i am a gemini=full of contradiction

note; please excuse lack of capitals and a partial lack of proper punctuation. my laptop is being a beast.

i aspire to live in a tiny home. it’s insane how drawn i have been to this idea since the very first time i came across it and yet it may not be something i could actually live with. on the one hand, i can see paring down on many, many possessions. i can see getting by with minimal kitchen gear that all nests together as much as possible, minimal dishes and cutlery/utensils, no problem. minimal wardrobe wouldn’t be an issue for me, i could digitize the movies and shows i ‘need,’ i already use a little laptop not a big desktop, i can totally see minimizing down to essential towels, bedding etc, i can see one day living with just a single cat or smallish dog instead of constantly cohabitating with a minimum of 3 furry fellow-travellers. shoes are not an issue. i can get by with a single pair for each function; snow boots, hiking boots, sandals, work shoes, and one dressy pair. i don’t even need a bunch of make-up i wear it maybe a few times a year. i’m sure there are other areas i could easily pare down as well, but…

it all falls down when i consider;

books. i have lots and i am forever acquiring more despite my best intentions. i have a nook, and there are many books i could handle having only digitally… but i ‘need’ a shocking number of books as physical objects. i love them so completely. books.
art supplies. paints, canvases, sketch books, colored pencils, bags crammed with odds and end i intend to use in some nebulous future project, adhesives, brushes, etc etc etc. it is hard to imagine paring it all down enough to keep in a tiny home.
crochet and knitting gear. holy crap. i have lots. lots. i can honestly see paring this particular hobby down a fair bit, getting rid of items i don’t really need, of which there are many. this one might be doable; a single bin of yarn, a basket for scraps and all the hooks and needles.
also sewing stuff. i have a sewing machine, a serger, and tons of fabric and hand sewing items too. just the basics of this one is fairly bulky.
games and gaming books, minis etc. we have a lot. we have several game platforms and tvs for video games, multiple bookshelves of rpg books, endless, boundless bins and bins of minis, etc. plus board games, card games and on and on. we could probably halve the amount without pain but it would be awfully difficult to divest ourselves of much more than that.
fandom stuff. yeah….. i do not, we do not, have a vast epic collection of museum worthy, collectable amazing fandom stuff, but we do have more than it seems at first glance. i have made tons of cool harry potter/hogwarts stuff for wearing, decoration etc. i have tardis string lights and a dalek pepper pot. in brief we have; marvel stuff, star wars stuff, doctor who stuff, game of thrones stuff, star trek stuff, fruits basket stuff, ruroni kenshin stuff… and many, many more. how would i even begin to pare that stuff down…

plus, i keep a lot of food on hand in case of emergency/illness/etc. i am not sure how low i could manage and not induce anxiety in myself. i tend to have at least a few months worth of food on hand. they wouldn’t be the best months we ever got through but we damn sure wouldn’t starve.

oh, and stuffed animals, using the term very loosely, i have more than would likely be great in a tiny house. henry, rocket, cap, and yix all live in the bedroom and i have a doll crib overflowing in the hall with more. i have pared down in that area, wildly. my remaining collection is ‘bare-bones’… for me.

so i want to live a minimalist lifestyle in a tiny house …but… i will also need another tiny house for my books, another for arts and crafts, and we’ll need a dedicated gaming tiny house as well.

yeah.

sigh.

i think that many tiny houses probably equals pretty much a regular house.

disappointing.

A Few of my Favorite Things

2020 has been a tough year. We’re not quite to the end of it yet but it’ll be wrapping up shortly. While I have a moment, before my last, desperate dash to get projects done before Xmas, here is a list of some of the things that brought a little light to a dark and terrible year.

BOOKS:

Mexican Gothic; by Silvia Moreno Garcia
In the Shadow of Spindrift House; by Mira Grant (audiobook)
The Year of Less; How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away my Belongings and Discovered that Life is Worth More than Anything You Can Buy in a Store; by Cait Flanders
Girls of Paper and Fire; by Natasha Ngan
The Hunger; by Alma Katsu

They were a delightful distraction.

