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"not right somehow"
Jan. 31st, 2020 11:35 pm Well, missed another day. All told, posted 26 days out of 31. And three of the missed days can be chalked up to Primrose.
A Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Wilde. The slightly porny ridiculously sweet feminist lesbian scientists and needleworkers period piece I didn't know I needed.
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia. The blurb says a grown-up version of the Westing Game and it lives up to the promise. A novel about a gothy recluse, written by someone who knows and loves the Boston area and liberally flavored with all sorts of period or Poe references. Campy, and I sometimes felt it didn't know what kind of novel it wanted to be, but I liked most of the things it was trying to be so it didn't matter all that much.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. So, I liked their heisty grisha novels and only manage to get through the first of the non-heisty grisha trilogy. This, however, was an amazing different story. The secret societies of Yale have magic and are using it in all sorts of privilege-protecting ways, while this girl who could see ghosts as a runaway dropout drug runner and drug user got a fresh start and a fake background to be part of the group of people who monitor the behavior of the secret societies (sort of). So, all my class jumping feels, with magic and asshole rich people protecting their privilege and ghosts. Fuck that cliffhanger end, though.
Snow White Learns Witchcraft by Theodora Goss. Confession time, I didn't make it through the third novel of the The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, I just got tired of the profusion of characters and their woes. But I had listened to a bit of Goss's reading of her retelling of the Snow Queen at the last Readercon and purchased the book on the spot. It then fell into that weird crevasse of a book I owned being slightly less urgent to read than all the ebooks I'm borrowing from the library. But lately, at least on weekdays, I've been trying to go dark by 9:30pm, which gives me a nice chunk of time to read paper books and I finally got around to this and it's brilliant.
Obligatory Seanan McGuire book: Come Tumbling Down. Latest in the Wayward Children series, not my favorite, not my least favorite. Solid. I loved the idea of a balance of power of the moors, a mad scientist to balance a vampire in one part, other balances in other parts (I loved the idea of a witch and her creation being the balance elsewhere.) I liked the mermaid's relationship with the sea, I liked how well McGuire portrayed the main character hanging on to her sanity by sheer bloodymindedness.
January's hard to sum up. New years make me maudlin, my birthday makes me maudlin, Primrose took a fuckton out of me again this year, but I don't think it was the work I was doing, but the everything else.
Skin and Grin visited, and I miss Skin a whole lot, still. (I once wrote Lesson a poem that included the line I miss you like I'd miss my skin / but that has never meant I want you back). Finland, you're too far away. But we talked for a bit about me going to visit them next year, and how that might be a good place to try traveling solo to. I almost made a bid to be part of a team to run Primrose next year, but withdrew for a number of reasons. It was interesting, at least, to realize that I could make a decision best for me even when I was worried about disappointing other people. (that said, it was really hard to push the withdrawal out into the world). Turned 44. Started the witchcraft immersion class. saw Mech and Teach and niblings, Hands made Hips and me an amazing ginger cake.
I met my new meds provider, she did a cheek swab and I got the results from Genomind that gave me the simultaneously heartening and disheartening news that the SSRI regimine I've been on for more than two decades is not a class of medication I respond especially well to (also learned I a decreased sensitivity to opiods). I'd been avoiding changing providers in no small part because I fucking hate hate hate intake appointments, trying to figure out what amount of truth I'm comfortable telling them. But, I tried to remember that the best way to get the best help is to tell as much of the truth as I can make myself, and that I'm a reasonable facsimile of an independent adult. Trauma, why do you unmoor me in time so thoroughly? Got on some new meds, went to a preop for next month's surgery, did a sleep study.
Spent a lot more money than possibly appropriate at AC Moore going out of business sales, but also managed to buy nothing at Primrose, and to resist the siren song of makeup glitter, clever t-shirts and more cross stitch patterns. Did not (of course) even try to resist the new year's day sale at PSB, some traditions are too important to fuck with, even when we own two houses.
