Category: Uncategorized

NB: If you’re wondering why I’m doing this, I’m trying to warm up for NaNoWriMo. I figure that adding to this a few times throughout the day should help set the stage for several posts a day starting tomorrow.

11:10 am

I’m starting a bit behind. My dad and I slept later than usual (well, he slept later than usual — usually on breakfast day I sleep until after I hear my dad’s radio coming from his living room and when I woke up at 9, his living room was still silent. So I ended up sleeping until almost 10.

We had breakfast (delicious as always) and then I showered. While I was in the shower, I got a message from my boss saying that he finished up that report for me (yay!) but that none of the work I did on Thursday went through (boo!). Almost immediately after that, though, he sent another saying that the deadline had been extended until November 14, so we can finish the report tomorrow and have it in two weeks before the deadline (yay!).

Now I’m having trouble getting motivated to go out and do something. This is kind of a common problem for me. I’m almost the living embodiment of both senses of inertia. It takes a big effort for me to get motivated to get out and do things, but once I’m going, I’m going and it takes a big effort to get me to stop.

Should I do a separate Gratuitous Amazon Link for each section? A gratuitous photo for each? I guess I’ll just post this for now and decide later.

4:39

Trick-or-treating can start as early as 4:30 around here and I still haven’t done any walking today. So I set up my table with six candy bars on it (I bought entirely too much candy this year) and now I’m going to walk until I (a) see some trick-or-treaters or (b) the candy starts disappearing.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do if the table disappears.

I did go to the store today. I bought toothpaste, more candy (my store didn’t have M&Ms), whitening strips, and an eyebrow pencil. I figure that I need to up my makeup game if I’m going to get the kind of job I want (and then I can start judiciously scaling back the makeup from there).

Now to walk around the block for a while. I’ll check back in later.

7:49

I’ve given up on Halloween for the night. Mostly. I was unraveling a worn-out blanket so that I can use the yarn to make a new blanket and it was getting too dark and too cold to unravel successfully. So I came in.

The table’s still out there and I’ll check on it once in a while and when the amount of candy goes down, I’ll replenish it and then give up at 10 or whenever the candy runs out.

8:48

I just came in from checking on my table. I put six candy bars out at a time (some M&Ms, some other chocolate, some Skittles, some Starburst) and when I checked, they were all gone.

Did I have six individual trick-or-treaters? Did one or two take them all? Is one of my neighbors helping themselves? Who knows. At least my table’s still there.

9:01

I really thought we’d have a bumper crop of candy left over, but we’ve given out 40 candy bars so far. I have 14 left, 4 of which are Peanut M&Ms. No one in my family eats those, so those are going to work tomorrow. Let’s see how many of the 10 remaining non-Peanut M&Ms I have in 59 minutes.

10:19

I forgot to update right at 10, but the final count is exactly what it was last time. I guess trick-or-treating ends by 9:00. At least I gave the stragglers some extra time.

Tomorrow I take those four packs of Peanut M&Ms to work and foist them off on my coworkers and then my family has until April to finish off the last 10 candy bars.

Now for the Gratuitous Amazon Link. I was going to link to a movie, and when I clicked on it to get to the correct page, I accidentally rented it. It was much easier to link to movies from Amazon when I wasn’t an Amazon Prime member. Well, I found a DVD of it with Korean subtitles. Don’t ask me. It is my favorite scary movie: The Others, starring Nicole Kidman.

Now, in an hour and a half, we start November. Wish me luckPray for me.

12:29 am

Happy Halloween! I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I guess this first paragraph or so will be my plans for the day and then I’ll probably open and edit this post to do do a little live-blogging-ish things as the day goes on, and then I’ll maybe do a recap early in the morning of November 1 to see if I followed my plans.

In the morning, my dad and I are having breakfast together. We have breakfast on one weekend morning. I’m working Sunday, so we’re having breakfast today. I do have to drop by work really fast after that. I have to do a report for work and my boss needs to be there for me to do it, so I have to drop in and do the last two questions really fast today, because this is the deadline.

