A while ago, one of my friends posted this meme about how college in the United States is too expensive to waste time with general education requirements. And I do agree that tuition and fees in the United States are highway robbery. Too many students taking out too much in loans and then not being able to find jobs that will help them make those payments is a sin. And it’s not the 18-year-olds who are being told by adults that this is a good way to do things who are the sinners.
My bachelor’s degree is in education, and, as a result, I have thoughts about this meme.
First of all, eighteen is very, very young. Yeah, an eighteen-year-old is legally an adult for most purposes, but in many ways, an eighteen-year-old is kind of a child, really. I mean there are some who are going to school and working full-time and all, but less than half of all teenagers even have jobs, much less are helping to financially support their families.
So many eighteen-year-olds haven’t seen anything of life. People change careers so often, and I suspect that at least some of that may be because we are expected to choose a direction for our life when we’re between the ages of 16 and 20 (16 for those who go through high school career programs and 20 for those who start out undeclared in college and make a decision going into their junior years in the current system). If we took out those two years of general education requirements, we’d be expecting everyone to choose a path when they’re between 16 and 18. Eeek!
Most high schools have way less in the way of educational programs and facilities and such than most colleges and universities. Having those two years can help a kid fine tune their decisions even when they know which direction they want to go. And for those who don’t know, it’ll open up a whole new world of options, including fields they may not have even known existed.
I’m going to end with a small anecdote about my own life. I was a C student in math for most of my life. Part of it was probably that my mom didn’t emphasize math and my preschool didn’t stress number or math skills. Part of it was definitely that I was nearsighted from a very young age and it’s very hard to do well in math when you can’t see the board. Since math is one of those things where one skill balances on top of another, getting off to that bad a start meant that I just kept doing badly. I took a placement test for math in junior college and I needed remedial algebra and so I did it. I retook the same math class I got a C in my freshman year of high school, only this time it made sense. I got an A. I retook the intermediate algebra class that I took my junior year, and this made sense as well and I got another A. So I took college algebra and wouldn’t you know? I got an A there, as well. If my college experience had only been glorified trade school, I would probably still have no confidence in my ability to do math. And that would have kept me from going for the pharmacy technician job. So general education courses really did broaden my horizons.
Where did I leave off on my Gratuitous Amazon Link? Holes? Yeah, why not? I really enjoyed Holes. I heard great things about it, but somehow just never got around to it. And I’m really sorry that it took me so long to get around to it.
They’re predicting really cold temperatures for tomorrow (by the time I post this, it’ll be “today,” since it’s 11:26 pm right now.
I’m stocking up on stuff that will be useful if the temperaturepocalypse brings along with it the collapse of the power grid. I bought an indoor-safe propane heater but so far I only have picked up two canisters of propane. So, I picked up some tealights so that we can try making one of those radiant heaters out of tea lights and clay plant pots.
I figure if nothing else, we can use the propane heater in my dad’s living room and take turns using the clay pot heater to take the chill off our bathrooms or something like that.
The only pots I could find are pretty large, so I don’t know how well they’ll work. They were also pretty gross, so I’m bleaching them in the sink.
Crap! I literally just remembered my phone batteries. I’ll be right back after I plug one of them in to charge it up
Okay.
I’m using a pretty strong bleach solution on those pots, so they may well be clean enough to eat off of by the time I finish with them.
On the third hand, I have a pretty small pot that I’m using to try to root a piece of my plumeria plant. Maybe I should use that and my smaller big pot for the heater.
Nah. Let’s stick with Plan A for now.
I also picked up some foot warmers to put in my shoes to keep my feet warm. I get a mild case of Raynaud’s phenomenon when I get cold, so even though I love going for a walk on a chilly day, I have to be kind of careful.
Raynaud’s is when the tips of your fingers and toes turn white from cold. I figure mine isn’t so bad, since it can turn your fingers and toes blue, and my fingers and toes have never turned blue.
I’m pretty sure it’s primary Raynaud’s, since secondary Raynaud’s usually comes with autoimmune problems, and I’ve never been diagnosed with lupus or anything.
So, if I go for a walk tomorrow, I can put those in my shoes and hopefully stave off my Raynaud’s. And I do hope to go for a walk tomorrow. The biggest issue is that the ground will probably be icy tomorrow, so I won’t really want to drive anywhere. Fortunately, I’ve got a park within walking distance of my house and can get from there to the Salado Creek Greenway without having to walk along the street. However, I would have to walk along the street to get to the park.
