Possibly deranged musings...

Still not feeling great. I went back to work yesterday and I'm not sure that was such a good idea. I still feel like my throat is full of foul smelling gunk. Charming n'est-ce pas?

I mentioned in my last post I've been reading Terry Pratchett books. Shortly after this I picked up Unseen Academicals, the most recent (I think) Discworld book. I was very excited to see this because I assumed he was going to stop writing after The Nation. However, I'm finding it very hard to read. It doesn't feel like a Discworld book at all. The characters seem all wrong, the tone is different, and it's freaking me out. I looked up a bunch of reviews online and only one other person I found seemed to even remotely agree with me. Other people who were critical of it, were critical on the basis of what they saw as plotting flaws. Mostly the reviews were just 'yay another great Discworld book!'  So now I'm wondering if I'm seeing it this way because I have just read a bunch of other Discworld books, or if the tonsillitis has affected my brain.

But this sort of thing is something to which I seem to be particularly sensitive. The thing I took most issue with in Star Trek: Generations for instance, was the fact that they seemed to have gotten all the original series characters wrong. That 'X would never say something like that' feeling really seems to grate for me.

Also today Ashwyn showed his first signs of entering my favourite phase of childhood speech development. When children first learn to speak they seem to go through a phase of learning by copying, then learning by asking (wherein the parent becomes heartily sick of 'what's that? what's that?'). Then they reach a phase where they have a certain vocabulary stock and they begin to make words for new things they encounter by creative use of words they already know. My older children have already given us such classics as 'tails' (for gummi snakes), 'pants thing' (for bathers) and 'cockaone' (oneupmanship over a cockatoo). Today Ashwyn coined 'eggfrog' for a bath toy which was a blue egg-shaped thing with a picture of a frog on it.