My husband makes me feel about two inches high sometimes.

Minutes after I snapped at him about reading over my shoulder (something I cannot stand), complained about being sick, and pointedly did not ask about his day, he returned from a quick trip to the grocery store with the makings of dinner and…

…a pony.

The significance of this goes way back to the first day we met. He arrived at a game one evening, was introduced, chatted a bit, then said that he was off to the dep for some Coke – did anyone want anything? People called out their orders, and he turned to me, bowed, and said, “Is there anything my lady desires?”

“A pony,” I said. It was my standard answer at the time. (Now I ask for world peace, or a million dollars.)

He bowed again and said that he’d see what he could do. He left, I went back to whatever I was doing, and when he returned, he passed out the chips and soft drinks everyone had ordered, then handed me a yellow inflatable pony with a flourish. There had been a vendor with a cart of kid’s toys on the corner.

Well, I was stunned. I had asked the impossible, and he’d succeeded in the quest. Okay, so it was a lot smaller than I had envisioned, and less fuzzy, and not exactly rideable, but it was a pony. That was about six years ago. The pony got lost in a move, but that’s not the point.

So when he walked in tonight and handed me a floppy stuffed pony, I felt warm, loved, lowly, and vermin-like at the same time. It’s a fluffy pony – it’s so soft to the touch, like baby blankets or towels. I am naming her E-Pony. You know – like Epona the Celtic horse goddess, only little and fluffy instead.

How can I feel so terrific and crawly at the same time?

Found a new test on a random website – what goddess are you?

Big surprise here – I’m Hestia.

You are Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. You are a patient and steady woman who finds comfort in solitude and exudes a sense of intactness and wholeness.

Yeah, I know – my home is my nest, I like a cosy environment, I worship a hearth goddess, blah blah blah.

So tell me something I don’t know.

I am feeling wretched.

Just what you all needed to hear, I know. Fortunately it was a nice quiet day at work; got tons done, not too much stress, and I escaped fairly quickly. Fairly quickly apart from carrying Tequila back up the stairs when he followed me down. And after I had to walk back to the shop and pick up the Lady Grey tea I’d bought earlier, since I’d run out at home.

Must have warm bath, watch Buffy, go to bed and sleep well tonight! We have another NSW game tomorrow night, and everyone’s keen; I want to be on my game and roll as many sixes on my Force die as possible. We don’t usually game at night any more, so this will be novel. Hopefully it will be warmer than today. They were predicting five centimeters of snow this morning – well, we didn’t get it, but damn, if precipitation fell from the sky, it would be white all right. It’s Beltaine next week, but it feels like November.

I don’t want to be sick again, damn it…

Okay, all of you who keep e-mailing, stopping by, and calling: Paze and Jeff are the proud parents of a baby girl called Devon Julia Preston LeBlanc! She was born on Tuesday night (sneaky, aren’t they?), mother and baby (and father too!) are doing just fine; they�re staying in hospital for a couple of days just to be sure everything�s okay, since Paze’s last few months were so closely monitored. They’re planning an official meet-Devon day instead of having dribs and drabs of people streaming through their place, which I think is a marvellous idea.

Congratulations to all three!

Well, that was interesting. I detest walking into a situation where I’m not prepared, and since this whole thing was non-disclosure protected (lots of espionage in the computer game world, I understand) no details could be released to me about this project to help me prepare. So I walked into the recording room cold. It was fun; no denying that. My partner was an absolute scream who made me cry with laughter. The main problem with the five female roles, though, was that they were female stereotypes as opposed to the ten male international characters. Granted, they were stereotypes too, but at least my partner could play with accents. I had to play up the stereotypes, which gave me much less room to improvise and basically left me pretty unengaged. They had fun fooling around with my voice, making me sound about a hundred pounds heavier than I am for one character, and I must admit I had a good laugh when they played back a couple of other characters that I had nailed dead on. All the same, though, as much fun as the exercise was, I wish I’d been given more than three catch-phrases for each role to record as a test, and I really wish I’d seen visuals for all of them.

In other news, we anxiously await the official good news of the birth of the new daughter of our upstairs neighbours and very dear friends Jeff and Paze! They’re at the hospital today, and they’ve sworn to tell no one the name of this child until she’s born, which has left the rest of us with no choice but to call her The Peanut. Poor kid; it’s going to stick. It will, however, be nice to be told the name that will be on her birth certificate! Watch this space for news as soon as there’s news to be released…

Woo-hoo! For all of you out there sitting on the edge of your seats, it was announced in Ottawa this afternoon that the winner of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads! project is In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje! Steven Page, lead singer of Barenaked Ladies, nominated this novel as the book that all Canadians should read together over the summer.

Well. That was my excitement for the day.

Tonight I’m off to a top-secret voice test for the spoken dialogue of a computer video game being developed here in Montreal. Oooh… the suspense…