GAMES:

Pathfinder 2ed. (We have 3 weekly games and a few others that meet sporadically.)
Minecraft. (Many hours, with the monsters turned off, building farms, fortresses, mazes etc.)
Red Flags. (Hilarious, uncomfortable, and hilariously uncomfortable. So much laughter.)
Dragon Age Origins. Still delightful as it ages.
Skyrim. I will never not want to build my houses and fight monsters to get money so I can build my houses.
Harry Potter Wizards Unite! It got me to go outside and walk, masked and distant, around my neighborhood.

HOBBIES:

Knitting
Crocheting
Sewing
Painting
Writing
Drawing
Bird Watching/Feeding

TV SHOWS:

Community. Light, funny, excellent.
Sherlock. Diverting and Distracting, completely delightful.
The Rookie. I keep rewatching the ones that are available.
The Mandalorion. Baby Yoda is a gift to all of us.
The West Wing. Here’s hoping President Biden will be a compassionate and decent leader to us all.
Vera. Freaking Awesome. Love this show.
Shetland. Same as above. Top notch.

VIDEOS:

Liziqi. A capable young woman in rural China growing, foraging and cooking food as well as making all manner of useful or beautiful things. This is my drug of choice to soothe my anxiety. Also my life goals. I have probably spent more hours watching this than anything else.
Tier Zoo. Real life treated as a video game. Weirdly calming and very entertaining.
Julie Nolke. Her future self talking to her past self during 2020 is comedy GOLD.
Ozzy Man Reviews. I like his animal videos the best particularly the Otter vs. Orca and Honey Badger vs. Python. His Destination F*cked videos are hilarious too. Great stuff.
Your Daily Dose of Internet. Amusing, amazing, weird and funny clips put together for our amusement.
Binging with Babish. Cooking show, very cool, entertaining and educational.
Bardcore. Modern songs played on medieval instruments with words altered like this: “Thee and me could write a bad romance….” Awesome.

FOOD & DRINK:

Local Beer. Brewery about a 10 minute walk from the house. Not my favorite beer in the world but good AND they do pay online curbside pick up… and they now recognize our car.
Local Bakery. Way too close to my house. Apple Galettes, donuts, bread, all manner of delicious carbs + Soup!
Local Pizza. Quite close to the house. I am in constant danger of deciding not to cook dinner and just order pizza for everyone.
Yorkshire Gold Tea. Every morning a sweet cup of comfort.
Cookies, home made, all of them.
Birthday cake. 2 in the Spring, 8 days apart, 3 in the Fall within about 2- 2 1/2 weeks. Ideally they’d be more spread out but I will take birthday cake whenever I can get it.

About all the local businesses: I live in a town of 1200 people and I have 2 excellent pizza places, a decent brewery, a fantastic bakery, a seasonal ice cream stand, and a fancy restaurant all within easy walking distance. We also have a little market with groceries, wine and beer and a deli, another okay restaurant, a coffee and donut chain store, and a few other businesses besides. It’s a quiet little town that could use a few more businesses to cover some basic needs but crime sprees around here consist of mailbox baseball, kids stealing change out of unlocked cars, occasional packages stolen off porches and speeding. I mean, you know, mostly. Sometimes someone the police pull over will have like a pound of cocaine in their car or whatever but we are between a few places where there is a fair bit of illicit drug use.

PLACES:

Home. The vast bulk of the year has been spent here and it really is a cute little house. It keeps us cozy and safe and has enough places to store food so we can withstand short periods of not being able to get all the food we need.
The Hippie Fort/Shed/Studio. Our own little getaway several yards from the house. Seasonal but excellent. Could use insulation, heat and plumbing. A great place for date night with music and candle light, a lovely place to read, write, paint etc.
The Library where I work. A terrific little library that has provided us with a wide array of reading materials as well as access to movies and TV shows on DVD. Also, the only place I hang out with anyone other than my immediate family for any length of time at all.
The Park down the street. Just a green space with some trees and a couple of benches but also a little hub for the Wizards Unite! game. Lovely trees.
My yard. I now have 3 little garden spots set up and ready to be planted in the Spring. The place is loaded with ticks but it’s really cute. I need to find a way to kill all the ticks. (I hate them more than almost anything.)

