Category: Uncategorized

My Back Feels Better

November 18, 2020 1 of 8

I know that this blog isn’t sequential in any way, but I’m going to go ahead and post a sequel to yesterday’s post. Yesterday, my back hurt not-quite-badly-enough-to-hurt-when-I-breathed. Today, it’s still a little twingy, but it’s way better than yesterday.

I did really well until just before 6 pm, when I finally had to sit down in a chair with a back. Fortunately, we have just such a chair in the vaccination booth. So, I put on a glove, grabbed an anti-viral wipe, and sat down for a few minutes, letting my back really relax and tilting my head back in a way I hadn’t done since I got up this morning. Then, after a couple of minutes, I stood up, wiped the chair down, and got back to work.

I wonder if there’s some kind of scuttlebutt that they might be closing the city down again. At one point the line at our pharmacy went oh, maybe a quarter of the way to the back of the store. And our store is pretty big. We had to stay a few minutes late to take care of everyone in line and then I did some shopping on my way out.

I basically bought some Apple Cinnamon Cheerios (love Apple Cinnamon Cheerios!) and soup for dinner some night (which will get a short “What’s For Dinner Tonight post, probably). The cereal, soup, and pasta aisles were all pretty picked-over. Not like they were by April this year, but kind of where they were in maybe late February or early March.

I’m trying to do a Gratuitous Amazon Link and my computer’s being a total butt. I think I need to reboot tonight. I keep clicking on the link I want, or at least think I’m clicking on the link I want. But my computer is dragging. And after all that, the next book up should have been easy to remember, because I remembered noticing that this was coming up before. We’re finally to the beginning of the Nancy Drew series, The Secret of the Old Clock, by Carolyn Keene. And this time the Kindle link works (and may be a special edition. I’m not real clear on what “a limited number of copies” means in the context of an Amazon link.

I Hurt My Back Today

November 17, 2020 1 of (hah!) 8

I don’t know what I did to my back. I was walking from the parking lot to the store and suddenly — ow! I kept my upper body as steady as possible while walking to the pharmacy.

I explained that my back was hurting not quite so badly as to hurt when I breathed, but pretty close to that badly. After about an hour of me being very, very careful with my back, a coworker suggested I take something for it.

I’d taken a naproxen that morning to ward off my tendonitis, so I wasn’t really sure about taking anything else. But then I remembered that I had a bottle of acetaminophen (paracetamol to people outside the US), so I took a quick break to take two of them.

That helped a lot, but in a way, that made me more nervous, because I was worried that I would injure my back worse because I wouldn’t be able to feel it.

I found that if I stand really close to whatever I’m reaching for and reach more sideways than in front, it doesn’t hurt nearly as badly as if I reach forward for it.

So I spent the rest of the day being very careful. Six and a half hours after taking the first acetaminophen, my back started hurting again, so I spoke to my pharmacist, who said that ideally you should wait eight hours between doses, but you can push it to six, just as long as you don’t take more than three doses per day.

So I took two more and then decided to tough it out for six and a half more hours, at which point, it’d be bedtime.

I’ve still got two hours until that third dose. Wish me luck. (not that it’ll help right now, since this whole back problem will hopefully be over by the time this posts.

Time for another Nancy Drew Gratuitous Amazon Link! Today we have The Clue of the Broken Locket by Carolyn Keene. The Kindle version kept going to a Page Not Found error, so this is the hardback copy.

You’ve Gotta Crawl Before You Can Run

Also: I’ve gotta learn how to apply makeup quickly

November 16, 2020 4 of 8

So I went in to get my fingers printed for my pharmacy technician license renewal and they needed to take a new photo. I basically only wear makeup for photos. I don’t object to makeup on any kind of philosophical ground or anything. It’s just that makeup has always made me break out and I’d rather have bare clean skin than cover up pimples with makeup.

So I recently bought some foundation and eye shadow in tubes, so that I can squeeze out just what I need, apply it with my clean hands, then wash my hands and never have to worry about contaminating the container or the application tools with germs from my face.

So that’s what I did today, and it took, oh, a good five minutes that I hadn’t planned for. I mean, that’s not much, but my usual skin care routine is wash face, apply sunscreen, and go. So, yeah.

If I’m going to start working on my makeup application skills, I wonder how long it’d take to do a full face? Would I have to start getting up two hours before I have to be somewhere, rather than an hour and a half? It’s a pity I can’t do it the night before and just stick it on my face in the morning or something.

