Bleh

Last night I got home fairly late and pretty much went straight to bed without blogging. Tonight I've been home, and at times I've been busy, but mostly I've just felt bleh and didn't get around to writing. I have, however, been fairly productive up to a point. I worked, went to an appointment, ran by the pharmacy (for the second day in a row), ate dinner with a friend, returned my library books, did all the hand-washable laundry (21 pieces that are now drying on the new rack with a fan on them), and so that's not too bad. I do plan on doing the regular laundry as well by getting up early in the morning. My back has been giving me trouble tonight with all the stooping and movement with the hand-washables, so I've been lying down trying to get it to ease up, and I took some ibuprofen, too. I also played some 'Joining Hands', an addictive game I got the other day for my phone when it was the free application of the day on Amazon.

Yesterday I came late to some news that made me sit in my cubicle at work and cry. Barbara Mertz, who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Elizabeth Peters, and who among all her many novels wrote the 19 Amelia Peabody mysteries, died on August 8th at the age of 85. I didn't know her, of course, but she touched my life and fired up my imagination with her strong female characters. I watched Amelia and Radcliffe begin their life together, their son grow up, their grandchildren born, and every year 'another dead body' as their foreman on the digs in Aegypt would lament. I felt like I'd lost something very special, much like when you've been entranced by a good book and you come to the words 'the end' and have to close the cover. Here is her obituary in the New York Times: Barbara Mertz, Egyptologist and Mystery Writer, Dies at 85. According to it, she wrote nearly 70 books. I have read about 32 of them, and have about 30. I have read her Aegyptology non-fiction under her own name, all of the Amelia Peabody books, several of the Vicky Bliss ones, and all of the Jacqueline Kirby ones, plus a few more sprinkled here and there and the guide to the world of Amelia Peabody. I have most of them in a coveted shelf near my bed. Oh, she will be missed.