I'm writing this from one of the computers in Lillie's office. We're here late today because we took a break and went down to Avila Beach, all four of us, and had hot dogs and cherry cokes. Lillie waded into the water with me. (The beach has been having a lot of work done on it in the last couple years...something to do with pollution and the way things were built along the shore. But it's cleared up enough to splash around in places. Lillie wore rubber flip-flops which she had to buy in a little beach-front shop. They were only five dollars, and since after all she really did need them (In case she stepped on something, I mean...Normally of course, her feet are covered, and she doesn't have to pay attention to anything they touch, but if she cut herself on beach glass or a rock or shell or anything, she wouldn't be able to help herself) I loaned her the money.

She was wearing a little straw hat with a white ribbon, and because it was breezy she had to hold it on with one hand. Which she did very gracefully till Mark offered to take our picture, and as we were posing she put her hand down. Jasper...who can't swim at all, and was sitting making a complicated kind of sand-labyrinth well away from the water...got up and went charging in after it, but the tide took it. He was quite upset, and offered to bring it back by, well, doing whatever he does magically as a Cordite(I can't say I understand it myself). Lillie demurred, and told him he shouldn't even think of messing around with the ocean. Especially not for the sake of a hat.

I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't left that note for Criseyde Keats. You never can tell with a lamia: she might have taken it into her head to come up and visit, and God only knows what what would've happened. The stupid House was so annoyed at us bringing Jasper back with sea water and sand to his waist that it's been sulking for the rest of the afternoon. Lillie dropped off at the gates at four so we could get changed, and I was supposed to meet her back at the offices at four. (It's about a five minute walk from the grounds of Haven House to the Collection buildings) But the House wouldn't let me out. I wandered for three hours, through halls and parlours and kitchens and conservatories and libraries and one room filled entirely with thousands of jars of jam. I stopped periodically to bang on the walls and shout, but of course the sound wasn't allowed to reach Jasper or Mark, who were off somewhere playing cards. Just about the time my legs were about to drop off, Lillie came to find out why I hadn't showed up yet and bullied the House into letting me out. Both her gloves were off when I came through, and she had her palms placed flat against the shuddering stone wall.

She was very much annoyed, and she said afterwards, as we were walking down Jacaranda Street in the deepening blue of the evening, that she'd told the House it was just as much her fault that Jasper had gotten wet, and anyway seawater wasn't going to kill him and she knew better than the House did, so there. But she's a little worried that It doesn't seem to approve of me. "You haven't mentioned that lamia within its hearing, have you?" worriedly.

"No, of course not," I said, and she seemed mollified, till I asked a moment later, "What would happen if Jasper met Criseyde? Or, like, any of the Cordi met any lamia?"

"I don't know," Lillie said, in a tone usually reserved for such phrases as "just put the gun down very slowly now" or "what do you mean, the landing gear is broken?"

So I thought I'd better shut up. I can't help wondering, though, and knowing Criseyde Keats and the chaotic temperment, I wonder if she's ever wondered. I'd better be sure never to suggest it to her.

I called Lillie and it's all set up. She was going to Haven House tonight to have dinner with her brother, and she said she'd ask him if Mark and I could spend the nights there. Although, in a sense, it's not so much a matter of asking him as asking the House.

It was actually kind of good that we called, Lillie said. She's got a new group of letters from Nineveh Brown to W. B. Yeats that she wants me to look at and help her catalogue. (The idea being to get them in order so that they can be cross-referenced, or whatever, with the letters from Yeats to Nineveh...which have been part of the Collection since 1931 when Edmund Brown died and left his sister's papers to posterity, or at least that part of posterity that has access to the Danae y Danae Archives.

These "new" letters were, of course, the ones that Yeats kept, and after his death I'd be inclined to think they went to some museum or other. I wonder whether Lillie bought them legally or paid someone in the St. Ia family to steal them for her.

Not that I'll ask her...I expect, if they're stolen, we'll soon be hearing about it anyway, as Mark's mother works at the V&A in London, and likes to regale him with the latest scandals in the world of antiquities. Some of which we already know about from a rather different perspective, which is awkward but kind of funny.)

