5 Things About Thursday, 19th March: Books & Bitches Edition

• The whiff of Autumn is in the air. It's been warm and lovely the past few days, but the days are getting noticeably shorter and the night's cooler. Time to get serious about the Autumn/Winter knitting schedule.
  
• There is a gorgeous, huge Great Dane bitch who roams the 'off lead' dog park near my house with her owner. She's so sweet and inquisitive that she's quite the belle of the park, everyone loves to stop for a pat and she usually has at least one little lapdog running around her ankles. What I really love is that she's the unofficial peace keeper of the park. Any snappishness or roughhousing sees her giant concerned nose poked into the fray, and all it takes is one deep, booming woof to scatter the participants. Tonight it was a gaggle of little yapsters that got the caution.
  
• Today I chatted briefly to visiting US blogger and kitchen whizz La Diva Laura! I've only recently statered reading Laura's blog, but we 'know' each other from Thombeau and Fabulon. It looks like we'll be catching up this weekend, I can't wait!
  
• I'm so grateful to be gainfully employed in this economic climate, but Great Caesar's Ghost my job's exhausting at the moment. I had a change of boss, and he's a little less highly strung, but this is a tough time to be someone responsible for keeping the funds flowing in! Everybody wants to hold onto their cash, and very few want to pay their bills.
  
• And yet curiously, I've been on a book buying spending spree. Sequels! The third Lucifer Box novel by Mark Gatiss, the seventh Retrieval Artist novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, "Imperium" by Robert Harris (sequel to "Pompeii"). Not a sequel, but I did also snap up the companion volume to the brilliant tv series I loved How Art Made The World. I want a world made by art.