11/21: What I Accomplished Today

1. Mandatory workshop on Sexual Harassment. Got that done.

2. Took a nap.

3. Read the last three Little House books. Observations:

a. Almanzo's age doesn't square. In either Silvery Lake or Little Town, he's 19 to Laura's not-quite 14; he's underage when he files his claim, but everyone ignores that. In The First Four Years, Laura turns 19 near the time when Almanzo turns 29. Hmm.

b. The beginning of The First Four Years and the end of These Happy Golden Years don't match. I know she didn't get to edit The First Four Years as she did the others, but frankly, that beginning seems more likely than the really vague ending to Happy Golden.

c. First Four Years is rather depressing for a number of reasons. In many ways, Laura epitomizes women up until quite recently (and perhaps for too many even now): she doesn't like being a schoolteacher; she hated being a farmer's wife; she wasn't crazy about keeping house. She seemed happiest when she got to be outside and active, but that came at a cost (at first the constant refrain of "You'll ruin your complexion" was funny, but it eventually became oppressive). She didn't edit it, so it's more a summary than the other books, and that's a shame; I was looking forward to seeing how she was going to perform all these tasks we'd seen her learn on her own, and we didn't get much of that. But it almost seems to be a book about a woman being utterly crushed by her lot, though she seems quite happy about her husband and loves her daughter. She seems to spend much of the book in a daze; the baby who dies before he's a month old is relayed almost in a daze, as though, even 60-odd years later, she's still in shock.

4. Kooky thing happened in WOW. I did some auction stuff and played the level 37 Human Mage a bit, and as I was skippin' through Stormwind, some guy basically offered to give me a guild. It had no members, but it's a guild. Now I've been thinking about starting a guild because part of the new patch is Guild Banks, and I think it'd be really handy to have 98 inventory slots all characters can access without having to mail stuff around or remember who's storing what Elemental.

The trick is that, in order to invite someone to be in a guild, you appear to have to be online at the same time, and since all of my characters are on the same account, that obviously isn't possible. I'll talk to one of my adventuring buddies tomorrow to see if I can put them in the guild and make them an officer and then log from character to character for the invite. That should work.

There are actually several other things I'd like to do now, but tomorrow/today is Thanksgiving, and I need to sleep before the festivities.