In the afternoon, I’m going to do my walking for the day. I’ve got to do about 20,000 steps today to finish the month where I want to be. I hope to get Mila from Evelyn and take her with me. Mila’s getting fixed on Friday, so some extra non-vet-related time with her would be nice.

In the evening, I might be having dinner with Alex. I don’t know what his work schedule looks like. After that, it’s possibly going to be trick-or-treating time. I may still have Mila with me at that point; I’ll probably take her back to Evelyn before then just because holiday nights are not a great time to be driving around out there. I got full-sized candy bars this year (two boxes of fruit-flavored and one of chocolate). Since the city recommends putting the candy on a table and cleaning the table after each group, I’m going to be camping out in the front yard. I’m going to put up one of those fabric camping chairs and sit out in the yard, listening to an audiobook and knitting until the end of trick-or-treat time. I have an outdoor fireplace and am thinking that I’d like to drag that out into the front and make a nice fire in it to keep me warm.

Then, as trick-or-treaters leave, I’ll wipe down the table and replace the candy bars. If there are any trick-or-treaters. We don’t get very many on a good year. And this hasn’t been a good year.

Then we’ll see how much more walking I need to do. If I can I’ll do some more walking and if I can’t, I’ll do some reading and then go to bed.

Also, since this ended up being too long, if I do the live-blogging thing, I’ll do it in a new post.

Gratuitous Amazon Link? Something scary or spooky or otherwise supernatural . . . I’ve got it! Down a Dark Hall, by Lois Duncan. I loved this book when I was a kid. I believe that this was the book that I was reading when I was alone at home at night when there was a rattling sound, kind of like a mason jar rolling along on its side. We didn’t have any mason jars and that scared the crap out of me. I ended up having put the book up for the night and spend the rest of the evening watching television.

I can’t find a subtitle box

So I’m going with headings

Subtitle: A/K/A The Weirdest Language Project I’ve Started So Far

Sub-subtitle: Our Gratuitous Amazon Links Aren’t So Gratuitous for This Post.

In the beginning (as I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before), my mom was a youth services librarian. I helped her read a bunch of the books that she purchased w-a-a-y past the point when it was age-appropriate for me.

And then I got a BSEd in Curriculum and Instruction (the fancy way of saying “elementary education”) and had to read kids’ books both for the degree and for planning my classroom library. I ended up becoming a paralegal, but the kidlit was definitely a high point.

Fast forward, oh, nine years? Ten? Alex was a baby and Harry Potter was the next big thing. I was kind of dubious because once something becomes what everyone I know talks about, unless I was an early adopter, I feel kind of excluded by the topic.

But when we were house shopping (and in this very house, btw), one of the kids’ bedrooms had Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the desk. It was this huge doorstop of a book and I was instantly intrigued. So I went out and got Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, and soon afterwards the rest of the series up to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I joined the fandom and wrote fanfic and waited impatiently for each book, despite growing sort of disenchanted with them as we got further into the series. More on this in maybe another book-blogging post.

Where to go next? Okay. While waiting for . . . . No, actually that came second, I think. Upon a quick visit to Wikipedia, yes, that came second.

In 2003*, Thomas joined a book club. One of the books they read was a mystery by a writer named Rick Riordan. Thomas told me about it, and it sounded interesting to him but didn’t do much for me.

In 2005, Thomas and I took a road trip and he wanted us to listen to an audiobook by Riordan on the trip. I was dubious until he told me that it was kidlit. So we gave it, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, a shot and I loved it.

Then, during the two-year hiatus between Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, one of my friends recommended Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. I read the first two books. This had to have gone down earlier than 2006, because I remember talking to my mom about this. I wasn’t really gripped by it and stopped at two. I have no regrets about not reading the third book.

I realized after a bit, though, that I already had the perfect books to read (and reread) and plug to all and sundry, Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and the people I plugged it too would still kind of get in on the ground floor, because there were, at that point, only two books into the series.

