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Month: March 2022

Hiding in a Book

Last time I posted, I was using Pentatonix reaction videos to get through my days. Things were rough, I said. It was a coping mechanism. Well, things continue to be rough. So I’ve fallen back on the original distraction, in my life anyway–today I am reading a book. I don’t have a lot of time for reading, usually. Or, I do, if I, you know, I didn’t do all those other things that I should be doing. So I don’t do a lot of it. I know me. If I start a book, I want to FINISH the book, and everything else can go hang. So guess what I did today? In my defense, I was stuck in a dentist’s office, waiting for a loved one to have a procedure. I had intended to write! I have a story due. But the office was loud. And hot. And did I mention dentist’s office? Very uncomfortable all around. So I tried to write, and it didn’t work. And then I tried to go on Twitter, because that’s something that only takes the time you have–but I recently came down on myself for wasting too much time on Twitter, and set my app blocker to only allow seven minutes of every hour. Locked the profile, too–can’t turn it off for ten days. Whoops. So there I sat, in the dentist’s office, trying to ignore drills, trying not to think about the bill, not wanting to use data… (yes, I know Twitter uses…

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Years in the Making

Howdy, friends! I just returned from a trip. A trip I was supposed to take in 2020. In March of 2020. March 15, 2020. You can guess how that went. The trip in question was a Western Caribbean cruise out of New Orleans, making two stops in Mexico, one in Belize, and one in Honduras. Back in 2020, we’d been watching the situation closely. If you recall (and I know you do, though you may not remember when this happened because time has been weird since the pandemic started), in Feb 2020, the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship, had a major COVID-19 outbreak, which culminated in something like 700 people getting sick and the whole lot being stuck off the coast of Japan for weeks. And there was another Princess ship around then that had a COVID issue–the Grand Princess, which hung out off the coast of California forever. (We didn’t go on Princess, I just remember these situations in particular because they were awful.) In the end, we decided we wouldn’t go, because cruise ships were obviously death traps, and cancelled. And then they cancelled the cruise anyway. So we rebooked the trip for March 14, 2021. Surely we wouldn’t still be in lockdown and everything a year out. Ha. Haha. Anyway, when the 2021 cruise was cancelled, we again, dutifully, rebooked for 2022. Each time we rebooked we got a slightly bigger, nicer room due to incentives because the cruise lines were really hurting. With the Omicron wave…

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Buh-bye, Springing Forward and Falling Back!

Just in case you’re wondering, Kit and I switched blog slots this month, so you’re getting me a week early. Lucky you! 🙂 I just found out that the Senate passed a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. By unaminious consent. I found that interesting. They all agreed on this. Everyone. It still needs to go through the House and to President Biden, so we’re not quite there yet, but I am optimistic. I’ve said for years — years — that this crap needs to stop. It’s antiquated and from a time long past (1918 apparently). To save energy. But the world was so different then, right? Now…I don’t know about you, but every time we change, no matter which direction, it takes me about two weeks to adjust. I’m irritable, basically jet-lagged for all intents and purposes, and I’m completely out of sorts. My body even rebels. I used to end up in fibro flares, too. Back when I was a kid, and there was no internet to quickly check what date we were changing (yeah, imagine that), we’d end up either early or late for church on Sunday because we never knew. Now, with my Esperanto study? My friend just moved back to the States. So, we have time zones to consider and DST. Because where he lived previously, they hadn’t changed yet, but where he is now, they did, and so did we, and they were different. So this afternoon, we’re sitting here trying to puzzle…

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Comfort Everything, Take 2

Dear readers, this quarter of the year is always the hardest for me, and I know I’m not alone, especially with all the things going on this year. (Recently it seems like we’re saying that every year, though…) So this week I’m revisiting a topic I’ve covered before in these, um, pages: where to turn for comfort. Here are the comfort reads and comfort viewing that have been helping me get through lately. Books I’ve blogged about comfort reads before, so here are some I didn’t cover last time… Epic fantasy Although I read (and write) all over the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, I read Tolkien at a formative time, so fantasy will always be my first love. For about a decade now, I’ve been taking time around the holidays in December and into January to read epic fantasy. (No grimdark either, thank you.) This year, I read the first two books in Elizabeth Bear’s Silk Road–inspired Eternal Sky trilogy, Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars. Featuring a nomad prince in exile, a princess-turned-wizard, a very interesting horse, and lots of epic landscapes and cities and cultures. (CW: there’s a plague in the second book.) Book three will be next year’s read, and there’s also a sequel trilogy. (My previous epic-fantasy holiday read was N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which is breathtakingly good but 100% not a comfort read.) Historical fantasy Still in the fantasy vein: historical fantasy, roughly defined as a past era in the “real world” with…

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Curiosity Killed the Cat–Part 8

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Wrapped in a net, carried by jeweled crabs, Srivasi and his companion traveled through dark passageways. They angled down for a ways—then up, in what felt like tight spirals. Once, the whole bunch swayed like seagrass in the tide, clicking loudly, then the journey resumed—back the way they’d come. No turning, just walking the other way. “Can we just get this over with?” Dasid groaned. “Be careful what you wish for,” Srivasi said, as the crabs picked up speed in their new direction, though the longer they went unharmed the more he was inclined to believe the creatures meant no harm. Why else capture them in a net, after all? “To feed us to their crablings,” Dasid said when Srivasi pointed that out. He was so young to be so cynical! A few crabs brought out glowing rocks, and Srivasi and Dasid were carried through a corridor that caught and split the light, refracting and multiplying, until the colors danced and swam about them and even Dasid gasped in wonder. Then they passed through a grey stone arch into a tunnel so low that Srivasi’s whiskers brushed the roof. It was remarkably uncomfortable until he turned his head. His nose, luckily, was not as long as the whiskers. From the close tunnel, they passed into a great chamber of rock and columns and connections, arches and spirals. The crabs headed straight for the edge of the rock, for…

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