sienamystic | More fun than an orangutan in a pickle barrel

So, today was full of adventure and excitement and jewelry and explosions and coffee and sex and ceramics. And by that I mean that Bemo and I went to the mall, where I bought jewelry to go with my little black dress, and then we went to the good coffeehouse and sucked down some Good Coffee, and then went over to the Ceramics Sale. The university has a very well-regarded ceramics program, which is good because it attracts a lot of talented potters, but it's not so great because the prices are really high, especially since most of it is student work. Good student work, but still. I ended up buying some raffle tickets because there is a plate there I really want, but couldn't pay $120 bucks for it, even if it has a really high Whimsey Quotient and I am a pure sucker for whimsey. And I did find a mug I liked a lot because it had a really good handle. $24 bucks was probably a bit too steep for what I should have spent, but it isn't too bad and I'm pleased with it.

And then we went and saw Quantum of Solace in which many things go boom. It was a lot of fun, and if it had been the first new Bond with Daniel Craig I would have been happy; however it did not come up to the standards of Casino Royale, except perhaps in the interaction between Bond and M, and the kickassedness of Camille. I'm not quite sure why it's a lesser movie, except that maybe they took so much care over the action scenes that the shoot-em-ups dominated at the expense of the quieter moments where you can find so much good stuff. Plus, I think at times the editing didn't bring us through the story smoothly.

In other news, I have spoken with Mom's Irishman on the phone, and he seems like a nice enough man. My sister reports the same, and says that he is very stereotypical Irish what with the charming the hind leg off a donkey and all. And apparently another woman tried to pick him up in front of my mom today. Apparently American women are just slaves to the Irish accent.

I'm also reading a very interesting book. It's called The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV. I'm been interested in the topic after hearing about it for the first time in a book that has become one of my favorites: Judith Merkle Riley's The Oracle Glass. There hadn't been much out there available for the non-historian who was interested in the topic, which is odd because it's absolutly lurid, so I'm glad Anne Somerset tackled it. It's also making me really awed by Riley's research for her novel (which I shouldn't be, because I think she's actually a historian in real life) and also the way in which she worked the history into her novel. I'm constantly coming across little moments that Somerset quotes that I recognize from the Riley book, and it's making me giddy with delight. Anyway, Somerset does a good job about a subject that was highly charged, and so produced a lot of biased reporting from the timeperiod. I have a tendency to get lost in names and to confuse La Maitenon and La Montespan, but that's not her fault, that's just me being lost amid all the names!