Bella whines, whines, whines. Self ignores her. There’s a swimming pool of piss on the kitchen floor. Self spread newspapers over it, a trick The Man showed her when she got back from her most recent trip to Bacolod. If you cover the piss with newspapers, the newspapers absorb the piss, and in a few hours, the floor is dry and back to the previous state. Most important, the pee smell disappears. What a genius The Man is!
Self is perched on the couch, and the TV is tuned to Syfy. Self loves the Syfy channel, even when it’s being crappy. Right now, the show is “Stonehenge: Apocalypse.” Self thinks that’s a pretty fab title and wishes she had thought of it first. Well, she does have a story called “Stonehenge/Pacifica” but that one’s not science fiction. If dear blog readers want to know the kind of story that is, kindly proceed to Wigleaf, January 2012.
Yesterday, The Man and self had this strange conversation:
The Man: What shall I do for my lunch tomorrow?
Self: You don’t have to worry about that until Monday.
The Man: But I have office tomorrow.
Self: You mean they asked you to come in ON A SATURDAY?
The Man: Tomorrow’s Friday.
Self: No, today‘s Friday.
The Man: No, today’s Thursday.
And it turned out The Man was absolutely right. OMG! Self better stop taking those pain pills the dentist prescribed for her! Onward!
Self was going to stop tabulating her books, but then she got an exciting comment from Kyi. So she will proceed.
Self is on shelf # 2 in a bookcase in the dining room: 52 books
52 + 211 = 263 total # of books tabulated so far
This shelf includes: Poeta en San Francisco, by Barbara Jane Reyes (signed by the author); Fiction by Filipinos in America, edited by Cecilia Brainard; the Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds; Delivered, by Sarah Gambito; Aguinaldo’s Breakfast: And More Looking Back Essays, by Ambeth R. Ocampo; Field of Mirrors: An Anthology of Philippine American Writers, edited by Edwin A. Lozada; Malgudi Days, by R. K. Narayan (the Penguin Classics Edition); Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, by Susan Straight; The History of San Isidro (Nueva Ecija) Told and Retold, by Leonila C. Gonzales (San Isidro is where The Man’s Lolo was from); Thousand Pieces of Gold, by Ruthanne Lum McCunn; The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer; Her Wild American Self, by M. Evelina Galang; The Peppered Moth, by Margaret Drabble; Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg (the first, the progenitor, the one that started the long run of Scandinavian-Mystery-Writers-in-Translation: Hoeg’s translator was Tina Nunnally); Old Glory: An American Voyage, by Jonathan Raban (a classic, the one that started self’s many decades-long fascination with travel books)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.