I’ll admit I haven’t exhausted my resources, but all my initial searching has come up short on this.

I need information on various Western customs of formal dining etiquette, particularly regarding where various people sit at the table. Does the guest of honor always sit at the host’s right? Why? I’m interested in this in an historical sense–I’m not throwing a dinner party myself, but I’m working with a highly structured society in my novel and they definitely have rules about this sort of thing. I’d love it if this was everyday etiquette, too, not necessarily high royalty stuff. I’m dealing with a noble household, but they’re essentially having a family dinner with an important guest at their country estate – at some point I’ll need to know about royal feasts, but right now it’s a bit more mundane.

So, if you know of any resources (either online or not–I’m within easy reach of four different major universities, so I can probably find almost any book with a little work) that might shed some light on this, I’d be extremely grateful.

And I’m also especially interested in anything I can find out about the reasoning behind the customs–why exactly is the lady generally seated to the left of her escort? I’m sure there was a reason at some point, but I don’t know what it is. And what if the husband is the guest of honor (and thus would be seated directly on the host’s right) but his wife is with him (and should be seated directly to the husband’s left)?

Any resources that investigate this aspect of the historical etiquette craze (it doesn’t need to be specifically focused on dining) would be greatly appreciated as well.

This is me noticing how little time there is until this month’s deadline. :-{

This is me counting how many days will be lost to other activities between now and then. 8-O

This is me still not buckling down and getting my work done. 0:-)

This is me writing a blog entry instead of a novel. :-\

This is me keeping my blog entry short so I can go back to staring at my blinking cursor, while still not getting anything significant done. >:-|

I’ve decided that in a few years, when I’m richer than J.K Rowling, I’m going to need a house suitable for that lofty income bracket. Naturally, I went looking for an English country house.

I think this one fits the bill:

As you can see on its info page, it only has 5 reception rooms, but I think the swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, and multiple other outbuildings make up for it. It’s a bargain at 12 million pounds (that’s just under 24 million USD, for those whose currency conversion faculties are rusty from disuse). And hey, there’s a carriage house, which means Dad gets his wish of guarding my driveway from rabid fans with a shotgun.

Of course, part of me likes this one better:

Because it is common knowledge that “There is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire.” (Bonus points for someone who knows who says that line *in the book*, not the movie.) And for less than $2.5 million it’s a steal!

Why yes, I’m avoiding work. Why do you ask? *halo*

The weekend was good. I didn’t write quite as much as I hoped, but I did get the ball rolling. I have four writing days this week, so momentum is good. I’ll have to cut down some of this material, or else it will take too long to introduce my hero, but this is all really important to know so it’s not wasted time. More writing tomorrow.

Finished reading yet another book… and I even took the dog to the field yesterday to run around. AND I made instant pudding. Talk about a productive weekend.

Drove up to the Denver Book Mall this afternoon for a dual reading/signing by two local authors and had a great time chatting afterward.

Matt rotisseried a fabulous beef roast for dinner. Yum yum.

This is what the dog looks like when she would really like to join us on the couch:

Okay, so usually she rests her chin really pitifully on the couch cushion, but she’s a camera ham and she perked up as soon as I had it in my hands, so this is as close as I could get to the real thing.

And yes, that’s Pride and Prejudice on the TV – PBS is running the AMC/BBC version in its original episodes, and this is the second time Matt has picked it to watch instead of any of the other viewing options.

Yes, I win at life. My husband voluntarily watches Pride and Prejudice with me.

In defense of his manly sensibilities, I feel the need to mention that he’s playing Starcraft while he watches P&P. I’m worse at Starcraft than I am at Halo. At least in Halo I just spin around looking at the ceiling. In Starcraft (or Warcraft, or any of the other build-a-civilization games I’ve tried in the same vein) I actually kill off my own people. In the tutorials. Yes. I realize this is pitiful. I don’t know how I do it. All of a sudden, my troops are attacking their own barracks and I don’t have any idea why.

I’m wicked good at Diablo II, though. Or at least I was, when I had the time to play.