I think this notion that Mark and I have any particular insights to add to the letters is silly. But I don't mind taking a look at them, and helping to enter them into the catalogues. It's kind of ridiculous, though, that I should be the fastest typist. I type 25 words a minute, for crying out loud. But Mark can't touch-type at all, he has to do hunt-and-peck, which is why I write up most of his papers for him (it's not, believe me, for the pleasure of listening to him dictate and getting into arguments with him about syntax). And Lillie is seriously slowed down by having to wear gloves, or else being hit by every word that every key has ever helped spell every time someone has used the keyboard. Which is just ridiculous, obviously.

But considering how early we're going to have to get up to get to Santa Teresa before late, I'd better get to bed. Or my own hands will be shaking so hard even Mark will be faster. He's been in bed for an hour and forty-five minutes, and has been rolling over and complaining the entire time about the sound of my typing keeping him awake. I think I'll put up the volume on the stereo and dig out my Dr. Demento CD. And then run really fast, and lock the door to the bathroom behind me. He should be done yelling at me by the time I'm done with my bath.

How many damn nights am I (and Mark too, of course) going to spend waiting to see if Criseyde Keats shows up? I've got to go back to class on the 25th...I bet she shows up right when I have started class, just to throw me off my stride for the entire quarter. Especially because, of the 4 courses I'm currently scheduled for, there's only one that I don't need to change times on/drop/exchange for another course that's theoretically full but I can hopefully beg my way into. If, that is, I don't have to do it with the entire surface of my skin stained blue. (I still swear I have no recollection of how that happened. And aside from weird hints about Pictish rites, which I'm pretty sure she's kidding about, Criseyde won't tell me) It's hard to seem really sincere and hardworking to a professor when you look like a deflated version of that girl who chews gum all the time in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."

Unrelated side note: how incredibly foul is it that they're talking about remaking that movie? For the love of whatever god, why? Why? It's even worse than that whole rumor about a remake of Casablanca...because you know there's just no chance anybody's going to approve of that. But people don't always take "children's" movies as seriously, so I can maybe see some critics liking the new version. Despite it being wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean, some of them liked Jim Carrey as the Grinch, so I'm not trusting in the critical sense of critics to steer them towards anything but the most accepted truths. But honestly, considering how many people it takes to approve a movie, and then to make one...how on earth do you find that many people who think these are good ideas?

Anyway.

Oh, yeah. Criseyde. Well, hell. I have until the 25th. I think I'll call Lillie DeMorgan tomorrow and see if I can't wrangle an invitation. I'd love a drive up the coast, if I can get Ivy to lend me the money for gas. And maybe I'll leave a note for Crisey, telling her where I've gone...

Um. Then again, maybe I won't.

Totally delighted tonight because I went to the library this afternoon and gave myself permission to hit the "Friends of the Library" sale area. They had an old hardback copy of Dorothy Parker's short story collection "Here Lies," and two of the volumes I didn't already have of "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror." And other stuff, too, but the kicker was a slim little art-book copy that looked like it'd been printed in the twenties or thereabouts of...get this..."The Love Letters of Henry VIII." I already read it, and Mark's reading it now. There's an amazing letter at the end, the last Anne Boleyn wrote to Henry, that's just wrenching...she's begging for her life and the life of her friends, but she can't seem to suppress her anger at the way she's been used. And the way she maybe guesses she will be treated in the monkey-trial being set up against her. Oh! Shiver! Shudder! I don't know why I've always loved Tudor history...I'll add to my currently totally empty "Writings" page a sonnet I wrote about Anne.

I was writing so much for the first few days I stalled out a bit. I've been telling myself, the last two days, that I have too much to do, or had done too much already that day, and I didn't have to write. This kind of reasoning is why, in a couple shoeboxes in the closet of my room, I've got four old diaries that I started at various times and abandoned after a month or so. And I type even more slowly than I write in longhand...

But I'm not going to poop out on this blog. Not after an ignominous three entries. When I left off, Friday night, I was in Palm Springs. (Gosh, I feel like Scherazade. Or possibly a Victorian serial-story writer. Too bad no one's reading this except me...) When I woke up the next morning I was still in Palm Springs, obviously (bad phrasing there, Tess) and it was, in fact, the morning. Normally I don't like to get up till the glare is off the day, but I do make exceptions.