Read a reasonable amount, cooked an unreasonable amount. (a lot of which was sheer stress cooking from Primrose, I brought more than enough food to not need to eat outside the room for the entire convention and pretty much didn't.
Five best things I made were:
Oatmeal toffee cookies, mostly to use up a bag of toffee bits in the freezer that were hanging around from not having been used at cakeoff. Sure, they were sugar bombs, but delicious to me.
Blueberry breakfast cookies, which were a strange conglomeration of healthy sounding things in the guise of a cookie, but also with chocolate. Pasta with edamame, broccoli and walnuts, which i had some skepticism about, but I like all those things individually (of course, I roasted the broccoli instead of steaming it).
Whole grain gingerbread with spelt flour, which kind of bordered on the almost too healthy tasting to be a dessert, but still basically a dessert, And finally, the showstopper Mexican Rice Bowl, which involves rice, a tomatillo-avocado dressing, a corn radish salad, and black beans cooked with orange juice and uses every pot in the kitchen.
Oatmeal toffee cookies, mostly to use up a bag of toffee bits in the freezer that were hanging around from not having been used at cakeoff. Sure, they were sugar bombs, but delicious to me.
Blueberry breakfast cookies, which were a strange conglomeration of healthy sounding things in the guise of a cookie, but also with chocolate. Pasta with edamame, broccoli and walnuts, which i had some skepticism about, but I like all those things individually (of course, I roasted the broccoli instead of steaming it).
Whole grain gingerbread with spelt flour, which kind of bordered on the almost too healthy tasting to be a dessert, but still basically a dessert, And finally, the showstopper Mexican Rice Bowl, which involves rice, a tomatillo-avocado dressing, a corn radish salad, and black beans cooked with orange juice and uses every pot in the kitchen.
(can't find a link for the rice bowl, you'll just have to come over and I'll make it for you)
My reading habits were very feast or famine this month, I'd go a week without reading anything and then finish two books in a single day.
Best five books were,
Best five books were,
A Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Wilde. The slightly porny ridiculously sweet feminist lesbian scientists and needleworkers period piece I didn't know I needed.
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia. The blurb says a grown-up version of the Westing Game and it lives up to the promise. A novel about a gothy recluse, written by someone who knows and loves the Boston area and liberally flavored with all sorts of period or Poe references. Campy, and I sometimes felt it didn't know what kind of novel it wanted to be, but I liked most of the things it was trying to be so it didn't matter all that much.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. So, I liked their heisty grisha novels and only manage to get through the first of the non-heisty grisha trilogy. This, however, was an amazing different story. The secret societies of Yale have magic and are using it in all sorts of privilege-protecting ways, while this girl who could see ghosts as a runaway dropout drug runner and drug user got a fresh start and a fake background to be part of the group of people who monitor the behavior of the secret societies (sort of). So, all my class jumping feels, with magic and asshole rich people protecting their privilege and ghosts. Fuck that cliffhanger end, though.
Snow White Learns Witchcraft by Theodora Goss. Confession time, I didn't make it through the third novel of the The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, I just got tired of the profusion of characters and their woes. But I had listened to a bit of Goss's reading of her retelling of the Snow Queen at the last Readercon and purchased the book on the spot. It then fell into that weird crevasse of a book I owned being slightly less urgent to read than all the ebooks I'm borrowing from the library. But lately, at least on weekdays, I've been trying to go dark by 9:30pm, which gives me a nice chunk of time to read paper books and I finally got around to this and it's brilliant.
Obligatory Seanan McGuire book: Come Tumbling Down. Latest in the Wayward Children series, not my favorite, not my least favorite. Solid. I loved the idea of a balance of power of the moors, a mad scientist to balance a vampire in one part, other balances in other parts (I loved the idea of a witch and her creation being the balance elsewhere.) I liked the mermaid's relationship with the sea, I liked how well McGuire portrayed the main character hanging on to her sanity by sheer bloodymindedness.
