I am in the middle of so many books right now that I think I should maybe put some up for later.
The two books I’m spending the most time on right now are El Ladrón del Rayo, the Spanish translation of The Lightning Thief, the first book of Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Woman who Would be King, Kara Cooney’s book on Hatshepsut.
On the back burner at the moment are Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofale, the Italian translation of Harry Potter and the (Sorceror’s/Philosopher’s) Stone, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, and La Travesía del Viajero del Alba, the Spanish translation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I think that’s it.
I also have another Fantastic Strangelings book club book coming in the not-too-distant future (the next week or two), Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.
I also might have another couple of things I’m working on on my Kindle. Oh! I noticed that my Ms. Marvel and maybe my Unbeatable Squirrel Girl compilations may not have read dates on them, so I’m going to probably be rereading them so they can fit into the Gratuitous Amazon Links. And for this post, you’ll see that our Amazon link is less gratuitous than usual.
And my current National Geographic issue is August 2020. I need to get back to that one.
Well, maybe not the *easiest*, but still pretty damn easy.
Now, as a warning, as far as I’m concerned, a little seasoning goes a long way. So if you’re like my mom, and like things with so many leaves and twigs and things of seasoning that they’re crunchy, move along.
So, this is the seat-of-my pants recipe for my pasta salad.
Ingredients: Rotini, carrots, olives, Newman’s Own Classic Oil & Vinegar dressing (or other salad dressing), other vegetables to taste (I usually put a little broccoli in there, my mom used to like radishes (don’t ask me)).
Boil pasta according to package directions
Drain pasta
Put pasta in fridge
While pasta chills, chop vegetables
Mix pasta and vegetables
Cover with enough salad dressing to . . cover
Serve
Put leftovers in the fridge for later meals/snacks/side dishes
Serves, um, however many people want to eat however much pasta you made.
See? Easy.
I bought the olives and salad dressing months ago, the rotini weeks ago, and the carrots the other day.
I tried, but it looks like eight posts isn’t going to happen today, either. Well, better luck tomorrow. I did leave my word count goal behind me over 300 words ago. So there’s that.
So, I’m still unraveling the blanket and trying to figure out how to make a large knitted blanket out of all of these pieces without losing a lot of yarn to knots when it hit me.
As I said earlier, this blanket is ancient. Some of the threads are snapping as I unravel them because they’re so worn. So I’m going to have to knit it from two strands held together as one.
This is one of my weirder photos. I was unable to get a picture of the Washington Monument that I really liked, partially because of my equipment but mostly because of the fact that they’d drained the reflecting pool when we were there in 2010. When we were walking along the National Mall, though, I noticed that I could see the reflection of the Monument in this puddle. So now, if this blog ever does take off, this pigeon will be famous.
So, rather than pairing up strands, what if I double the strand over and join it to another strand with a square knot*? Then I don’t have to find two strands the same length. I mean, knotting it this way will automatically make two strands the same length kind of by definition.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.
*That’s the knot where you bend both strands in half and then loop one loop through the other and then pull the non-looped end through the loop. That’s probably not really any clearer, but it’s nearly midnight and I’ve had a busy day, so that’s probably the best I can do right now.
Gratuitous Amazon Link time! This one’s by one of my favorite kidlit authors, so you’ll be seeing her name a lot. This 12-hour period will be brought to you by Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor, by Ally Carter. I wasn’t really thrilled by the title, but the story was fantastic. April comes to live at the Winterborne house with a group of orphans. April has a key with the Winterborne family crest on it, and she’s convinced that the key opens a lock somewhere in the house.
This post is brought to you by still more blanket unraveling. The blanket is king-sized and while trying to work out the best way to do this, I’ve only unraveled about 0.9% of the blanket. By my estimation, the original blanket (minus the hem, which I just cut off, because life’s too short for trying to unhem a 10-year-old blanket with a seam ripper) is 56 square feet (5.2 square meters) and I still have 50.25 square feet (4.67 square meters) of blanket to unravel.
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, since those 5.75 square feet are a fringe, I’ve only unraveled half of that area. So I think I may have only unraveled 0.045% of the blanket.
So I’m thinking “at least I’m getting my NEAT on,” which made me wonder if the science is still good on that.
Looking at the PubMed abstract of an article (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)) from 2002, which may be the original article defining NEAT, I see that this article has been cited in 33 articles total, four articles of them in the last year. Two of the 33 articles were clinical trials.
Time for another Gratuitous Amazon Link. This is another choice from the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas. This one was good, but really creepy. Our protagonist, Ines, is invited to Catherine House, a school that doesn’t consider itself to be a college or university, but which takes the place of one. The course of study at Catherine House takes three years, and their students are forbidden to leave the grounds during that time. And, of course, as with all of these kinds of books, there is a secret at Catherine House and Ines cannot leave it alone until she finds out what it is.
I went to the seamstress’s shop and dropped off my purse. I’m getting a new lining with the internal pocket and everything for a very good price. I hope her work is as good as it looks like because I will promote her services to all and sundry if it is.
