Bookcase!

I have a bookcase! I drove down to my grandparents' house, which my aunt and uncle (brother and sister, not married) have been sorting out, and there was just a bookcase loafing around, waiting for a home.

Which I have given it! It's sitting across from my bed, gaping emptily. CLEARLY I MUST BUY BOOKS.

I am an academic. Book-buying therefore constitutes a virtuous furtherance to my career!

***

The long drive gave me a lovely time to think. I'm working on an Eagle of the Ninth book fic - OT3 fics are hard, you guys! So many people having so many feelings! But carmarthen kindly beta'ed it for me, and it's almost done.

As fic-writing often does, it's spurred other plot bunnies. I'm just burning to write a Cottia story, and I've got this splendid (and by splendid I mean probably grueling) idea for a fic about Cottia's arrival in her Aunt Valaria's house, and her reaction to Valaria's efforts to force her to be a proper Roman girl. Valaria clearly managed to enforce Cottia's surface conformity, which, given Cottia's spitfire personality, must have been difficult and painful for them both.

And another, about Esca's clipped ear. There's no reason in canon to think he has a complex about it, but it would make sense to me that he hates it: it's a visible encapsulation of everything that's been taken from him, and ugly to boot. He probably thinks it's hideous.

Alice

Emma's in town again, and we went to see Jan Svankmajer's Alice today. It's a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, which naturally means it's absolutely cracked. There's only one actor in the film, the girl playing Alice - who is quite good, actually (though I may be biased, because she looks a lot like I did at the age of eight) - and a lot of puppets. The white rabbit is a taxidermied bunny with sawdust leaking from its abdomen.

This sets the tone for the general uneasy creepiness of the rest of the film. There are size-changing kolaches and jam containing tacks, and a sock caterpillar who sits on a darning mushroom - apparently darning involves a mushroom shaped thing? - which inspires Alice's socks to slip off her feet and make a break for caterpillarhood. She has to drag them out of the floor as they try to escape.

When your very socks turn on you, you know it's a bad day.

There's a sense that nothing can be counted on, which seems liberating at first but grows oppressive. Sure, it's nice to be surprised, but I just want to eat a kolache without changing size already!

It's an interesting film, and I'm glad I saw it; but I can't say I liked it, exactly.

***

In other news, a photo of one of the local restaurants. I haven't eaten here yet, because it's been too hot to eat outside; and just look at this place, you just have to eat outside here, surrounded by flowers and overhung by vines.