A few things

 * I worked some more on the Moominhouse but it's agonizingly slow going because you have to glue stuff together, and then wait for the glue to dry before doing the next step, or you have to paint something and wait for the paint to dry before painting the other side. 

I did assemble a little wall mirror and most of a dining room chair, and I got the beams for the ceiling made and glued onto the ceiling part. But I have a lot of backed up boxes to work through. 

I also ordered acrylic paint for the things that needed it because the little tubes I had bought were - womp womp - oil paint, which I forgot existed as an art thing and I didn't even read the labels. 

* I also added a bit more to the corner-to-corner blanket, but it moves really slowly. I think one episode of the Poirot mysteries Saturday evening was like two and a half rows. 

* Tonight, I worked on the heel flap for the scallop-lace socks. Didn't quite finish it. 

* Today started with good news - a paper I submitted AGES ago, that I thought had either got lost in the shuffle or been rejected and I was never told, came back as a revise and resubmit. I'm not mad about how long it took; this is a journal that runs entirely on volunteer labor (so: unlike many journals it doesn't charge the moon for subscriptions or page charges, and I believe the authors retain their copyright).

It's going to take some work but maybe I can get it done this week and next, and sent back in. If I can, it should come out in this year's issue. Which is really good as I've not done any publishable research for a while and I'm anxious that I really won't be better enough come summer to do much in the field - I still hurt a lot, and walking on hard surfaces (like over at school) give me SO MUCH PAIN at the end of the day.

I suspect I'm walking more than is really ideal given the whole injury but there's no other way I can do it. 

I'm trying to do some of the PT stretches, and I did a slow 15 minutes on the cross-country skiier yesterday, but I think I'm paying for that today with more pain. 

But I didn't get to start on the revision because all of a sudden, there was all this paperwork needed - midterm grades, and departmental scholarships, and a couple other things. All the stuff that is urgent (sometimes because the office asking for it waited until the last minute) but that pulls me away from the things that actually feel valuable to me (like working on the revision).

I have IDEAS for summer research but no faith my knee will be good enough I can actually do it. I feel like I should be almost totally healed by now, and at my best I'm about 85% of how I normally am, and at the worst - like at the end of a day when I've had to be on my feet on hard surfaces for a long time  - I'm only at about 60%. 

Yeah, yeah, I have to see about getting in for PT but I'm still afraid I'll be told "get operated on first and then we can talk" and I don't want to/can't do that until summer, and even then I'm going to have to get a worst-case scenario estimate of how long I won't be allowed to drive or walk or anything for, and figure out how to manage. 

I'm still holding out a vain hope it will heal up without the arthroscopy but every day that seems like an increasingly vain hope. (But I also fear: what if something goes wrong during surgery and I'm WORSE off?)

* I almost finished "Seat of the Scornful," a John Dickson Carr mystery. Unlike some of these, I didn't guess who did it - in fact, both the people I figured at different times were probably the culprit were innocent (unless there's another big twist in the last 15 or so pages). There's a little less Gideon Fell in this one than some, and he's the primary reason I read these. He's basically a pastiche/homage to GK Chesterton, though more with the mystery-solving skills of Chesterton's creation, Father Brown. 

It also strikes me that a lot of these mystery-series detectives are "allowed" to be odder than the average book character, and in some ways more solitary - Nero Wolfe plays at living as a shut-in ("never leaves the house on business," though he certainly DOES leave the house), and while Fell is shown as married in some of the stories about him, his wife never plays much of a role (in fact, she's only a bit more prominent than Mrs. Columbo is - and in some ways, Fell is a more-upper-class, British version of Columbo, both in terms of being disheveled and going off on tangents). And famously, a lot of them are unmarried - Miss Marple, and Wolfe*, and Poirot (I cannot quite imagine Poirot having a true romantic attachment to either a woman or a man - yes, he does seem to have a bit of an eye for the ladies and courtly manners, but it never goes beyond the courtly manners). And Sherlock Holmes, too, despite all the slash fiction written about him, was canonically single (though perhaps, Irene Adler was the one who broke his heart). 

(*though isn't it implied somewhere that Wolfe was briefly married, over in "The Old Country"?)

And one of the reasons I like mystery series is that the "detective" figure (professional or amateur) is allowed to be eccentric in a way that most, say, dramatic leads, would not be. 

(Heh. To use internet parlance: they're all weird little guys (nongendered version) and I like weird little guys.)

The other reason I like them, though, is the familiarity: you learn the character's quirks, and you look forward to them in the "new" stories you read: Fell running his hands through his mop of greying-brown hair, Wolfe and his prodigious meals, Albert Campion pretending to be an upper-middle-class twit while keenly observing and mentally cataloguing what goes on.

And even the fairly "normal" ones (like Inspector Alleyn) are interesting characters to read about.  I'd rather read a good mystery than any other "genre" writing.