Tales From An Alternate Reality

Some of you may already know what I'm referring to here. We're watching Survivor for the first time in about 25 years, and the current season on Fiji features a lot of bats— sizeable ones that are regularly out during the day. Y.I.K.E.S. Also (if I'm interpreting early footage correctly) flying fish and small sharks. \o?

The show has really changed since we last watched it. Lots of new twists and turns (which is one of the things that keeps Survivor fresh), and I see that the challenges have been adapted so that most of them balance speed and strength with puzzles/cooperative strategy and other things that women are more traditionally good at. It truly takes a team to win a challenge, and broadens the types of players that are useful to the team in the early game. But OTOH, there are a lot more "luxuries" as well. Flint rewards, instead of teams depending solely on their own fire-making abilities. Eyeglasses no longer appear to be something you have to choose as your single bonus item (pre-Lasik, I would have had to choose them over sunblock, which I think also used to be a bonus item). A machete as part of a reward, useful for building shelters as well as hacking into coconuts. A shelter-building kit! OTOH, I'm glad people aren't being devoured by bugs like poor Colleen in season 1, who got permanent scars from the experience. And that there are still people who don't seem to understand that there's an early game, a mid-game, and an end-game, and the strategies are all different. People bork themselves over without even realizing it.

Speaking of borking, moving back into our house has been a Limbo-land extravaganza. ( Read more... )

In Idol news, we're down to the Top 10, and I still desperately need your votes! Things are horribly quiet this week (post-election blues), and no one seems to be reading or voting. The poll is HERE, with links to all the stories. Please take a moment to vote for me and any of your other favorites!

Now, back to packing. And nailbiting. This week is going to be a nightmare, and I took my time off LAST week, so... *flails* :O

Last year's New Year's Eve was probably the worst ever—our house had burned, we were staying in a hotel, and I'd spent hours in the house's toxic environment trying to remove everything valuable and portable before thieves got the chance. I was tired and disoriented, and I don't know if I was even aware it was New Year's Eve until it got late and fireworks started going off. None of it seemed real.

This year, I spent the evening with our meager supply of flashlights and a single Dollar Tree candle, listening to the storm raging outside our rental house and hoping the power wouldn't go out. Our house was lucky that night, but the experience provided a dry run for the following weekend (a week ago), which featured flickering lights, and ferocious winds screaming over the roof so loudly that I was Googling "inland hurricane" just as we lost power. I have only ever heard that kind of wind during hurricane scenes in movies and TV shows! Scary. We don't have any large trees near this rental house, though there are quite a few next to our actual house. I find myself thinking about these kinds of things more and more often, as weather all over the world grows more extreme.

The power was out for 10 hours overnight, which was not the worst time of day except that without the electric blanket, it was too cold to sleep. The rain and wind were especially brutal here around Sacramento, so losing power wasn't surprising. We had a 17-hour outage in 2021, also due to a storm, and that was a wake-up call. Our municipal power company is really good and conscientious, so prior to 2021, if we lost power it was usually restored within a few hours. The intensity and frequency of these winter storms has changed all that, and now we need to think about it more seriously.

My sister who lives near Portland goes through this every year, and they're still not prepared. But one thing they DO have, which HalfshellHusband wants to remove when we rebuild our own house, is a wood-burning fireplace. They spent a WEEK huddled around it during an outage a few years back, a total godsend since outside temps were near or below freezing. We will have a gas-fueled fireplace going forward, which I can't see ever being useful in troublesome conditions.

This is what life has come to now. People living in the mountains or other remote areas often have wood stoves for heat, which is exactly what you'd want during a prolonged outage. Without power, your furnace and space heaters (and even pellet stove) won't run, and your range and microwave won't work. Wood stoves help with both problems, which just... we imagine we're living in a modern age, and then Mother Nature smites us for our hubris. \o? :(

Our storms have dumped a LOT of rain on California, endlessly. By the time it (hopefully?) clears up for a few days, I will have biked outside ONE TIME in the last 4 weeks. Ugh. Biking on a track stand in the garage is better than nothing, but when it goes on this long, I lose a lot of conditioning. This is also true during long heat spells in the summer. But it means that I watched a lot of great streaming TV this year, all on Netflix:

( All the TV )

And there's so much more in my Netflix list to possibly try out during the upcoming months of continued garage-biking. Which I hope will not be a thing, but let's not kid ourselves. :O

I don't know why I'm having such a hard time getting back into the swing of reading and posting. I guess the doseage for my anti-depressants just isn't quite high enough to cope with the fallout of long-term COVID-isolation depression on top of the ongoing chemical depression? I can't seem to quite escape this funk, and my follow-through has been lousy for more than a year now. :(

So, there's been a lot of "enduring." Waiting to be able to make plans of any kind, and to travel around more freely. Waiting even to get out of the house for anything other than exercise and errands! Waiting for an end to this Covidternity...

