This has been a good day. I’ll say it openly, knowing it’s entirely contrary to my idiom, and throwing myself open completely to all kinds of joshing from commenters.

The air conditioning guy came today to do the warranty work. I had to take the afternoon off work to be here.

The first pleasant surprise was that, instead of just replacing the condenser (as I’m sure the woman on the phone said) he replaced the whole unit.

The second pleasant surprise was that he asked for no more than the regular deductible in payment. The woman on the phone had said there’d be extra charges for parts.

Oh, I expect the other shoe will drop in a couple days, and some kind of horrendous bill will hit me like a cosh to the back of the head, but for today life is good.

More snippets from The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III:

From a letter to Mary Van Deusen, July 7, 1955:

Don’t let anyone bully you into avoiding sentences with a preposition at the end! It’s an arbitrary rule that most great writers took no notice of. The Authorized Version and E. Burke thought a preposition a very good word to end with. So there!

From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, Sept. 8, 1956:

…(that journalists can be saved is a doctrine, if not contrary to, yet certainly above, reason!).

From a letter to Martin Kilmer, Jan. 22, 1957

The (Narnia) books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get into Aslan’s country in the end—in her own way.

From a letter to Clyde S. Kilby, Feb. 10, 1957:

The children (in Till We Have Faces) made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do.

From a letter to Francis Warner, July 15, 1959:

So many people, when they begin ‘research’, lose all desire, and presently all power, of writing clear, sharp, and unambiguous English. Hold onto your finite transitive verb, your concrete nouns, and the muscles of language (but, through, for, because etc.).

A good weekend to all of you.