So. It’s now nearly 1 am on Thursday, February 3, and it’s thundering outside. Since I’m trying to post a blog every day this month, I won’t be actually posting this until 12:30 am on February 4. By then, we’ll know what, if anything, comes of temperaturepocalypse.
I may write another post in the morning, or maybe I’ll queue up my second COVID post for the 5th. At any rate, I’ll see y’all later and, oh, blast. I need a Gratuitous Amazon Link don’t I? Where was I? In the middle of 2020, I think.
Welp, I’m going to go back to late 2019. I don’t remember doing The Strangers by Margaret Peterson Haddix, so there you go. The Strangers is the first book in the Greystone Secrets series. Chess, Emma, and Finn discover one day that three kids with their same first and middle names and their same birthdates have been kidnapped. Soon afterwards, their mom has to go on a business trip and leaves them with a stranger. This begins the Greystone kids on a science fiction adventure that I’ve really loved so far. I haven’t read the third book, but I did just finish The Deceivers, the second book, and it looks like this is going to go some fascinating places.
Now, to schedule this before a power line goes down and we end up in darkness. See you tomorrow, probably.
I’m writing three posts regarding my COVID journey. My three posts will be “I have COVID” and how I found out (which I haven’t even written yet), “My living and quarantine situations,” and “Entertainment,” which will include what I’m doing/going to do with this laptop.
Now, how did I find that I have COVID? As I may have mentioned before, I have asthma. My two biggest triggers are allergies and illness, and one of the biggest allergic triggers I have is “mountain cedar,” which is technically Ashe juniper. Mountain cedar levels have been pretty high lately, but I’ve also been pretty good about my Flonase, which usually helps a lot. I was coughing on Thursday and mostly wrote it off as a little bit of mountain cedar, but it was in the back of my head that it might be COVID, since that happened about five years ago. I had a cough in January that year that I was sure was mountain cedar and it turned out I was actually sick.
Then late on Friday, my knees started to really hurt, and when I sat down to check it out, I realized that it was actually the lower part of my thighs, like, my biceps femoris, maybe? At any rate, it was muscular pain, and even when it’s an illness that doesn’t cause muscle pain, my legs will hurt when I’m sick. And COVID does cause muscle pain.
I knew I should have tested Friday night, but I cheated and did it Saturday afternoon. Pikmin Bloom Community Day was Saturday and I knew I could get my 10,000 steps in in my neighborhood without having close contact with anyone, so that’s what I did. I knocked that out between 11 and 12:30, then I did the at-home test. Five minutes into the 15-minute wait, I could see the line indicating infection forming.
So I ordered some food, bottled water, and rubber gloves from Walmart for curbside pickup and began to gather my food and entertainment options and filled out the registration form for the urgent care we go to for testing. By 2:30 pm, I had an official diagnosis.
Normally, I’d’ve sent Alex on the errand to pick up the food and my prescriptions, but Alex also has COVID. He moved out over a year ago, so neither of us could have caught it from the other, but boy what lousy timing!
I took some things to him on Friday night and told him that there was a good chance I had it, too, and if I was sure I’d’ve given him a hug, but didn’t want to take the chance just in case. And now I know that I could’ve given him a hug and I’m chagrined, to say the least.
So after I returned from picking up my food and my medications, I grabbed another couple of things (maybe this is where I found the laptop that I wrote this on?) and was sequestered by 6:30 pm. I had a bunch of jackets piled on my bed and one of those stairstepper thingies on my floor, but after I’d locked all of that in my closet, the room was much less claustrophobic.
And now I’m living in a world that’s mostly without time. My only form of time is my Medrol dosepak. I have to eat four times daily, to ensure that I have food in my stomach when I take the pills, so that I don’t feel nauseated. Well, that was for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, at least. Wednesday I go down to three times daily.
I’m going to take another stab at a NaNoWriMo-type output for the month. However, I am going to cheat a bit. You see, I have a circa 2011 laptop that has one long stream-of-consciousness post that I will probably edit into at least three individual posts on my recent bout of COVID. I’m finally out and about at my desktop computer because I just did an at-home test and got a negative test.
Yay!
