Wishes Come True!

You know I don't make the wish list so you'll buy me stuff, right? It serves a dual purpose of placeholder until I decide I deserve/can afford something and as a place to point the family when they ask what I want for Christmas.

Miflohny has always been a woman of extraordinary skill at orchestrating complicated maneuvers with a "green" mindset but today I believe she surpassed herself. She kept reading depressing journal entries (whoops, apparently the words you write do affect other people) and decided she wanted to do something for me. She checked my wishlist and noticed she had a couple of the offerings on her shelf. She's been trying to pare down her space to stuff ratio just like me so she put the ones I wanted aside for me. Then she purged the rest of her shelf and started bringing small batches to the used bookstore and getting store credit. Then do you know what she did? She spent her store credit on things I had on my wish list and she gave them to me.

How nice is that?

I have just updated the list to reflect the bounty so gratefully received. You'll notice that the following books have been deleted:

American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon (This is part of that Outlander series, so now I have a good reason/excuse to beg, borrow or buy the rest of it too!)
The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman (I love Alice Hoffman. If you haven't read Here on Earth you should go do it right now...right after you go finish watching those Cate Blanchett movies I told you to watch last night.)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss (My Grammar Wednesday topic submissions are about to get a lot weightier now that I have a reference for the more common stuff!)
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Which I suspect will be super depressing but also help me break out of my money fears a little and that's something I really need to do.)

There's a scene in season 2 or 3 of The Gilmore Girls where Lorelei is trying to get Rory to lighten the load in her backpack for a school day. Rory pulls out all of the books and explains them. There are school books, a novel, short stories (Eudora Welty if I remember correctly), essays and even another novel in case she's not in the mood for the first one. She explains that she can't predict what mood she'll be in so she has to be prepared. This is the same character who always has a book in her purse, she brings the fiction issue of the New Yorker on her big 3 month anniversary date with CuteDean (tm TWoP).

I'm so with her.

So now I've got some variety when I finish the book I'm reading now (the second book of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series if you're interested). I'll have plenty to read in case I get snowed in (it pays to be certain, I'm telling you). I'll be able to tailor my book packing for the week I spend next month helping mom.

This has really cheered me up.

Also, I'm sure it didn't hurt that in order to get them to me Miflohny convinced me to go walk in the park with her, the little Seal and the pooch. That waterproof blankety thingamajig you see under the little Seal in the photo at the top is very comfortable. Had I not felt it was important to keep up my end of the conversation I might have dozed off under that tree and stayed all day.

Oh yeah, and the baby is cute too, a very pleasant walking companion.

Thank you!