1. We had a great time at Disneyland this morning, despite some rain.
2. Woke up this morning to find a huge ant infestation in the kitchen. We've had six months at least that were ant-free, but it's not surprising with the amount of rain we got yesterday. They were all over the sink and surrounding counters and even in some drawers and cupboards. D: So that was a huge cleanup job before we went out this morning, but thankfully when we got home there were still quite a few here and there, but not a whole other swarm, and now it's really just one or two. Tomorrow's supposed to be more rain, but that should be the end of it, so hopefully after that the ants will go back to staying outside.
I ran the Berkeley Half Marathon 10K again today. Contrary to my ambitions, my time this year was even slower than last year, although still more than 30 seconds/mile better than my worst-ever showing in 2022. I think part of it is that I really didn't put enough training in over the last month for various reasons. And yet my split times actually came down by nearly 10 seconds/mile over the course of the run per the tracking, which does seem to show that I've gotten better at the downhills.
So yeah, I'm not particularly satisfied with this result, but on the other hand I was once again physically pretty okay afterwards, not completely destroyed like I used to be. I haven't done a great job at integrating 8K or 10K runs into my training plans over the past year, so I think a clear goal is to start doing an 8K run regularly and ideally aim for a 10K once a month or so. And I've also bowed to the inevitable and acknowledged that my shoes really only last eight months at the outside--I bought a hardly used pair of shoes on eBay the other day so I'm looking forward to new ones.
I haven't gotten a race shirt since 2019 because I have more than enough running shirts, and amusingly now that's apparently old enough to qualify as vintage--one woman in the corral was asking me about the shirt, and another dude gave me a fist bump mid-race because we were both wearing the shirts. Pleasingly enough, the "loyal runner" gift this year was actually useful: a running hat that I wore in today's race. Previous gifts have been mostly...more T-shirts...which seems to defeat the purpose of not getting a race shirt.
One final bit of shenanigans: I left the bike station after parking my bike and the keypad went dark behind me. I figured I would deal with that after running the 10K, and the eventual answer (after "Someone else called about this earlier!") was "I dunno, no one's answering because it's Sunday." "Yes, a day of the week." (The entire premise of the bike station is 24/7 access to cardholders.) The dude swore up and down I would get a call back about the keypad status, which of course I didn't, so tomorrow I will have to call them because a) it's not difficult to get back down to the bike station, but I'm not making the trip unless I know I can retrieve my bike; and b) I want a refund of the money I've unwillingly spent on it being locked in there. Overall BikeLink is great! But the edge cases where there's a problem have, in my experience, been extremely annoying. Luckily I was able to call my roommate to come pick me up, so at least that worked out.
The forecast this morning said a little rain early and then cloudy but no rain for most of the day. It was not raining when I took my walk in the morning, but we did get a bit of sprinkling on the drive down to Anaheim...and then as soon as we got to the parking lot it started to full on rain. D:
Reading: Recently finished: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Schwab, V.E.), Confidence (Frumkin, Rafael), and Hemlock & Silver (Kingfisher, T.).
Currently reading: Still working through Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (Lamott, Anne) and most of the way through Metal from Heaven (Clarke, August). scruloose and I have passed the halfway mark on listening to Network Effect, and haven't watched anything since that's occupying our "watch/listen to something together" time. Weathering: Well, the weather sure has noticed it's November! This is not the first gray wet day we've had, and while yesterday kindly didn't rain on us when we went out erranding, it was down near the freezing mark (and had gone below overnight). Eating:scruloose and I have a delicious go-to Indian place, but both it and our fallback spot too universally have onions in everything for them to be good choices for Ginny, so periodically when she and Kas are over we gamble on an Indian spot that none of us have tried. ( butter chicken sadness )
What Moves The Dead: Another T. Kingfisher novel, and, wow, it’s a good thing I didn’t start with this one. DNF halfway through. I figured out the twist pretty quickly, double-checked on Wikipedia that I was right, and wasn’t gripped enough by the characters to enjoy the process of “listening to them bumble around for a couple more hours failing to figure it out.”
Future game plan: stick with her fantasy works, skip the horror.
The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz: Bought this on Audible years ago, and didn’t remember not liking it. So I downloaded it when I tried out Libation, and gave it a re-listen.
Definitely worth it. Reminds me of 1984, in that it’s a near-future dystopia run by a government that is as totalitarian as it is surreal. At the same time, it’s set in Unnamed Middle Eastern/Muslim City (the author is from Cairo), so it all plays out in a way that’s culturally-specific to that part of the world.