During my illness, I did a lot of reading, a lot of knitting, and a lot of wrestling with the laptop. I the laptop to connect to the Internet and almost got the laptop to the point where I can watch YouTube videos and DVDs on it, but there was just no way I could get it to work.
Alex has been working on computers lately, so I may see if he can take a stab at it and speed it up so that I can use it for things. It is also incredibly heavy. Why am I trying to knit a 12-pound weighted blanket when I can just sleep under my 7-pound laptop?
I finally gave up and after I went back to work, I ordered a new portable DVD player. Now if I ever find my old one, Alex and I can have dueling DVD players when we travel. Now I’m working on a Chinese series I bought on DVD — The Bratty/Mischievous/Unruly/Crafty Princess (isn’t Chinese great?). Basically, it’s about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to help a refugee community in ancient China. She and the new young Emperor fall in love and it turns out that the young woman, it turns out, is the daughter of the previous Emperor, thus “Princess.” And the schemes she gets up to to help the refugees are what qualifies her as Bratty/Mischievous/Unruly/Crafty.
I watched the first ten or so episodes, then Thomas and I split up and the DVDs ended up shelved. So, like, 12 years later, I’m tackling it again. I’m having more trouble with the spoken language than I did back then, but the reading is much easier.
So, now that I’m out of quarantine, you know what that means? I can start walking again!
Also going back to the gym. I hope. The last couple of months at work were pretty rough, and I just was so sore afterwards. I compared it to, like, when you’ve been in a car accident and are sore all over? Yeah. So now things have settled down a bit and I’m over COVID, so let’s see how it goes.
I was a very heavy knitter back in the day. I used to knit in front of the television, I’d knit while talking to friends. I’ve even brought my knitting to the movies. I have probably dozens of knitting books. 28. I just counted them.* I also subscribed to Vogue Knitting for years** and I used to pore over women’s magazines in the checkout line looking for knitting patterns and if I liked the pattern I’d buy the magazine, cut out the pattern and put them in one of those sticky photo album pages. Then there were the patterns I downloaded from places like the Berroco and Lion Brand yarn companies’ website.
I’m not sure why I stopped knitting. Moving to Texas didn’t help. I need a severely limited number of warm sweaters down here. I have so much yarn that would make beautiful sweaters and no sweaters to make.
Years ago I found Project Linus, a charity where people make blankets to be given to preemies or to children who have suffered losses or trauma, and so I started knitting blankets for them. I kept knitting blankets for several more years, even though I no longer knew how to get them to the charity.
Then. Hm. I think I decided that I wanted to make sweaters for Mila and all of her foster sisters, but I couldn’t get motivated.
I know one of the things that happened to stop me knitting. Well, first, I stopped watching TV. So there’s that. Also my dad stopped parachuting. I used to knit all the way to and from the jump site.
Well, on Christmas, my dad and I were watching It’s a Wonderful Life and I decided to dig out the Project Linus blankets I was working on. Turns out I was almost done with one of them — a pink, blue, and purple one that was a larger version of a blue, yellow, and green one I did a few years back and that looked almost like a plaid. It doesn’t look so plaid-y when it’s larger, but the blanket is still pretty.
Then I found one that I was working on based on the trapped-bar pattern scarves from the Harry Potter movies (the ones that they unveiled in Prisoner of Azkaban). I couldn’t find the rest of the yarn for it, though, so I unraveled it and will start it over on a slightly smaller scale.
I also saw a commercial for a knit weighted blanket and I was playing around with ideas for that for a while. I weigh about 125, which means that the standard adult weighted blankets, at 15 pounds, are way too heavy for me. Since cotton yarn feels pretty heavy, I dug out some Lion Brand CottonEase and am now playing around with it. I’m working a strand of yellow and a strand of, like, turquoise and will see how that works out. If it’s too light or too small, maybe I’ll put it in my container for Project Linus.
Recently I’ve gotten pretty heavily into several YouTube channels and also some Amazon Prime series, so I figured it’s not television, but it’s pretty close, so I’ve been knitting in front of them. Speaking of YouTube channels, I need to see where I am in my Content Creators series.
I went through my yarns years ago and sorted them by color, but that was undone ages ago and so I think I need to go through them again.
For today’s Germane Amazon Link, I bring you the source of some of my favorite patterns, as well as the book that had me take my first stab at knitting sweaters all in one piece, which is now how I knit, well, pretty much everything I can knit in one piece: Fishermen’s Sweaters: Twenty Exclusive Knitwear Designs for All Generations, by Alice Starmore.
