Reading: Don Quijote, The Horse and His Boy, and The Blue Sword

Watching: "The Fellowship of the Ring"

Moving: walked 2.5 miles

18 September 2002: Damn it

It's rainy, RDC is sick, and if any night were meant for a slugfest, it's tonight. I found "Fellowship" on Pay Per View, and while I deliberately didn't buy the first release, I think it's pretty excessive for me to pay for it now and again in November. Which I will. But I damn well wouldn't've if I'd known it was going to be shown in pan-and-scan, without good sound. Damn it.

What else. I am rereading three books that all have to do with knighthood in one way or another. Horse and His Boy least of all, but Bree is a cavalry horse. Even when I don't read straight fantasy (which I still publicly deny), I still tend toward the medieval: discounting Under the Net, which bored me stiff, my first Iris Murdoch was The Green Knight and the next will be The Black Prince. I started rereading Blue Sword to ascertain that Angharad was Harry's given name (then gave up and looked online, where I might have started if I didn't love the book); I reread Horse and His Boy because Jules and I were talking horses after my picture of painted horses from Wyoming. Bree, as she remembered, is dappled; Hwin is nowhere described.

I commented to RDC that New Zealanders have said that yes, their country does look like it does in this movie. Just a moment later, Saruman attacked Gandalf. "Wait a minute. If this is New Zealand, shouldn't Gandalf be spinning the other way?"

I laughed and laughed.

I look forward to "The Two Towers" much more than I do to "Chamber of Secrets." I have no Haitch to go see Harry Potter with and RDC just doesn't get as enthused, and I liked "Fellowship" better than "Stone" anyway. And at this point I don't care about Episode Three at all.

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I looked up rainbows. I hadn't known that you see the red refracted from higher and violet from lower drops, though that makes sense. A double arch is formed by a second refraction, and while I understand how that reverses the spectrum I didn't find out why a second refraction happens--does it always happen, just not always visibly to an observer? or does some special other circumstance have to happen to facilitate a second refraction?

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I listened to How Green Was My Valley while packing today. I got through a tape and a half and am three sides (of 28) from finishing. Welsh has a lovely sound, more pleasing to me even than Irish. This might be why the Welsh accented is the sexiest version of English to me.

And everything but everyone's own desk is done. One week more. Someone suggested going to tea at the Brown Palace on the last day. That made me smile.