At some point, Thomas gave me Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban as a gift, and I realized that I could get all of the Harry Potter books in translation as foreign language practice. I started with Chinese and got the Chinese translations of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (for some reason, I can’t get typing in Chinese to work right now) and have spent the last couple of years working on them. I also have the Italian and German translations of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Then JK Rowling came out as a transphobe. I have friends, coworkers, and patients who are trans. My son has friends who are trans. I thus kind of reluctantly** decided to stop buying foreign translations of her Harry Potter books.

And then it hit me. Riordan has written, oh, dear, God, so many books in the world that started with The Lightning Thief. And so many translations! Spanish and German and Dutch and Vietnamese and Icelandic and Czech and Turkish and . . .

So, now the weird project. To get all of the translations of all of Riordan’s mythology books — Percy Jackson, Kane Chronicles, Magnus Chase, wherever else he ends up taking us. In every language we can get them in.

I know that I don’t speak Dutch, or Icelandic, or Turkish (and I barely speak Vietnamese and Czech, but I’m working on them!). But who knows where time and curiosity will take me in the future? And when I finally do start this degree, maybe I’ll have a classmate who wants to study one of these many languages and I can lend (with emphasis on lend!) a book or two to the cause.

I hope that Riordan is as great as he seems because I love his books so much.

At this point, it’s 1 in the morning and I’ve been writing for an hour. I have to work tomorrow so I’m going to leave this here and dig up a gratuitous travel photo sometime tomorrow (well, later today, I guess) and then post.

*I can remember what year it was because the only book they did that sounded interesting to me was The Devil in the White City, which was a new release that year. Thomas and I read it in parallel. I don’t remember if I went to the meeting or not, though.

** See also my growing disenchantment with the series.

The next milestone in my history as a reader was in August of 1974. My mom had breast cancer (though she didn’t know about it yet), and Nixon had just resigned.

My family was in North Carolina visiting my grandfather, and I had run out of books to read. We were in some kind of convenience store/ice house place. I think the building was painted red and it had a screen door.

Anyway, I told my parents that I’d run out of books. There was a rack of comics there and one of them (I think it was my dad) said, “Buy a comic book.”

I felt really uncomfortable, almost like I was doing something wrong, or someone was playing a practical joke on me. But I took a Superman comic book and we paid for it. The story in the comic book wasn’t really gripping to me, but the ads had something that made a big impression on me. Super heroines. Supergirl in particular at first. So I mentioned that Supergirl stories sounded like they’d be interesting.

My dad worked in the circulation department of a newspaper and when he was making his rounds, he saw a Superman Family comic book that featured Supergirl. So he picked it up and it was all downhill from there.

Soon my dad was buying me any comics he saw with female leads, or groups with multiple female characters — Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Ms. Marvel, Justice League . . . . Also Howard the Duck, which is awesome, even if it didn’t fit the theme. This lasted about eight years? 10 years? Until pretty late in my high school career, at least.

In 1991, I married Thomas. He’d seen my comic book collection and wanted to start collecting as well. When we first got married, we’d occasionally go to the 7-11 and get two Slurpees and a couple of comic books.

On or around our first anniversary, Superman died. I knew there was no way they’d leave him dead, so even though I was tempted to bite on those comics, I figured I’d wait until they brought Superman back.

As fate would have it, the first of the Return of Superman storyline came out just before I moved to Texas. Thomas was already here and I was living alone while I got to the midpoint of my final semester of paralegal school, at which point I would take incompletes and have the rest of that semester and all of the next to write papers to finish up those classes.

I went to a comic book store on Jackson Street just around the corner from the Sears Tower and picked up the first of the comics in the arc. I felt very conspicuous, as I was the only woman in there. But I got the comic and reading comics was just as much fun as I remembered.

Once Thomas and I were reunited in Texas, we decided to really commit to collecting comics. There was a comic book store not too far from where we were living, and when we went in there, they didn’t stare at me like I was some kind of alien lifeform. They treated me like a customer.