*29. I forgot the dog knitting pattern book I have in Kindle format.
**I was considering seeing if I could make Vogue Knitting magazine my Germane Amazon Link, but apparently Vogue Knitting is not available for Kindle. Hm.***
***Oh! Vogue Knitting has its own app! Would it let me access back issues? I’d love to be able to access back issues. I love my old magazines, but they’re awfully dusty.
Wow. I’m not sure what to say. I actually procrastinated on watching the episode because I know it’ll be another year or so for Season 2. This is why I never would have binged it. I was hoping to stretch out my viewings so that I will only have 43 weeks* to wait until the next season.
And then once I watched it, I had a bunch of “What even was that?” to unpack.
I’ve read some critical reviews of the episode and some less-critical ones and now I think I’m ready to tackle this task. Probably.
The view from the Empire State Building at around 5:00 p.m. on, near as I can figure August 16, 1988.
We start the episode with a flashback to the tail end of the Age of Legends, with Lews Therin Telamon trying to convince Latra Posae Decume, the leader of the female Aes Sedai, to help him seal the Bore on the Dark One’s prison. She is afraid of what could go wrong and refuses to help him. He ends with a line that if the women will help, they won’t fail.
There’s a line in this scene in which Latra calls Lews Therin “the Dragon Reborn.” Is this an error, or has Judkins come up with a way to shorthand a plot point by having Lews Therin have also been the reincarnation of the soul known as the Dragon?
I’m leaning towards error, myself.
After the opening titles (and why is the Brown sister shown at such an odd angle? That’ll make it really hard for me to make it an icon), we pick up with Rand and Moiraine in the Blight. They had to create the Blight in a studio because they had a real-world location chosen, but COVID put an end to that.
We get a scene with Egwene and Perrin fretting over Rand. Now, at this point, it’s been hinted that Perrin had a thing for Egwene and maybe he still does. And when Egwene turns to him for comfort, he wraps his arm around her.
Now, someone (don’t know who! sorry!) on the WoT subreddit opined that. . . . Okay. I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the books, The Shadow Rising specifically, the ruler of the tiny city-state of Mayene, Berelain, starts to pursue Perrin romantically. Perrin is in love with Faile, though. So, when Perrin finds out that the Whitecloaks are in Emond’s Field, expecting that he will die, and knowing that he cannot bear to watch Faile watch him die, tries to make Faile stay behind by telling her that he prefers Berelain.
This gives Berelain hope that he will choose her and she becomes a real pain in the ass from there onwards.
Anyway, my fellow Redditor suggested that as part of the streamlining, maybe they were going to jettison Berelain and make Egwene the woman he tells Faile that he prefers. And since Perrin is certainly attracted to Egwene, there will definitely be more truth to the lie he tells Faile to try to drive her away than with Berelain.
Nynaeve sends Lan after Rand and Moiraine and they say a tearful goodbye, particularly since Lan has given up on them ever being together.
Rand and “the Dark One” have a confrontation in a dream in the Blight. Afterwards, Moiraine gives Rand a sa’angreal, which will make Rand much more powerful than he would be alone. Her big plan is for Rand to “put him (the Dark One) back where he belongs.” Wow. Thanks for that well-thought-out plan there, Rainey.
Meanwhile, Trollocs are approaching Fal Dara. They evacuate the foreigners who want to leave, which includes Min. I have to admit that I was wondering how the foreigners would get out of Shienar but when I looked at the map, I realized that the Trollocs are coming from the north and the foreigners are fleeing to the south.
Of course, while Min gets the heck out of Dodge, Egwene, Loial, Nynaeve, and Perrin are staying. What follows in this storyline is a battle scene and as I’m usually “meh” about battle scenes, I’ll try to sum up the interesting parts.
Since the Fal Darans believe that this is Tarmon Gai’don, they dig The Horn of Valere out from under Agelmar’s chair, assisted by Perrin and Loial. Meanwhile, Amalisa leads a circle of channelers to stop the Trollocs once they get through the first defense of the city. I assume that Amalisa was in charge because she is the only one who has been to Tar Valon. She may also be the only one who’s ever used the Power in battle.
Of course, the channelers defeat all 10,000 trollocs in a scene that either presages or maybe will even replace, the little Roto-tiller trick the Asha’man will use at Dumai’s Wells, if we ever get there. The difference, however, is that where the Asha’man use earth and fire, the channelers here use lightning.
