Extra ordinary

Some days I'm just incapable of sitting down and writing a post. I don't know why.

I spent the weekend, when I wasn't with someone else, playing my Gameboy in sunny parts of the house. I bought an used copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is the most static RPG I've ever played and frighteningly addictive. I never played the famed Playstation version of FF Tactics, but I feel like I know it through Marian, who was obsessed with it through much of highschool and always put it in her top five games list (a very big deal) and drew fan art of the different characters. Sorry to drag you into this geek paragraph, Narns, but you know you belong here with me.

Today at work Ivy and I rode around on her tricycle, an old red and white "Mercury" that I'm crazy about. Ivy sat on the metal seat (I remember those getting really hot in summer) and strained to reach the pedals with her feet while I bent over her, holding the handlebars and pushing off from the back. We had to go do very slowly to keep my weight from tipping us over backwards. It took us ages to get down the street and back.

When I got home I had a package from a bookseller in California. I've been trying to find this book I read in highschool, Jean Ure's Plague, since, er, highschool. I couldn't find it anywhere because not only is it out of print, and not only could I not remember the author, but it was published in the US with a different title: Plague 99. It's a "young adult" SF novel about a plague in England. It's set, I think, in the early 90's? Maybe not. It was written in 1989, but the American title confuses me. In any case, I was transfixed by it in grade eight, my first year at private school, when I hid in the back of the library and read it during lunch breaks for a week or so. I couldn't take it out, I remember, because I already had books overdue, so I used to hide it behind a set of encyclopedias that nobody ever read.

Here's the teaser on the back: How can three teenagers, Fran, Harriet and Shahid, survive a plague that has killed their parents and left London a ghost town? Jean Ure's harrowing picture of life after the plague is realistically and sympathetically portrayed in a compelling story of survival, friendship and loyalty.

I have no idea if that's true, that "realistically and sympathetically portrayed" bit, because I can't trust my judgment at thirteen, but I know I found it suitably "harrowing". I had a healthy dose of morbid curiosity, which helped. The dead parents thing really got to me.

So I finally found it, ordered it, and now it's here. And it turns out it's the first part in a trilogy, thank god, (the first book ended very abruptly, which bothered me), so I've got two more books to read after this one, and I'm very, very happy about it, as you can probably tell. Even if the books turn out to be crap, it's another PHBM (Personal History Book Mystery) solved. On to the next, gang!