Wednesday, July 16th, 2025 03:52 pm
books (Aaronovitch, Greene & Sasportas, Erlewine, Billock, Wells, McCord, Kaufman, Odyssey, Oken, Hamaker-Zondag) )

healthcrap
Yay, I'm not anemic anymore, though I've still got another 3 months of iron supps ahead of me. I had a psych appt today to confirm my meds are still doing their thing. Boo, I'm temporarily off the rhodiola rosea and back on Adderall for the next month (because rhodiola hasn't been safety tested for long-term use). cut for mention of weight loss )

yay!
As has been posted everywhere, Murderbot is getting a Season 2! That means ART! \o/ I haven't yet caught up with the last few eps of S1, but I'll get there in due time. (Viewing, such a challenge when I'm on a reading kick. And when I'm NOT on a reading kick. Sigh.)

rl )

yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday and had a really nice time. Great turnout, and it's good for me to see human beings in person. Pain in the shoulder, though. I want my crochet arm back! But I met a few new people, including one young woman who also has Ehlers-Danlos. So cool to commiserate in person.

natural disaster: Texas floods
My parents were finally able to leave their ridgetop and run errands, though all the intact bridges are missing guardrails (at minimum). One of them was completely surrounded with gear and detritus from the kids camp upriver. So heartbreaking. Thankfully, their POA jumped right on finding engineers and requesting bids for repairing their main bridge & its banks, and the low water crossing is sound, now that it's clear of downed trees. I am still so sad about the catastrophe, even though I'm not directly affected. Camps were a safe space for me when I was a kid, and though they were in a different part of the state, it's all too easy to imagine the worst happening.

kitty
[youtube.com profile] KittenAcademy has moved to Pennsylvania and is searching for a new rescue/shelter to work with in the Bethlehem/Allentown general vicinity. If you know of one that is willing to provide pregnant momcats and manage adoption apps, please let me know so I can pass it along to them. ION, the family of black cats and kittens who had been living part time in my backyard are no longer around. I hope they got scooped up by a shelter and/or TNR'd somewhere safe.

#resist
July 17: Good Trouble Lives On protests/marches tomorrow. If you participate, please think of me & everyone else who would like to march but can't.

Note: Mercury stations retrograde tomorrow, July 17, at 15*34' Leo (and stays retrograde until August 11 at 4*14' Leo). I'm curious what that will mean for the protests. At least they're on a Thursday, so maybe that will help keep people safe amid the likely miscommunications.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333
Tuesday, July 15th, 2025 08:30 pm
I decided to leave on Monday instead of Sunday, so yesterday I drove from St. Paul to Winnipeg, where I visited a botanical garden and had dinner (a delicious gourmet cheeseburger accompanied by an interesting local hard cider) in their attached café/bar.

Today I drove from Winnipeg to Regina, where I visited a natural history museum. Unfortunately both restaurants located within a block of my hotel are temporarily closed (probably due to roadwork) and I didn't feel like driving anywhere, so for dinner I ate half of a dubious pre-made turkey sandwich (thrown out: 1 slice of bread, raw onion, raw cucumber; eaten: 1 slice of bread, turkey, "swiss" cheese, lettuce, tomato) and one dubious pre-made pork "empanada" (I strongly suspect this began life as a Cornish pasty recipe, somewhat inelegantly repurposed), both purchased from the dinky café attached to the hotel lobby. Two dubious empanadas remain, lurking in the hotel room mini-fridge.

So far driving in Canada has been an interesting experience. I am glad that Google Maps has switched to tracking my speed in kph, because trying to read the kph part of my car's spedometer is, shall we say, challenging. Also, did you know that in Canada you have to pre-authorize the dollar limit of your gas payments? Wild. And there are no rest areas on the Trans-Canada highway in Manitoba or Saskatchewan (can't speak for any other provinces), so you have to look sharp for gas stations or fast food restaurants at each tiny gathering of stuff beside the road if you want a chance to stop -- and settlements are few and far between on the prairie.