The channeling is so strong that most of the women involved end up not just burned out, but burned up. The only apparent survivor is Egwene, who somehow manages to heal Nynaeve’s death. I hope Nynaeve wasn’t completely dead, just mostly dead.
Meanwhile, after they unearth the Horn of Valere, Padan Fain and a bunch of Trollocs show up and start stabbing people. Fain says that the world needs the balance of the Light and Dark and Fain is, I guess, just doing his best for his side. We get hints that perhaps Mat will fall to the Dark at some point in the series, and boy will the Mat fankids be up in arms about that! Fain stabs Loial with the Shadar Logoth dagger and takes off with the Horn of Valere.
In the books, they need to get the Horn of Valere back because Horn of Valere and they need to get the dagger back to heal Mat, since they can’t break his connection to the dagger without it. I suspect that the urgency for the dagger will be to heal Loial.
Then we get to the big battle at the Eye of the World. Unlike in the books, where the Eye of the World is a big pool of untainted Saidin, here it is some kind of underground chamber. Rand remembers being there as Lews Therin and he reaches down to touch the “ancient symbol of Aes Sedai” in the floor, only to find himself back in the Two Rivers, now married to Egwene. They have a daughter, named Joiya, and seem to be very happily married.
Rand is suspicious of this, and tests Egwene. She remembers a shared childhood memory, but shows no interest in being either a Wisdom or an Aes Sedai.
“The Dark One” turns up and tells Rand that through the Power, he can make this dream a reality. He teaches Rand the achieving the void trick that we didn’t have time for Tam to have taught Rand, and Rand begins to channel.
Outside of that dream world, “The Dark One” is talking to Moiraine and taunting her about the possibility that Rand will turn to the Dark, at which point, Moiraine pulls out a knife and holds it to Rand’s throat. You see, Moiraine would rather there be no Dragon Reborn than an evil one. I can respect that.
Eventually, Rand denies “The Dark One’s” plans and fights him. You see, the Egwene that Rand loves would never just walk away from becoming an Aes Sedai and Rand would never do that to her.
I loved that part.
Happy New Year, by the way. I just finished that paragraph above before midnight and am picking up here on the night of January 1, 2022.
After Rand finishes blowing “The Dark One” away with the Power in the sa’angreal, he tells Moiraine that he’s done and that she should tell everyone else that he’s dead. He could feel the madness taking hold of him while he was channeling and since the madness causes men to kill everyone they love, he is leaving and he doesn’t want anyone to find him again.
After Rand leaves, Lan shows up and Moiraine tells him that Rand is “gone.” Then she tells him that she cannot unmask the bond because “The Dark One. He. I can’t touch the Source.”
This is going to give Moiraine something to do next season. She doesn’t have much to do in The Great Hunt, so while Egwene and Nynaeve are going to Tar Valon, and Perrin heads off to find the Horn of Valere with whoever is left of the Shienaran army, Moiraine will probably be looking for the solution to her shielding/stilling.
Later, Moiraine is holding a piece of something white, which is cuendillar and unbreakable, even by the Power. It seems that the penny drops there and she realizes what The Eye of the World is. Because it certainly seems to me to be the Bore, the place where the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends opened up The Dark One’s tomb and tried to destroy him/it. The “ancient symbol of the Aes Sedai” is the seal. In the books, there are seven seals all in that shape, all made of cuendillar. I guess we have one large one here.
Moiraine says that this wasn’t the Last Battle, it was the first.
The season ends on a tag in which a flotilla of ships is approaching the western coast of Randland and women in gray dresses with kinky-looking ball gag things in their mouths channel the water into forming a tidal wave. And the season ends.
I put “The Dark One” in quotes throughout, by the way, because we don’t know if we’re going the same way as in the books, but in the books, that character turns out to be the Foresaken Ishamael.
*An interview with someone behind the scenes said something about The Wheel of Time being a holiday thing, so my guess is that it’ll start eight weeks out from Christmas 2022, which somehow ends up being October 30, 2022.
Today I will probably spend entirely too much time worrying about how one of my favorite Lan/Nynaeve scenes from the book will play out in the series, and wonder if they’ll just skip it. I will also wonder what Mat would have done in this episode if Barney Harris had returned after the COVID shutdown.