Oh, well. I put makeup on today and maybe I’ll do it again someday. Or maybe not. We’ll see when we get there.

And for our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we have The Heroes of Olympus Book 5: The Blood of Olympus. I really do need to reread Riordan’s complete mythology series. They are so good. Also travel-y, which is huge as far as I’m concerned.

What’s For Dinner Tonight?

November 16, 2020 2 of 8

Is this my second post for today? It seems like there should be more, but yeah. I think it is.

Dinner tonight was white-girl tacos. This is not as sexy as it sounds. It’s just that the cheese is wrong and the seasonings came from a packet. The tortillas were also flour, and not corn, but a lot of Latin@ people buy the flour tortillas, so I’ll pretend like they’re authentic.

I browned the ground beef (neither Alex nor I like fatty food, so I get the ultra-lean ground beef) then added just a tablespoon of the seasoning (Alex doesn’t like spicy food). I warmed up the tortillas in a warm (not hot!) oven, then put meat, shredded cheddar cheese and chopped tomatoes on, in that order. Putting the cheese right on top of the meat makes the cheese melty and good.

No, we don’t put lettuce on our tacos. It’s pretty much the only thing we’d use iceberg lettuce for, so I leave it in the store and save it for someone who’d appreciate it.

It’s not authentic, but it tastes good, it has all four old-school food groups in it, and a pound of extra lean ground beef will leave enough left over for me to make a couple of white-girl quesadillas later in the week.

Wow. Even though I haven’t done much writing today (I’ve gotten a pretty good deal of reading done and also went out and got my fingerprints done for my pharmacy technician license renewal), I’m still pretty punchy. Instead of searching for “Calamity, Sanderson,” like I usually do when searching for my Gratuitous Amazon Link, I typed “Calamity in:inbox” like I usually do when trying to eliminate some of the crap in my email.

Reading Update

November 16, 2020 3 of 8

So I’ve spent about half of my blogging time this weekend* reading in order to catch up my Goodreads account. After all, if I don’t read enough to keep up with my blogging, then there go my Gratuitous Amazon Links.

I’m only reading graphic novels, comics compilations, and comic strip compilations this weekend in order to get the most undated read items from my Goodreads account knocked off. And so far, I’ve reduced my undated books from 9 of the 14 pages to 8 of the 14 pages. If I keep this up, by the end of the week,** maybe half of my Goodreads pages will have dates! Yay!

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Though since I’m talking about reading, maybe less gratuitous than usual. This post, we have Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 2 The Hammer of Thor, by Rick Riordan. I guess the first book, The Sword of Summer, is buried somewhere in the wilds of the undated books in my Read category. There’s a surprise.

I only have one Unbeatable Squirrel Girl compilation to go. I’m starting on FoxTrot compilations and Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novels.

*I had a three-day weekend, then worked a short (7.5-hour) day, then had another day off. It all feels like one weekend to me.

**Tuesday November 17 through Friday November 20.

What’s For Dinner Tonight?

November 14, 2020 2 of 8

This isn’t a recipe as such, but I’m hard up for words today, so . . .

Most of my meals are pretty basic. When Thomas and I split up, I pared down most of my meals to the bare basics because neither Alex nor I wanted the extra stuff.

I mostly said that for the wordcount, because I’m pretty sure this meal is the same now as it was back then. If I remember differently, I’ll edit this post later.

When I was little, the only fish my mom made was perch. She’d get these blocks of frozen perch at the store and we’d thaw them, pry them apart into individual fillets, brush them with lemon butter, and broil them. I believe we served this with French fries.

When I started getting older, my mom decided to start trying new kinds of fish. We tried halibut, turbot, orange roughy, salmon, sole, and other kinds of fish. Just fresh from the seafood counter at the store. And we’d cook it pretty much like we had the perch — lemon butter and broil The halibut, orange roughy, and salmon were the ones that did the best with that approach.

When I started dating Thomas, he swore that the only kind of fish he liked was frozen, breaded fish sticks. After several months, I got him to have fish with my folks and me on fish night (which was usually Friday, though we aren’t Catholic. If I could explain my mom . . . .) and he really liked the fish.

So when we got married, we made halibut and salmon. Then when we moved to Texas, something happened to the halibut. It was no longer firm and flaky but kind of mealy. So, so much for halibut. Now we were just down to salmon.