MVPs of 2020:

The Pantry. Excellent work holding lots of pasta, canned goods, tea, cocoa, cereal, crackers, snacks, peanut butter and so on.
Chest Freezer. Ours may be small but it has worked it’s butt off all year storing meat, veg, & breads ready to tide us over when such became hard to find during parts of the pandemic.
Wood Stove. Keeping us warm is a piece of cake for this little beauty. It also assists in the drying of foods and can be used as a stove top for cooking if the power goes out in winter.
XBox 360. Still working like a champ keeping my Skyrim and Dragon Age games ready for me to go hide in.
Playstation 4. My Minecraft machine that also has a Pirate Game, Witcher games, etc that everyone else uses. Also has a little game of Fallout Vault in there that I occasionally like to mess around with. Many, many hours of entertainment for the entire family.
CD Player. Currently providing Xmas music, often used to play audiobooks as well as music of all types. Makes life better for all of us.
Book Shelves. Loaded up with something under 5,000 books, 50-100 board, card, and dice games, as well as RPGs and an abundance of DVDs, they provide storage for many things that keep us entertained and distracted through this long, long crisis.

just forget the world…

I’ve done all I can and I need a break from stress and worry so I’m here to talk about things that are bringing me joy in some way, things that take me out of myself and distract me, all that sort of stuff. So, onto that! First things first: Books. They are my sanctuary, my education, my consolation, and my many, many other lives.

Current/Recent Reads:

The Ballad of Black Tom; by Victor LaValle (fantastic mythos-related story)
Adventures in Opting Out; by Cait Flanders
Disfigured; On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space; by Amanda LeDuc
The Library of the Unwritten; by A.J. Hackwith
The Only Good Indians; by Stephen Graham Jones
Dirt to Soil; by Gabe Brown
A Deadly Education; by Naomi Novik (The latest Fantastic Stangelings Bookclub read)
Beowulf; by Maria Dahvana Headley
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; by Becky Chambers

There are other books, of course, but these are all the ones seriously in the flow at the moment. Other wonderful things I like to fill up my senses with: Shows!

Community. (Hulu & Netflix) My current comfort watch. Brilliant show with a ton of laughs and lots of heart.
The Haunting of Bly Manor. (Netflix) Pure gold so far. Atmospheric, subtle horror, perfect storytelling. I think I’m on episode #5 and I am having such fun. As always, my brain is whirring on ahead of the story making guesses and trying to expose the whole picture. I spotted a few things before they were revealed but, wow, there is so much here to unpack and it is glorious.
Liziqi. (YouTube) My ultimate escape from my own reality mixed with my ultimate life goals. Somehow relaxing and inspiring at the same time.
Good Omens. (Amazon Prime) We’re on our own side. Perfect.
Vienna Blood. (Dvd from the library) Very cool, entertaining, a bit like a Sherlock Holmes homage. Victorian Vienna. Hitting a bit close to reality with the superior race nonsense but a good crime procedural with interesting characters. Some absolutely stunning voices among the cast; loads of deep gravel in varying flavors. Particularly the lead detective and his rival. (I’m a sucker for a really good voice)
Shetland. (Dvds from library) Love, love, love this. I love the way this show is paced, the slow unraveling of the clues, the deep sense of Place. The landscape as another ever-present character. I have sadly finished all the available seasons of this and…
Vera. (Dvds) The same author wrote the books this series and the series Shetland are based on. Brilliant TV, just brilliant.
Videos of babies laughing hysterically, goofy pets, etc.