A bed of lilies on the north side of the main building of Ellis Island.
We start out where we ended last episode — with them calling for Mat to join them. After the Waygate closes, they demand that Moiraine open it back up. Moiraine tells them that she cannot because channeling in the Ways is dangerous and that Mat has made his decision.
In service to the medium, Judkins made changes to the way the Ways work. In the books, it is pitch black inside the Ways, but here there’s constant thunder and lightning. This allows the audience to see something of the bridges and islands.
Machin Shin is also different in the series. In the books, it mutters about blood and screams and will rip your soul out if it catches up to you. Here, the voices are individualized — Machin Shin picks up your doubts and fears and tells you that they are true.
They encounter a Trolloc and reflexively Egwene channels and pushes it off the bridge into the void below. This attracts Machin Shin, but fortunately they’re at the Fal Dara Waygate by then. Nynaeve does another amazingly strong bit of channeling and pushes Machin Shin away.
They arrive in Fal Dara and a lot of the things that Machin Shin said to them bear fruit while they wait for the morning so they can head to the Eye of the World.
We meet Min, finally. I mean, we couldn’t’ve met her earlier, because she can see who the Dragon Reborn is. She works in a pub and Moiraine takes the Emond’s Field Four to the pub so Min can read them. She sees stuff that we know is coming, like Perrin as Wolfbrother and Egwene and Nynaeve going to the White Tower. The scene of the darkness trying to swallow up the sparks was more understated than I’d hoped it would be, but you can’t have everything.
One of the things that Perrin heard from Machin Shin was that he killed Laila to be free of her because he was in love with another woman. That woman turns out to be Egwene. Now, if you’ve read The Eye of the World, you may remember that Perrin gets very jealous of Egwene once Aram starts paying attention to her. So, yeah. I don’t think that Judkins made that up out of whole cloth.
Lan and Nynaeve’s romance progresses. She stalks him when he goes to dinner with a family in Fal Dara. He knows she’s there, though, and catches her. Then he invites her to join them for dinner. After they return to the keep, they go to bed together. I was kind of disappointed by this development. I liked the kind of slow burn thing that book Lan and Nynaeve get, but I also acknowledge that Judkins thought that he might only get one season, so I can accept that he’d want Lan and Nynaeve to get together by the end of the season.
Now, for my concern about one of my favorite scenes. That’s when Lan calls Nynaeve “Mashiara.” The book explains “Mashiara” as “Beloved of heart and soul, . . . but a love lost, too. Lost beyond regaining.” And everyone here who’s read the books knows that Lan is counting his Mashiaras before they hatch, because Nynaeve isn’t going to give up that easily, dammit. And I just love that whole thing.
The problem is that we’ve established that Nynaeve in the series doesn’t speak the Old Tongue. I mean, the “Mashiara” scene will kind of lose its punch if she has to go to someone else for a translation. I’m hoping that since she had the conversation about not being able to speak the Old Tongue with Lan, she has been taking lessons offscreen. Then we can get our translation not from someone explaining it to Nynaeve, but from someone (maybe Nynaeve, maybe someone who overheard the conversation) explaining it to another of the Emond’s Fielders.
While Lan and Nynaeve are .. . doing whatever they’re doing, Rand cannot sleep. He gets out of the bed he’s sharing with Egwene* and goes back to the pub where Min works. Turns out that one of the things that Machin Shin told Rand was that he is the Dragon Reborn. We see the scene where a delirious Tam says that Rand is a baby he found. We also see that he channeled to break down the door in Breen’s Spring and that he pushed the Trolloc off the bridge. Or maybe he and Egwene both pushed the Trolloc off the bridge.
Min tells him her first viewing, in Tar Valon. She saw a man who was going to help a woman give birth on the slopes of Dragonmount and take the baby home and raise him in a small village between two rivers and that that baby was something impossible. We watch Tigraine give birth to Rand as Min tells the story.
After this, he asks Min what she sees now and she says that she sees rainbows, carnivals, and three beautiful women. I like this line because if the series had ended there, the three beautiful women would have been Egwene, Moiraine, and Nynaeve. As the series will be continuing, the three beautiful women are going to be Aviendha, Elayne, and Min herself. Well played, Mr. Judkins.
Egwene, Nynaeve, and Perrin join up in Nynaeve’s certainly unslept-in room and decide that they all want to go to the Eye of the World. Meanwhile, Rand has already told Moiraine that he’s the Dragon Reborn and they’ve already headed off for the Blight.