So, for the next 10 years, Thomas and I had a date night to go out to the comic book store and then go out to dinner. We had pull lists and when the daughter of the man who owned the store got married, we sent her a wedding card. When I was pregnant with Alex, she sent us a card, as well.

Good times.

Eventually, it just wasn’t as fun as it had been, so we stopped. Then, like, six years later, we got divorced. I asked for my pre-marriage comics and a couple of other series that I really loved in the divorce. Thomas got the rest of the comics.

The post-2003 break from comic reading ended up a bit longer than my first break. In the late 20-teens, I began to hear new things about comics that sounded interesting. Specifically, the comics that sounded good were the new Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. Since I came into these series pretty late, rather than going back to my old comic book store, I started buying the compilations as ebooks.

Squirrel Girl is over and I’m putting off buying that last compilation. It’s weird, I know, but I don’t want it to end. Once I can face the ending I’ll get it. I was waiting for the next volume of Ms. Marvel to come out and apparently with COVID and everything else, I missed it entirely. The latest volume came out in April. So that’s probably next on my list of things to buy.

Will I keep buying comics or will I enter a new break? I don’t know right now. I do know that it’s likely that even if I do take another break, I probably will never stop reading comic books entirely.

As for my mom’s cancer, it was Stage 2, and she needed some pretty exciting surgery for it. She found the lump on Thanksgiving of 1974 and had the surgery on Christmas Eve. She was fairly traumatized by the whole experience and used to go into a depression during the holiday season every year. 27 years later, when I got my diagnosis, I started seeing a psychiatrist so that I wouldn’t end up as emotionally scarred as my mom did. I’m pretty sure it worked.

Oh, and 1974 was momentous for another reason. Not too long after we got back from North Carolina, my mom, who was a preschool teacher, had a very important preschool student. Thomas.

Now, for the Gratuitous Amazon Link. Let’s go for it. Ms. Marvel: No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona.

I don’t know if this is going to be a review or not. It’s 11:30 and I have to be up at 7. But I alluded to this book in my last post, so I figured I should update y’all.

I finished it. I’m trying to enumerate exactly why I found this so . . . ungripping. First the truly offensive thing. Elizabeth Smith, an African-American woman, is sort of a sideline character. And every damn time, de la Torre refers to Smith as “(N-word) Liz.” Granted, the book was originally written in 1955, and the past is a different country and all, but still. God gave us editors so that we could fix stuff like that. Just globally search-and-replace that string with “Smith.” I mean, that was her name, and we don’t see another Smith until the trial, where Smith is the surname of the prosecutor, or something. Argh.

There’s a reason why Twain chose that word in Huckleberry Finn and I understand the pushback on changing it. But The Truth About Belle Gunness is not a classic of American literature. It’s not even a classic of the true crime genre. I think that this time it should be possible to engage in a little judicious editing.

Speaking of the trial. Well, I wasn’t really expecting a book on a female serial killer to turn out to be a book on the man accused of killing her. That’s what this turned out to be. The Truth About Belle Gunness is actually the story of Ray Lamphere, former handyman and sex partner of the killer who was accused of killing her and her children and then setting fire to their house. The middle section is basically just trial transcripts rewritten so that they look like dialogue.

Additionally, there is some question about whether the body of the woman was Gunness at all. The body of the woman was found without a head and no head was ever found. Some time later, they found Gunness’s teeth in the ashes, which was apparently enough for the authorities to identify the body as Gunness. The book ends with de la Torre’s supposition on what actually happened. It’s an interesting theory, but she doesn’t back it up with any kind of evidence.

Speaking of editing, I’m not going to have any time to do any here, because I have to be up in a minute.

I’m going to end this with a Gratuitous Amazon Link to a real classic of the true crime genre, The Stranger Beside Me, by Ann Rule. This took me a while because all of the paper copies I could find were so expensive. So I ended up linking to the Kindle version.

What will be my next book? Looks like Kara Cooney’s The Woman Who Would Be King. I have so many books to read. So. Many. Books.