Kage Baker loved to travel, but she loved coming home. We always took special routes on a homeward jaunt, so she could pre-select the passing scenery. That first glimpse of home when you’ve been on a the road awhile is magic, and can be made more magical still by a careful run up. It usually involved going through somewhere where a chocolate malted – not merely a milk shake! – could be procured as sustenance for the final leg.

Me, I have been travelling hither and yon for the past few days. The scenery has been grand; I have been well-supplied with necessities like Good N’Plenties.  My metaphysical journey has ranged from Depression-era Alabama  (ah, the charms of Atticus Finch!) to the Darwin estates at Down. There have been stops at collapsed cellars in San Francisco’s Chinatown, on the crumbling continental edge below the Sutro Estate, in the scorched lees of hundreds of stews, tenements and rich men’s pleasaunces throughout the post-earthquake City. I’ve overnighted in city parks, and breakfasted with the refugees on pancakes made on a salvaged restaurant’s iron stove.

I’ve been skipping from chromosome to chromosome like Eliza on the ice floes. Did you know you can repair damaged mouse genes with the human equivalent genes? (They are identical.) One could presumably therefore repair human genes with spare parts from mice – God He knows there enough damaged humans and surplus mice around – but no one has had the guts or backing to try it yet. If I had a parent with Parkinson’s or a child with hemophilia, I’d be raising hell about that.

I’ve been exploring the surface of Mars. I’ve been considering real estate ventures on the Moon. I’ve learned that lunar dust smells like gunpowder, that grizzlies can mutate into and out of polar bear-hood at will (and are doing so), and that squids are colour-blind. That is, their eyes are. Oh, and cuttlefish have pupils shaped like rick-rack.

So today I am warming up my engines again. A lovely trip into the quiet and richness of the printed word has been had, and now I am back – full of energy, over-flowing with wonders, ready to pontificate and spin yarns. And last night I dreamed that Kage kicked me in the ass and told me to get back to work: really, I felt the bed shake! So I’m motivated as all get out.

See you tomorrow, Dear Readers. Maybe we will talk about Lunar caves, or the carbon dioxide cycle of the Martian poles, or red-haired tree rats. Left-handed moths? There is just no end of the marvels out there, I tell you.