(no subject)

Have just mangled more oranges for more orange sorbet tonight, as emperor is coming round for dinner.
Recently I have been playing a lot of Dungeon Siege, as has G. We're totally hooked. Great skills system, and so _beautiful_. The game designers seem to have had a big thing about spiders, though - the game is full of them! Spiders in ruins, spiders in caves, even enormous ice spiders in the northern wastes. I bet there's going to be a fiery section later on containing fire spiders, or something. Re fantasy games, can anyone think where the convention of having health and mana represented by red and blue bars/globes/whatever respectively first appeared? I know it's in Diablo, but was it established before that? Just curious. Red to represent health is perhaps obvious (blood), but why should mana be intrinsically blue? Why not yellow or white sometimes? Anyway.
I wrote again to the guy at OUP about my book proposal, and he said all the stuff I sent him is currently being reviewed by two people who are quite enthusiastic about my work, and who should respond by the end of the year. So it may all take a while to be sorted, but at least I know what's going on now, and it seems quite hopeful. Which is good, because I was feeling very down about not having heard anything at the weekend, and about the OU job which I've also not heard anything back about, and about other things. G and I had a big row on Friday night and were both quite traumatized by it on Saturday (hence my miserable last post), but sorted things out on Saturday evening, I think. Communication was achieved in the end. It could perhaps have been achieved less traumatically, but at least it was achieved. I do love you, G!