We were all meeting for breakfast. Normally I don't do breakfast. But there were crisp white tableclothes, and towering flower arrangements in silver thingamagigs (there's a word for it, starts with an "e" and is probably French, but I don't care enough to look it up) and exotic fruits carved in fanciful designs. I figured it was probably some kind of sin to stay upstairs sleeping while, downstairs, ice sculptures drip water onto the lox and cream cheese set out for your delectation.

Anyway, there we all were, looking at the ice sculptures and the flowers and the chattering tourists, shredding croissants into little feathery fragments and actually eating very little. We were all affected by that dull gloom you get when you've had plenty of sleep without having been terribly tired when you went to bed. It's like a haze in the morning air, (yet another reason why I don't like mornings) and sometimes it burns off with the sun. Sometimes it just gets more overcast.

It took all of my teen years to realize that you really do feel much worse, in this mood, if you go with your inclinations and stay inside to mope. With a consciousness that I sounded like the more annoying kind of summer camp counselor, I suggested we get some fresh air. The Joshua Tree National Monument was supposed to be a great place to hike.

There was some confusion. After I explained to Sebastian that "monument" didn't, in this case, mean any kind of marble statue or pillar or many-staired building, but just a lot of desert to wander around in, he looked at me as though I were mad and asked why anyone would go, then. (He was also disappointed at there not being a cathedral in Cathedral City. Actually, so am I. Kind of.) Mia said she wasn't really a hiking sort of person either.

So Mark and I drove out, with a packed lunch we had gotten from the hotel and a ton of water. Mark started by complaining about all the water, and the fact that he was going to have to carry half of it, but I told him if he collapsed from heat stroke and dehydration that he'd just have to wait for rescue by the park rangers because I wasn't going to try dragging him. He didn't shut up till he was through his second bottle. He wore long pants, as usual, having some unlikely ideas about snakes being more frisky in hot weather, and I took my black paper parasol.

In general we had a very enjoyable day. Of course it was hotter than hell, but after the fuss the day before it was nice to have nothing to deal with that was more supernatural than Mark's sunburned ears. (There's always somewhere he forgets to put sunscreen. Last time we went to the beach it was the backs of his hands, and at Disneyland he lost his hat after 20 minutes and burned his scalp where his hair parts.)

We got very solemn about the beauty of the desert, and talked about the notion of Nature-as-the-sublime in Romantic literature. I did, anyway, and Mark said something about "A Sentimental Journey" which was meant to be sarcastic and might have succeeded if I'd minded being compared to Laurence Sterne. Which I don't. And he took lots of doubtless very fine photos, and I laughed at the silly positions he assumed to take them. There was one which involved standing on one foot leaning over a boulder and I nearly fell down myself, I was shaking so hard.

And we got lost driving back. Which meant that we got a little cranky with each other, but ended up being a good thing because we got to see the windmill field after dark. You wouldn't believe the view, with the sun setting behind you, and the stars coming out above, and in front of you and to the side the pale blue lights flashing to warn passing planes, and in a linee off in the distance the thousand thousand orange and red lights of the desert cities. Although I'm still not sure how we got that far west...

There are a million chi-chi restaurants in the desert, though a lot of them close down for the summer. The one we went to (obviously Mark and I changed first) had dramatic gouts of flame welling up at strategic intervals from the patio tile (which probably would've been niftier in the winter) and a big rock-filled fountain inside the restaurant. The appetizers came out on a big gilded banana leaf. Well, on a plate made to look like...you probably got that. Sebastian and Mia were sort of dragging around, and barely touched their dinners. The weather wasn't agreeing with them, and even worse was the contrast between the real climate and all the unnatural landscaping. Pansies and peonies planted for less than a week before they wilted, and were replaced by new, fresh flowers. It is kind of subliminally upsetting: temperate flowers in a heat that makes your face numb. It just feels wrong, around the edges of reality.