We'd been wanting to go north to visit my family, and found that daunting because of unknowns Covid side-effects like, Will rest stops be open? and Will gas stations let us use their bathrooms? No, really--that used to be mainly about my small bladder, but now that HalfshellHusband takes diuretics twice a day, it's paramount. Sometimes he has to use the bathroom every 10-20 minutes once those meds have kicked in. :O

I got some helpful answers from friends who had recently traveled out on the highways, so we took a very sudden 10-day vacation in early July. It was SO good to finally be able to leave town (first time in 17 months) and see people! My family is mostly doing well, though my Mom is having some mobility issues. Her back and hips are sore, so she walks hunched over and limps when the pain is really bad. I think it's sometimes hard for her to even get around her house, which is really sad. She fell on her hip years ago, and had PT afterwards... but the PT created pain in her OTHER hip. So, all of that not only left her in a bad situation, it also made her leery of consulting the doctor about any other pain issues. :(

She's still very sharp at 95, but I worry about losing her if those frustrations wear her down. :(

My siblings are doing pretty well, and the cooler weather was nice. We were a week late for the really intense heat in the Pacific NW, and also missed some scorching days back home as well, which I always appreciate. Not nearly enough of them, though-- the forecast has been for 97-105^o heat for most of the last 3 weeks and most of the weeks ahead too. A blip of 93 tomorrow, but that's about it. I hate this climate SO much. :O

I DID have some unexpected luck early last week. There were some hazy clouds, which are almost unheard of here in the summer. Sometimes that makes no difference, and it gets just as hot. But on Monday, the temperature went up to 80 at the expected time, and then stayed there for several hours. I took a chance and went out riding, and it was the nicest ride I'd had in a month (since the last day of unexpected partial cloudiness). It was 82 when I finished, and so refreshing. Tuesday, it got up to 84 and then "stuck" there for awhile. But the wisps of clouds shifted almost as soon as I went outside, so after a great first half hour, it was a slog and about 89 when I finished.

Wednesday had more hazy clouds, and I was SO hopeful! After my morning meeting finished at 11:00, I stepped outside to see how hot it actually felt and discovered that it smelled like smoke outside. And that I could see smoke drifting down to ground level. UGGGGHHH. There was a forest fire to the Northeast that we weren't aware of, and the wind had shifted the smoke in our direction. Really unexpected, and the smoke only lasted a day, but the fire is really close to Paradise, which was destroyed a few years ago, and the people in that area have been through so much already. :(

It was slightly cooler Saturday, thanks to a little breeze, so I did some yard work after I finished riding. I hadn't done any weeding for over a month, thanks to 100-degree temps every weekend and/or being out of town, so it was good to make a dent there. I DID spend several hours in the last few weeks cleaning up fallen cherry-plums (from the backyard tree that is supposed to be non-fruiting), because I discovered that was what was making our yard so attractive to raccoons! Two hours of cleanup on one Friday, and a whole new batch of plums a week later that I cleaned up again. I never cared about raccoon visitors until they ate through some of our solar water-heating panels for the pool and cost us $1200. :(

I've been doing quite a bit of reading over the months, and we're watching some interesting TV series. We're really enjoying The Expanse, and looking forward to the final seasons of Lucifer and Bosch. Looking forward to seeing them, anyway--not to having any of those series end!

I was disappointed all over again when I finished watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in the garage before vacation. That was such a great series, and I so wish it hadn't been cancelled. And one of the things I liked most about it was the thoughtful, melancholy feeling so many of the episodes evoked. Not at all what you expect from the genre, and it just made the show all the more interesting. Now I'm watching Castle out there, and since we only have the first 2 seasons on DVD, I need to start digging through our home library soon. I wish we had something new and interesting to dive into, but my only options are rewatching something I've already seen. Why can't I get our Wifi signal to reach the garage so I can stream Netflix out there?!?