I came thisclose to hyperventilating when I saw our credit card balances this month. In a panic about the amount of money we apparently let flow like lifeblood in the month of January, I issued a household moratorium on buying anything not immediately related to the continuance of life (i.e. food and medicine), conveying us to school and work (i.e. gas), or furthering our education–until the end of March, at the very least.

Then I looked more closely at the statements and realized that we spent a lot less than I thought, because we paid both our tuitions last month. Januarys are brutal that way. But I’m sticking with the not buying stuff thing, because buying less is a good thing in terms of financial stability. Also, not buying things means not spending valuable Writing Time shopping instead of writing. Not that I ever do that….

Unfortunately, it also means I can’t just swing by the bookstore and pick something up for fun with all those 30% off coupons they keep emailing me. But I’m confident that I’ll survive. It might get rough sometimes, but I’ll pull through somehow. I hear they’ve got these new places called libraries, and rumor has it you can use their books for free! Imagine that!

I’ve also decided that I’m unplugging all internet access this weekend. Matt will be up in the mountains for the youth group’s annual ski trip, and I can’t really express how much I need to buckle down and write. There will be no hanging out on the couch all day Saturday watching movies.

So what will I be writing? Well, I need to finish filling the gap between my new beginning and the old one, and then I think it’s past time to get down to business about my B’nei stories and legends. And, if by some miracle I work my way through all of those, I’ll pick back up at the tournament where I left off back in October.

And maybe I’ll play around with Vince and Audra a little bit, too. I still haven’t decided whether they’re good for anything more than fiddling at this point, but I think they do well together so I’m going to keep working on them here and there and see where it goes. Regardless, they’re a diversion so I can keep writing when I need to redirect my thinking about the thesis, so they’re secondary no matter what.

So don’t expect to see me online after tomorrow at noon, responding to emails or chatting or anything else. And if you do see me, harass me in whatever fashion you feel suitable until I come to my senses and return to work.

Thanks. I owe you one.

Okay, so I’m not quite done fiddling around online. This is currently one of my favorite songs:

Just thought I’d share.

I’m at work.  Do I post blog entries while I’m at work more often than not? Hmmm… I think I might. There haven’t been updates lately because although I’ve been getting things done, none of them have been terribly interesting. I mean, I folded four loads of laundry, but that’s not really worth blogging about unless the lint trap in the dryer caught fire. (That did actually happen once. My roommate didn’t know you had to clean out the lint trap, and as a result she almost burned down the house. Gotta love that.)

We also signed all the paperwork to renew our lease despite the crazy price hike, the dog got her rabies shot, and I went to the doctor. See? All good things checked off the list, but not really blog-worthy.

Ok, almost not blog-worthy. I went to the doctor because I’ve been having trouble sleeping… I wake up five or six times a night, on average, and have wacky dreams. No, really. Wacky ones. I don’t remember a lot of them, but in one, a town had built a dam and pumped all the water away from their shore (which wasn’t really a shore, but more of a vast shopping mall right on the lake) and they were all pitching in to make it deeper by hand. I’m fairly certain it was Lake Michigan. Yes, they dammed out Lake Michigan so they could make a tiny piece of it deeper. I was looking for a friend, but instead I sat down in the middle of a middle-school concert band, which was directed by my 5th grade band director. I didn’t have an instrument, so I just sat there in the trumpet section while they practiced outside with the mall behind them and people digging with shovels and backhoes all around them. I played a lot of instruments in my band days, but trumpet was never one of them.

Yeah, I’ve got no idea where that came from.

At any rate, I haven’t been sleeping well, so we’re trying out new medication and I have instructions not to drink caffeine after noon. The biggest trouble that presents is that I usually drink tea while I write in the afternoon and evening, which means I need to find decaf loose-leaf tea, of which there seem to be surprisingly few varieties. Or, at least, few affordable varieties that don’t require also shelling out for shipping. But as far as the new meds go, I think I slept straight through last night and I don’t recall any dreams, so I’m thinking that’s a good thing.

But I should stop fiddling around online and get other things done. Things like catching up (again) with my reading journal. Oh, yeah, and writing. Maybe a bit of that, too….

