Category: Uncategorized

My Reading History

Part Something of Some Number

Wow. It’s December 5, and I’ve completely gotten out of the habit of writing every day. Well, not out of the habit as such, but, well, I realized that I hadn’t finished posting my 24 Hours of Happy project (and I missed a couple of hours along the way, too) and now I can’t find the file it was in.

So I’ve spent the whole month so far with File Exploder* (or whatever they’re calling it nowadays) searching my entire computer in the background for the word “Pharrell.” So far it’s found some music and a backup of my blog. This is no help.

Last night I was having trouble sleeping, so I started organizing my reading projects in my head and I realized that I’ve had a lot of “phases” in my reading. The first phase I had was probably Nancy Drew starting at about 10 years old. Then I had an Agatha Christie phase. After that, was maybe gothic romance? I think that was late middle school or early high school.

Somewhere around then was my Erma Bombeck phase. I still love to reread those books.

Then it was genre fiction. Mostly it was epic fantasy with a side order of science fiction, but there was a lot of supernatural stuff, too. That phase lasted years.

I never left genre fiction entirely, but I did go back to gothic romance again. At some point, I attempted to read all of the books of Victoria Holt. I think I only scratched the surface, but I’ll have to do some digging to figure out what percentage I read. I think that might have been around the time of my Ann Rule phase.

At some point, before Amazon became a thing, I began to scare myself with how fast I was killing off the books, so I joined the History Book Club in an effort to slow myself down. I still have a bunch of books from back then that I haven’t read. I’ve got to make some decisions about them.

Then I had cancer and my reading became no longer as fast as it had been. There’s a condition known as “chemo brain” where people who have had cancer have more trouble concentrating than they did before. And that was definitely me. I left the history books behind then, because reading anything successfully was a challenge at that point and haven’t really gotten back into them. I did go back to focusing on epic fantasy, supernatural, etc. for a while.

At some point, I entered a kidlit phase. I really enjoy this in a way that kind of resembles my enjoyment of epic fantasy, but in a way, it’s actually maybe more enjoyable. I think this is because the books are shorter and they may deal in heavy topics like interpersonal relationships (not just romance, but friends, family, coworkers, etc.), trauma, etc. but they do it in a way that isn’t so traumatic. Or something like that. The other thing is that since the books are shorter, I can cover more genres. Science fiction, fantasy, thriller, mystery, whatever. If it sounds interesting, I’ll give it a shot.

Crap. I had a historical fiction phase, too. When even was that?

When I say “phase,” I don’t mean that I read this to the exclusion of all else. Rather, it’s more like, I don’t know. I just read so many books that I don’t know if I could ever read just one genre to the exclusion of all else. I’m trying to come up with a good analogy. Or even a bad analogy. Maybe it’s like meals. You can have the same thing for breakfast every day for a long time, but you’ll still have a varied diet for lunch and dinner? I think that’s as good as it’s going to get for now.

It feels odd to have a Gratuitous Amazon Link here, since this was about books, but since I didn’t discuss any specific book, it’d be weird to shoehorn that in just so that I can have a Germane Amazon Link. Looks like Men at Arms, a City Watch book of the Discworld series is up next. Let this be a warning to anyone reading this — be careful how many books in the same series you read. You may have to end up posting links to them in your blog someday, and that will be *really* monotonous.

*I don’t know if that’s original to Thomas or if he got it from somewhere else. It certainly isn’t original to me.

More Language Updatey Stuff

November 30, 2020 3 of definitely-not-going-to-be-8

So. It’s November 30, which means that tomorrow I change languages to Italian for December and January. I suspect this will go more easily than October and November did, simply because I have an easier time reading very, very small Latin script than very, very small traditional Chinese characters.

Italian is great. I love Italian. I love Italy. I’m going to do Italian for Duolingo and my games and go back to ChinesPod in the car (because I always work on Chinese in one way or another). This dovetails nicely with my current cookbook, which is Italian, and the next cookbook, which is also Italian.

It’s the language I’m going to do in February and March that’s causing me some consternation. I don’t want to go right from Italian to Spanish, so I’m looking for a language for between them. When I looked for a low-corruption country to maybe consider specializing in, I ended up mostly in Northern Europe. Okay, I thought. Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish. I can work with those.

Only apparently I can’t. It’s my phone. I can set my phone on each of those languages, only at this point, Android is only slightly compatible with them. I set my phone on Danish, with Spanish secondary and my phone ended up being this kind of disturbing combination of the two languages. The same thing happened with the other languages.

So. I guess that’s not going to help me decide.

