chicken, leftover rice, a splash of soy sauce. It was much more palatable this way. That was my dinner.