one project - and beans

We just wrapped up one of our projects at the office.
It's working.

Me, I'm going to sleep.
Hopefully I didn't have too many of those chocolate-covered espresso beans tonight.

beaned

Those chocolate-covered espresso beans must really work. I had only 4 hours of sleep last night and felt like it when I got up, then I chewed on a few beans this morning and, after 4 hours of housework, I am still quite energetic.

Hugo, Flaubert and TexAnne would be aghast

My wife recently bought me a Bodum coffee press. Since it's from Switzerland, the text on the box is in English and in French. I understand that translation must be colloquial, not a word-for-word conversion, but I felt my eyebrow rise when I saw that...

Brew coffee or tea on the go!

...had become...

Mug à piston portable pour le café ou le thé

Sacrebleu!
Molière must be spinning in his grave.

"Beneath Ceaseless Skies" #64

Goodness. It’s been more than a week since web-based fantasy magazine "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" posted its 64th issue, and I failed to mention it until now. I blame Life, and my body’s annoying need for sleep. Stories are "Breathing Sunshine," by Garth Upshaw, and "Mr Morrow Becomes Acquainted with the Delicate Art of Squid Keeping," by Geoffrey Maloney. They’re on my Nook, awaiting my eyes.

Speaking of which, I quite enjoyed Marie Brennan’s “Two Pretenders”, in #60. It shares the same setting as her Elizabethan fantasy “And Blow Them at the Moon” in #50, although this one is set earlier, after Tudor has seized the Throne.

Besides that, there was #61’s “Recapitulation in Steam,” by Margaret Ronald, with the same steampunk/fantasy setting as her “The Guilt Child” in #52.

And, last but not least, #63 included another tale of Richard Parks’s Lord Yamada, a ghosthunter of the Heian Era’s Japan. “The Ghost of Shinoda Forest” hits Yamada more personally than his other cases because it appears to involve the spirit of a woman he’d loved.

I looked out at the view from the mountain. “The ancient Chinese poet Li Po once said that when he drank, he forgot Heaven and Hell. And when he really drank, he also forgot himself and thus found his greatest joy. I’ve been ‘really’ drinking for a long time now, Kenji-san. Would you concur?”

“If there were such a thing as drinking at heroic levels, you would be an immortal,” Kenji said cheerfully.

“And in all that time I never, not once, forgot myself or found any joy.”

Kenji frowned. “So the lesson is ‘Never trust a drunken Chinese poet’?”