Kage Baker always associated her migraines with hot weather – late July and August, when all of California’s hills were covered with either asphalt you could fry an egg on; or with miles of the wild oats that have covered the land since the Spaniards rode through on their well-fed horses. Weather where heat haze filled the Basin. Weather where the wavering heat above the roads patched them with a series of auroras and puddles shimmering in illusion.

Hot times, you know? Popsicle and gin and tonic days, ice cream for dinner nights – unless her brain went on the fritz and the tsunami of migraine rolled over like an evil spell, changing her world behind itself into something rich and strange … and painful as hell. She hated those times. Seeing the world in a new palette of quivering inhuman colours was not worth feeling like her brain was hatching out of her head.

If it had, she’d have cheered its escape and held the door for it, as long as the pain stopped.

It’s not hot, not yet. Summer this year started with rain,and a dawn wind straight out of some Paradise of cut grass and roses. It’s still not really hot, and the June gloom keeps faithfully creeping back at night to cool whaevert fever the hills produce. But then Kage’s certainty that migraines only happened in hot weather was never true, not even for her. I think those were just the ones she remembered most intensely – a lot of them happened at Faire, which was NO place to suffer a migraine.

I am not sleeping well at nights right now; except that I managed to sleep through most of the times Kimberly needed my help with Ray last night. So when I actually made the call for assisting Ray in the eredawn this morning, I was wracked with guilt – and by the time I made it back to bed, the edges of the world were dissolving in migraine-infused acid.

Also, the garbage disposal croaked it this afternoon. Tomorrow must be given over to re-arranging the kitchen enough to get a plumber in to replace it. That’s just a vile perfection of a migraine accompaniment.

Still, we have a sort of battle plan for the damned disposal. And the migraine is mostly gone. But I got no writing done. I dreamed about it, mind you – and as soon as I filter out the truly bizarre things (images of stilt-legged cats wearing boxes as tunics, for instance, teeter-tottering around on their furry toes) I will force wring some sort of plot out of it all. I’ll be back on point tomorrow, Dear Readers.

In the meantime, imagine Neith sleeping uneasily in a bower near the bee hives. And poor Rosemary lying stark staring awake, on the alert for fingers clawing at her windows …

Worse problems than I’ve got. Thank you, all the gods!