in my dreams i'm dying all the time

Since I'm leaving for Iowa on Wednesday, I'm in a frenzy of preparations - some obvious, some less so. The obvious ones involved doing laundry, packing (I know, who would have guessed I would have packed today?), picking up a prescription, eating some of my leftovers (including whipping up an entirely impromptu mushroom/arugula/goat cheese scramble, which was way tastier than anything else I could make with a random hodgepodge of leftovers). And I also wrote three pages or so of Nick and Ellie; I was really hating what I was writing and thought it was all drivel, and so stopped, but when I reread it later I thought it was great - sometimes I hate the creative process.

But I spent the last six hours or so reading and taking notes from two different books about the East India Company - one was the rest of that book about London warehouse workers that I was so enamored with a few nights ago, and another was called "Glorious Sahibs", which seemed to be a rather romanticized account of a few British players in India during the Regency/Georgian era. It was really interesting and a quick read, but since he didn't cite sources and had a tone that sometimes verged on trashy sensationalism (if you can sensationalize the diplomatic dealings of the East India Company vs. the Marathas, Sikhs, Mughals, Mysore, Hyderabad, etc.), I think I need to treat it as an interesting set of anecdotes and read more if there are things I want to verify.

This may not have been strictly necessary, but I need to firm up my grasp on what Nick might have been up to while he was in India all those years, and now was as good a time as ever. This also means I can take these books back to the library tomorrow and get two more that my research turned up as contenders of interest - nothing like a little light reading about the East India Company on the plane, right? But now, I really should go to bed if I have any hope of going down to Stanford, going to the post office, and running other necessary errands before Iowa. Goodnight!