Pretty good weekend. My big project Saturday was to take a plane to the tops of a couple doors. The bedroom doors in my house haven’t closed properly since I’ve been here. I suspect it has to do with their being painted at some time in the past, while most of the woodwork in the place is original finish (and beautiful). I, being me, was willing to live with it, but my renter asked to get it fixed, and I could hardly deny the justice of that request. It was a little more work than I expected, and I never got his door completely right. I’ll have to take it off the hinges to do that. Maybe one day. For now, both doors will close and latch, which is a major improvement.

Sunday was a Viking occasion, at the annual Danish Day at Danebo Hall in Minneapolis. Because of weather we had to set up inside the building, which cramped our style a bit. Our combat was a scheduled portion of the program, so we only got one set of three fights in (it was just Ragnar and me, and I got one kill, which is as good as it gets for me). I sold a total of four books, two of them to members of our own group.

I also finished The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III, another accomplishment not to be sneezed at, even in allergy season. Here’s a few more excerpts, which attentive readers will recognize as a pretty good sign that I’m in a vegetative mental state today:

From a letter to Joan Lancaster, Aug. 11, 1959:

I’m all for the Gauls myself and I hate all conquerors. But I never knew a woman who was not all for Caesar—just as they were in his life-time.

From a letter to Father Richard Ginder, Aug. 18, 1960:

I wonder do we blame T.V. and the Comics too much? Was not a certain sort of boy in a certain sort of home wasting his time just as badly in other ways before they were invented? It annoys me when parents who read nothing but the newspapers themselves—i.e. nothing but lies, libels, poppycock, propaganda, and pornography—complain of their children reading the Comics! Upon my soul I think the children’s diet is healthier than their parents’.

From a letter to Mrs. R. E. Herman, Oct. 10, 1960:

The queer thing is that this horror of the [mentally] deficient is quite modern. Our ancestors don’t seem to have felt it at all. On this, as on many other subjects, we have grown odiously and wickedly ‘refined’.

From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, July 31, 1962:

Yes, it is strange that anyone should dislike cats. But cats themselves are the worst offenders in this respect. They very seldom seem to like one another.

That’s all for tonight. Now scroll down and watch the Sissel clip again.