Maybe I can do a non-European language next, though. and leave the Northern European languages for later. I think I have a pretty convincing case for Vietnamese in February and March. I wonder what apps will come out in Vietnamese if I put that first on my phone?

Ooh! Android likes Vietnamese! Let’s try my other apps. I know that neither Wizards Unite nor Design Home are available in Vietnamese. No on Pokémon Go. Not Candy Crush, either. Also Kindle. Well, Samsung Health is available in Vietnamese. Babbel’s a no, too. Duolingo has Vietnamese for English speakers.

That may end up being what I do.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, I’m doing yet another Discworld book, this time a Witches one: Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett.

Argh!

November 30, 2020 3 of 3

It’s 10:30 and I need to get to bed soonish. I’m also 15 words short of hitting 30,000 for NaNoWriMo.

As a result, I will be just blathering more than usual. I realized that I posted a lot about my Goodreads account, but not much about the books I read this month. I guess that’s because it was a lot of comic book rereads and such and not really something I really had much to say about.

I’m rereading The Glass Sentence (yay for germane Amazon links), which I recall really enjoying when I first read it five years ago, but not really the details. I guess I could write about that once I get away from “I need words and I’m panicking!” mode.

I have made a nice habit for myself of sitting down to write every day. I hope to continue that, maybe in a more considered way for December and January.

I’m already two weeks ahead on posting at one post per day. If I can keep this up, I should stay two weeks ahead, which will be nice if/when I catch COVID. I’d probably be out of commission for two weeks at that point.

I’m going to continue reading and come up with more content creators to feature in posts and we’ll see where we are when my first practice NaNoWriMo for 2021 hits in February. Maybe I really will make it to 8 posts a day then.

Or maybe not.

What’s for Dinner Tonight?

November 30, 2020 2 of definitely-not-going-to-be-8

Tonight’s dinner is going to be a pretty short one, probably. Tonight we’re having what Alex and I refer to as “Election Night Chicken.”

Back in the early 2000s, I worked as an election clerk. It was pretty good money for one day’s work. I’d work the entire time, from 7 am until the last voter left and we’d packed everything up, so maybe 12.5, 13 hours. At $10 per hour, that was pretty good for one day. I also got to know a lot of my neighbors that way, which was nice.

I didn’t take a lunch hour those days, more like a lunch long break. I’d buy chicken legs and stick them in the freezer. Then, the day before Election Day, I’d stick them in the refrigerator to thaw most of the way through, and then at noon, I’d run home, throw the chicken and 1/3 of a cup of Liquid Smoke into the Crock Pot (I can use the brand names for both because I was using the brand names of both), set it on low, then go back to the election.

At about 6 pm, Alex would start checking the temperature, and when it hit 165, he’d turn it down to warm, and wait for me to come home.

After a while, Alex decided it needed a name so that we didn’t have to keep calling it “chicken in the Crock Pot with Liquid Smoke.” I believe the recipe I stole this from was originally called something like “Faux Barbecued Chicken” and was more complicated than we made it, but since we pared it down to just the Liquid Smoke and the chicken, we decided to just call it Election Night Chicken, since we had it on, well, Election Night.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. I though we were getting close to the end of the Discworld books, but it looks like we’ll still be there for a while. I do have a break from them today, though. Our book right now is Generation Why, the second Ms. Marvel compilation by G. Willow Wilson, Jacob Wyatt, and Adrian Alphona.

My Goodreads Account — OMG

November 30, 2020 1 of 8

Every once in a while, it hits me — I have a shelf full of Ranma 1/2 manga and a couple of Naruto ones. I’ve read all of them, but can’t remember when.

It’s the 30th and thus the end of NaNoWriMo. I’m definitely not going to make it to 50,000, but 30,000 is looking good. And so I don’t really *need* to keep going lockstep through all of my comics compilations, graphic novels, etc.

But I really probably should. I am, after all, going to try to take another stab at writing 8 posts per day going in February, 2021, so I may well need the additional books some day.

Or maybe not. I was going to do the words “Ranma 1/2” above as a not-gratuitous link to the first volume of the series only to find that you can only get $14 used copies of volume 1 right now. So, I guess it’s going to be Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have Small Gods, which is a standalone book. I get a kick out of how it is currently titled at Amazon: Small Gods: Discworld Novel, A, like the computer finally figured out how card catalogs worked and is going a little nuts with it.

NaNoWriMo Update

November 28, 2020 3 of 8

It’s 6:27 pm on November 28, and I’m not even to 30,000 words yet. I think this is definitely a personal best for me, as the last time I registered at the website, I only got in the 15,000s, but I’m not going to make it to 50,000.

