A Quick Update...

Hello, friends! This is just a quick note to tell you that I'm still alive. A very quick note - Friday Five quick.

1. But this wasn't what I started out writing today: I was going to write a Review of the Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Then I was going to write a quick meditation on Harry Potter, and What J. K. Rowling and Her Characters Mean to Me and My Generation (yes, I saw the film last weekend).
   
   But today, I'm too restless to concentrate.
   
   
2. My sister returns from France today. She went out there with the intention to stay three months, travel around, and learn some things about life and herself. I'm afraid she also caught bronchitis there. She is now headed home three weeks early, to rest and recuperate and talk to doctors she shares a mother tongue with. She'll arrive around 8PM. Which means that she is probably over the Atlantic right now, coughing up a storm and making her seat-neighbors worry that they'll catch TB or something.
   
   I'm a little worried about her as well. I always forget that she is only fifteen months younger than I am and that she can really take care of herself.
   
   
3. One of my oldest, bestest friends is sitting across from me right now, here at the Barnes & Noble cafe. She is flipping determinedly through the stack of bridal magazines in front of her. She got engaged in April, and the wedding will be in September/October of next year. This weekend, she and her mom goes to Charleston to meet with the wedding planner. We're holding a running commentary on dresses, straps on the bridesmaid dresses, kids to participate in the ceremony, flowers, etc.
   
   Example:
   "I definitely want roses, but not red. I've never been a fan of red roses."
   "They look so...Bachelorette-y."
   
   
   She doesn't know that I took this picture... :-P
   
   (This may explain why I'm having trouble focusing.)
   
   
4. Book 2 is taking over my life. 60% of my reading is research. 87.5% of my brain activity has been consumed with the characters talking in my head, and the chapter they're currently trapped in, and the world they're learning more about, etc. Which means I've become about five million times more absentminded than usual. For example, this morning, getting gas, I had to park about five times, because I kept forgetting what side the gas tank was on. :-/
   
   (This should explain why I've been MIA. It is a good excuse. ("I was writing," is always a good excuse.)
   
   
5. There's just an odd mood over my life, and over the lives of many of the people close to me: we are in transition, or on the move, or in between. It's not bad; it's not good. It's a stew of indefinable mush, where things happen, small unimportant steps in a forward direction, which add up to a big word like Change.
   

Okay, next week, I shall post that review. And if my sister is feeling better, I might drag her to go see Harry Potter - just so that I can see it again. :-P