There are many more shows I could list that are excellent distractions but these are the ones I’m currently living inside. I’m also playing RPGs, of course. I am currently playing in; Hell’s Rebels (Pathfinder) on most Tuesdays, Azartia (a friend’s homebrew D&D) on Thursdays, and Age of Ashes, (Pathfinder) on Sundays. I am also running; Extinction Curse, (Pathfinder) on Saturdays and The Slithering, (Pathfinder) randomly, and my hubby is running the teens from the library through Age of Ashes as well. I’m playing 2 Human Druids and one Gnome Bard multi-classing into Druid and experiencing whiplash between characters. My bard is level… 12? 14? Something, and in Pathfinder which is designed for characters to be heroic. She is a blast to play, and absolutely good time. My Pathfinder Druid is low level, fun but kind of a letdown after playing the high level bard. The D&D Druid is… fine. She has a few pretty great spells that are fun/effective but… D&D 5e is just, well, it’s awful. Simple to play? Try; Over simplified, broken, frustrating. Cat, my druid, is level 9 with a 15 AC… The champion in our party has only a 20 AC. We get hit constantly, just absolutely constantly. The game is just not on a heroic scale at all. It’s dumbed down to the point of, why am I playing this? But yeah, it’s a distraction for a a few hours a week and time spent with friends. There are a lot of laughs as we play. Many laughs come from failed saving throws.

Other:

Knitting: one big project for a present, over half done now. ^_^
Work: 2-3 shifts a week, busy, on my feet, frustrating with Covid restrictions but, hey, I love it anyway and I’m lucky to have a job at all.
Baking/cooking: my daily chore and sometimes creative outlet.
Macrame’. I just got supplies to start doing this. I’ve been wanting to try it for ages, since like the 70s. Just getting around to it!
Holiday planning: well underway, constantly on my mind, so much to do!
De-cluttering. On the back burner but always on my mind. I want to get the excess out of here and have a semi-orderly, uncrowded, welcoming home.
Writing. Blogging here, jotting down ideas that keep coming to me, writing for work, which is fun and cool that I get to write for work at all. It’s mostly instructions for craft kits I make up or promotional writing for said craft kits, but still.

Sigh, and now the world is calling, I’m afraid, and I must answer. Stay well, be safe, see you soon.

Banner photo credit: “Contemplation – Dartmoor, Devon” by Faborsky Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Balance in the Library

Years ago when I was asked to list my favorite authors I realised, looking over my list, that most of them were men. My list had writers like Tolkien, Guy Gavriel Kay, Christopher Moore, Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, R.A. Salvatore, and loads more. There were two women on my list: J.K. Rowling and Caitlin R. Kiernan. I thought about what I read and reread and added Anne Bishop because how did I forget her? I read her stuff all the time! But still, I had at least ten male authors to three female and I wondered, why? Do I really prefer the writing styles/tones/etc of men? Or was I just not exposing myself to many female writers?

So I started consciously choosing to read fiction written by women. I found Gail Carriger, Mira Grant, Genevieve Cogman, and N.K. Jemisin. Lately I’ve discovered Diana Rowland, Brigid Kemmerer, Kira Jane Buxton, A.J. Hackwith, Angie Thomas, Ijeoma Uluo (nonfiction), Sherry Thomas, Cait Flanders and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I gravitate toward books by women. If I’m looking at a book it is more likely I will buy it if the author is female. Not that I shun male authors. I’ve also found Chuck Wendig, N.S. Dolkart, Jim C. Hines, and James Lovegrove in recent years and I love them. My personal bookshelves are pretty egalitarian at this point. But I recently noticed that the YA Collection I curate is pretty slanted toward female authors so now I’m working on restoring balance. I’m scanning professional journals looking for male protagonists and male YA authors and it seems to me that there are actually a good deal more women writing YA than there are men, or maybe that’s just the releases of the past several months… I know for sure that YA is heavily tipped toward fantasy and it takes some effort to find other genres.

I want the collection to be balanced, to represent all the types of people that might browse it or use it. I want male authors, female authors, authors of color representing all the colors there are, and LGBTQIA authors. Stories featuring all types of characters, from all walks of life should be in the collection. And all genres, all interests… just a good variety, a good sampling of what is out there. Right now the YA collection is organized alphabetically by author and I would LOVE to organize it by genre and then alphabetically by author within those sections. We don’t even, for the most part, add gere stickers to our books, so it is really hard to help teens that just want to see a selection of romance, or horror, or sci-fi etc. There are some stickers but they aren’t used consistently. I really want to change that. Overall, I’d say now is the time to try to do it with the library not being open to patrons right now. I could take it all apart and put it back together… but first I should weed it. Goodness knows I haven’t properly done that yet. At the same time, we are busy, busy with phone calls and curbside pick up and trying to plan for next year.

