We have a new kitten.

A friend of ours has been feeding a colony of feral cats for months. The tamest of the lot, obviously an abandoned pet, showed up with a litter of kittens. When they got older, she brought them to Deb to be admired and fed and petted and played with.

Last Monday, Shadow came to our house in a cat carrier. He spent the night behind the gas stove, hissing. He's slowly adapted to this whole human-being thing. Now he sits in the window and yells. When you come near, he hisses. Then he gets petted. If you stop petting him, he yells again. Sort of like Resurrected!Buffy, really.

Reached Realtor. Not only has house not shown in 3 weeks, not only has nothing in the neighborhood shown or sold, not only did she give an open house and nobody came, but the buyer who fell through because she lied about her divorce status is suing us in small-claims court for the return of her deposit.

I hope there's another Jilly Cooper in the mail when I get home. Or possibly a cask of malmsey.

The secret to life is being able to handle day-to-day annoyances serenely.

I can't. That's what makes it a secret.

So, in the ongoing saga of our house, the realtor had a family crisis in early June -- her father had a massive stroke. Since then, we haven't heard one word from her. I've made repeated calls to her, her assistant, and her broker, and have not gotten useful information. We have an empty house in what should be an active real estate market, and we have no idea if anybody's looking in it. Two weeks ago, I asked the broker to do a market analysis, and she came back grimly announcing that we were $5K over the market.

My husband broke a tooth last night.

We're having trouble finding daycare for the kids over the summer; we're lurching from summer camp to summer camp.

And this doesn't compare to being a woman in Afghanistan or a poor person anywhere; my troubles are pretty darned tiny. But I would really like to stop stubbing my toe on the rocks of life for a month or so.

So, the migraines continue apace, the old house in NC has still not sold and the realtor isn't returning phone calls, and the child care is shaky.

When this sort of thing happens, the only course is to read romance novels. Really bad romance novels. The kind whose covers you want to hide at the checkout counter. "Mostly I read Dostoyevsky! Honestly! Oh, look, right behind you, it's a meteorite!"

At times like these, Jilly Cooper really hits the spot. (They're known as "bonkbusters" in the U.K.) Observe the cover. All about sex and high life and sex and bad puns (not terribly funny, but hey) and intrigue and sex. And British class issues.

You can tell somebody's going to be the villain when she puts picture windows into an Elizabethan and plants a pink-and-mauve garden. You can also tell because she pronounces "i" as "ai". "That would be faine." What's wrong with this, I don't know, but apprently it's damning. Much more so than, say, getting pregnant at an orgy, or seducing a woman because you want to photocopy her company's proposal, or throwing a temper tantrum and announcing to the press that your mother doesn't know your father because she conceived you at an orgy.
And that's three sympathetic characters. In Rivals, if you're curious.

Then there's the character who muses "Rupert's cock was amazing. As he entered her, she felt all the surprised joy of a canal lock discovering it could accommodate the QEII."

Really, it's all good.