I also have 16 scheduled unposted posts. I was scheduling them out a week, and then for some reason, I did several days of scheduling for November 30. So I just spent half an hour straightening out my future schedule. I think they’re technically out of order, but I’m pretty sure that I have Alex’s suspected COVID case (his test was negative) in order, so there’s that.

Now since I have 16 unposted posts, I’m too far ahead to schedule them for a week out without messing up my schedule, so I’m scheduling them for Christmas now. This is scheduled for 1 am on Christmas. I’ll go in later and move it to the . . . 8th, I think?

I was also going to start socializing with the other WriMos, but that never worked out either. Variable work schedule, stress from Alex moving out this month, COVID, Thanksgiving. Yeah.

I think that writing a bunch of posts in a row and scheduling them ahead of time will work pretty well, though. I don’t think I can do an unofficial NaNoWriMo in December or January, but February might work. I may have to go back in and spread my scheduled posts out to one a day or one every other day to fill in the blanks of December and January, though.

Now for our Gratuitous Amazon Link. We’re back to Discworld today with Reaper Man, a book featuring Death.

Content Creators: Yes Theory

November 28, 2020 2 of 8

I really thought I was going to make it to eight posts today, but then I went back to bed and slept until I woke up naturally and now it’s 2:30 pm. So maybe not. But we’ll try.

I think I found Yes Theory because YouTube recommended them to me. Nothing really exciting there. Now I’m trying to remember which video I started with. I’m pretty sure it was the one where two of their members went on a bus ride from Miami to Seattle. Yeah, looking at it, I think that was it. That was in October of 2019, and I enjoyed that so much I went back and watched their entire body of work.

Yes Theory started out as a comedy channel called Project 30, which was three young men (Ammar Kandil (from Egypt), Matt Dajer (born in NYC, raised in Paris), and Thomas Bragg (born in Paris to Swedish parents)) spending 30 days doing things they’d never done before, like dancing in public with strangers. A fourth young man, Derin Emre (from Turkey) started out as just the camera man, but by the end of Project 30 often appeared on camera as well.

The four original members of Yes Theory met in Montreal. Matt and Thomas met during college and then Thomas met Ammar at a party. They then met Derin through a mutual friend. There’s a whole video about exactly how they met, and this is just a sort of Cliff’s Notes version.

They were searching for meaning in their lives and decided that they wanted to make videos that made an impact on the world. Their first impactful video actually was covered on the news. Right after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, Ammar, Matt, and Thomas wore t-shirts explaining that they were, in order, left to right, from NYC, a muslim from Egypt, and from Paris. Derin also wore one saying he was from Turkey, but he didn’t really appear on camera. They stood in a train station in Montreal holding hands with signs saying that they’re roommates, best friends, and brothers. Then people came up to talk to them and hug them, which looks really unsafe from the COVID world we’re living in today, but the video still gives me goosebumps.

After Project 30, they stayed together and created more videos, evolving into what they called Generation Y Not and doing more elaborate things, including getting Matt into Montreal Fashion Week as a model, telling bad jokes in public places, sneaking into expensive hotels, and so forth.

After about a year, they were offered a chance to move to California and make videos for money and they changed their name to Yes Theory.

The meaning of the name “Yes Theory” is that they believe that saying “yes” to things that make you uncomfortable are the things that help you grow the most. And I’ve done quite a few since then and it certainly seems that they might be right.

Over time, their lineup has changed. Stress between the United States and Turkey led Derin to return to Canada. He still appears in videos from time to time. When they first moved to California, they opened their home to a bunch of their friends, who appeared in some of their videos. Matt’s younger brother, also named Thomas, started out as an editor but he spends a lot of time in front of the camera now. I’m sure that the lineup will change more in the future.

They’ve gone to a bunch of other countries (including, but not limited to, France, Egypt, Italy, Colombia, and Cuba). They’ve taken some of their followers, and also some strangers, on adventures with them. And if you’re aware that Will Smith went bungee jumping out of a helicopter over the Grand Canyon on his 50th birthday, well, that was Yes Theory. It started with a dream that Ammar had.

And, for me, my life hasn’t changed too much from Yes Theory (it has only been a year so far). I’m still going to my regular job and living in my suburban house. But I do leave my comfort zone once in a while. I go to concerts in Spanish. I walk for distance in new-to-me parts of the city. I tried to go state parking by myself with Mila a couple of weeks ago. And their videos allow me to dream of the travel and adventures I want to do. Seeing them do it means that someday, if I can ever get my financial ducks in a row, I can do it too.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, by Carolyn Keene. A while back, there was a lot of angst about Dynamite Comics killing off Nancy in honor of Nancy’s 80th birthday this year. My first thought was of this book. Nancy gets a letter addressed to Nancy Smith Drew (our Nancy doesn’t have a middle name) in Nancy’s Mysterious Letter. I wondered if that was the Nancy Drew who was going to die. Spoiler: No Nancys died in the comic book. Nancy faked her death.