Hmmmm, maybe I’ll just start with the “New” section… just organize that by genre and see how it goes? It would make things easier for sure if I could get it done. So many teens want a specific genre and it would be a huge improvement to be able to just show them the section so they could browse independently.

Decluttering Revived

After some very low-energy days I am back at it again. I baked a cake for my husband’s birthday yesterday, made french toast for breakfast and nachos for lunch yesterday as well. Today I have picked up the decluttering baton and worked on the front hallway. It was, of course, a disaster. I only snapped on pic of said disaster though so you will have to imagine the rest.

So, you have to imagine shoes Everywhere, dirt, sand, leaves etc. It was pretty bad.

Anyway, I spent some time picking up, sweeping, vacuuming, and setting aside some stuff to toss or give away, depending on the state of the item, and the entryway is improved if not yet finished.

The bags and boxes of stuff to give away is getting a little bit much. Also half the basement is full of foam computer bags connected to my husband’s work. It would be awesome to see all of it gone. There is just SO MUCH and a lot of it needs to go. Even all those damned shoes, we don’t need all of those and I’m positive that some of them haven’t been worn in ages and don’t fit anyone. Such a mess. I also need to sort through that basket of gloves, hats and scarves and get rid of the matchless, the ruined and the unneeded.

I let the dishes slip yesterday so I need to get back on that. I cooked 2 meals and baked a cake, prepped and ran The Slithering RPG for a bit of a celebration. The Fall birthdays continue! It felt bad giving my husband one skinny little book for his birthday, I think I will score him a bottle of the scotch he likes next chance I get.

My paints are all out in the shed and need to come back in the house for the winter. Bummer. I can’t let them freeze but I hate to bring more stuff into the house. In trying to get clutter under control I’m trying to use the library instead of buying books. It’s difficult. Books are my thing, my life, my weakness, my downfall when it comes to stopping spending. I’m doing fine at the moment, but I know there are books that I can get through the library and read and will still desperately want to buy anyway. Anything featuring both Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu is pretty much already bought. Whether it is written yet or not even conceived of at this time, it is as if those volumes are already in my hands and on my shelves. I always have a short list of books I “need.”

Everywhere I look, aside from the areas I’ve recently worked on, there is clutter. It’s depressing, draining and sometimes feels insurmountable. That’s why I need to take it one step at a time. If I do this slowly, and correctly, I might just get this all under control and have the nice, clean, fairly orderly, homey home I want to live in. I’m trying. Day by day, I am trying, and I can’t really ask much more than that of myself.

The Cake is not a Lie

My middle child has her birthday today so of course making the cake was a key honor and duty I had today. Triple chocolate with purple frosting. It seems to have come out alright. There will be ice cream and, I believe, Chinese food tonight after I get home from work. Happy Birthday, my sweet girl.

Of course I have also been cleaning. Laundry and dishes are caught up, our bed is made, cat boxes are clean, extraneous sensitive papers are shredded. I’m getting somewhere. Still busily decluttering and organizing. Today I cleaned off the heater in our bedroom and made a start at the disaster by my side of the bed. I’m a nester everything I use frequently ends up in a pile, or several piles, where I can reach it.

I’m working on getting us on an even keel again. It’s finally working because I am only shopping for really specific things that we have thought about deliberately and decided we truly want or need. It’s nice. Retail therapy is not a good thing. That little boost only lasts such a short time and the money is gone forever and there we are drowning in STUFF. I am really enjoying making our house, ever so slowly, into a soothing, serene home.

But I have to get ready and go to work! It really is very odd loving my job but hating leaving home to go do it. I’d much rather stay here and work on the house. It doesn’t help that work is So Weird with no patrons in the library. I can’t wait till tomorrow when we have our trial run of outdoor browsing. I’m not sure how we’ll enforce distancing and all that but hopefully it will go well. It would be nice to see people again. Oh, and I got a late b-day present from my husband. He forgot he’d pre-ordered it so it was a surprize for both of us. I can’t wait to read it!

