On the job.

 Breakfast today is sesame steamed buns, and the tea today is coffee, which is technically a tisane. (Later there might be some Bush Tea.)

 Today's mug: bats of the Northeast.

 Books on the table are Kelly Gay's The Better Part of Darkness and The Ninth Daughter by Barbara Hamilton, a pseudonym for my beloved barbara_hambly (!!!!) featuring Abigail Adams as a detective.

As some of you know, I adore Abigail Adams so much that she's the lead character in the only real alternate history story I will ever write. (That other stuff is contrafactual history, which is easier and more fun. "The Ladies" is six pages long and took me six months to write, and I read the entire Adams-Jefferson letters to do it. In contrafactual history, I don't have to spend six days worrying about what to call a galvanized nail in a world with no Lord Galvan. I just make shit up that sounds good.)

I'm in chapter eleven, and so far I adore this book. *keens and rocks and clutches it close*

There are two serendipitous kitties, not one. This explains why the food vanishes so quickly.

They have it worked out. There's the sandy marmalade I've been seeing, and a smaller brown tiger tabby. The orange one runs recon for the brown one. The way it works is, the orange one sneaks up and starts eating, and then Brother or Sister joins it.

I am trying my favorite cat taming trick, which is to put the food out, and then go sit down about fifteen feet away with a plate of my own, and eat. Which is how I saw the brown one.

O Devious Monkey!

The orange one wouldn't eat in front of me, but just kept hovering around the corner, and checking to see if I was gone, so I came back in. But the brown was either desperate enough or convinced enough that the monkey had its own food to keep crunching away.

If they're both boys, they may wind up being Napoleon and Illya. *g* Since there's a blond and a brunette, and they've got each other covered.

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In other news, I'm enjoying the Adams-Jefferson letters enormously.

The stylistic idiosyncrasies amuse the hell out of me, much like following a mailing list debate you're not participating in. jefferson doesn't much bother to capitalize, you see, and Adams, is Beset, by Commas, and Considers that the More of them, the Better. I'm finding I have to read them out loud to myself to get a sense of what they're saying, much like reading Elizabethan stuff. Otherwise I just wind up staring at the orthography.

I haven't hit Abigail's letters yet. Further details will follow.

This should be a fun story to write, though I need a better title than "1796." I've never written an epistolary story before. This should be fun.

From last night:

[22:15] matociquala: I think I'm going to bed with Thomas Jefferson now.

[22:15] matociquala: Yeah, me and the rest of the newborn nation, I know.

[22:15] melinda_goodin: really?

[22:15] melinda_goodin: must be crowded in there

[22:15] melinda_goodin: :-)

[22:15] matociquala: Boy got around, what can I say?

[22:16] katallen: heeee