We spent a leisurely day in Redding yesterday, going places we don’t usually go, doing things we don’t normally do. We bought a vast assortment of foreign dark chocolate at Cost Plus World Market. I bought two used books at Bog Bean; two new books at B&N. We investigated a new tea house, which requires reservations on weekends (as we found out once there), so we will re-investigate it next weekend for lunch. We searched for the location of the soon-to-be-built Trader Joe’s. We had Japanese for lunch, which was lovely.

I found some great books: The Mountains of Majipoor, a little-known OOP book from Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor cycle; Immortal Unicorn, an anthology of unicorn stories, edited by Peter S. Beagle; The Book of Atrix Wolfe, one of Patricia A. McKillip’s earlier works, reprinted as a quality paperback this month; and The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, at last! I’m already 50-odd pages into it (it’s YA, so it reads fast.) I have a lot of reading to do and it’s all delightful.

I’m interspersing my fiction reading with Arab Roots of Gemology. The latter is fascinating and I’m currently debating whether to a) buy it new (expensive), b) find it used (toss of the dice) or c) copy it flat-out for around $10, two-up. C is the cheapest, A would support the translator but I wouldn’t have it for a while, B is just very… questionable. I might be able to find it at Powell’s, but I might not get up there before I’d have to send it back (I can extend the ILL by two weeks but, with our Portland trip semi-hazily-tentatively planned for late March, it’d be a near thing.)

Going to try another free-write today, time to get back into writing a bit. The drawing has been nice, but I’d like some writing too….