To Hither and Yon

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite — WTF?

November 2, 2020 2 of 8

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.

I Have a New Hobby

November 2, 2020 1 of 8

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.

The Trials and Travails of A Language Learner

November 1, 2020 4 of 8

Okay, today’s language learning hurdle wasn’t actually too bad from a global standpoint, but it did set my savings back a bit.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m attempting to focus on specific languages for a couple of months at a time. June and July were Spanish, August and September were German, October and November are Chinese, etc.

One of the thing that I’ve been doing is attempting to understand my phone games in each of these languages. Only, when I made my list of languages: Spanish, German, Mandarin, Italian, and Czech, I realized that my games aren’t available in Czech. So I decided to stack Mandarin in my games and Pimsleur Czech in the car and Duolingo Czech.

I put Pimsleur Czech on hold from my library and checked out Pimsleur Lithuanian (because I may qualify for Lithuanian citizenship and so why not?)

Only when I attempted to listen to Pimsleur Lithuanian using my old cell phone and my bluetooth speaker, I missed whole syllables. So eventually I figured out how to get it to come out right, I realized that this is too challenging for something I was doing just to fill in time while I waited for a different challenging language to become available.

So I switched to Pimsleur German and, aside from it being really strangely formal — I mean, they’re inviting each other to their homes for drinks and still calling each other “Sie”? — it mostly just awakened stuff that was already in there somewhere.

After a few days, I checked in on Czech and discovered that I’d missed it. They let me get back in line right behind the person who had it out then and I went back to German and checked in until the other day, when it finally became available again. I tried to listen to it this morning and, remember what happened when I first downloaded Lithuanian? Where I was missing syllables? It’s happening with Czech.

So now I’m racking my brain trying to remember what I did to make Lithuanian work way back a month ago. Hopefully I’ll figure it out pretty soon, because one Pimsleur lesson is $0.60. That’ll go a long way towards bolstering my savings for my modern languages degree.

Well, if all else fails, I can always turn the volume on my phone way, way up and also close my windows. I would very much prefer to get my bluetooth speaker to work, though.

It’s 11 pm now and I need to think about getting to bed. Time change is really not my friend this month. I didn’t get my eight posts in, but just maybe I’ve made my 1,600 word count goal, though. We’ll see once I post my Gratuitous Amazon Link.

The Gratuitous Amazon Link for this post is a goodie — A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik. It’s a fantasy story about a wizarding school in a world that’s overrun by little evil critters. It’s the first in a series, but it’s also a standalone story all by itself. I’m reading it as part of Jenny Lawson’s Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, and I think it’s my favorite so far.

Writers’ Block

November 1, 2020 3 of 8

So I just had a long conversation with Evelyn and came up with a number of things to write about. And now I can’t remember one of them.

So here’s my list of topics:

travel
writing
reading
crafts
“content creators” (i.e. YouTubers, podcasts, etc.)
medicine (I’m a medical librarian, after all).
adventures in cooking
walking
pets
games
languages
childhood trauma (because why not)

This looks like a good place to start. I can pick eight of these every day (I don’t know if I’m going to really go into my childhood demons or not here in public. But God knows it’d be a fertile topic. I could ramble about that for pages.

This list is just off the top of my head. In future posts I may take this list and rank them from most to least useful. Or maybe I’ll just randomly choose one based on my mood. We’ll see what happens as the month progresses.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Using my latest idea, to go in reverse chronological order through my Goodreads list, next up is The Tower of Nero, the most recent book in the series (is there a term for a series of series?) that Rick Riordan started with The Lightning Thief. I’m never sure if I should do this as a Kindle edition or hard copy. I opted for Kindle this time. If I ever get a critical mass of readers who do buy these books, I’ll crunch the numbers and see which goes over better then edit as necessary.

My Reading History and My Goodreads Account

November 1, 2020 2 of 8

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.

Warmup Post NaNoWriMo 2020

11/1/20 1 of 8

I don’t know how long this is going to be. I’m not even sure what it’s going to be about. Maybe I’ll just ramble for a couple of hundred words and then post. I know that I’m normally up until, like 1 am or whatever most nights, but I’m already pretty punchy and will probably go to bed soon.

Do I need to do any laundry tonight? That’s a good question that I should research once I’m done with this.

I think that my first post once I’m actually, you know, awake should be a real introduction post like I did in 2015 when I started this blog and then once I finish it and polish it and whatever, I should take Facebook up on the credit that they’re always offering me to promote that post. And if there’s no offer like that now, I guess I’ll wait until there is an offer like that.

It kind of sucks that the first day of the first year in a long time that I’m really putting the effort in on NaNoWriMo I have to work. It’s a short-ish day, though, starting at 10 am and ending at 6 pm. I’ll have to throw together post 2 of 8 during breakfast. Unless I oversleep, in which case I’ll just have to punt.

I should probably try auditioning some more speech-to-text apps. Then I can write while I drive when I need to. I guess that would count as writing, right?