And then, walking back to the hotel, we ran into Criseyde Keats. She was accompanying some very, very drunk holidaying Germans and were headed for the next nearest bar. Criseyde, who was, for reasons known only to herself, dressed and illusioned-up as a Playboy Bunny, called out to me and Mark from across the street. (We probably wouldn't have recognized her otherwise...aside from not being a snake from the waist down, she'd changed her hair from auburn-with-green-streaks to blond and given herself a few cups sizes in the chest.) One of the drunks took offense at the familiar way she had her arm around Mark, and we had some difficulty getting away...especially as Criseyde couldn't decide whether she wanted us to join them or not (if she had decided she wanted us, I don't flatter myself that I would've been able to say no...or, indeed, to pay for my share of the tab by the end of the night). Finally she settled on a promise to visit us sometime soon, and went off swinging hips that she doesn't really have. The drunk Germans stumbled behind.

"That's it," said Mia. "We're leaving tomorrow morning. I didn't know you knew a lamia," she said to me, looking as though her opinion of me had been higher before that revelation.

"Ivy introduced us," Mark and I said at the same time. That was unanswerable, but Mia still had a snarky expression when we got back to the hotel, and Sebastian still looked a particular kind of thoughtful.

But as they got on the plane Sunday afternoon, Mia and I were teary and we all hugged and made vague promises to keep in touch. "I'm so glad you came. It was a dreadful idea but you two made it better," said Mia, Sebastian's arms wrapped around her shoulders. I'm not sure this was really true, but it was a nice thing for her to say and allowed us all to leave as friends.

I think maybe in some cases it's easier to stay friends at a distance. In the future I'll remember this, or at the very least think out the plans for a visit more thoroughly beforehand. Not that I had a bad time, myself. But now I've got to prepare myself for Criseyde coming by, at some date and time unspecified. I'd better get out some aspirin.

I don't usually start writing a post this early (usually...I've only been doing this for three days now), but I'm kind of tired tonight. Partly with too much sun, during the drive, and partly from stress.

We picked up Mia and Sebastian as planned. Well, mainly as planned. Actually Mark and I thought we'd be late, since we both managed to pack all our notebooks and film and books and so on, and neglected to remember his toothbrush and my purse. And then we realized that I didn't have my passport in my purse. It's a real pain to get in and out of Saxesby Airfield without one, it being technically not U.S. soil...which is a whole thing, and I don't want to get into it right now, but the point was Mark and I had to spend twenty-five minutes looking for the passport when we were already late.

But as it turned out, their plane was running late too, so we hung around and ate stale candy canes and wandered through the Christmas trees which were being trimmed. (Why this charter airfield also has a Christmas tree farm on one side is another thing that would take a while to explain. I'll get around to it sometime.) It was very nice. A little bright out, but the pine trees smelled wonderful in the heat...and it wasn't as if there's anything else to do in Banning. It's all fast food and Motel 6s and little Mexican restaurants with signs advertising "camarones y mariscos" despite being worringly far inland and in a desert.

(Although there is a sign I love, as you drive in east on the 10. It's on a billboard put up by the Banning Chamber of Commerce and underneath a cartoon of the state of California and a weird little covered wagon--why?--it says: "Welcome to Banning. We have what you need." Isn't that wonderful and ominous?)

Anyway, after about forty-five minutes the plane arrived, Sebastian and Mia got off, and we all got underway. Of course, Sebastian has no notion of packing light, and there wasn't a ton of room in my trunk...I have an old VW Bug...but we prodded and shifted a bit and Mark held his backpack on his knees.

"Now," I said before we left, "should Sebastian be in shotgun instead of Mark? I mean, I know you two like to hold hands or whatever, but didn't you say you get motion sickness?"

"It's not exactly motion sickness," said Mia.

"I'm just not over-fond of cars. I thought at the first I should never find myself accustomed to being hurtled along at such a speed, and with so little between myself and death, but use has bred some easiness. I'll be fine."

And he was, for a ways, till we got near Cabazon, and he started sitting up very straight and looking directly ahead of him and all the other things you do when you're trying not to toss your cookies. It was good timing, though, because we got to stop at the dinosaurs.

We went into the diner, first. I remembered that they had good pie, having been there with my father as a kid. It wasn't very busy this afternoon. We sat down in a booth and the waitress looked around after a minute and said "Oh. You want coffee."

