Month: October 2021

I know I’m going to focus on blog posts again for NaNoWriMo. I’m going to get ahead on this someday. I hope.

So I’m going to just post something every day until November 1 so that sitting down and writing will be just a thing that I do by then.

So, Hi.

What’ve you been up to lately?

I’ve been working, mostly. I went for a walk on the Riverwalk on Saturday. It’s nice that things are cooling down a bit, so that I have more energy for exploring.

I’m going walking with Ray on Wednesday. That’ll be nice. We haven’t seen each other in months.

I’ve been waiting for Nowhere Bookshop to open, which it has, and I’ve been there three times so far. I certainly plan to go there again in the future.

Wow. I had to take a potty break and now I can’t remember what I was going to write next.

Oh! I was at the gym and a song came on and my brain briefly felt like it felt back when I was writing fiction. I didn’t have any actual, like, plot or characters or anything, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. So that’s encouraging.

And I really, really am thinking about putting AdSense ads on these pages. I’m not 100% sold on it yet.

So, until then (and likely afterwards, as well), we have our Gratuitous Amazon Link. Today we have The Glass Sentence, by S.E. Grove. I’m sitting here trying to figure out where to start. The world has been fragmented across an unbelievable number of eras and no one can figure out what year it was when it happened. From our heroine’s point of view, it happened in 1799. In the eastern half of the United States, it is the 19th century. The people who were in Southern Canada, however, are gone, and the land is as it was during the ice age. It’s all very intriguing and took me a while to figure out. Definitely worth reading, though, or I wouldn’t’ve posted it here.

Okay, so I was getting ready to go to sleep yesterday. I’d done my reading, I had my nightlight, the bunion in my right foot is bothering me, so I had my toe separator in, I lay down, I started to count . . . .

And then I suddenly bolted upright.

Did Wurzbach used to end at Lockhill-Selma? I was nearly certain it had. I even had a memory of a T-junction with lot of trees and brush and things. But was I remembering correctly?

Was that the Voelcker farm?

I mean, when we first moved here, I turned the wrong way onto Northwest Military and drove almost all the way to Huebner. Did Northwest Military Drive go *through* the Voelcker farm?

And there were my memories of when they started the Wurzbach Parkway part of Wurzbach. Had that been a brand-new street? Or a continuation and broadening of something that had already been there?

Later, by the way, I remembered that I had begun to wonder if I’d turned the correct direction onto Northwest Military when all I saw on either side of me were trees, and I certainly wasn’t going to try to make a U-Turn in an entirely new state like that. Although, at that point Wurzbach wouldn’t’ve done me any good even if it had gone through to Northwest Military. I mean, I couldn’t’ve gotten anywhere I recognized on it. I was really, really new to the city and this was before Google Maps.

This was before Google, even.

Back to 2021. I bolted out of bed and went into my closet. I figured that the map we had when we first moved here must be around somewhere, and I had a boatload of maps in my closet. I had three Texas maps with inset maps of San Antonio in my closet, but they were all too new.

So I finally went back to my desktop and found oldmapsonline.com and with entirely too much hit-or-miss clicking (I’m not sure what’s up with the navigation on that site), I finally got the map for my area in 1993 and, in fact, Wurzbach did end at Lockhill Selma back then. So my memory of the street ending in trees and brush is probably accurate.

I also often wish I’d taken pictures of the park down the street from where I grew up, so that I could, for example, find a picture of the Japanese artillery piece that stood in the park. I didn’t have access to a camera until 1974, so I suspect that the elephant slide we used to dig away the sand under and hide underneath was gone by then. I could’ve gotten some pictures of the people-sized hamster wheel that used to be in the park in the next town over, though.

This is all in aid of saying, take pictures of the area around you. Things change, which is part of the fun, but it’s also fun to be able to see how things were and how they compare to now.

Now I’m going to start planning how to take pictures of, like, everything everywhere, so I can track the changes over time.

I’m going to try to spoiler-tag my Gratuitous Amazon Link. There’s an area with dark gray text. Highlight it if you want to see whom Zuko brings back to the Fire Nation Capital with him.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! We’re on to Smoke and Shadow now. Recently, someone on Reddit opined that it’s unrealistic to show that Zuko took the position of Fire Lord and they all lived happily ever after. Welp, here we have an adventure from the Fire Nation. Zuko is coming home with his mother, stepfather, and half-sister in tow, and someone, seemingly a spirit of some sort, begins to kidnap Fire Nation children. Is it a spirit? Will Aang be able to help? Or is this something that Zuko has to handle on his own?