counting down

[incandescens]

I confess that I'm watching the Sacred (computer game) website and checking it daily. There's a large patch/expansion coming out near the end of October, titled Sacred Plus, which will be bundled with the game in future sales, but is free to download if you already own it. This is distinct from the Underworld expansion which is coming out somewhere in 2005. Who am I to turn down more play?

Coworker should be back from conference in Washington, and back in work tomorrow. I'll be interested to hear what it was like.

8 days to go. It becomes harder to concentrate. I assemble a list and try not to count the days, the hours, the minutes. I refrain from starting to pile things up in an orderly manner, because they'll just be in the way at the moment.

I plot to make chicken teriyaki (with mushrooms, leeks, and peppers) tomorrow evening. That will keep my mind busy for a little while; it's hard to focus on America when you're stirring a wokful of vegetables and hot oil and counting the seconds till it's done. (I know it sounds stupid, but when I'm stirfrying "for three minutes" or similar, I find that actively counting off the seconds is one of the easiest ways to get it right. It seems to work. Nobody's come down with food poisoning from undercooking yet.)

---

Winter landscape, with rocks

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,
plunges headlong into that black pond
where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan
floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind
which hungers to haul the white reflection down.

The austere sun descends above the fen,
an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look
longer on this landscape of chagrin;
feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,
brooding as the winter night comes on.

Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice
as is your image in my eye; dry frost
glazes the window of my hurt; what solace
can be struck from rock to make heart's waste
grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place?

-- Sylvia Plath

Comments

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmmm Sacred updates... forbidden Sacred updates....

[incandescens]

So when Underworld comes out, will you be playing the Dwarf or the Succubus? :)

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

Probably both! Woo!

[stormcloude]

I'm the same way, except I've got about three half-made lists and no finished lists because it's not close enough to make a real list. ^_^;

And I've started piling things to take, even though there's still a couple of weeks to go.

[undauntra.livejournal.com]

I believe that this is the first of you daily poems which I haven't liked. It has some well-drawn imagery, but its feel is far too depressing, with no mention of why the reader should look upon the poet with sympathy rather than contempt.