In conclusion, I hope all of you have been happier and more energetic than I've been feeling, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed toward climbing out of these doldrums...

I guess I hadn't realized quite how burned-out I was from the combination of my stressful work project and the last phases of Survivor Idol, not to mention the isolating effects of the pandemic. It's been a struggle to do much of anything, including posting to my journal and catching up on my friends-list, making phone calls and writing/answering emails, and taking care of 'paperwork' for various household issues. Plus finishing the sewing pile and some reorganization projects...

So much Blah, and so little that brings me anything like joy. I feel like I've been hanging on by my fingernails since last Fall, and even with something closer to normalcy on the horizon, it's too late. I ran out of "cope" months ago, and I don't know if it's coming back. :(

So, what HAVE I been doing in the last month? Well, I got my second COVID shot (the Pfizer vaccine). It made me pretty sick for about 24 hours, but I felt almost 100% again after that—except for having a really sore arm for almost a week. Our daughter visited for the first time since Thanksgiving, which was wonderful! She's doing well, and is working at her summer internship after finishing her first year of law school. She also has a boyfriend—her first—and we're thrilled that someone she likes has noticed how special she is. Her previous romantic experience from junior-high onward was pretty much the same as mine, and we'd really hoped it wouldn't be...

The weekend after that was Mother's Day, where I made it out for a walk with our son (not even a hike, as it was too hot), and worked on our taxes all weekend. E-filed the federal return, and drove to the main post office to mail the state return around 10 p.m. on the last possible day. Ugh. Although I was not alone... :O

I've been doing a lot of yard work, cleaning up weeds and trying to get things planted before the Season O' Scorch settles in. Final planting was last weekend (temps of 100, 105, and 100), i.e., later than I would have liked. Now I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I've bicycled a lot, sometimes in the garage when it's been too windy or too hot (which has been often). I think the season for the peppery smell and the cottonwood fluff on the bike path has come and gone. I haven't seen much new and interesting wildlife lately, except for a tiny egret (about 1/6th the size of an adult, which made it automatically cute) and the lump that refused to get off the pavement when I tried to shoo it and which turned out to be a small tortoise. \o?

We've been catching up on TV shows, and lamenting the effects of the last year. Many shows seem excessively "woke" (too much all at once, and if only they'd been farther along the spectrum to begin with), making it appear that they're all trying to tell the same story. Both The Good Doctor and New Amsterdam have become more like soap operas than dramas, which, hey—there are bunches of medical soap operas we're already not watching, because we don't like the genre! We're irked at the sudden shift in Bloom's character on New Amsterdam (in the world of the male gaze, all kinds of women seem to be randomly bisexual, whereas men never are). It doesn't feel as if the justification has been established, and rewatching House with The Boy, I can't help thinking about where things will go on that show and how much of a jolt that will be for him. The writing just doesn't support it. Also on New Amsterdam, Max seems to have become obnoxiously manic, and he's vying with Helen's niece for "most deserving of a smackdown."

I've finished a bunch of books lately, too: Real Life and Memorial (which have overlapping themes and which show how much alcoholic parents can screw their children up), Uncomfortable Conversations With A Black Man (recommended), Piranesi, Leave The World Behind (which aborts rather than finishes), and now, Neuromancer. Lots more to go after that!

I hope you've all been having a good Spring, and have been able to get vaccinated if you're eligible. I'm looking forward to being able to leave the prison of this house behind soon...

Well, so much for the 3-day weekend! That was over much too quickly. :(

I spent much of it trying to write my Idol story for this week. I started out with non-fiction in mind, then switched to a fairy-tale, then a comedic ghost story, and finally decided on a poem. I think 3 abandoned starts is probably a new record for me. :O The final story is here, with a link to the poll at the bottom. Please read and vote if you can, and soon—voting ends today! Thank you for your help!

