To Hither and Yon

I don’t know.

Well, with the Wheel of Time TV series starting in November, I probably need a new knitting project. I’m turning two falling-apart blankets into a new blanket, and unraveling the old blankets is a pain in the ass. I’ll have to wait until the weather cools off more to get back to unraveling.

Oh! I’ve got a concert in less than a week (that’s a topic right there!) and I’ve always wanted a kind of string bag bag for concerts. Something transparent and within the size limits for the venue. Like that.

I have two rolls of fishing line. One is the plasticky kind and the other is more stringy. I was hoping to use the stringy fishing line to reinforce the bag, but right now all I can find is the plasticky roll. I’ll keep looking for the stringy one, but if I can’t find it by the time I go back to work on Tuesday (I’m off on November 1), I’ll get another roll.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Dark Souls, by Paula Morris. We’re starting the 2021 books now. I’d better get on the stick with regard to my reading, or I’m going to be out of books by the end of November. Dark Souls is a supernatural story of Miranda, who discovered that she can see ghosts. After a terrible automobile accident kills her best friend, Her parents take her and her brother to York, England, where she gets exposed to the fear and the fascination of some of England’s famous ghosts.

I’m really enjoying this era of book blogging, but I do kind of miss the old travel blog days. I may go back to 1992 and do Thomas’s and my second honeymoon at some point during November.

I’ve started researching book blogging conventions and have found some that might be interesting, if I can recover financially from our upcoming house repair to attend.

I’ve always sucked at networking. I’m either too “I’m here to meet other professionals and make contacts” or I’m too, “I’m just here to check things out. I don’t need contacts.” And I guess that the only way to do this is to do it.

Maybe I should attend a virtual conference or two. They should be cheaper than traveling to the convention, after all.

Well, I’ll keep looking at them. I don’t have to make a decision right now. At least, I hope not.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link today, we’re at the end of the books I read in 2020. My last book for the year was Ruined, by Paula Morris. Ruined is the story of Rebecca, who has to move in with a distant family friend in New Orleans while her father works abroad. Soon after moving to New Orleans, Rebecca meets Lisette, a the ghost of a slave who died in the Bowman home in 1853. And who would turn out to be Rebecca’s arch-nemesis in school? Helena Bowman, who lives in the very house where Lisette died.

I had a bad mourning day today. Stupid cat.

Right now, it’s anger. I don’t suppose that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross really expected people to be interpreting her Five Stages of Grief for pet deaths. If she had, she certainly would have considered “guilt” to be one of them. Because I do feel guilty. I feel like I should have noticed . . . something before he got to that point.

I also feel guilty about the loss of one of my cats, oh, 15 years ago. If we do see them on the other side of the “Rainbow Bridge,” I feel like he’ll be angry with me. I’ve been thinking about talking to my vet about it, just to clear the air.

Dammit. Now I’m starting to tear up.

Moving on. I took three bags of books to Half-Price Books and came away with just a little more money than a copy of The Invention of Hugo Cabret* costs. I’ve decided that’s going to be my next steampunk kids’ book to help me in writing my own.

Oh! And speaking of reading and writing, apparently there’s some kind of organzation for book bloggers? Or a club or union or something? That’s something to try to track down in the not-too-distant future.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link looks to be the final of the Gitty Danesvari Ghoulfriends series, Ghoulfriends ‘Til the End.

*Not going to make a Germane Amazon Link out of this yet. I’ll wait until I’ve read it for that.

I removed Deimos’s litter boxes today.

I realized today that the last time I did these things — removing the litter boxes and food and water bowls of a deceased cat, my next cat was one of the loves of my life. So, maybe once I’ve healed up from this loss, amazing feline things await.

Of course, since all cats are best cat, this is entirely likely.

I always said that I wouldn’t subscribe to Audible and would, rather, buy one book at a time. However, I cannot figure out how to buy the audiobook of The Great Hunt *without* subscribing. So, I broke down and subscribed. I have a four-month trail thingy for half-price and I got The Great Hunt* for my free book for the first month. I’m going to pace the purchases of the other 12 Wheel of Time books over that four-month period so that three of them are the ones included in the subscription and I only have to pay for the . . . other . . . nine. Then I’ll cancel my subscription.

Anyway, I only have, like, two and a half hours of The Eye of the World to go, and then I’ll be ready for Eye of the World-related blog posts in November. Yay!

*Germane Amazon Link. Kindle again this time.

So. Things are changing.

I had to have Deimos put down at 1:15 this morning. His blood work looked okay, aside from the anemia, so they put him in an oxygen tent to try to boost his, well, oxygen levels, since his blood wasn’t carrying as much as it should have been.

Then there were a bunch of emergency, emergencies. And then at 12:00 this morning, he went into cardiac arrest. I’d authorized one round of CPR so that I could give him a chance to fight if he wanted to and so they did that one round of CPR and by the time they got his heart started, he was unresponsive. The vet thinks that he had severe brain damage from the lack of oxygen and may even have been “brain dead.”