None of us did. This seemed to be the wrong answer, because she compressed her lips, and when Sebastian asked for hot chocolate she gave him a funny look. (Granted, he is about 25 and a guy, but they drank it sort of medicinally back in his day) Mia didn't want anything; I got a fat slice of coconut-cream pie, and Mark, once he noticed they were on the menu, had to have a buffalo burger. The waitress asked him twice if he wanted onion, and then forgot it when she brought the order.

Mia and I exchanged a look. Mark seemed oblivious (he was staring at the glass case of silver belt buckles for sale), and I thought it would never occur to Sebastian that an underling might give intentionally bad service, but she and I were steamed. And when Mia asked for a piece of pie to go--it was good pie--the waitress repeated "to go" and then brought it over on a plate. There being nothing else to do, we asked for a box, left a decent tip by way of heaping coals of fire on her head, and went outside.

There were a fair number of kids running around the dinosaurs, and parents with cameras backing up to try to get the big EAT sign over the diner in the same frame as the tyrannosaurus rex. There are metal stairs with railings that go up into the dinos, so you can look out and down, and there's a gift shop near the brontosaurus that sells "fossils" and informational booklets and so on. As I was sitting on the brontosaurus's tail, Sebastian came over and watched with me as Mark took Mia's picture in various silly poses.

"I collect I ought not to have refused the coffee."

I looked up in some surprise. "I thought you didn't notice. I think probably that waitress is just used to truck drivers and is...well, a little hostile."

"Because we look rich?"

I nodded. "Ha," I added, in reference to Mark and myself.

"Mia thought it was because we're St. Ias."

"What?" The St. Ia family isn't exactly beloved in its native Cornwall, having spent much of the last five centuries in piracy, smuggling, and god-knows-what. Mia spent a lot of her childhood at the old Abbey manor, and, like all the St. Ia kids, had to deal with a certain amount of crap from the people in the village below. But: "How could that waitress possibly know that?"

"She could not. But Mia has a great deal of sensibility on that point."

"Huh," I said. My opinion of Sebastian's own sense was improving.

When we got back in the car this time, he was in front. This seemed to work better, and I was just reflecting on what a euphonious place-name "Indian Wells" is, when Sebastian started having some kind of panic attack.

"What's wrong?"

"Sweetheart? What is it?"

He was breathing hard, staring out the window with wide glassy eyes. There was nothing for him to be looking at, just the desert and the billboards and, as the road went up a bit, the big white windmills that cover the hills to the left and the plain to the right. We were in the middle-left lane, so I couldn't pull over, and I put my hand out to his neck to try to calm him...

...and found myself in the landscape of a nightmare. Dry, alien hills shone with merciless light and heat, which somehow did not touch me. There was writing floating all around, in different sizes and shapes and lurid colors, meaningless collections of words that nonetheless demanded attention. In the distance, but bearing closer, skeleton shapes twirled their enormous arms. And all around me was the keening wail of incomprehensible music...

I took my hand away and reached forward, shakily, to turn off the CD player. "I don't think the Radiohead is helping." With extreme, mostly unnecessary care, I managed to shift three lanes to the right, pulled over on the shoulder, and cursed softly under my breath. If I was going to keep getting telepathic flashes like that, I was damn well going to stop meditating.

After that, I let Mark drive the last twenty miles or so to Palm Springs. Sebastian and I sat in the back and, as we started feeling better, made weak Don Quixote jokes. But I'm still feeling a bit wrung out, and my eyes are starting to burn, so I'd better leave off for tonight. It's a very nice hotel, and Mark has already stolen one of the pillows from my bed.

Feeling obscurely guilty over having nothing to do but read, work on my evocation, and read Saki, I called Ivy and, at her suggestion, started organizing and compiling her various address and telephone books. This turned out to be extremely interesting, if somewhat embarrassing when I had to check some of the older numbers. ("Hello?" "Hi, is this the headquarters for the Knights Templar in Chicago?" "Is this the what?" "Nevermind. Sorry.") While I had three address books on my lap, seven more in a circle around me on the floor, and the phone balanced on my knee, my cell rang from the couch arm, across the room. I looked piteously at Mark and he sighed, put down the notebook he was looking at, got up and brought it over.