Other stuff I thought I'd be doing this weekend? Yardwork did not happen (Sunday threatened rain all day, which was a lie, but that torpedoed bicycling outside too). I didn't get around to cleaning up my and HalfshellHusband's remaining office stuff (and his is from 11 years ago!). I didn't fix the broken Christmas lights that are keeping me from reshelving those boxes in the garage. All of those have been on my todo list for months! As well as cleaning up my in-home office (where stuff collects). I started to put some folders away in there, but there was no room in the filing cabinet for them, so I moved several years of tax returns out to the garage... also over-full, so I brought the ones we could get rid of back into the house to shred. I'm still shredding even now, because that takes forever. :O

One thing we DID do was watch Inception on streaming. I thought for sure HSH and I had seen it before, but I have no memory of any of it except for some tsunami-like thing crashing into a city street. Which, TBH, was probably included in the movie theater trailer back in the day. I just now checked to see what other movie we might have seen around that time that I confused with "Inception," and the answer is... nothing. We must have really, really intended to see it, to the point where I imagined we actually did. :O Okay, then! Terrific visuals, fascinating concept. Although it is essentially a "heist" film (as our son pointed out) and neither HSH nor I really like those, the multiple layers of false realities and ongoing themes regarding separating dreams from reality were all mesmerizing. So, thumbs up overall!

For regular TV, we have started The Expanse and are also watching House, M.D. with The Boy. "House" is a re-watch for HSH and me, but we've always thought our son would like it (the writing is fantastic). Now that The Boy consistently takes meds for his anxiety, he can actually watch it without the risk of getting pulled into a hypochondriac doom-spiral, which is nice. ;)

So, for those of you in the Midwest and East (and even parts of Texas!!), how are you holding up with all of the snow and/or extreme cold?

Now that the "Grow-it-yourself" Homeropus is out of the water, he's slowly shrinking:

 Today (6 days of shrinkage)                  Maximum size

But he's doing it in a strange way. I mean, doesn't he look a tad... fabulous... in the picture on the left? (Maybe you can't see it--some of the tips are now pointing upward). The water is evaporating much more quickly at the ends, so there are those twisty tentacle tips (with flair!) and then the fat, rubbery middle is almost unchanged. :O

I could swear there's a blue cartoon hat-wearing octopus in a similar pose, but the context just isn't coming to me... In any case, I've put a big ketchup-bottle lid between him and the plate now, to let air flow underneath. We'll see if that changes the shrinking pattern at all. :)

In other news, HalfshellHusband is still having a hard time. He's able to get around a little using his walker, though it's painful and tiring. But mainly, things hurt all day and all night (including while he's trying to sleep). It all just gets exhausting. This actually hurts more than the hip replacement surgeries did, which could be because most of the soreness is deep bone pain rather than muscle pain. He's looking forward to when it only hurts if he stands on the broken leg, instead of while he's just sitting or lying down. :(

It's been hot again here, and smoky. The week before last, I bicycled outside 5 times. That was followed by a week and a half of riding indoors, mainly because of the smoke. While a couple of the bigger wildfires from August are almost entirely contained now, several new ones broke out a little over a week ago, so the cycle continues. By the end of the day, it starts to seep into the house until it smells like the inside of a chain-smoker's car. :(

I think I've ridden in the garage (and then the laundry room, thanks to the smoke) more times this summer than I have during ANY winter in the 30+ years I've lived in Sacramento. It's maddening. Elementary, S2 is still sitting in the DVD machine out in the garage. In the laundry room, the WiFi is strong enough that I can finally catch up on some of the Netflix streaming shows that HalfshellHusband doesn't want to see.

So, I'm up-to-date now on Better Call Saul, which is getting increasingly depressing (not surprisingly). If there were a version of it that was just The Amazing Mike Ermantraut, HSH would watch that in a heartbeat, but he doesn't like the rest of the characters. I can't blame him. Mike's sub-stories are definitely my favorite parts. The utter creativity and sheer competence of that character are just fantastic. Now I'm watching A Series Of Unfortunate Events, because HSH thought the premiere episode was kind of dull. That may be because he has no memory of ever reading any of the books. The episodes are not fast-paced, but they're compelling, and reflect an obvious love of the books. The art direction alone! *swoons* The casting of Patrick Warburton as the drily humorous Lemony Snicket! *swoons again* I like the overall casting quite a bit, as well as the unexpected racial diversity. "Mr Trick" (as I think of him) is a delight as the cheerfully clueless Mr. Poe, and Alfre Woodard was a wonderful surprise as Aunt Josephine. I can't get the show's theme song out of my head these days, but it's worth it.

What next after that, though? I just started S3, and at the rate things are going with the outdoors here, I need to start looking ahead. But at the moment, I need to go to bed. :O

Voting on these week's round of Idol ends tomorrow. I'm out of it, but rayaso's still playing. His story is here, with a link to the poll and all other entries for voting. Please read and vote, if you can!