I really need to reboot my computer. This post has taken an hour and a half. Much of that was waiting for pages to load.

About To Hither and Yon

November 28, 2020 2 of 8

At the beginning of November I said that I wanted to write one perfect introductory blog post that I could pay Facebook to promote and see if I could grow my audience.

This is that post. Or the first draft of it, at any rate.

My “name” is Olivia (not my real name, but I hate my real name, so why not take a pseudonym, right?). Olivia actually in some way relates to my real name, but . . . anyway.

The original plan for this blog was to blog about travel. Places I’d been, places I wanted to go, places I was when I wrote specific posts. I’d post my favorite pictures from each location and then monetize it with a goal of making my hobby of travel self-perpetuating. Travel -> post -> cash check -> do more travel.

It has never quite gotten to that point. At first, I didn’t want this blog to look like a *total* cash grab, so I held off on attempting to monetize it. Then, I began posting Amazon Associates links (if I can’t find a book germane to the topic, I refer to it as a “Gratuitous Amazon Link”). By the time I felt comfortable enough to think about putting ads on the pages, Google had canceled my ads account from lack of activity.

So now I just have the Amazon Links, which are not exactly making the dough roll in.

Since I haven’t been able to use this to do the travel I needed to make content for the blog, my focus has broadened. First, I added book blogging, which seemed to be a good fit with the attempted monetization through Amazon. Then I began talking about a project I’m starting where I will be working my way through my cookbooks. That is still book related, but also cooking-related, so there’s that.

And, occasionally, I post about my life and what’s going on in it. I spent November doing what’s called National Novel Writing Month, where you attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I’ve done better this year than in any year before, but I’m not likely to actually reach 50,000. In order to hit that point, I’ve started talking about medical topics and also Internet content creators that I enjoy (kind of like book blogging, but with YouTube). I don’t know if those will stick around after November.

So, since I’ve talked about the Gratuitous Amazon Link in the text above, here’s one so you can see how it works. I guess that since this is not in the regular continuity of the blog, I will go outside the continuity of my Gratuitous Amazon Links for ideas. What book have I given the highest rating to on my Goodreads page and that I absolutely love? Hm. Let’s go with No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, the first compilation of the adventures of Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel. I’ve loved comics since 1974 and this series is especially wonderful.

What Did We Have for Brunch?

November 26, 2020 Part 2 of 8

I spent my dad’s whole brunch-eating period writing a post on headaches. I’m almost done with my food, and Alex got a start on his then had a dinner appointment somewhere else.

So I guess I can use the past tense, since 2/3 of us are done-ish.

Anyway, since COVID is still a thing (and getting worse — we had over 1,000 cases per day for the last couple of days), we ordered Denny’s in as a sort of faux Thanksgiving brunch.

I got an Ultimate Omelette (for Easter, I somehow ordered it without the sausage or onion, but couldn’t figure out how to do it this time, so I pulled them out as I came across them. It was still delicious, though), Alex has a ham and cheese omelette, and my dad had steak and eggs.

I’ve finished my omelette, half of my toast, and about 1/3 of my hash browns. My dad has eaten everything and is taking a post-brunch nap. Alex is still not feeling 100% so he ate some of his hash browns. His future roommates are having a big dinner starting soon, so he’s there right now.

We started having brunch for every holiday when Alex was little. Well, maybe before then.

Let’s see. My mom always wanted to go to a champagne brunch on Easter and when I was a teenager or young adult, we noticed that the nice hotel on Halsted Street — I think it was a Hilton, maybe? (cue short break to see if that hotel is still there (I found where it was, and it’s a vacant lot now because of course it is*)) had a champagne brunch. Now, if I recall, my mom was more interested in the decadence of the champagne part, but since alcohol has always tasted nasty to me, I was more into the brunch.

We continued Easter brunching once Thomas and I got married and moved to Texas. We went to Easter brunch at the Hyatt Hill Country hotel for years. After a couple of years, we added Christmas brunch (we were still going home to Chicago for Thanksgiving at that point) at what was then the Adam’s Mark hotel downtown. Eventually, the hotel changed hands and those brunches stopped.