Then I went for a walk and played Pokemon Go for a couple of hours. I also started a new (slightly imperfectly implemented) project. As I think I mentioned earlier, when Evelyn and I went walking with the dogs this summer, it was hot. Like hot-hot. Like “surface of the sun” hot. And the dogs weren’t fans.
So we’ve been looking for the most shady paths to take. It’s all pretty subjective, though. I mean, “Hey, that place we went walking last week was pretty shady.” So we go there and it takes X amount of walking in the sunshine to *get* to the shady place.
After I dropped off my purse, I hit the Leon Creek Greenway. While I was walking, I took a picture every 10-ish minutes (I missed one and took it three minutes late, so the picture before that was 13 minutes before and the next one was 6 minutes after). I stopped right after my sixth picture and the next time I have time to walk on the greenway (mid-November, probably), I’ll start from where I took that picture and then take pictures every 10 minutes.
This was the most shade I photographed on this outing. We’ll see what happens in future trips.
Then I’ll do the same thing on the Salado Creek Greenway and make movies of each greenway and see which areas of each seem to have more shade and next summer (if there is a next summer), Evelyn and I will take the dogs here.
Now, as I said, this is imperfectly implemented. Ideally, I’d take these pictures from, like 11 am to 1 pm or something, but I enjoy having a job. I don’t have the time to visit the greenway every day during that two hours in order to get a perfect view.
So, the shadows will be longer in some pictures and shorter in others. Maybe if my dad wins the lottery, I can buy a drone and zip the drone down a greenway at noon on a weekday during the summer when there aren’t many people on it and get one perfect shot of exactly what the shade on the greenways look like at noon.
But for now, as long as I’m doing this with shoe leather and a cell phone camera, we’ll get what we get.
For our Gratuitous Amazon Link this time, we have The Authenticity Project, by Claire Pooley. Julian Jessop, a fairly well-known artist, decides that most of our problems stem from an inability to be honest about our true selves. So he writes his truth in a notebook and leaves it in a coffee shop, inviting the person who finds it to do the same and leave it somewhere else. In the course of the book, six people find the book, and then they find each other and their lives become more intertwined. I really enjoyed this one and hope that by putting this here, someone else will also find it and enjoy it like I did. This is the Kindle edition.
I got up for-me-extra-early today (8:30) and tried to knock out some words, but I’ve found a new YouTuber that I like (and then found a new one, who really is new — she only has two videos so far) and wrote a post, then watched some videos and unraveled, then wrote another post and watched some videos and unraveled.
I mean, these will all be useful later this month, when I write about these YouTube creators and about the blanket-rebirth project (which really needs a name), but it’s not helping me get my daily stuff done.
Along the way, I also took my Symbicort and ate breakfast, so those are useful, obviously. Today I was planning to go to a seamstress that one of my coworkers uses to get a new lining put into my black purse (it’s a black lining and it’s a nightmare to find anything in that purse) and to get started on a project to determine which of the greenways has the most tree cover (almost said “shade,” which sounded wrong).
It’s now noon and I’ve got to get my showering done and try to figure out what’s going on with Pimsleur Czech on my way to running those errands. I’ll post Czech, the errands, etc. later.
This posts’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for Crossings by Alex Landragin. I enjoyed this one, which is about people who lived in a Polynesian culture hundreds of years ago and where the members of the culture can switch souls with others. Our two protagonists were lovers and they lost each other and now the woman has been hopping from body to body trying to catch up to the man and there’s another order you can read the book in which supposedly also makes sense, but I must have been doing it wrong, because it made less sense to me that way. At any rate, the link is to the hard copy version, because I don’t know how the alternative sequence would work in Kindle. Maybe it’d be easier. I don’t know. I enjoyed the book but not enough to buy the Kindle version, too.
It’s now 9:45 am. I’m working from 11 to 7 today and so I have to hustle off to the shower in 15 minutes, so I’m going to have to make this quick.
Today is the Presidential election. I’m terrified that Trump will win again. I mean, we survived the last four years, and Trump is guided by his id more than either of the egos, so I don’t know if the next four would *necessarily* be worse, but I was really hoping they’d, you know, be better.
When I get off work tonight, the polls on the east coast will already be closed and preliminary results will be coming in. So I’m going to close most of my tabs that have anyone talking about current events on them, which leaves me with, um, fiction books, longform articles and old YouTube videos, I think.
I was going to start my content creator topic tonight, but looking at their current videos would be a spoiler, so maybe I’ll do some book blogging. I don’t know yet, but I’ll see what I do once I get there.
Will I make it to 8 posts tonight? Doubtful, but, once again, I’ll try.
A quick Gratuitous Amazon Link. This was the first book in the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Follow me to Ground, by Sue Rainsford. This one is also excellent, but creepy. Ada is not human. She and her father are some kind of mystical constructs that use a patch of dirt, called Ground, to heal the local villagers of their illnesses. Everything is going well enough, but then Ada falls in love with a villager named Samson. This link is the hard copy.
