Paksworld

Not that I’m jittery or anything…just because the US edition of Oath of Fealty will hit the stores in five days…but I started thinking about fives.  Five bits of wisdom about fives that I’ve accumulated over the years:

1.  Five hours of sleep a night is not enough once you’re over forty.

2. Five pennies make a nickel, but if you’re going to save coins, save bigger ones: five Susan B. Anthony dollars  is five dollars, which will actually buy something.  And it’s just as hard to lean over and pick up that penny as it is to pick up the dollar.

3.  Flowers with five petals create more different shapes than flowers with four…for no reason I can see, but they do.

4.  A musical interval of a fifth is easy to sing.  Not so a sixth.  For me, anyway.

5.   Five pages of writing usually takes me less than two hours, but the next five pages will take twice as long.

I have other bits of wisdom about fives (and other numbers) that I’ve accumulated (such as “Two times five fried oysters is always OK, but somewhere between 11 and 15 I wonder if I really want another–and the answer is No, don’t eat it.”) but there’s no reason you should suffer through that.

The blog entry for the UK Orbit site is almost-nearly-completely finished (letting it sit before a final check for typos and flow) and is called “Two-Trick Pony.”    I’ll send it off today, before my trip to College Station tomorrow (leaving at 7 am–chances are you won’t get a blog entry here for March 12; I’ll be back Saturday.)

Stealing a line from it, to explain (in this case) why it seems to be taking forever for next Tuesday to come….my husband said once, when I was struggling with a book and worried that maybe I’d never finish another one, “More than one is an infinite number.  You’ve already finished three books, that’s more than one, so there’s no limit.”   In the present case…five is still more than one, and it can feel infinitely large when what we want is over there, and not over here.   (It can also feel infinitely small when what you don’t want is looming “only” five days away.)