All gothic'd out

For the first half of Portrait of a Lady I found myself thinking 'wait, where's the gothickery? Have I got the right Henry James?'

The second half was... all the force of ghosts and spooks and vampirism and whatever else you get your gothic kicks from, concentrated into the perfectly mundane person of Gilbert Osmond. In the plotting of it, Portrait is a... social novel, I guess. Marriages and friendships and tea parties. But I don't think I've ever encountered a (fictional) character so terrifying as Osmond.

More SRS thoughts later, when I've got my head back on straight.

Let me tell you about my dinner!

Today, I was putting dinner off and off, since I was (am) this close to finishing the Great Dewey Coding of the Bookshelf. However, dinner had to happen at some point, and it was delicious.

It consisted of:

Eye fillet steak, pan-seared. Turned out a little too rare even for my taste, and kinda chewy. BUT IT WAS DELICIOUS anyway.
Mushrooms and onions, fried with said steak.
Masterfoods Pepper Sauce - vr. quick and easy to make, vr. vr. tasty. I have half a jug of it left, and I think I might make PIES.
And a huge mountain of veggibles. I am incapable of serving a normal, one-person serving of vegetables (problem, since I'm not really capable of EATING two people's worth of veggibles).

AND it took about fifteen minutes to make, if that.

~

Also awesome: Someone in the SMH deserves a cookie. Look who they've got filling in for Miranda Devine. :D:D

~

Not awesome: I have huge convulsive hiccups right now.