Where Have I Been?

I haven't posted for over a month and am wondering why. My current excuse is pneumonia, which I've had since the first week of February. I don't know how much longer I had it, since it was mostly asymptomatic. I had a backache and then a fever and went on-line to read about backaches. Backache and fever is not a good combination, so I went to the doc.

I'm on my second set of antibiotics. It's way down in my right lung, and Patrick says it's hard to treat when it's burrowed in so deep.

There is a coffee shop next to my clinic, which serves quite amazing cinnamon rolls. I have stopped in a couple of times after a visit to the doc. The cinnamon rolls reminded me of Robin McKinley's quite wonderful fantasy Sunshine. The heroine is a baker at a coffee shop, who makes cinnamon rolls "as big as your head." Sunshine the only vampire-baking novel I have ever read. (The vampires do not get baked, but the baker acquires a vampire.) Anyway, I bought the book and reread it. It really is very sweet and strange. I recommend it.

I am currently reading Last Rituals, an Icelandic murder mystery about witchcraft. The last time I was in Iceland, over four years ago, Patrick and I visited the witchcraft museum in northwest Iceland. Icelandic witchcraft is different in that the people accused of being witches were almost all men.

Northwest Iceland is amazing -- mostly empty of people, but with plenty of sheep and eider ducks. The ducks sleep along the shore, and the black and white males look like deflated soccer balls.