We're halfway through the current scorch-window here. It started last Friday, and is expected to run through Tuesday, when we might finally see a high of about 93^o instead of 98 to 100-plus. SO sick of this heat, and we're only at the end of July. *sigh*

I have some links to share. The first is courtesy of tsuki_no_bara, and it's a collection of funny and sometimes no-holds-barred signs posted by shops and restaurants in response to COVID-19. One of my favorites there, apart from the Australian one, is the mouthy and attitudinal sign that ends with "drink responsibly"— like it's some kind of required disclaimer for any official business communication. \o?

I'm beyond frustrated with COVID deniers and people who protest wearing masks and social distancing. We will be stuck in this economic tailspin until the vast majority of our people start making serious efforts not to spread the virus, or until a vaccine is created (which could be more than a year off, and may be too late to help the resulting destruction of the economy). The decision to politicize that issue, on the part of the president and various conservative leaders, has proved disastrous. It will take a lot of effort and luck to bring adherents out of that mindset.

But the other problem is people who are science-deniers or simply scientifically ignorant. They don't think they need to wear masks (and shouldn't be required to) because they're "healthy." But being pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic looks and feels exactly the same as "healthy," and those who have been infected can spread it whether they're aware they've been exposed or not. That's a HUGE problem, especially with an incubation period that can extend up to 14 days.

So, please—wear a mask when you're out and around other people, and keep your distance. Your mask helps increase your chances of staying healthy, but it really really helps keep you from spreading the virus to other people—especially if you don't know you're infected. And if you think that's a hardship, well,

( Clickety! )

More linkage: while I was at boredpanda looking at that list above, I stumbled upon a selection of extremely highfalutin' chicken coops! I would love to have a little garden studio as fancy as many of these things, or as much fun as the crooked house or hollow-tree-house or police callbox. :D One of those designs looks extremely drafty, though, and while the UFO is awesome it is also small and flat and made of metal. I mean, was the goal to take an extreme shortcut on the route to 'dinner'? Because the UFO one is basically also a solar oven. o_O

In TV viewing, we finished watching all of Lucifer on Netflix, and are now eagerly awaiting the next season. \o/ We're still watching The Travelers (also Netflix) with the Boy, as well as True Detective, S3. True Detective is a great showcase for Mahershala Ali—what a role! Though we had to turn on closed-captioning in self-defense after episode 5, because the combination of Mahershala's soft-spokenness and the Southern-ish dialect made it impossible to follow some of the dialogue. And finally, HalfshellHusband and I are watching Luther, S5 on Amazone Prime (the Boy has already seen it). Episode 2 of THAT show has me cringing over what happens when television gives in to fan service. There were scenes of something that couldn't possibly have happened, and it was confusing— was it a dream? Was it wishful thinking on the part of the other character? And when it became clear that we were supposed to accept it as an actual part of canon, well, HELL no! The show has been very clearly on Luther's character, and exactly why he would never make that choice—and was never even y tempted to. And now this? Ugh. :(

Oh, yikes—it's late, and I have to read more of those Idol stories before heading to bed. Happy almost-Friday, everyone!

The entire weekend (and parts of yesterday!) were spent writing my LJ Idol story for this week—no surprise there. This was another intersection (which IS always a surprise to me). But for this round, our success rides on the combined votes for our entry plus our partner's, which is problematic for those of us who don't bring any RL friends or family or Facebook people to the part. My entry is here, with links to the poll and to my partner's story. Please read and vote, if you can! :D

I forgot to mention that in starting Elementary S2 for my garage-biking entertainment, I've come across the first appearance of Mycroft Holmes. Rhys Ifans looks a little scruffy in that role, but there's a captivating something-something about him that defies all logic. Every time he appears on the show, I think "Yes, Please!" And I do not know why. :O

OTOH, it also occurs to me that I made it all the way through S1 without once thinking, "Good god, what is Joan wearing?" So, those questionable fashion choices that seemed out-of-character to me in later seasons were not initially present. I mean, I found the 4-inch heels a little bizarre, but her S1 clothes were generally fun, attractive, and not particularly weird. Yet.

