Happy New Year!!!

After an evening of sparkling beverages, fireworks, and late-night babies, we woke slowly...

and found our bathroom wall was rotting!!!

So we are starting 2008 by spending money we don't really have to retile a bathroom we barely manage to clean anyway (perhaps *that* was the beginning of the problems)...

But this only intensifies my need to finish THE DANG BOOK and turn it in. Because I can ill afford extra child care. Sigh.

All this to apologize once again for the intermittent posting. Really, I'm going to get CRAZY on this blog just as soon as "life calms down".

HA!

In the meantime, have you read Laura Amy Schlitz's A Drowned Maiden's Hair? I love it!

It's a gothic-ish tale, set somewhere between Baltimore and England. Which is to say that Schlitz is from Baltimore and set her orphan-stranded-in an-asylum-but then adopted-by spiritualists-and-taken-to-a-seaside-town-and-forced-to-work-seances (yeah, another one of those) somewhere nearby, but that it has the feel of a true Gothic tale.

I love Maud, the heroine, and I love the crazy seance-sisters, but most of all I love Muffet, the deaf/mute with a limp who mkaes odd noises.

And of course, I looooooove Baltimore, and "Cape Calypso", which reminds me of Beach haven, or Rohobeth, or Bethany, the beaches of my youth!