Anyway tomorrow I should reach the gathering place in Alberta, and I am told that toward the end of the drive the landscape becomes excitingly vertical instead of flat. :D
Sunday, July 13th, 2025 11:57 am
53. Beautiful Just - Lillian Beckwith ) I don't love this any more, but I can see why I did.


54. The Whig Supremacy - Basil Williams ) Moving into ever more familiar territory...


55. A Tale of Time City, 56. Eight Days of Luke, 61. The Game, and 62. Dogsbody - Diana Wynne Jones ) Apparently I have strong feelings about Dogsbody still. But these were all very readable, if in some cases rather slight.


57. A Problem for the Chalet School and 58. The Chalet School Triplets - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) Always a pleasant time re-reading these.


59. A Sorceress Comes to Call - T Kingfisher ) Kingfisher is just generally reliable for me, and this is not an exception.


60. The Incandescent - Emily Tesh ) I enjoyed this a lot, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing where Tesh goes next! Recommended to anyone with an interest in pedagogy and school stories; what a great combination that definitely should be more common.
Saturday, July 12th, 2025 11:29 am
lest you think that having returned The Pushcart War to its rightful owner I went away with my bookshelves lighter! I did NOT, as she pushed 84, Charing Cross Road into my hands at the airport as I was leaving again with strict instructions to read it ASAP.

This is another one that's been on my list for years -- specifically, since I read Between Silk and Cyanide, as cryptography wunderkind Leo Marks chronicling the desperate heroism and impossible failures of the SOE is of course the son of the owner of Marks & Co., the bookstore featuring in 84, Charing Cross Road, because the whole of England contains approximately fifteen people tops.

84, Charing Cross Road collects the correspondence between jobbing writer Helene Hanff -- who started ordering various idiosyncratic books at Marks & Co. in 1949 -- and the various bookstore employees, primarily but not exclusively chief buyer Frank Doel. Not only does Hanff has strong and funny opinions about the books she wants to read and the editions she's being sent, she also spends much of the late forties and early fifties expressing her appreciation by sending parcels of rationed items to the store employees. A friendship develops, and the store employees enthusiastically invite Hanff to visit them in England, but there always seems to be something that comes up to prevent it. Hanff gets and loses jobs, and some of the staff move on. Rationing ends, and Hanff doesn't send so many parcels, but keeps buying books. Twenty years go by like this.

Since 84, Charing Cross Road was a bestseller in 1970 and subsequently multiply adapted to stage and screen, and Between Silk and Cyanide did not receive publication permission until 1998, I think most people familiar with these two books have read them in the reverse order that I did. I think it did make sort of a difference to feel the shadow of Between Silk and Cyanide hanging over this charming correspondence -- not for the worse, as an experience, just certain elements emphasized. Something about the strength and fragility of a letter or a telegram as a thread to connect people, and how much of a story it does and doesn't tell.

As a sidenote, in looking up specific publication dates I have also learned by way of Wikipedia that there is apparently a Chinese romcom about two people who both independently read 84, Charing Cross Road, decide that the book has ruined their lives for reasons that are obscure to me in the Wikipedia summary, write angry letters to the address 84 Charing Cross Road, and then get matchmade by the man who lives there now. Extremely funny and I kind of do want to watch it.
Thursday, July 10th, 2025 11:33 pm
I mentioned that I did in fact read a couple of good books in my late-June travels to counterbalance the bad ones. One of them was The Pushcart War, which I conveniently discovered in my backpack right as I was heading out to stay with the friend who'd loaned it to me a year ago.

I somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.

The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.
Thursday, July 10th, 2025 03:51 pm
Trip planning is HARD, you know?

I will be leaving on either Sunday or Monday on an approximately 2-week trip. The main point is a gathering of fandom friends in western Alberta, but I have planned my approach so as to have time to do One Thing in Winnipeg (Manitoba) the afternoon of my first travel day, and One Thing in Regina (Saskatchewan) the afternoon of my second travel day. Then the gathering, and on Sunday the 20th I will head to Drumheller to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum.

