Yes, drool, slavering, utterly enchanted … with my new arrival from Amazon today: “The New Annotated Dracula”. It’s hardcover. It’s BIG. It’s cover is black red and silver (and the red is sticky, like blood!). It is VERY annotated! I think there is probably a bigger word count for the annotations than for the novel itself! Chock to the brim with information on the novel, the Victorian era and historical oddities, such as the science of blood transfusion, illustrations and images galore … it’s a treasure. I’m going to shelve the novels I was reading and get stuck into this instead. And all for the price of $25 USD. In Australia, a book like this would be well upwards of $60. OOO and it smells deliciously booky, unlike most new books. Good paper stock.
WATCH RICHARD III!! That is, the 1995 version with Ian McKellen (he also wrote the screenplay). PHENOMENAL. All round. McKellen set Richard III in a pre-war (30’s that is), facist Britain . McKellen’s Richard of Gloucester is suitably twisted, physically and psychologically, quite mad, creepy, yet you sympathise with him.
I’m having bad dreams about failing my first uni assignment. I spoke to my counsellor about it at my monthly session on Monday, and she reminded me … “have you actually failed at anything before?” No. Never. And I came top of my class for the welfare class. But never before have I had to deal with chemobrain before either. How long will this last? I always feel slightly spacey, dizzy even, and my brain seems unable to grasp hold of anything definitively.
I’m very much in a place of peace despite my unruly intellectual vicissitudes. I’m reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Meditating. Sleeping. The weather is beautiful this time of year, though this morning I noticed it looked like the dust was back over my ‘old town’ when I went in there, but it was purely bushfire smoke.
I did something yesterday I never do … gardening. It was such a beautiful day. I tackled the little shady garden underneath my bedroom window. Big elephant ears, azaleas, bromeliads, a lovely ground cover (which I need to transplant more of) … a pity the azaleas flowers are just on the turn. There are gardens all over the placehere, so I am going to have to weed continuously it would seem, as my housemate, while she has lots of plans to get in the garden, does nothing! The froggies are happy with my efforts … a little fella in my patch hasn’t shut up since! Some pics of my bedroom garden:
And, because these were on my memory card anyway:
And because I’m really in a sharing mood about my world today, check this out. The song of the male whip bird, which we have down in the little bit of bush behind our backyard. The liquid sound of the whip bird always reminds me of rainforests. (The image is crap, but the sound is clear.)
But wait, THERE’S MORE! Photos from my Gloucester camping trip the previous weekend over at my photo galleries.
Hope you’re all enjoying your world as much as I’m enjoying mine.
Pretty! I love the inverted lorikeet.