Now, had the series ended after one season, I think that Rand would have won and, since we haven’t introduced the “the blood of the Dragon on the stones of Shayol Ghul” bit, or even the “she’s not for you, nor you for her, at least, not in the way you both want” part yet, Moiraine would have died and Rand would have survived. There’d be some kind of series tag implying, or stating outright, that Egwene and Nynaeve would have gone to Tar Valon and eventually that Rand and Lan would have been their husbands and Warders.
Now, the million-dollar question. Did they completely rework this episode when Barney Harris didn’t come back or what? Because the way it stands, I cannot see how he’d fit in. I guess that maybe he could be off establishing the uncanny luck that Mat has after he’s separated from the Shadar Logoth dagger, maybe? Like, when they’re at the pub he’d head off to a dicing game and when they meet in Nynaeve’s room he’d’ve spent all night dicing and be in a hurry to head to the Eye of the World because the people he’d beaten certainly wouldn’t’ve followed him into the Blight? I guess?
We also see Padan Fain come out of the Waygate and Loial disappears entirely at21:07. Maybe Loial is enjoying Fal Dara’s library. I bet Fal Dara has a great library.
* Several people on the Wheel of Time subreddit are upset about Egwene and Rand having sex together. I’m currently reading The Shadow Rising and when Berelain throws herself at Rand, Rand refers to her as wanting to act as though they’re betrothed. And Egwene and Rand have been promised to each other since they were children.
I mean it. It’s been just. I’m almost done with my reread of Steelheart* by Brandon Sanderson and I’m about 3/4 done with A Wizard of Mars by Diane Duane and I only have two hours left on my audiobook of The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan and I’m half done with my reread of Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi Jones and I’m not sure how far along I am in The Deceivers by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
Maybe I’m in the middle of too many books.
Well, it kind of makes sense. The only two I’m reading in hard copy right now are A Wizard of Mars and Professional Troublemaker. Steelheart is the ebook on my main phone. The Deceivers is the ebook on my backup phone. The Dragon Reborn is what I’m listening to when I’m driving.
Yes. I have two phones. I got my backup phone in 2014 just before we went to Italy. My previous phone was a Palm Treo and Palm Treo didn’t allow me to make phone calls in Europe. I knew that I’d need to be able to call 113 just in case (I never did, but it pays to be prepared), so I bought a Samsung Galaxy S5. It worked wonderfully for the next two and a half years and I nursed it along for another two and a half (by the end of this period the only way I could upgrade Pokemon Go was to uninstall and reinstall the game). In 2019, I got a new phone, a Galaxy S8. I got a good price on it because the S10 was about to come out.
My account was with Sprint, which is now T-Mobile, and T-Mobile is shutting down the network that my S8 worked on, so looks like I’ll have two backup phones in a bit.
I’m off tomorrow, so I guess I’ll be working on finishing up some of these books. I have plans in the morning and afternoon and might be going out with Alex tomorrow night, but if he isn’t able to make it, I can go for a long walk and maybe finish The Dragon Reborn. I might even finish Steelheart before bed tonight. That’d be nice. Then I’d go on to Firefight, the second book in the The Reckoners series.
*I thought that having six Germane Amazon Links would be about five too many, so I’m just linking to the first one. I reserve the right to come back and link the others in the future.
The last time I did one of those was when I first moved to Texas and was unemployed. It took me so long to find a paralegal job that I began to wonder if I was barking up the proverbial wrong tree and by golly, I got mostly the kinds of things I already liked to do, like working as a librarian.
The careers with the brightest futures and the highest pay on my list are poets, lyricists, and creative writers; art therapists; music therapists; interpreters and translators; news analysts, reporters, and journalists; and mental health and substance abuse social workers. All of these are supposed to pay at least $5 more than my current job and it says that creative writing pays $32.70 per hour. Now, I don’t know if blogging is *creative* writing. Maybe it’s more journalism and reporting, which pays $23.70. So where’s my somewhere between $23.70 and $27.99 per hour?
I’m pleased that my post-retirement career of working as a foreign language translator (my real dream is to translate children’s books) is still in line with my interests, though.
So I guess I just keep going with my current plans — continue reading and writing and practicing my languages. Well, at least I’m not heading the wrong direction as fast as I can, right?