I also forgot to say that one of the books I recently finished was The Refrigerator Monologues, and I really enjoyed it. I don't really read comics/graphic novels, but I could not resist this book's premise. It's a set of linked stories set in the afterlife and told from the POVs of various women who were superheroes, or the girlfriend of a superhero or supervillain, and died as a result. All of these women have essentially been forgotten—the SuperArc has moved forward without them—and they are bitter and delightfully snarky about it. There are also fun nods to comics in general, such as the kids with Special Powers trying to decide what their Superhero names should be, or the supervillian who builds a gigantic pipe-organ under the big city, a pipe-organ that can wreak havoc and destruction. I mean, I would think that underground would not be the best place for a weapon that destroys buildings and infrastructure, but perhaps that's just me. This was a fun, creative read. :D

Now I'm currently in the middle of Butcher Bird, which seems a little like it was Richard Kadrey's test-pilot for his later Sandman Slim series (some key plot elements overlap). And speaking of bad ideas... I know they look cool and all, but there are reasons beyond the Hindenburg that airships and giant hot-air balloons never much caught on as a form of transportation. They're incredibly fragile, and thus very easy for enemies or simple misfortune to destroy. If you're on the water and your ship is destroyed, you might still survive. But if you lose your ship at altitude, the ground is much less forgiving. :O

Not that I'm bringing that up for any particular reason...

I've been exclusively working from home for 2+ weeks now, and haven't been out of the house in all that time except for yardwork or walking/biking. Meanwhile, HalfshellHusband has made far too many trips to various stores to keep us supplied with food and toilet paper. The hoarding thing has definitely been bizarre and unhelpful.

I'm definitely feeling a little stir-crazy, and for those of you who are also in self-lockdown, I'm sure you are too. I hope you're all doing well!

Because gyms have closed down, the number of people exercising outdoors has really increased. The bike path was a zoo on Saturday, almost what you'd expect if a continuous 3-week rainstorm had finally ended. I bike downstream on weekends, which is not as nice as upstream but always less crowded. I hadn't been down there in a couple of weeks, so I was surprised that part of it smelled as if a skunk might have *foomed* either it or some person/animal in transit. That always makes me nervous. Did the fooming happened at night, or does the danger still exist? Yikes.

Being that the weather can't decide between Winter and Spring, we've had a lot of rainy and/or windy days, so I've been biking in the garage a lot too. I finished the final season of Burn Notice last week (in which Michael Westen ruins the lives of everyone unlucky enough to love him). I briefly tried seeing whether the wireless on the inexpensive home laptop I got at Christmas is powerful enough to stream Netflix in the garage, but no. That hasn't worked since my previous work laptop. Maybe I need bluetooth to boost the signal? And possibly something to boost the volume on that thing too, because Oy.

So I've started watching Elementary DVDs now, instead. I don't think I ever saw anything before late S1 or early S2, so most of the first season is new to me. That show still has one of the best opening-credit sequences ever. MAD LOVE!

And in real TV watching, The Boy is back for Spring Break (and now the entire Spring Quarter), so we're finally watching S2 of Altered Carbon. I miss the rugged Elias Ryker sleeve from S1 (because hubba-hubba!), but I'm always glad to see the original Kovacs and the intriguingly baby-faced and deadly Quell.

But most of all, Poe. All the Poe!

All right, so randomly: has Weird Al made a parody My Corona cover of the classic Knack song yet?

Whoo, just squeaking in before the day ends.

Wishing all of you a Happy New Year, and a wonderful year to come.

We've been lazing around, enjoying having the kids home for the holidays. Our daughter stayed through the end of the Rose Bowl today (Oregon won—what a knucklebiter of a game!), and our son has to drive back to L.A. in a few days. Too soon, but it's been wonderful.

The Boy has been watching the most recent season of Bosch with us, and our daughter wanted to acquaint us with Big Little Lies, so we binge-watched Season 1 of that. Highly entertaining, though I'm not sure why it's set in Mendocino other than the beautiful scenery. Culturally, it feels much more like Marin County, and there is SO much histrionic drama. Which I guess is the point...

I finished reading The Devil In The White City a few weeks ago, and also read Thomas Tryon's The Other (not as impressive in our current culture as it probably once was) and Where The Crawdads Sing (very disappointed in the last chapters, and I have mixed feelings overall). Next up, Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds.

Meanwhile, there has been too much eating (of course), a fair amount of biking in the c-o-o-o-l-d, and much overall relaxation.

I hope your holidays have been good as well!