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Month: May 2020

The Dread is a Lie

I didn’t want to get up yesterday. I woke up at 5:30, when my alarm wasn’t going off till 6, and thought about not getting out of bed for a while. Only I had to go to the bathroom, so that didn’t work for long. But I tried. One thing I thought while I lay there? I didn’t want to go outside and deal with my plants. Too much effort, I thought. Couldn’t they just take care of themselves? Well no. Clearly they can’t. They’ll reach the point where they don’t need watered every day, but not for a while yet—at the very least, they need bigger pots to hold water for more than a day! Not all of them need watering every day, though. Surely the bigger ones would rather NOT be watered every day? So, I promised myself. No dealing with the irrigation (which STILL isn’t all put together.) No repotting anything. All I had to do was water the plants that wouldn’t last the day without it, and then I could be done. Once I got out there, that’s not how it went. I watered the plants that needed it. Then I saw the rosemary that’s been under attack by spider mites, and remembered treating it three times a week meant it was time to do that. So I did. Then I realized that if I repotted the tomatoes I’d accidentally planted three together in a pot (my hand slipped or something, I don’t know) separately while…

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Get Your Giant Insects On?

So, in my unofficial continuing “fluff” series of posts, I am going to talk about giant insects. <laughs> That’s one way to start this with a bang, huh? Giant insects? What the hell? Well, you see, a few weeks ago on a Sunday, my mom was watching a movie called Empire of the Ants. (Warning: Wikipedia page ahead). It was one of my rare days off, I literally had nothing to do, and I was curious. For the uninitiated, it’s about these scammers trying to sell a crap house and property to a bunch of people and a bunch of giant ants attack them. These are ants mutated by radioactive waste (how original) and they are vicious! At one point, they are stuck on an island with them! Scary! For a film made in 1977, it’s not horrible, but damn, the special effects are cheesy. I mean, no CGI, and it’s painfully obvious that the ants are fake. The gory scenes aren’t bad (and yes, these ants tear the poor people up. It’s insane). There were mind control elements, which surprised me: the queen ant would spray the people with a mist that made them compliant. I guess the other people on the island were in on it? The dialogue is pretty stilted, too. But it was entertaining, and we talked about the cheesiness, and I guess that’s the point? Second up was last weekend’s film, The Deadly Mantis. (Obligatory Wikipedia warning). I laughed at this one through most of…

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Whittling Away at the TBR List

Like many authors and some other people, I hoard books. I hardly go into a bookstore, used book store, or library book sale and come out empty handed. But then do we read those books? Oho, of course not. There’s always something shinier, or your holds have come in at the library, or you were passing a shelf at the library and saw a cover you had to have, etc. (I try to mitigate this somewhat by delegating shiny books to either my Amazon wishlist or my library account’s For Later list. In the pandemic age, where the library is closed, I have found myself buying eBooks of the things that would normally have gone on the library list, so this is not helpful.) (Especially since the library’s digital library is available, so who even knows.) In December we had to buy a new six-foot bookcase to accommodate the books just laying about, so when 2020 started, I made a pledge. And that pledge was to read one book that I’d bought at a library book sale a month. Since I typically read 3-5 books a month (though more like 6-8 in the pandemic age), this still allows me leeway to read whatever else I felt like. Now, I’ve made pledges like this before. A few years ago, I thought I’d read one new book off every bookcase shelf until I made it all the way through all my many bookcases (and then start over, I assume). I think I…

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Week Seven

We’re into Week Seven of pandemic life here in Toronto. More than that if you count the weeks of constant hand sanitizing, before schools closed and most workplaces were declared non-essential. I’m counting from when my workplace told us to start working from home full-time, and I started living my best life as a hermit. Okay, I’m kidding about that last part. The stress is taking its toll. My will-power and short-term memory are shot. Keeping the kitchen stocked with groceries is taking way too many brain cycles. I’m turning inward – I keep needing naps at odd times, I don’t want to talk to people (except my spouse, he’s allowed…), and going outside for walks is too much effort (though to be fair, we’ve had a cold and miserable spring). Yet I have no desire to watch TV, and I’m having trouble concentrating on books (!). And no, I am definitely not spending this time learning new skills or reorganizing my house. I live with many of these symptoms from depression, but I don’t think I’m depressed now. I think it’s just freakin’ hard to live through a world-altering era of massive uncertainty. (And that’s even with all the privilege I have: I’m not an essential worker, I haven’t been laid off, my workplace is set up to allow us to work from home (just in the last few years…how timely is that?!), I don’t have kids, my home is big enough that my spouse and I and his…

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Coat of Scarlet: A Clockpunk Tale, Part 6

by Siri Paulson Read previous installments: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 True to his word, Niko did not approach Marius for the next three days. The airship gained her distance from the busy skies around the city and settled into what Marius learned was cruising height – below the clouds, yet above the birds. They were high enough that he couldn’t look down without wanting to evacuate the contents of his stomach. It was unjust, he thought; there was insufficient motion to merit seasickness, and yet here he was feeling weak-kneed and queasy regardless. Marius found himself a succession of out-of-the-way corners to curl up in, often with the justacorps coat on his lap for lack of a table. Several of the niches had the advantage of allowing him to watch Niko at work. The captain’s confidence and swagger had dominated Marius’s little shop. Here aboard ship, among his crew, Niko’s airs seemed not only fitting but necessary. Small wonder he had been so anxious for the return of his scarlet coat. Everyone on the ship seemed to have an outsized personality, from Gloriana on down to the little cabin boy who spouted facts about airships – and this one in particular – at every opportunity. Everyone, that is, except Marius, who could not help but wonder what Niko had seen in a plain, unassuming tradesman like him. He had asked for time to settle in; now he began to fear…

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