Now, where did I leave off on Gratuitous Amazon Links? I think I was on The Throne of Fire, by Rick Riordan. The Throne of Fire is the second book in the Kane Chronicles series and it concerns the search of Carter and Sadie Kane for the god Ra. Ra may be the key to defeating Apophis and the Kane siblings have to find him.
I have read the third Kane Chronicles book, The Serpent’s Shadow, and I have a copy around here somewhere. But damned if I know where. I’ve come to the conclusion that I must have books somewhere other than the four places I know of. So it’ll be a while until The Serpent’s Shadow will be my Gratuitious Amazon Link.
Okay. You know the drill if you’ve been reading these posts for a while. I’m going to post an old image and below that, all spoilers are fair game, both from the series and from anywhere in the books, and we’re definitely talking about The Shadow Rising here.
The area around Grand Central Station is really congested and has this real “concrete canyon” vibe, so it took me a while to find place where I could get a decent photo.
We start this episode with a flashback to the childhood of Siuan Sanche, who at this point in the series is the Amyrlin Seat. Siuan leaves her home in Tear because the villagers near where she and her father live find out that she can channel. In Tear, it is illegal to channel, and girls who are found to have the ability are sent away immediately. I don’t know what happens to boy channelers who are discovered. I’ll look into it.
We get our first look at the Hall of the Tower, when the Amyrlin Seat calls a meeting of the Hall so that Alanna, Liandrin, and Moiraine can answer for their extrajudicial gentling of Logain. Siuan is very unhappy and tells Alanna and Liandrin that she’ll decide their punishments later. Then she demands to know why Moiraine has been out of pocket for two years, and Moiraine keeps insisting that she cannot tell her. They have a major confrontation over it, and Moiraine still insists that she cannot say.
And I’m, like, “Wait. Siuan knew about Moiraine’s search for the Dragon Reborn in the books. It was a whole plot that they’d cooked up between them. What’s going on here?”
Meanwhile, Moiraine has broken the link between Mat and the Shadar Logoth dagger (Wow! That was a fast subplot — blink and you’ll miss it!). Egwene and Perrin have arrived at the Tower and Moiraine visits them. The head of the Blue Ajah tells Moiraine that she has to remain in the Tower for now, which puts a kink in her Dragon Reborn plans.
We see Moiraine in a dress thing that has man’s dress shirt vibes. Lan complains about Moiraine masking the bond, then wishes Moiraine a good night and ends with “Give her my love.”
It turns out that not only are Moiraine and Siuan in on the search for the Dragon Reborn together, they are lovers. In the books, they were what was known as “pillow-friends,” meaning that they had a sexual relationship during their youth, but it’s kind of implied that it’s over. This is particularly evident in that both end up with men. Well, for varying definitions of “end up with.”
So. Since Moiraine and Siuan definitely seem to me to have a love relationship here, after Siuan gets stilled and is youthened to the point of being unrecognizable. Or, I guess, will she get stilled and youthened to the point of being unrecogizable? I mean, the Gareth Bryne plot is part of that, and I cannot see Siuan being all, “It’s over Moiraine. I’m in love with Queen Morgase’s ex-boyfriend.” It just doesn’t seem to fit the tone of the series. Or, I guess once Moiraine is presumed dead, maybe Siuan and Bryne will have a fling?
We’ll see what happens when it happens, I guess.
Siuan mentions a premonitory dream that she had about the Dark One and the Eye of the World and so after Siuan exiles Moiraine at Moiraine’s request (to get her out of the demand of the head of her Ajah), Moiraine gets the band back together and meets them at a Waygate. She tells them that they have to go to the Eye of the World so that whichever of them is the Dragon can hurry up and get the Last Battle over with.
I guess that if they’d only gotten the one season, they would have gotten the Last Battle over with and that’d be it, but they have had a renewal, so what will happen?
Then Mat says that he is having second thoughts and Moiraine says that there’s no turning back. The rest of them pile into the Waygate and Mat just stands there. They yell for him to hurry up, but he doesn’t come any closer. And then the Waygate closes.
This is the “Wait. What?” moment.
I’ve since done some digging and from what I can gather, this is when Barney Harris left the show. They shut down production for COVID-19 and something happened behind the scenes and they ended up having to recast Mat. I gather that they are going to reintegrate Mat into the show with the new actor sometime in Season 2.