And while they were doing the CPR, the vet found a tumor that had ruptured and was bleeding. So that explains the anemia.

I can’t have any more cats or dogs, at least for the foreseeable future, so I’m going to ramp down a bit on the foreign language studying and focus on writing. If I can make this blog take off and/or can write that book, then maybe I’ll be on my way to being able to pay off my mortgage.

I’m not going to stop my foreign language learning entirely, of course. I am still going to have my phone set on a language and keep up with Duolingo and converse where I can. But since I want to spend a lot of November talking about the Wheel of Time, I’m no longer listening to foreign language stuff in the car. Instead, I’m listening to Michael Kramer, Kate Reading, and Robert Jordan.

A Gratuitous Amazon Link today, and one that I will probably post several times in November: The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan. I’d’ve linked to the Audible version, but the Audible version is more than $40, for some unknown reason. I swear I paid less than that when I bought it before. So. The Kindle version.

Deimos is in the hospital.

He was fine when I left for work this morning, but when I came home, he was lethargic. He was definitely aware of what was going on (he did *not* like it when I left the house to take him to the vet), but didn’t seem able to actually fight me.

Turns out he’s anemic, which could be the result of internal bleeding, or of an infection, or an autoimmune disorder, or cancer.

We’re waiting for the results from the blood tests right now, and, depending on how the blood tests come out (like, if it’s terminal), I might not be going to work tomorrow.

I can’t believe it’s only 10:00.

In other news, looks like I now have a profit motive to write, write, write next month. Our house needs a $25,000 repair, and I’m going to dig into my long-term investments and pay off half of it.

Pity I’m no good at making things go viral. A crowdfunding account (or a Patreon) might not be a bad idea right now.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is the next Monster High Ghoulfriends book: Who’s that Ghoulfriend, by Gitty Daneshvari.

Wow. I have literally nothing to say.

So, um.

See you tomorrow, I guess?

I’ve been thinking a lot about my nearsightedness lately.

I can’t actually remember a time when I could see distances. I wonder if that played into how I ended up being bullied in grade school. Perhaps the other kids were friendly to me and I couldn’t see them, and so I looked unfriendly?

The biggest drawback to this theory is that if that’s what happened, why didn’t it come out during the times when the teachers tried to reason with the bullies and get them to stop?

I mean, “she’s unfriendly to me” would seem to be a decent defense to accusations of bullying, after all.

I can definitely remember times when I couldn’t see what was going on around me. My personal favorite was when I went to my uncle’s wedding and thought that the candles were blinking lights, like on the control panel of the Enterprise in Star Trek.

I also tried to cross against the light when I was little. I mean, I knew not to cross when traffic was coming, but my teacher had told us only to cross when “the light” was green. And the only light I could see, the one perpendicular to me was green, so I went, even though the traffic going parallel to us wasn’t stopped. I’d been trained not to break the rules, no matter how stupid they seemed to me.

When we discovered that I needed glasses, we were at the circus, which was held, I believe, at the International Amphitheatre. We were waiting for it to start, and I asked my folks what time it was. “Can’t you see the clock?” they asked in surprise.

When I said I couldn’t, they said it was there, on the wall. I looked way down at one end of the arena, then way down at the other, and looked at my parents, mystified. My mom had brought a pair of opera glasses with her, and she held them in front of my face. “Stop me when you can see the clock.”

She began to adjust the dial. Slowly the clock came into focus. It was right across from where we were sitting.

My parents later told me that they already knew that I was nearsighted because they’d gotten the results from the school vision screenings, but I don’t believe that’s how it happened at all. I don’t think they’d’ve gotten nearly that quiet if it was something they were expecting.

So I went to the eye doctor, who sold his practice to another eye doctor, who was my doctor until I got married in 1991.

Speaking of which, I’m overdue for an eye checkup. I need to get on that soon.

Our Gratuitous Amazon Link for today is Ghoulfriends Just Want to Have Fun, by Gitty Daneshvari. We’re continuing the tale of Robecca, Venus, and Rochelle’s first year at Monster High and we see more of the major characters from the Monster High toy series.

I just remembered the thing I was going to write about before. A few years ago, a group of us were talking about how outdated the “literary canon” was and so I took a stab at figuring out who the most influential writers of our day are. I took the top selling authors list from Amazon.com and searched Google for them and then sorted them by how many Google hits I got.

This was back in 2018 and the top 10 were Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Stephen King, Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, and J.R.R. Tolkein.

I was thinking that I might revive this project, but I cannot find that list of writers. I guess I’ll keep looking, and we’ll see what we can find down the line.

Wow. That was a day.

Somehow I picked up an extra 2.5 hours of work time this week and had to take an hour and a half lunch.

My digestion hasn’t been happy lately.

No matter how much work we did, it seemed like the numbers never went down.

I got my Moderna booster today and so we’ll see how my body feels tomorrow.

I went to the gym tonight just in case I do feel as lousy as I’m afraid I’ll feel. If I don’t feel that lousy, then maybe I’ll go out and do something that I can write about tomorrow.