It came out . . . unusual. Let’s see if I can edit it into something more coherent.
So I’m taking a long walk right now, and I’m making my threatened attempt to show how the writing process goes. The last time I tried this software, it took down everything I said twice. I don’t know why. I may have to edit this a lot before I actually make a blog post. (Spoiler: I basically ended up turning this into an entirely different post on similar topics and downloaded a new speech to text converter program to try during my late evening/early nighttime walk tomorrow).
I’m thinking that I’m going to maybe start doing book reviews here too because right now with COVID-19 going on I’m reading a lot more than I’m traveling. I hoped to take Alex to New Mexico last year but I’m thinking this year might be the year. It’s already June but we could do New Mexico in a long weekend. Basically, you know, we could take Friday through Monday off, you know, or any other four days. We could take Monday through Thursday off. So we do the 7 hour drive — that’s the length of the drive to Carlsbad Caverns — we could leave Sunday night at 10 p.m. Arrive in Carlsbad and what would that be 4, 5, or 6 in the morning leave our luggage at the hotel go to the national park for a few hours, come back to the hotel and collapse. Then in the morning do another few hours at Carlsbad and then drive to Capulin, which is an extinct volcano. It’s an even-numbered year, so we need a volcano. We could do the volcano on Wednesday then spend Thursday driving back and that would be get us back to — at that point it’s like a 10 hour drive — so if we get to leave at like 10 in the morning on Thursday we’d arrive back in San Antonio at like 7. This would give us a good night’s sleep before having to be back at work on Friday. Any 4-day stretch like that.
As you know what you know I lost Phobos on May 1. The crematorium that my usual vet uses has a service where they scatter the ashes in the Hill Country. But with the self quarantine and everything I couldn’t get Phobos over there so I have his ashes in a box in my living room. I’m hoping in July or maybe sometime in the fall once it’s cooler (it’s insanely hot right here right now) to find a county that will let me just, you know, scatter his ashes in a pretty spot. Maybe out by Fredericksburg or something. That’s pretty much my travel plans for this year.
I do still need to go back through my travel history. I was in what 1989 (nb I think I’m still in 1988). Then we have our first honeymoon to Indianapolis in 1991 and then our second honeymoon to Florida in 1992. I don’t know what the next time we traveled anywhere would have been. We went to Seattle for a job interview for Thomas in 1995, or was that 1996? And then Los Angeles for the first time in 1996, or was that 1995? In 1999 we went to California but didn’t do too much traveling other than that, since I was pregnant. In 2000, we went California, Chicago, and Florida with Alex. In 2003 we went back to Florida and while we were in Florida we went to Key West and that’s the most recent time I’ve been to Disney World. We also went to went to Toronto for WorldCon. Oh wait. 2002 was England and Paris and Scotland and Wales.
After those 2002 and 2003, I was like if we can’t pay cash for it we cannot go because we put stuff on the credit card and then would have hard time paying it off. Because of that we didn’t really go anywhere. We visited my parents in Florida a couple times and went to my mom’s funeral in 2006.
After the divorce Alex and I started traveling again. 2010 we went to DC. No. 2011 was DC. 2010 was Chicago, 2011 was DC, 2012 was Hawaii, 2013 was North Carolina, 2014 was Italy, 2015 was New York City, 2016 was Yellowstone and Salt Lake City, 2017 was California, 2018 was Arkansas, and 2019 was Stonewall Texas. I really want to get out of the state this year if COVID-19 cooperates. And then I’ll make it to Seattle for 2021 I’ve got the money saved up to do that. I have to write up all those. Actually not all of them because I started this blog in 2015, so I don’t have to do 2015, 2016, 2017, or 2018 so 1988 through 2014.
But I won’t have any new content really in terms of like new places I’ve gone for a while, but I’ve been reading books — oh my God — so I think I’m going to start book blogging here because I’ve tried a couple times to make a comprehensive list of all of the books I’ve read in my life, which is kind of fun because I’ve read so many books. My mom was a youth services librarian and had to read all of the books she bought so I’ve been reading kidlit for years, way before Harry Potter made it cool to do this.
And I can’t remember the titles or authors of so many of these books. One book somebody actually dug up the title for me and then the website that we were posting on crashed. The owners were, like, we’re trying to restore it and apparently I think they gave up on restoring it and it’s gone. I’ve even tried looking it up on the Wayback Machine and had no luck at all. The woman who gave me the name loved that book too. But I can’t remember what it was is called.
My most recent attempt to make a comprehensive list is on Goodreads. I have something like 250 books on my Read shelf.
I’ll be honest with you here. I’ve been reading a lot of book reviews recently. Since I’ve joined a book club, I’ve gotten a lot of ads for books on Facebook. A lot of them are for thrillers and I don’t think I’ve read a lot of thrillers, so I’ll have to check that out and see if they’re right. Anyhow a lot of these reviews mentioned something called Netgalley and it turns out that if you’re a book reviewer you can get free Advanced Reader Copies ebooks and I’m like this would be awesome (because the hundreds of unread books I have aren’t enough) So I go to sign up and it asked where you’re reviewing books, like on Amazon or Goodreads or your own blog and I’m like, I don’t write reviews for books on Amazon, though, I kind of just go here are four stars unless it’s bad, in which case it gets three or it’s really bad, in which case it gets two, or it was so bad I couldn’t finish, in which case I give it one. I don’t really give out five star reviews unless it’s a book i would want to take to a desert island with me.
At this point in my dictation, I realized two things: 1. I somehow had missed a street in my walk, and 2. that this software really, really wasn’t working. I decided to keep dictating, though, because of the thing about how if you can talk you’re not overexerting yourself.
Well right now I’m reading . . . What am I reading right now? I’m reading a book about Belle Gunness who died in a fire and who turned out to be a serial killer. I guess we’re going to start the fire and work forward or do a flashback. I don’t know. I’m only, like, 2% of the way into the book.
So, I guess next up is more of 1988, followed by maybe my opinion on the Belle Gunness book?
Oh, and another store needs a pharmacy tech and will pay overtime, so I’m only getting one day off next week. I hope I don’t end up regretting that.