Dancing Around the Four Sides

SO. After a truly awful weekend, I called my doctor yesterday morning and begged asked for another antibiotic -- something, anything. So now I'm taking doxycycline, and NOT feeling like my meds are actively trying to kill me. Win/win!

Anyway, I'm now reading Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, which is an entertaining romp through an alternate history of space exploration and colonization, with crewed flight beginning in the 1950s.

You're not forgiven for that massive health scare you gave me, no, not yet. Took my first industrial-sized antibiotic pill this morning; nine more to go.

Started reading Ben Aaronovitch's Lies Sleeping last night, and before I knew it, I had fallen 100 pages in. :D

1) Between my Chronic Kidney Disease acting up and what seems to be bronchitis (or maybe walking pneumonia), my health is kicking my ass these days. The symptoms of both include deep fatigue and loss of appetite, so I've been eating like a bird. (Yes, I am seeing my doctors.)

2) Chernobyl, on HBO, is one of the best mini-series I've seen in a long time, and holy shit, Stellan Skarsgård deserves all the awards.

3) Watching the Stanley Cup playoffs and cheering for the Boston Bruins. Apparently I like teams with giant assholes on them? Looking at you, Brad Marchand! :D

4) Currently reading Esi Edugyan's Washington Black, which is pretty good.

5) Got a haircut this week, which I really needed. The kid who cut my hair was named Kevin, and I was legit old enough to be his grandmother. We talked about how much we both like the John Wick movies. LOL

Annual eye exam was this morning, so everything has been slightly out of focus and a little TOO bright the rest of the day. I really like this ophthalmologist, but I'm always glad when it's over. My eyes are fine (no diabetic damage, yay!), although now I have a teeny tiny cataract in my right eye to keep the teeny tiny one in my left eye company. So eventually I will have to have those removed. But for now everything is good, and I got a new lens prescription for my glasses. :D

Last night I finished reading Dara Horn's Eternal Life, which is about a woman who makes a bargain with God two thousand years ago (to save the life of her sick child) and then finds she cannot die. So she ... lives, for two thousand years. Periodically, she "regenerates," which allows her to start her life over somewhere else, with people who don't know her. It's an interesting idea, and I thought the author did a good job with the idea, but ... maybe not so much with the characters? I mean, there's some very good writing here, and Horn asks some big questions about faith and love and the meaning of organized religion in a secular world, but when I put the book down for the last time I thought, "That's IT?" IDK, I was just left vaguely unsatisfied. And yet, I am recommending this book. For me there was enough good writing to make up for its faults, but ... it was a close call.

Now reading Ian McEwan's The Child in Time.

Yesterday was my birthday. Just as I get the hang of being 58, I have to start working on 59.

Weather was beautiful today, and I saw a pair of scissor-tailed flycatchers perched on a telephone line while I was out. :D

I forgot to do this earlier!

From Taiga and Topaz Eyes -- Grab the book nearest you, turn to page 117, and the second sentence is what your life will be in 2017.

Well, I actually have three books, all of them equally near. Let's see what they say ...

( Read more... )

Okay, this should have been yesterday, but oh well.

1) Vacuumed downstairs.

2) Folded and put away two loads of laundry.

3) Washed dishes that had been lingering in the kitchen sink.

BONUSES:

4) Wrote more on Down to the Sea in Ships.

5) Read more about ocean-going cargo vessels than I will EVER NEED TO KNOW kthxbai.

So, anyway, I think this meme was a useful exercise, and I may start doing it once a week. :D

1) Got out today and went to Home Depot. Found two wooden pots with good drainage holes -- one for our little fig tree and one for our little sapodilla tree. For some reason pots with real drainage holes have become difficult to find, so I was glad to get these.

2) I am reading Things the Grandchildren Should Know, which is a nonfiction memoir by Mark Oliver Everett, who grew up to become the frontman for an indie rock group called The Eels. But I'm reading it because Everett is the son of Hugh Everett III, founder of the Many Worlds Interpretation of modern physics, also known as the multiverse. So it's an interesting and strange (and heartfelt) read, but I love following trails of breadcrumbs to new things.

3) L'shana tova to all who are celebrating. :D

Because yarroway. :D

1) My thick woolly socks came today! I bought a new pair of boots a couple of weeks ago (Ariat Fatbabies), and, while they fit, they needed some thicker socks to fit perfectly. So the socks came today and they feel so soft and comfy on my feet. I can't wait for cooler weather.

2) Are we allowed to report events from the day before? Yesterday Mister Nightdog and I went to an "artisan and fibre faire" (honestly, that's what it was called) in Denison, Texas, which is about 70 miles north of us. It was a lot of fun, even though the faire was more fibre than we had expected (lots of skeins of natural and dyed wool, LOTS).

3) I have been writing on a Housefic that I started in ... 2010, I think. It's called Down to the Sea in Ships.

... editing to tag blackmare. Heh.