We decided that the salmon needed a side dish and somehow decided on the Pasta Roni Angel Hair with Herbs.

This is now Alex’s favorite dinner, and so I pick up salmon pretty regularly. And that’s what we had for dinner tonight.

A couple of posts ago, I started on the The Madman’s Daughter trilogy. Well, tonight is the second book, Her Dark Curiosity, which is an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

So I’ve Hit Four Years of Language Study

November 16, 2020

I missed my 30-day streak on NaNoWriMo. I was pooped when I came home last night, so I went to take a nap for a couple of hours and woke up right at midnight.

I passed the four year mark on my language study yesterday and I have $2,700 in principal saved up. Assuming that life will have me bopping back and forth between the lowest amount I’ve averaged ($0.48) and the highest ($2.04) for the next 20 years, Then I’ll have $13,500, which is good enough to be going on with.

Though, currently, as I go I’m getting more studying and work done every day. When I first started, my average deposit was only $0.48. Now it’s $2.04. If the average keeps going up, maybe I’ll even finish early.

Of course, this is all in aid of paying for me to get a master’s degree in modern languages so that if I ever become too ill to have a physical job, I can still work to keep the money coming in (and for fun, and also maybe as a side hustle while working my day job).

And there are other ways to pay for schooling besides handing the school cash and saying “Here you go.” If I don’t start this until past 65, then I might be able to get some of my classes tuition-free. Then there are fellowships, which are like scholarships, except that it seems that there’s some kind of work component. My impression is that it’s like if scholarships and work-study programs had a baby and that baby went to grad school.

So I guess I need to start researching how to get a fellowship and figure out how to prove my dedication to an as-yet-undecided-upon language.

Also, I don’t know if I’ve come right out and said this, but I definitely need to go to a public college or university for this. $16,000 is the adjusted-for-inflation cost of my MSIS from when I got it in 2009 until 2016 when I started this program. I figured that most of the increase in tuition and fees from then until 2031/2036 will be taken care of by interest on investing that money. I hope.

Our Gratuitous Amazon Link this time is Steelheart, Book One of the Reckoners trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. I really enjoyed this, though I do disagree with how readily Chicagoans would agree to refer to the city as “Newcago.” I grew up there. If you search for “Marshall Field’s,” the site FieldsFansChicago, which advocates changing the name of the State Street store back from Macy’s to Fields, shows up on the first page of results. There’s a meme that shows 233 S. Wacker with text saying “Spelled W-I-L-L-I-S. Pronounced ‘Sears.'”
So, yeah. I don’t see “Newcago” happening.

More Musings on My Future Reading

Pray for My Goodreads Account

November 14, 2020 3 of 8

So I’m going through my next Goodreads account for future Gratuitous Amazon Links and, oh, my God. Like, I’ve got read dates for the first and third of Brandon Sanderson’s Reckoners series but not the second. And one of the books on my bed right now is Sanderson’s The Rithmatist , which I’m pretty sure I’ve read at least twice, and it doesn’t have a read date, either.

And none of my Foxtrot compilations (two of which are on my bed right now) are my Goodreads account at all. I’m marking all of those books as “currently reading” just so I don’t have to go dig them out of the morass of 300-some read, currently reading, want to read things on my Goodreads account.

I’ve been pretty good about actually keeping up with the Dark Horse Comics Avatar: The Last Airbender books, but they aren’t on my Goodreads page either.

I think the easiest way to tackle this would be to lie and make up read datesdo all of the cartoon/graphic novel things first and then maybe pick the other books by how thick they are?

So. Flagging all of the cartoon books that I can think of as “currently reading” has caused that topic to balloon to 35 books. Fortunately I should be able to knock them out pretty quickly.

I hope.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! We’re going to finish off the Madman’s Daughter trilogy here. I remember liking the first two, but can’t remember anything about this one, so read at your own risk. A Cold Legacy, by Megan Shepherd.

My Bed Is Covered in Books

November 14, 2020 1 of 8

Supposedly I’m reaching the end the “difficult” week of NaNoWriMo, so let’s see if I can make that work out and get my wordcount way up. Granted, after this post (or maybe the next one), I should be farther than I got the last time I tried to NaNoWriMo my blog, but I’d really like to actually win once.

