Governor's Mansion; state pride(?), pencil-pushers

So I just got this email from my mom, who is in the DAR. I know, I know I know, but they do cool tours. This weekend, they went on a tour of the Governor's Mansion. Which sounds lame, but actually... haven't you ever been curious about how the governor of New York State lives? Nelson Rockefeller, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mario Cuomo, John Jay, Martin Van Buren? It's not something I'd paid much attention to, though my father often worked with the governor when I was a child. I actually saw Pataki once, just randomly, walking past in the hall with like a dozen guards.
( I haven't had much sleep, so this got rambly and odd, but there's some interesting stuff )

cat, why do you plague me so?

So I finished the Kushiel series. I couldn't deal with the bike thing. So I just plowed through at one go. And yes, I did like it a lot better once I read it off the bike.
Hm. If there are things I want to hate, I should read them on an exercise bike. I'll have to think what to do. Maybe I should print out my latest WIP draft and do line edits. Oy. Talk about torture...

Though I think it has much more to do with the fact that I was reading them in small increments. No patience for rereading means I pick up where I left off whether I remember what was going on or no, and that means that I skim pretty heavily and miss a lot, because I'm trying to find the next interesting bit.

I stopped skimming the sex scenes. I did keep skimming the torture scenes. They got pretty dark in the third book. I think they sort of didn't go as dark as the author thinks they did, though. Or maybe it didn't work for me? I'm not explaining it well.

But the love story part-- well, I could love the hero OK, so I guess that's how I work. Joscelin Verreiul stone-faced in the hall of the Drujani, smiling only when he fights-- it was a good image. More compelling than him patiently carrying buckets for the Skaldi, or teaching Yeshuite teenagers knife-fighting. I found him a bit of a prig in the first book, a whiny bitch in the second, but in the third he more or less earned his keep. And I've realized, that's what I need in a series. I need to love the hero.

Is this sexist of me? I have tried to write books that hung upon their female characters. But when I make characters female, I make them less attractive to myself. Why is this? It's not like I haven't been in love with women. It's not like I haven't been in lust with women. But I am far more compelled by a brave man standing up to suffering than by a woman doing what she must to survive-- even though, intellectually, the latter should move me more.
I do not know why this is, but it holds true in both books I read and stories I write. Even the immortally beloved Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy-- I admire Tremaine, but it is Ilias I love. (And, well, Giliead.) (Ok, also weird: I seem to prefer blonds. Maybe it's coincidence. I swear, before Z, I had never dated a blond.) (Third weird thing: skinny dudes. In fiction and real life. Weird!)

Anyway. For whatever that's worth.

I'm headachey and full of snot, and really feeling like hell. Got little sleep Wednesday night, and less last night, both times due to feline intervention in the morning. (Hence the title of the post.) Thursday morning it was Chita, singing forlornly to me in an attempt to get me to let her outside at 6 am. This morning? Remi wanted to rouse the household at 5 am. I had only been asleep two hours; her rude awakening made me notice that I was full to leaking of snot, and I spent about two hours dealing with that-- Sudafed, lots of Kleenex, etc. I hid their food dishes in the oven to stop Remi banging them. I drank a bunch of water. It all leaked back out my face. I tried to sleep more. Finally, around 7:30 or 8, I drifted off to sleep... only to be awoken at 8:30 by the phone ringing. The house phone. It was the twentieth or thirtieth time an automated system has rung us to "return a call to the office of Scott Windsor" at a 1-800 number. (Ah, they're a shady pseudo-collections agency based locally. No way to get them to stop calling, even if they're calling in error. Sweet.)

So I hate them with a flamey passion and I think that really, we've got to disconnect our house phone. The only humans who call it are Z's mom and aunt, and we've told them repeatedly to call his cellphone, we don't check the answering machine reliably. We've turned off the ringers on all but one phone. But even that one phone is enough to wake me up.

We pay $25 a month for it, because we need the phone line for our DSL. It's pretty fucking ridiculous. Z assures me we can't get DSL without separately paying for the phone line, but I think there's got to be a way. I don't want to pay $25 a month for something that only annoys the shit out of me.

Ugh ugh ugh. At least I have a lasagna in the oven. I impulse-purchased the ingredients, which is good, because I was really not feeling like making anything more complicated.
I have no sense of taste at the moment anyway so I'd rather go for texture, which lasagna's got...