how could you use a poor maiden so?

I'm thinking that maybe this weekend I will actually have a really excellent night's sleep. This I am looking forward to.

So: I have all this stuff to do tonight, including a) some baking, b) cleaning the bedroom, and b) NaNoing. Ergo, I am drinking coffee. I don't particularly like coffee, but I need to stay up tonight, and today at work I was feeling terribly bleary again: especially as I had a grand total of one gorram customer. *facepalm* At least there were truffles to compensate. (TRUFFLES! AT MY REGISTER!) But yes: Stuff must be done, ergo, coffee + me. I want to like coffee. It's very cosy. And this is gingerbread coffee, and I very nearly like it, but that bitter undertone keeps throwing me off. It is also now cold (bleaaaaah!), but I mean to finish the cup. Eventually. (You know, maybe whipped cream and, like, cinnamon would make this more awesome.) 

I should have been cleaning my bedroom, but I did this instead: got sucked into a glorious whirlwind of traditional ballads. "Reynardine" is traditionally about either your average everyday stalker luring some girl to his castle (castle?), or it's about a werefox (hee!), or a werewolf, and it was suggested to me as a possible Vampire Ballad. Well, turns out? There are actual legitimate vampire interpretations of this ballad. I could dance. And then "The Unquiet Grave" is pretty fabulous, too, especially the versions where the lyrics are a little more menacing. Solas' version is too -- plantive? -- and not scary enough, I think. Her lover rises from the grave, you guys. And he's all "if you kiss my clay-cold lips, your time will not be long". Totally. a. vampire. Like, I can hear him saying this with a dangerous little smirk on his face and everything. I am now composing a new version that may reference vampires a little more clearly. ....Annnnd something made me decide that the innocent-enough "Early One Morning" is totally a bowdlerised version of a now-lost ballad in which the singer's lover has become a vampire, and either abandoned her so as not to eat her (CHAGRINNNNNNN!), or ... he's the non-vegetarian sort, and she is either dying or very very worried. I know how there is absolutely no reason for me to connect this ballad to vampires ... ever ... and especially not James Marsters ... oh dear, my knees get all wobbly when he sings it. Dear me. There is a tremendous deficit in instances in which James Marsters sings traditional ballads, let me tell you. 

Also? Mr Caruthers' past is kind of sordid. Eep. Poor bloke. No wonder he's so anti-social and completely unwilling to let on that he's in love with Evangeline.