Anyway, between trying to update my Goodreads page and Alex moving out and giving me back all of my books that have been accumulating in his room and that I just don’t have any room for, the spot that used to be Thomas’s is now dedicated to my books.

Below, I threatened to take a picture of my bed with all of the books on it. Well, there you go. And maybe the blanket isn’t really *teal* per se, but I did make it that bluegreen color with teal dye.

Oh, and I got my latest book from The Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, which is a book about books bound in human skin. So that promises to be interesting.

OMG. I just realized that I don’t have any of my comic strip compilations on my
Goodreads account. Crap. I guess I’d better get to that, too.

I really should take a picture of my bed. My bedroom is really dark, though, so who knows what it’ll look like in a photo.

I found another cookbook in Alex’s bedroom, so that’ll be a new source for recipes now that I’ll just be cooking for myself. The cookbook is *also* on Thomas’s side of the bed.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, erm, I don’t know how the oldest Nancy Drew book in my Goodreads page is the 16th in the series (I wonder if my Overdrive account with the San Antonio Public Library has the dates I read the first 15 books), but it is. So, here’s The Clue of the Tapping Heels, by Carolyn Keene.

Ow!

Or: I Just Took a Long Walk in Sandals

November 13, 2020 2 of 8

Okay this all starts in August of 2019. Phoenix and I went to Pedernales Falls State Park for a star party. On the way, we stopped at a Walmart that has a Subway for sandwiches and picked up some socks.

The socks initially felt pretty comfortable. However, at some point I noticed that the socks were too tight and made my feet actually hurt. I treated the pain by giving my feet days off by wearing sandals without socks. When the pandemic started and we were locked down, I didn’t get a chance to go shopping for new sandals and I thought that the last pair of sandals I had from 2018 were going to be the last sandals I would be able to get until 2021. So I’ve been wearing my athletic shoes with the tight socks and putting an adhesive bandage over the sore spot and toughing it out until i can get my act together and get some new socks.

Then, just the other day, I found that they still make my sandals, so I ordered five pairs (enough to get me through the pandemic and maybe even into 2022). Since I no longer have to preserve this last pair of sandals, I decided to give my foot a day off from those socks and wore the sandals.

After all, I reasoned, I was going to be walking on a broad, paved path and so the sandals would stay on well enough and give me adequate support for that walk.

Then I misremembered where the path went on the Leon Creek Greenway and ended up in OP Schnabel Park, which is a very nice park, but isn’t where I wanted to be.

I wandered around in the park for a while trying to see if there was a way out that wouldn’t require me to walk all the way back the way I came. I use Pokemon Go as a map of park trails, and Pokemon Go said that there was an alternate route, so I decided to try it.

It was an unimproved dirt trail, but it led the correct direction, so I kept going.

And then I found a steep, rocky, downward, I don’t want to say “slope” because that kind of downplays the steepness of this. Not really a dropoff either, because it wasn’t quite that steep, either. I don’t know. Is there a word between a slope and a dropoff? It was, like, steps, maybe? But not that regular.

Anyway, I don’t really like going downhill at all. I tend to cling to the railing when going down stairs. Up? Up is okay. Down, not so much.

So here I am, in sandals, of all things, trying to climb down this rocky stair/slope/dropoff thing. Fortunately the trees closest to the path were pretty small, so I used them as a railing. I checked my phone at the bottom of that slope and I was (fortunately!) still going the right direction and so I kept going down the unimproved what is now largely rock trail until I finally got to the regular paved path I was looking for.

On my way back to my car, I then continued my project of taking pictures on the Greenway looking for shady areas. It was overcast today, so I don’t know if the movie will really emphasize where the shady areas are (and there were shady areas!). I hope to post the movie once it’s done, but that won’t be for a long, long, time. In the last two weeks, I think I’ve done about 1/3 of the Leon Creek Greenway and 0/3 of the Salado Creek Greenway. So, assuming that the Salado Creek Greenway is about the same length as the Leon Creek Greenway (I think it’s longer), that’s at least a 12-week commitment.

So you’ll be seeing the movie on January 25, at the earliest.

Our Gratuitous Amazon Link today is The Dragonfly Season, the second book in the Streetlights like Fireworks series by David Pandolfe. I’m very sorry that Pandolfe has apparently stopped writing, because I really loved this series and also his Jump When Ready series. If he Googles his name and finds this comment, I really would love to see more from you, Mr. Pandolfe!