I THINK I have my itinerary roughed out for the following week.

-Monday 7/21, drive south across the Canada/US border to Glacier National Park, hike an easy trail

-Tuesday 7/22, drive west to Yakima, WA; no stops planned

-Wednesday 7/23, drive to Olympic National Park, hike an easy trail, look for banana slugs, etcetera, then overnight in Forks or Oil City

-Thursday 7/24, drive south on US-101 and stop at some point to get out and dabble my feet in the Pacific Ocean, before heading inland and stopping short of Portland, OR, probably in Beaverton; might also visit Tillamook Creamery if time permits

-Friday 7/25, drive to Boise, ID, possibly stopping at a winery or two along the Columbia River valley (more research needed)

-Saturday 7/26, drive from Boise, ID to Bozeman, MD, skirting the western edge of Yellowstone en route; might stop for photos but more likely will just drive on through

-Sunday 7/27, drive from Bozeman, MD to probably Dickinson, ND, with a stop en route to sightsee in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and hopefully see some bison and/or prairie dogs

-Monday 7/28, head home to the Twin Cities; no stops planned

This feels generally doable to me. None of the driving days are excessively long, none of the activities are excessively strenuous, and I will return home before August. Now I have to research national park admission policies and also start making motel reservations. Argh.
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 07:20 pm
When [personal profile] kate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!

Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?

We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.

By a few chapters in, I was describing it to [personal profile] genarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time.

Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. mid-book spoilers )

Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.

Now even as I write this, I know that [personal profile] genarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak.

And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.

On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.
Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 02:09 pm
books (Forrest, Aaronovitch, Aaronovitch, Hamaker-Zondag) )

dirt
goddamned thrips. Beyond that struggle, the spider plants are putting out babies, the baby thaumatophyllum is up to 3 leaves and needs potting up soon, the money tree is looking better, Grandma's thanksgiving cactus is looking pretty great, the rhaphidophora cutting finally put out some baby leaves, and the terrarium is overrun by red stem peperomia. I need to trim it, srsly.

meditation work
Yesterday I listened to/watched [youtube.com profile] HealingVibrations' sound bath video on cutting old ties with crystal singing bowls and a windsinger instrument. It was surprisingly intense, or maybe it just hit me right at the time.

natural disaster
my heart hurts over the Hill Country floods. So many needless deaths, so many people claiming there were no warnings. Per Robert Reich's Substack: The San Angelo NWS office is missing a meteorologist, staff forecaster, and a senior hydrologist. The San Antonio NWS office is missing a warning coordination meteorologist (who left on April 30, thanks to DOGE-inflicted early retirement), and a science officer. These people are meant to notify local emergency managers to plan for floods. That said, warnings DID go out but weren't accessible or heeded by the people who needed them. (We don't have flood or tornado sirens or anything here, something the state gvt is saying will change. Though how they'll put flood sirens out in the middle of nowhere is kind of a mystery.) Regardless, it's a tragic loss. Hopefully the news blitz will help get weather warning systems put back into the 2026 fiscal budget for everyone. More personally, my parents' area had nearly all its bridges get washed out, so they're basically stranded until they can be fixed/replaced. They've got food and hopefully no need to go anywhere, so they're fine, but it's all just a completely harrowing situation. The morning of July 5, they had 10+ inches of rain in 12 hours, and that was AFTER the floods hit. I'm just glad they live on a ridge instead of down in the valley or in a floodplain, however hard it is to be stranded. There's so much destruction in their area. It's heartbreaking. Addendum: Dad texted last night that there are teams out on horseback searching for the missing/drowned. Thank gods it's ranch country so horses are locally available. Here's one place you can donate if you feel inclined: https://cftexashillcountry.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create/fund?funit_id=4201

#resist
July 17: Good Trouble Lives On Protest/March

I hope all of y'all are safe and doing as well as can be. <333