Tuesday Update: Now w/ Books!

It was 39 degrees when I woke up this morning, so lovely. Not that I want the growing season over just that I enjoy being slightly sane and enjoy being able to stand wearing clothing. I’m hoping to enjoy wearing sweaters again someday, maybe even this winter, when my crazy hormones finally loosen their grip. We’ll see. I am pleasantly chilly this morning.

My hubby is sick but of course started work before 8am. At least he’s home and can work in his bathrobe if necessary, he could work from our bed even. Working remotely is kind of awesome, I mean it would be better if it was more of a choice, but still. He’s working ridiculous hours now, that’s just a job at a school in September, to be expected.

Apparently I’ll be writing the grant proposal for the Cultural Council next month. My boss has confidence in me and promised to check it over before we send it. Look out, I just might become competent at my job! I still have plenty of gaps but I love what I do so I keep trying to learn it all. One thing at a time, I’ll get there.

My reading for the year is ahead of schedule. I think I’ve read 42 books out of 52 I aimed for. With life being busy, stressful and so on I figured 1 book a week would be a decent goal for 2020. Then it turned out the whole world changed and got weird so I might have to raise my goal or something. I am currently reading The Library of the Unwritten; by A.J. Hackwith, Crossings; by Alex Landragin, Among the Fallen; by N.S. Dolkart, Fury of the Demon; by Diana Rowland, and This is My America; by Kim Johnson. Next up: Beowulf; by Maria Dahvana Headley and Disfigured; On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space; by Amanda LeDuc. I’m enjoying all the books I’m reading, I just can’t seem to settle down into one. I’m blaming stress.

I’ve only read one dud-book this year. Surviving the Lake House was just a dull slog. I almost never give a low rating to a book, I hate to do it, but I felt like the writer could have benefitted from serious editorial intervention. It was bad enough I looked up the publisher and, sure enough, self-published. I understand the desire to want to hold a book you’ve written in your hands. How amazing must that be? But writers need editors. They need a dispassionate someone to tell them; “This isn’t ready yet. It needs to have a consistent tense.” or; “You’re writing in the first person you need to tell your audience why you’re telling them this tale.” or: “You need more description. The reader needs to be able to visualize your characters, scenes and so on, they need to connect to the characters.” Plus all the usual grammar fixes etc.

Work in a Library @ the End of the World.

Life feels weirdly paused right now. Not that things aren’t happening, lots of things are happening, I just feel like I’m holding my breath, waiting to be able to relax and breathe. My son has started his senior year of HS, and my husband is putting in 90-100 hours per week at his job, mostly from home, and I still go to work 2-3 times per week but the library is still closed. Patrons are getting really cranky about not being allowed in to browse, and I get it, I love browsing too. But we are doing many hours of curbside pick up and we’re even delivering items to patrons as well as putting out story walks and giving out take-home crafts. It’s the best we can do for now until the Board of Health and the Trustees decide to open the doors. Oh, we are also setting appointments for patrons to use the computers.

Right now we are working on setting up a time for some limited outdoor browsing of new items in our collection. We’re hoping to do it once a week so patrons can have at least some opportunity to browse. I’m also trying to get a grant to put together a take-home painting kit for some time next year. I want to provide canvases, paints, brushes, and a relevant book for beginners. It is way beyond the kind of kits I’ve been sending out so far. We put together kits mostly from art supplies we had lying around and added LED tea lights, glass jars, or skewers. We did have the stained glass kits which were expensive but those were bought with a grant that was supposed to cover a stained glass workshop event so I guess the painting kits would be comparable.

We’re ordering books again! It’s awesome. I hated only being allowed to order virtual books. I mean, they’re better than not having books at all but it is nice to be able to have new books for the shelves again. I was trying to diversify the collection before the pandemic and now it’s much easier. I feel like more books by writers of Color are being published and are getting promoted more, they are easy to find right now so it’s a big help. There are some excellent YA novels coming out, too many, I can’t keep up!