When we had Alex, we expanded to brunch for every holiday. Alex was an awesome baby who literally was only cranky when he was tired. When he was a baby, we’d put him in his clothes while he was still half-asleep and by the time he woke up, we were there. He was nice and rested and cheerful for the duration, then, with a full tummy, he’d nap for a while and be cheerful and rested for the rest of the day.

After Thomas and I split up and my dad moved in with us, we kept going to the Hyatt Hill Country for a few years, but then my dad decided that we should go to a hotel closer to home. The brunch isn’t quite as nice, and they don’t have waffles with strawberries and chocolate chips, like the Hyatt Hill Country used to have, but it is nice (and also less expensive!).

We generally go for Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, but this year they aren’t having brunch, because, well.

So we did Denny’s for both Easter and Thanksgiving. What will happen on Christmas? Probably Denny’s again.

Maybe we’ll return to real brunch at some point in 2021.

*I later found an article saying that they were plans in late 2019 to put a casino at the southwest corner of the intersection between Halsted and Interstate 80, which is right there. I’m not sure if it’s going forward, what with COVID and I’m not sure if it’s going on the brunch hotel side of 174th or the other side, though.

We begin the Discworld’s “Industrial Revolution” storyline in today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link Moving Pictures. I’m not sure if I’m crazy about this arc. I really was in the beginning stages of Discworld fatigue by this point. It seemed odd that Pratchett was going to skip from the late middle ages/Renaissance to the 19th/20th Century like this. I know, the books are more social commentary than anything else. I don’t know. I guess maybe someday I’ll pick up the project again and see what I think. I’m not at the end of my spate of reading the Discworld books — I still have 12 books before I finally had enough of marching lockstep through them, but we’ll see what we get when we get back to the books someday.

I’m Going to Be Keeping Busy for A While

November 28, 2020 1 of 8

So. Alex is moving out in a few days. I’m totally not ready for this. I mean, he’s 21 and that’s a perfectly appropriate age to leave the nest.

But I feel that there’s a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. We started an audiobook series for our road trips, and now we’ll probably never take a road trip again. I bought a bunch of food for dinners that we’ll never have.

I’m, quite frankly, mourning.

And as a result, I’m going to be doing a lot of introspection into my own life. What do I want? What do I need? How can I make a new, Alex-less, life for myself?

I mean, I’ll hear from him a couple of times a year. I still have his college fund. But will he go with me when I can face scattering Phobos’s ashes? What about our annual national park trip? I’d decided on four close by ones that I wanted to do with him (Big Bend, Carlsbad, Hot Springs, Jean Lafitte). Additionally, those four would take care of our next four audiobooks.

When I was mourning the end of my marriage, I used the anger part of it to get a bunch of work done around here, including painting my bedroom. Can I use the anger part to end my current inertia and either find an audience for this blog or find another alternative source of income that will actually pay me income?

Can I use it to get the things together that I need to do to make the career changes I need?

Can I use it to finally pick a foreign language and get the stuff I wanted to do to prepare for that degree (getting familiar with a *lot* of classic literature in my target language)?

Can I intentionally spend most of my time in “anger” and “acceptance” and ward off “denial” and “depression” entirely? What should I do about “bargaining”? Can I somehow bring that into play? Like when Thomas and I split up, I didn’t really do much bargaining. I made the offer to try counseling and when he turned me down, I washed my hands of him.

Depression hit really hard, though. I went to see a counselor on my own, and I was so scattered that I required a standing appointment. The counselor said that the only other time a patient had needed that, the patient was in end-stage dementia. So. Yeah.

Alex keeps telling me that if I text him, he’ll keep in touch. But I know myself. I have. Er. Had a really good friend whom I’ll call Catherine. We saw each other every two weeks or so for about four years. Then she started dating a guy that she really liked, married him, and they had a baby. She disappeared from my life after the wedding. Suddenly it was all about her in-laws. They had so much stuff going on that she didn’t have time to call me, or text me, or meet me for dinner or anything. I got tired of trying to find a way for us to see each other, and so I just let her go.

Basically, I feel forgettable. Once people aren’t looking directly at me, I feel like I might as well never have been part of their life. I’ve always assumed that friendship is not perfectly, but almost like that game where you have two strings and each string has a handle on both ends. Threaded on the string is a ball. and the game is that the players each spread out their arms by turns, which sends the ball to the other player. I don’t expect it to be perfectly my turn-their turn-my turn, but I do expect to have the ball come back my direction occasionally. And if the ball doesn’t, well, eventually, I figure that the other player has stopped playing and I’ll put my handles down and walk away.

And that’s what happened with Catherine. And it’s what I’m terrified will happen with Alex.