What I Did on My Other Summer Vacation

Today I unearthed an important fact about plastic of which you may not be aware.

When it's molten, it burns just as bad as molten sugar, for exactly the same reasons.

Ow.

And right on the pad of my right ring finger¹, too, which makes typing a highly entertaining activity, let me tell you. I spent an hour or so just clutching an icepack (and later a frozen steak), because it was the only thing that could transform my hand from a white-hot mass of unspeakable agony and back into a, you know, hand. I've got it bandaged now, and it still hurts intermittently, but at least it's manageable, and I managed to write 970 words despite it. With the 945 words from yesterday, I've broken the 40kword mark -- 40,116. Praise me.

I haven't been posting highlights lately, and I admit that I haven't been committing much funny lately, but I've also just been forgetting a lot, so here are the good bits for the last two weeks or so (some of which are not, I admit, funny, but I like them all the same):

"Don't say it! Jesus, but nobody can seem to talk about the fucking thing like anything but a cowering peasant: it's all Great Cataclysm this and The Remaking that and The Time of Woes the other."

Arunir, with an impeccability of timing that Rook wondered if she had to practice in front of the mirror, announced, "We're here."

This had gone on for rather less than the predicted three hours when Rook's horse began to slow; he looked up, entertaining unpleasant thoughts about running out of fuel or fairy dust or whatever powered this thing and realizing that no one had actually turned it off at any time over the last two days and oh, it was just slowing down to keep step with Arunir's.

"The accent is giving me trouble [...]. It helpsn't that you and [Arunir] have completely different accents."
"Welcome to America."

He knew Underground was built under a mountain range. Everyone knew that. What not everyone, specifically not Rook, had understood was that they were so ... so.... Well, he had pictured them being more craggy and snowcapped, and less low, hilly and ... deciduous.

Rook hadn't a clue as to the value of any of the coins that exchanged hands, but there were quite a number of them, and they were all encouragingly shiny.

The man at least had the grace not to tell Rook that he had an abnormally large head. Which was not, so far as Rook was aware, the case, but his size relative to every other humanoid in his vicinity seemed to be much on everyone's mind lately, and it would just figure, wouldn't it. Once the measuring was done, he gave the glazier his current glasses for reference and the man wandered off into the curtained depths of the stall, there to produce a series of hideous noises Rook hoped desperately were part of the lens-grinding process and not, for example, the glazier being eaten by a demon.
He had all of his limbs and did not appear to be in any way half-devoured when he emerged from the back of the stall, which Rook considered sufficient support for the lens-grinding theory.

¹ And the sides of my middle finger and pinky, and the base of my thumb, but it's worst on that one finger.