A Baggy Book and Rain, Rain, Rain

Yesterday may have been the rainiest day of the year so far. According to The Guardian, we were set to receive a month's worth of rain in a single day. I spent the whole day on the couch reading, and every time I looked up, it was pouring outside. I didn't even go out into the garden.

Olga, needless to say, was not thrilled at the prospect of leaving with the dog-walker. I wondered if it would feel more like punishment than pleasure. But we sent her along anyway and dried her off well when she got home.

We watched the second episode of the BBC's "The Man in the Orange Shirt" last night, a two-part miniseries with Vanessa Redgrave exploring how gay men coped with social and familial pressures and expectations both back in the 1940s and in the modern era. Vanessa Redgrave is a few months older than my mother! I think it's pretty impressive that she's still acting, and so effectively. Anyway, it's a good show -- I recommend it if you have the opportunity to watch it.

I also learned, happily, that I don't have to be at work until the 17th -- and not the 14th, as I'd previously thought. Woo hoo! A few extra days of vacation!

I am not enjoying this Arundhati Roy book as much as I had hoped. I was following the initial story really well at the outset, and then the book leaped to another set of characters and circumstances that I didn't follow as well, and now it's coming together but it feels very...loose. I think there's an excellent novel in here somewhere, but it's still buried in what feels like a very long, overstuffed draft. Someone needed some more rigorous editing -- that's my non-novelist's take on it.

(Photo: Our inula plant, through the rain-streaked living room window.)