Cool and enriching to see which parts are different. Depressing to see that certain things are the same. The POV residents have a range of perspectives and life experiences, but they’ve all been more-or-less frogboiled into accepting an untenable situation as Just How Things Work. One guy spends the whole book actively dying, but he was injured during the Disgraceful Events that nobody will talk about directly, and his friends/loved ones/doctors keep running into “of course the government will authorize him to get life-saving surgery…just as soon as you have all the proper paperwork.” The titular Queue is all the citizens lined up to get their paperwork. It hasn’t moved for a month now. But it’s going to start soon! Somewhere between the MOASS and the Rapture, probably!
Also, there’s a character named Yehia, which I assume is the same name as Yehya Badr with a slightly different Anglicization. So that was entertaining.
Mogworld, by Yahtzee Croshaw: Checked this out based on how much I liked Will Save The Galaxy For Food, and it did not disappoint.
Starts as a fantasy story about a necromancer overlord’s reign of terror through his undead hordes, but from the POV of Jim, a beleaguered zombie who just wants to die (again) (for good, this time). Then it develops into a parody of fantasy-adventure video-game mechanics. Then you start to see the chat logs between the game developers. Then Jim starts to see the chat logs between the game developers…
It’s like if Terry Pratchett wrote Guilded Age. It’s full of absolutely incredible turns of phrase. (One that I had to stop and write down: a group of supernatural beings is described as “heading off to deliver unwanted resurrections, like a flock of poorly-briefed storks.”)
There’s a character type you see sometimes, where the male protagonist has the support of a devoted female hanger-on, who he finds grating and annoying and never appreciates…but he keeps her around because she does useful things for him. She conveniently never notices his disdain, so she keeps giving him endless support for zero care/support/respect in return. (Misa from Death Note is…a deconstruction of this trope? A commentary, at least.)
Mogworld pulls a twist on this that I’ve never seen before. Undead bodies don’t heal, so Meryl is the local expert in sewing them back together. When the plot drags Jim off on a solo adventure, Meryl follows, conveniently dedicating herself to repairing all the dramatic injuries he gets along the way. But, the reason is: Jim is the only other zombie from Meryl’s home country…and Meryl is a huge [their country] supremacist! So there’s something Jim can legitimately resent about her, he’s not just being an entitled sexist. (They both do a bit of learning and growing as the story goes on, too.)
One warning: the R-slur gets thrown around a bunch. It’s a book that deals with video-gamer culture and was published in 2010, so this isn’t hugely unrealistic…but the writing mostly doesn’t have other slurs/profanity outside of that, so it was kind of a jumpscare.
As long as that’s not a dealbreaker, definitely give this one a read.
What Moves The Dead: Another T. Kingfisher novel, and, wow, it’s a good thing I didn’t start with this one. DNF halfway through. I figured out the twist pretty quickly, double-checked on Wikipedia that I was right, and wasn’t gripped enough by the characters to enjoy the process of “listening to them bumble around for a couple more hours failing to figure it out.”
Future game plan: stick with her fantasy works, skip the horror.
The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz: Bought this on Audible years ago, and didn’t remember not liking it. So I downloaded it when I tried out Libation, and gave it a re-listen.
Definitely worth it. Reminds me of 1984, in that it’s a near-future dystopia run by a government that is as totalitarian as it is surreal. At the same time, it’s set in Unnamed Middle Eastern/Muslim City (the author is from Cairo), so it all plays out in a way that’s culturally-specific to that part of the world.
Cool and enriching to see which parts are different. Depressing to see that certain things are the same. The POV residents have a range of perspectives and life experiences, but they’ve all been more-or-less frogboiled into accepting an untenable situation as Just How Things Work. One guy spends the whole book actively dying, but he was injured during the Disgraceful Events that nobody will talk about directly, and his friends/loved ones/doctors keep running into “of course the government will authorize him to get life-saving surgery…just as soon as you have all the proper paperwork.” The titular Queue is all the citizens lined up to get their paperwork. It hasn’t moved for a month now. But it’s going to start soon! Somewhere between the MOASS and the Rapture, probably!
Also, there’s a character named Yehia, which I assume is the same name as Yehya Badr with a slightly different Anglicization. So that was entertaining.
Mogworld, by Yahtzee Croshaw: Checked this out based on how much I liked Will Save The Galaxy For Food, and it did not disappoint.
Starts as a fantasy story about a necromancer overlord’s reign of terror through his undead hordes, but from the POV of Jim, a beleaguered zombie who just wants to die (again) (for good, this time). Then it develops into a parody of fantasy-adventure video-game mechanics. Then you start to see the chat logs between the game developers. Then Jim starts to see the chat logs between the game developers…
It’s like if Terry Pratchett wrote Guilded Age. It’s full of absolutely incredible turns of phrase. (One that I had to stop and write down: a group of supernatural beings is described as “heading off to deliver unwanted resurrections, like a flock of poorly-briefed storks.”)
There’s a character type you see sometimes, where the male protagonist has the support of a devoted female hanger-on, who he finds grating and annoying and never appreciates…but he keeps her around because she does useful things for him. She conveniently never notices his disdain, so she keeps giving him endless support for zero care/support/respect in return. (Misa from Death Note is…a deconstruction of this trope? A commentary, at least.)
