Two good things

I have finally forgiven my local bookshop for refusing to put my book on the shelves on the grounds that I wasn’t famous enough.  After Amazonfail, I decided that I would swallow my hurt pride and go and buy my books at my local bookshop anyway.  But I carried on doing it a bit begrudgingly, with a sort of subconscious grumble every time I came through the door.

However, this Tuesday I went into town to go to the library, couldn’t find anything at all relevant to Gandharvas and Apsaras, either celestial or historical, so I thought I’d check the bookshop on the way home.  There weren’t many people in the shop on a rainy Tuesday lunchtime, so when I asked one of the people behind the desk where I might find something, he accompanied me up the two flights of stairs (I didn’t even know the shop had that extra third floor!), looked for me in the Religion and Folklore sections, was most distressed not to find anything, had a sudden brainwave and found the Mahabharata and Upanishads in the Poetry section, and then he put them on a table next to a window, brought me a chair and a pot of coffee on a tray, and left me sitting looking out over the High Street with a pile of books and not a single implication that I might want to pay for anything.

Of course, I bought them both, and a book about the Gnostic gospels which I happened to see in passing.  But all the same, I can’t possibly continue to grumble about a shop that brought me free coffee and left me alone to read enough of Anne Rice’s book about her journey back to her faith to decide that perhaps I didn’t need to buy that after all.

Another good thing that I discovered yesterday (good for those of us with WordPress blogs anyway) was a WP plugin wordcounter.  This displays your wordcount discreetly  in the sidebar of your WP blog, and it means that you can update your daily wordcount for your own benefit without annoying your friends by posting about it every single day.

You can find that here Dave’s Whizmatronic Widgulating Calibrational Scribometer if you’re interested 🙂