Ack! I just realized that if I’m going to write 240 posts, I need 240 photos and 240 Gratuitous Amazon Links. Maybe I can press my Goodreads account into service here. I’ve shelved 270 books and I’m still digging more out of my subconscious. Maybe I can post 240 of them in reverse chronological order by date written. Well, kind of a hybrid chronological order would be better, I guess. The book that I just finished last night was Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. The one before that was Tower of Nero, which relies on things learned in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Heroes of Olympus and the first four Trials of Apollo books and skipping those would be counterproductive.

On the other hand, the posts aren’t going to be read in any particular order, so would it really matter which order I post the books in? I don’t know. It’s almost 12:30 am and I’m not thinking really well at the moment.

This would mean, of course, that the very oldest book I’ve ever read (right now the oldest books I have there are the first three Nancy Drew mysteries) would never be a Gratuitous Amazon Link this month.

Thinking of my Goodreads account, I just realized that I’m really far behind on updating them. I just took a break to update. And so now my Read shelf has 274 books on it and so now I have a bunch of Gratuitous Amazon Links lined up, but not anything like 240.

First up, the most recent book I’ve read, Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. It was published in 2012, and there are eight more books in the series so we’ll see how this goes. I really enjoyed this book and some not-quite-spoilery things I’ve read make me think that I might enjoy the rest of the series.

Maybe I’ll write about it later today for my first book blogging post for the month.

Now, let’s see how many words I’ve racked up so far.

Word tells me that it’s 592. That’s a respectable number. Not nearly enough for today, but enough before bedtime.

Liveblogging a Holiday: Halloween 2020

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 luck~~Pray for me.

Halloween 2020

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.

Gratuitous photo time! I took this in September 2009 (I think it was a Mexican Independence Day event?) at Market Square. I almost used the photo I took of this Children’s Hospital mural, but this is unlike my usual photographs, so I figured I’d give this a try.

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’m Starting to Get Nervous

I was really nervous on my way in to work this morning. Not about work, though. About NaNoWriMo. I think I like my plan of attack — eight short posts a day, on various topics including travel, parks, books, cooking, etc.

And, of course, on November 3 and 4, I should have a pretty good topic in the presidential election. If Trump wins again, I should be able to rant about that for quite a while, and if Biden wins, I wonder how many words I can get out of pleased astonishment.

Also, if Trump wins again, I’m going to be sucking on a shot of my dad’s Harvey’s Bristol Cream, so we’ll see what that does for my output.

Gratuitous photo time. This is what I’m pretty sure is the original Espada Dam in the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. I’ve been walking down the River Walk and I reached this part last time, but totally forgot to take a new picture. This is from 2009; it probably looks pretty much the same now, in all honesty.

I’m going on a short road trip on the, like, 7th and 8th. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work, since “my” dog is being spayed on the 6th at my vet’s office. I might take her with me, since she needs to be watched to keep her from overdoing and opening her sutures. How better to keep an eye on her than to have her seatbelted loosely in the back seat of my car, which I am driving?

Well, I’m using too many November words here in October.

I think I might just be able to do this this year.

Wish me luck.

Ack! I was in the process of posting this when I realized that I forgot my Gratuitous Amazon Link. I almost panicked, going, “Oh, my gosh! Which book am I completely going to fail to sell them this time?” Then I realized that Allie Brosh’s second book, Solutions and Other Problems, has already been released. So go forth and don’t buy this book, either.

Two Weeks to NaNoWriMo

So I need to come up with some kind of plan. I remember telling y’all (or yelling into the void, whichever) that I need to write about eight 200-word posts a day to make my goal. Eight and one-third, to be precise.

In addition to travel and book blogging, I think I may add a round of food blogging as well. You see, I’ve got a whole bunch of cookbooks and I’ve hardly ever used them. So since Alex is grown and hardly ever home, I’m going to start to, well, use them.

I cooked Diane Seed’s version of Pasta al Boscaiola, which is the rosso version. The rosso version uses tomatoes and the bianco version uses cream. You basically sautee garlic in olive oil, then add mashed up tomatoes, salt, pepper and parsley. Then you top with sauteed mushrooms. I love sauteed mushrooms.

I knew that the recipe I was following was supposed to feed six people, so I cooked a bunch of mushrooms and then realized that the mushrooms were a topping and not an ingredient in the sauce. So I topped the spaghetti with a few mushrooms and ate the rest as a rather odd dessert.

Today’s gratuitous photo. I took this at the San Antonio Botanical Garden in 2009. The sculpture there is one of my favorites. I don’t know if the gardens own it or what, but I look for it every time I go to the garden. Speaking of which, I haven’t been there in more than a year, I don’t think.

It was really delicious and an excellent way to start my exploration of these cookbooks.

Not-so-gratuitous Amazon Link this time. The book I got the recipe from is The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed. I’m going to try posting my Amazon link with an image. Let’s see how it turns out:

ETA2: It didn’t. It was just a big block of HTML. So, back to just text links for now. The Top Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed.

ETA: This post was 253 words. If I can do that consistently next month, I’ll have over 60,000 words for the month