It's just going to be one of those days, I can tell already. Friday? Bah.

Penny was fussy all morning, and went into hysterics as Matt was about to put her in her jacket to leave.

I got to work, turned on the light in my office, and went to put my purse on my desk - only to realize I'd left my purse and my lunchbox in my car.

I've got a weird cramp happening in my abdomen which, along with some TMI junk, is making me wonder if I'm going to have to go back to the OB/GYN to have my UID checked.

My knee, that I fell on three and a half weeks ago, still hurts. I'm beginning to suspect that I did break it - just a tiny hairline fracture, I guess, since I didn't lose any mobility. But I'm afraid to have my doctor look at it; if he restricts me from bending my knee, it's going to make it an enormous pain in the ass to help take care of Penny.

My bathroom scale varies in readings by as much as five pounds - that is, I got on it this morning, and it said XX2, and then I stepped off and stepped back on, and it said XX7. Makes it kind of difficult to track weight loss, even with the very nice tracking tools provided by the Hacker's Diet. But it's looking like I haven't lost much weight this week, either. If any.

I realized in the shower this morning that the bit of re-writing I did yesterday still didn't include the critical bit of information that was the whole reason why I was doing the re-write.

Despite going to bed before 9 last night, I'm still dragging and exhausted this morning.

Enough whining. Something amusing with which to begin your day.

I'm currently (slowly) working my way through a translation of the Arabian Nights - right now, I'm on the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp (or 'Ala al-Din, as my translation has it).

So 'Ala al-Din is living a comfortable life with his magic lamp. (The lamp's wishes, by the way, aren't restricted in number. Weirdly, he doesn't ever ask the genie to bring him money. He asks the genie to bring him food, and then takes the gold and silver dishes that the genie brings the food on and sells them. Nice boy. Not too bright, though.)

Anyway, he's walking through town one day and word spreads that the streets must be cleared because a princess is on her way to the baths, and no one is allowed to look at her, even veiled. So 'Ala al-Din gets the bright idea of going to the baths and hiding behind a door so he can see her when she takes off the veil. Naturally, he's completely overcome by her beauty, because that's how things happen in these stories.

And then he goes home and perplexes his mother (nope, he's not an orphan, either, though his father is dead) by not talking or eating for the rest of the day. And then the translation says:

"Without going into how 'Ala al-Din spent the night, captivated by the beauty and charm of Princess Badr al-Badur, I shall only say that as he sat the following day on the sofa, facing his mother, who was spinning cotton as usual, he spoke to her in these words..." (And then proceeds to recap the whole story of how he spied on the princess and fell in "love" with her.)

Without going into how he spent the night??? Really? I fell over laughing. I really did. These are not children's stories. Several of them are astonishingly racy. There was a tale in the first volume about a porter and three women who get drunk together and make up a pretty salacious game involving the display and naming of private parts.

But now we're not going into how he spent the night after spying a beautiful woman going into her bath? HA!

(I hope I'm not the only one who thinks this is funny...)

--Liz