It was Miyuki St. Ia, who wanted to know if we wanted to go out to Palm Springs with her and her husband Sebastian. "I've been trying to reach you on your ground line, but it's been all tied up," she said with a hint of reproach. Since she was calling from London, I suppose she had a right to be reproachful. "Sebastian is getting a bit...culture-lagged again, so I thought we might go out and a have a minibreak in the desert." She'd already made the reservations at the hotel. Mark and I are going to drive out to Banning tomorrow to meet their charter, and then we'll all drive the rest of the way east so we can see the dinosaurs and the windmills and so on.

It should be interesting. Sebastian and Mia are distant friends of Mark's and mine. No, I am not name-dropping, here. We don't see them very often, but I sort of think kindly of them at intervals, and when I see their names or photos in Town and Country or wherever I smile and take notice. We met them shortly after Ivy scooped us up into her life, and shared a plane ride from Heathrow to LAX with her direction to "be good and play quietly" disconcerting us all equally. As I'm sure it was intended to.

They're both more than a little intimidated by Ivy. And at the time, Mark and I were pretty intimidated by the fact that they were intimidated, so it was kind of awkward. We all thawed a bit when we started talking about Japanese literature and English history; Mia's obsessed with the works of the ladies of the Japanese court of the 10th and 11th centuries (The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogan, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji, and so on), and Sebastian is from early 1700s England and obviously therefore has a unique perspective.

In a weird way, knowing that about him and the little bit I had learned about the St. Ia family made me a lot more comfortable talking to them than I think I ever would have been otherwise. I guess because it gave them more dimension. Really they're both very sweet and a little at loose ends.

St. Ias usually have to do something (and it's usually something illegal) with their time in order to be considered adults. But after it happened, I guess Mia's parents considered that travelling back in time to meet and fall in love with a remote ancestor, and then bringing him to your time and marrying him, all counted as sufficient something. So they've got a pretty lavish allowance, and spend it jet-setting and whatnot. But they don't always seem to know what to do with their time. Mia informed me today that Sebastian is Writing A Book.

"He works on it every afternoon of the week, after he gets up and has his glass of wine."

"What kind of a book is it?"

"It's...well, it does keep changing. Right now it's a rather noir-ish thing set in Hollywood."

"Set in..? Why the hell doesn't he do a historical novel?"

"Because he's trying to branch out." She sounded indignant, so I judged I'd better just "Oh," and agree to meet their plane at two tomorrow. Well, today, actually.

And considering I'll have to get up in the morning, I'd better pack tonight. So I should probably just post this and go to bed. I wonder which parasol I should take.

This is very exciting. I've been thinking about this website for so long that making this first entry feels like a Bold New Step. Into what..? I don't know. A time, or space, or place, or state of being, where Tessa actually does the things she intends to do.

Of course, already, looking at the previous paragraph, I can tell that in a few months I'll be thinking, "What pointless silly blather! Why didn't I wait till I had something real to write?" A sense of what I'm doing when I write is always escaping from me. And then I find it again and have to sew it painfully back onto my feet, like Peter Pan's shadow.

But I'm not going to let that bother me right now. At least, not much. Avaunt, shade of my future self! (Wait...is that how you spell "avaunt"? It doesn't seem to be in my paperback dictionary, and of course spellcheck doesn't like it. "Spellcheck" itself is a fun word...it would do interesting things to many lesser stories of an H.P. Lovecraft vein to have a calm, cool voice speaking out up out of nowhere, mid-ritual, to say, "The dark sands of Nq'tchal appear to be in an improper configuration for the last incantation. Do you want to (a)correct incantation, (b)cancel ritual, or (c)ignore and allow ingress to the Devourer of Souls?" Hm. Where was I?)

Anyway, I've got some rum and ginger ale, and Mark's just answering the door for the Chinese food, and for dessert there are these little doughnut-shaped peaches I've developed an addiction to. (Mark will inevitably cut his up and dump about half a pint of heavy cream all over the slices, but I'll probably forgive him as long as he doesn't try it with mine) School is still weeks away, and I have nothing to do tomorrow but read Saki, work on my evocation, and write. So why should I need something momentous to say in my own diary?