I’m in a weird headspace. I’m going to stop writing now. I hope you are all well safe.

A Few Sherlockian Recommendations

I read a lot. Shocking, I know, that a librarian should be a big reader, fulfills a stereotype at least. I read all sorts of books, fiction and nonfiction, but I have my favorites. I read a lot of fantasy, especially what is generally called ‘dark fantasy,’ of course as a YA librarian I tend to read a lot of young adult fiction too, a lot of dystopian fiction, lately I find myself reading a fair few mysteries, and I have always been fond of Sherlock Holmes stories. There are so many authors now trying their hand at writing the great detective that I cannot keep up. I really love what James Lovegrove has done with his Sherlock stories, especially the ones involving Cthulhu. I love the mythos originating with H.P. Lovecraft and fostered by his literary descendants. Seeing the mythos combined with the world of Sherlock Holmes is a treat.

The Lady Sherlock stories are surprisingly good too. I didn’t think they would be, thought the concept would be gimmicky, but they are very well done. The young Charlotte Holmes needs to forge her own path in life but she’s a privileged young lady in Victorian England and is thwarted at every turn. So she, with the help of a few accomplices, comes up with a way to use her bright and questing mind to make something of a living for herself. Of course it’s more complicated than that, with relatable and interesting characters, and plenty of plot twists to keep the reader guessing. I’ve read the first 3 books so far and I just ordered the 4th from another library. This series is worth reading for any fan of Sherlock Holmes. Interesting take well executed.

Oh, and another favorite, and recent, adaptation! There are 3 books by Kareem Abdul Jabbar starting with Mycroft Holmes; that are delightful. Co-written by Anna Waterhouse this trilogy is irresistable. Full of excellent and appealing characters, well plotted, perhaps not quite globe spanning but with some interesting travels and travails, these books deserve to be widely read. It seems a bit funny, I had always thought of Mr. Jabbar as simply a sports figure. I hadn’t realised he had other hidden talents. Hidden to me, I guess, I don’t pay too much attention sometimes.

Pain and Confusion…

Hurting today, my head, my joints, it’s not a great day if I’m talking about pain. We’re supposed to game tonight but I’m not sure I’m up to it. I wouldn’t even have to be out of bed to play so that’s saying something. I took a brief walk this morning. I’ve made breakfast and lunch for Bill and I, done a few dishes, and am trying to come up with a dinner plan but that is the extent of my efforts today.

Oh, wait, I’ve also been emailing back and forth with one of my teen’s mom about matching books that interest her son with audiobooks so he can listen while he reads. It’s really tricky because audio books are expensive so libraries tend to focus on physical books. I’m working on it though, even requested my Director purchase a copy of an audio book to match one of the YA paperbacks the teen is interested in. We’ll see if she feels it’s a good investment. The book is not a new title, not terribly old either, but we’d have the only Ebook in the system so it would likely see some use.

What stage of the apocalypse is it when we’re all stuck in a weird limbo of the world returning almost to normal even as the virus spreads. My grown offspring can’t job hunt, can’t see friends, aren’t sure what their best moves are and neither are we? Even weirder, what stage is it when I love my job but I kind of want to quit it so I won’t be exposed, but we’re taking all the precautions we can at work and I really love the job, and my boss is Awesome, but I cannot, cannot bring this virus home? And what insanity is it that my mother can beg to spend time with me, insisting she has been “Super Careful” and socially distant etc etc… but I looked at her FB and there are pictures from her recent travels of her on the beach with a whole group of people None of whom are masked?????

Later, some time in the dim and distant future I may understand WTH she is thinking, but I doubt it. Almost everyone that I know personally who is acting foolishly about this pandemic is a Boomer. I know some Boomers are actually being careful but in all seriousness, I totally get why Gen-Z is calling this virus the “Boomer-Doomer.” In my household, that has been locked down as hard as it can be since early March, Gen-X, Millennials, and Gen-Z are determined to ride out the insanity and live to see a post Covid-19 world. Our Boomer relatives are travelling, spending time with friends, giving people rides, shopping, etc. I do not get it. They are at higher risk…