So for some unknown reason the biweekly events in HPWU have been quite a bit harder lately. The other events are kind of more of a challenge, too.
I mean, I can get that as your central player base gets stronger, keeping the challenges pretty easy may cause them to lose interest, but then there’s the casual players like me and the newbies. I finally finished the most recent brilliant event but if I succeed at the weekend event, I’ll be very surprised.
And I’m not the only person who feels that way. During the first brilliant event for October I was, like, I need to up my game on this . . . game and went looking for information and found a lot of people complaining. A number of them said that they used to be gung-ho about this game but now they just get their ten coins for the day and stop.
I think I know that feeling.
I’m not ready to give up yet. but that time may be coming. A new brilliant event starts tomorrow. Let’s see how I feel in a week once that’s over.
Gratuitous Amazon Link time. The Bone Shard Daughter is another Fantastic Strangelings book club book. Like A Deadly Education, it’s the first in a series but is also a self-contained story. It took me a while to get into this one, probably because it jumped around so much. We started with one character and then after a few pages went to another and so on. It took me quite a while to really get a feel for what was going on. I really enjoyed it once I did, though. This link is to the hard copy.
Okay, maybe it’s not technically a hobby, but it is a long-enough-term project that if I end up developing an enjoyment of it, it might count.
Back when I was married, I would get very hot under heavier beadspreads. I would end up sleeping on top of the covers with a thin blanket, rather than under them. I would even develop a rash that looked like a heat rash.
So, once I was single, I went out and bought a big white cotton blanket and dyed it blue-green to coordinate with my bedroom. The blanket was kind of small, so thinking that I might have shrunk it when I dyed it, I bought another in a different color and just left it. I don’t know if I was right about the shrinking but it was larger.
Gratuitous photo time! I’m going through my old photos looking for any that I can edit into something useful. As you can probably tell, this is the Lincoln Memorial. My next two gratuitous photos will also be from my 2010 trip to DC. I wish I’d gotten some better photos of, i think it was Tian Tian. Oh, well. I’ll do what I can with what I have.
Now I’m forgetting. There may have been another blanket along the line that I tossed after I lost Velcro, because as he aged, he needed to pull himself up onto the bed by his claws.
Anyway, eventually I got this kind of sage green blanket, which was also bigger than the teal one. I used this one for *years.* It started to fall apart and I just turned it so that that part wasn’t where I was sleeping and kept going.
Well, I finally gave up on it recently and while I was thinking how much space this thing would take up in my garbage can (it’s huge!), I realized that it’s made of discrete pieces of yarn and decided to unravel it and use that yarn to make a new blanket.
I had no idea how much work would go into unraveling this blanket. I’ve been working on it on and off for a couple of weeks now and I barely have anything unraveled.
I’m probably going to have to will this project to my grandchildren.
I used to knit in front of the television. My new hobby is going to be unraveling a blanket while watching YouTube.
I’m staying in a hotel on Thursday night, so maybe I’ll bring it with me and take a picture and then when I’m in a different hotel on Saturday, I’ll take another picture and see if there’s any progress at all.
Gratuitous Amazon Link! For this post, my book is Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh. After a seven-year absence, Brosh returned with this book and while I hope she doesn’t disappear for seven years again, this was worth the wait. This one is the Kindle version.
It’s funny. My handwriting is pretty bad and I get handwriting fatigue pretty easily (this is not a side effect of typing so much — I’ve been shaking my hand to help alleviate the fatigue since long before I ever touched a computer). And when we have multiple bottles of a script to fill at work, there’s a way to set the computer up so that it automatically prints out that number of labels, with “1 of x,” “2 of x,” etc.
There are a few medications that don’t generally have that turned on, like ibuprofen 800, because we don’t usually dispense an entire bottle. So, if I got, like, 180 tablets (we have — I got a script for 270 of them once), I would hand-write the sequence on them. Since my hands tire so easily, I write them “1/6,” “2/6,” etc. and do you know how long it took me before I had to resist the temptation to reduce those fractions?
Anyway, preparatory to using 240 of my 274 books in my Goodreads history as Gratuitous Amazon Links, I’m cleaning up my read dates. So many of those 274 books are things that I read before Goodreads, so I won’t be able to use that tactic on a bunch of them. And, since I’m working on a Nancy Drew reread project, I guess I will be able to try to sell you a copy of The Secret of the Old Clock.* It has a read date.
I guess I’m going to do some rereading, or try to remember which of these hundreds of books I read on or around their release dates and I can fake it. Or both. Probably both.
Also, I’m looking at some of these books and cringing because OMG, so they won’t be Gratuitous Amazon Links.
Oh, and it turns out that only 94 of those books have read dates, so I’ll be doing a lot of rereading and/or estimating. Eeek.
*Look! A not-so-gratuitous Amazon link! We’ll be seeing this again later this month, probably, when the pressure is on for me to post and I forget that I already posted this one.
