Himself set out on the train today for Ottawa, where he intends to do some legal research at the Mother House of the Judge Advocate General of the Canadian Forces. He won't be back until Sunday, so I have the house to myself for a few days.

But my main concern is the book.

It is *so* not a good book, but the best I can do with it is make it a little less bad. The author has spent his adult life writing about war and armies, especially the Canadian Army but he's not picky. He's prolific, with some 14 works in print right now, but he obviously went native at some early point so every paragraph is larded with staff-speak and soldiers' jargon. After only a week of working with this book again, I'm already heartily sick of troops "engaging" insurgents with mortar fire, enemy forces being "attrited" by air strikes, and fighters "exfiltrating" the area of operations. His primary sources are the Daily Situation Reports in which every manoeuvre unit records the minutiae of life in their grid square, and they are overwhelmingly written in the passive voice. So the author does the same, to the great detriment of the story; when everything is passive, it's a tad difficult to tell who does what and with which and to whom. Which, as we all know, is the very essence of Story.

But, as my dear old sergeant used to say, it's clean work and I don't have to do it at night if I don't want to.

Speaking of clean work, with Himself out of the house, I guess I can wash the kitchen floor any old time.