Onward and upward

Unexpected pleasure today, as I got to spend a couple of hours at a local climbing gym, training with our son. I managed to get up some pitifully easy routes, while I belayed him on his training laps on the sixty foot long roof routes. The gym wasn't crowded, they had good world music playing, and we had a good session.
On a whim, I went running later in the evening with my beloved spouse, and went to bed well-exercised, too tired to really get much traction in the strange Iris Murdoch novel I've begun, Message to the Planet. This work was published in 1989, and is not, thus far, as interesting as some of her earlier novels.
My very last bit of Eliot was consumed recently, a weird little novella called The Lifted Veil; odd, in that I learned Eliot was interested in the occult at some point. I have to wonder why all those fine rational women writers, like Eliot, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen, would bother to write ghost stories and the like.