Yeah, love and lists. Let’s get the icky love stuff out of the way first. ;)

I have mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day.

On the one hand, it’s a commercial scam to get people to buy chocolates and out-of-season flowers and jewelry and go out to dinner. It usually ends up making people who have someone to call their valentine all panicky and guilty because they have to find a good present (but then you know how I feel about obligatory gift giving) and it makes a lot of the people without valentines for whatever reason feel lonely and dissatisfied and otherwise depressed. For all those reasons, I wish somebody would do away with Valentine’s Day. It’s not worth the trouble.

On the other hand, I have a special place in my heart for February 14th, because that’s when Matt and I went on our first Official Date. There were a few Not-Dates before that, because neither of us was allegedly interested in dating at the time, but by this date five years ago we’d given up and finally admitted we were interested, and we went out for dinner and a movie. We were surprised at the number of couples who were out to eat, and suddenly we realized it was Valentine’s Day and neither of us had even realized it.

Let me just say I was appalled. I mean, really. What kind of sappy romantic cheeseballs go on their first date on Valentine’s Day? Apparently, we do. I won’t bore you with the details of all the reasons I was appalled, but some of them were good and some were sort of lame. But really, honestly, we didn’t do it on purpose. If it makes any difference, the movie we saw was really terrible. Bad Valentine’s Day date. That makes up for some of the romantic sappiness, right?

In any event, I remember this anniversary more easily than our wedding anniversary most of the time, but maybe that’s because they make candy just for the occasion and plaster the entire world with pink and red for a month beforehand. Hey, if somebody would start hanging up big “Happy Anniversary, Matt and Betsy” posters everywhere starting in early May, I’d probably remember it before I see the calendar that morning.

So that’s my Valentine’s Day dichotomy. Stupid holiday; happy anniversary. End icky love discussion. ;)

Now, on to the lists. There’s a lot that needs to get done, but I’ve been putting it off for one reason or another. My work schedule has changed, so that now I’ll have more time for writing and a more stable work schedule, which should help me find a groove. I work well with grooves, and I need to be working well.

In an effort to kick-start that, I’ve made myself a list. Normally, my lists are of all the things that need to get done rightnowtoday. This list is of all the things I’ve been meaning to do for however long (more than a month, most of them) but I haven’t quite gotten to them. Some of them don’t have deadlines. Some of them have deadlines that have passed. Some are just annoying, and I don’t want to do them.

There are 11 things on my list today, and I have 3 of them checked off already. I intend to check off at least six more before the end of the day, and have the remaining two tasks at least halfway finished, so that I can mark them off by tomorrow night. Then I won’t have things to worry about instead of actually getting other important things done.

I’ll be able to focus on writing and all the other important things instead of wallow in my chronic inability to finish everyday tasks.

For a little while, at least. :)

I’m having trouble getting things sorted out with the whole admin password fiasco, but apparently I can still post.  Imagine that.

Mom and I went shopping today and I actually found two pairs of pants that fit really well. We also got two shirts and a skirt (yes, a skirt – very cute denim mini, believe it or not) and I’m still on a mission for cool shoes to go with all of them.

And we got Shiloh a bed, which she already likes. And we saw a movie and went downtown to one of my favorite restaurants for lunch. All in all, a great day.

I’ve lost the admin password for the blog – again. One would think, since I just reset it two weeks ago, that I would know what it is, but apparently I don’t. I can’t explain it. I’ll have to get in through the backside again, but I won’t have time for that for a few days, so if I’m a little slow on responses and comment moderation that’s my excuse. That also means I can’t check traffic flow to the site, which eliminates one of my obsessive procrastinatory activities during the day. You’d think that might free up some time, but so far no beans on that count.

I’ve got a kajillion receipts to stuff today, and I keep thinking of things I should have gotten done before I went to work today to get things ready for Mom’s visit. I was going to get up at 6, but I was tired and the bed was so snuggley and warm, and all of a sudden it was 7 and I had to hurry to get to work on time. But I left Matt a list of things to take care of while I’m gone.

I think I’ll turn on the heater to keep my feet warm.

Distracted, who? Me?

I’m having chili for lunch.