Had a good evening last night. Matt picked up a couple of quarts of barbeque from Pierce's, the local BBQ pit, and we went down to K.T. and Kevin's to game.

We had a bit of a rough beginning, but eventually got underway and had a good time. Though I tell you - I'll be much happier in about a month, when this constant sense of fatigue is supposed to fade. I managed not to actually fall asleep until after we got home last night, but it was a near thing in a few cases. It was not helped by the fact that I was feeling cold all out of proportion to the actual temperature and had wrapped myself up in K.T.'s throw blanket.

Rachel gave me The Arabian Nights for Christmas, and I've been reading it during slow moments at work.

It's good; most of the stories are pretty typical fables. It's almost ridiculous, the extent to which they're layered - a story about a guy who tells a story about a guy who tells a story... and all this within the framework of a woman telling stories in exchange for her life, of course.

The prologue, which sets Shahrazad up in this situation as the mistress of a woman-hating king, is very funny in parts, though I'm not sure whether it was meant to be. There are two brother kings, and one of them is very depressed about having been cuckolded - until he witnesses his brother's wife having an affair as well, at which he immediately feels better about the whole thing!

And then the two brothers go off into the wide world to see if anyone else is suffering as much as they are, and they encounter a demon with a woman he keeps under lock and key in the middle of the ocean. While the demon is sleeping, the woman blackmails the two brothers into sleeping with her, and she brags to them that they are the ninety-ninth and one hundredth lovers she has taken since the demon stole her away from her home. The two brothers conclude that if God has decreed that a woman will be unfaithful, there's nothing that can stop it, and so they sort of shrug and go home. (After which the older brother decrees that he will marry a new woman every day, sleep with her that night, and then kill her in the morning, thus setting up Shahrazad and her life-preserving tales.)

The whole thing had me in stitches, quite honestly. Though as I said, I'm not sure how much of that was really meant to be funny, and how much was the absurdity of cultural translation.

In any case, it's Friday. Yay! I hope to get some extra sleeping done this weekend. Not that I think it'll make anything like a dent in this pregnancy-induced exhaustion, but it'll be nice to indulge it, at least.

Of course, now that it's January, I need to get busy. I need to start editing the novel, and working on writing the next one. I need to take down the Christmas decorations and pack them away, and then we need to get serious about clearing out all the excess stuff in the computer room to make way for the massive re-arrangements of the house mandated by the arrival of a baby.

(Can I blame it on my nesting instinct that I'm pondering rearrangements of the living room as well?)

Have a good weekend, and we'll see you on the other side!

--Liz