Mogworld pulls a twist on this that I’ve never seen before. Undead bodies don’t heal, so Meryl is the local expert in sewing them back together. When the plot drags Jim off on a solo adventure, Meryl follows, conveniently dedicating herself to repairing all the dramatic injuries he gets along the way. But, the reason is: Jim is the only other zombie from Meryl’s home country…and Meryl is a huge [their country] supremacist! So there’s something Jim can legitimately resent about her, he’s not just being an entitled sexist. (They both do a bit of learning and growing as the story goes on, too.)
One warning: the R-slur gets thrown around a bunch. It’s a book that deals with video-gamer culture and was published in 2010, so this isn’t hugely unrealistic…but the writing mostly doesn’t have other slurs/profanity outside of that, so it was kind of a jumpscare.
As long as that’s not a dealbreaker, definitely give this one a read.
1. That rain is really raining, but I did get in three walks today. (I usually get four on Saturdays but skipped the farmers market as I had already taken one pretty wet walk and the rain didn't let up much until after they were closed.) It was drizzling when I took my morning walk and I did take an umbrella, but it really didn't seem too bad, so I decided to stop and get bagels and lattes, but it got much rainier and windier after I got my stuff, and the cup holders they have do not have handles (just those four cup cardboard things), which made it very awkward to carry, especially with an umbrella. And the tread is mostly gone on my shoes, so I have to walk carefully on wet pavement and couldn't even hurry home. D: Carla was very happy about the surprise bagels and lattes, though, and I enjoyed mine as well.
2. It's still looking like tomorrow will just be cloudy with a small chance of rain, so we're planning on Disneyland in the morning.
3. I think I've got the Christmas tree branches all pulled apart and fluffed out. We still have our old tree skirt (Winnie the Pooh), so I put that down and will start on ornaments at some point. It's been so long since we had a tree, I don't even remember all our old ornaments, though I do know there were a lot of penguin ones.
4. One of the cats sat on the bathmat too soon after peeing and got pee on it, so I had to wash it, and after washing, I just set it in this basket rather than putting it back on the floor, and suddenly it's the most popular spot.
Miss Morton and the Missing Heir I was worried this series might be winding up, but it looks like there will be more. I prefer mysteries where the protagonist is more proactive about solving the case, whereas these ones it's definitely more of a "murder happens around the MC and she happens to make some discoveries" rather than really actively wanting to solve it herself, but I do enjoy the series.
A Death in Tokyo Another Detective Kaga mystery. I am enjoying these. Sadly, it seems there's only one more translated in English, and the Japanese ones are not available as ebooks, so I won't be reading any more any time soon. (It's something to consider looking for on our next trip to Japan, I guess. Might pick some up if I can find them for cheap.)
I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons Humorous fantasy book about a young man who works as a dragon exterminator in a world where dragons are pests that infest peoples houses like rodents and gets involved in a much larger dragon-slaying quest after being summoned to clean up the local castle. I picked this up at a Little Library because of the title. It's written by the author of The Last Unicorn, which I have neither read nor seen the movie of, though I know it's a classic. This was a fun read, so I might check out some of his (numerous) other books at some point.
1. The rain has definitely arrived. I was able to get out and take a walk this morning during a break in the rain (and it didn't seem to have been very heavy before then anyway), but once I got home, it started raining and I wasn't able to go out in the garage to do my morning exercise (and puzzle time). It rained pretty steadily on my way to work, but wasn't pouring when I arrived, so I was able to get in the building without getting too wet. According to Carla, it rained off and on throughout the day, though she was able to get out for a little walk this afternoon. When I left work, it wasn't raining, and I thought maybe if it still was dry when I got home, we could take our evening walk before any further rain, but alas, it started raining almost as soon as I got out of the parking lot and only got heavier and heavier as I got closer to home. It's been raining pretty hard all evening, though I was able to get out to the garage for a bit when there was a short break, so I was able to use the exercise machine today. Still hoping there might be another break long enough to take another walk later, but we may have to skip it tonight. It's supposed to rain for the whole next week, with a couple maybe less rain days in the middle, so we'll see how this goes. (A bit bummed that it's going to be too rainy to make Disneyland pleasant tomorrow, because it's the start of the holiday season and we want to try to new foods, but we're hoping to go Sunday as that should have some less rainy periods.)
2. So glad it's the weekend. I'm making progress on stuff at work, but feeling stressed and blah about the project as a whole and just ready for a break.
3. It's payday today and when I went to pay bills I found that the air miles credit card suddenly charged me a membership fee. It had no membership fee when we signed up, but apparently that was just for the first year. Since discovering that the miles don't work well for a trip to Japan, the only thing they're useful for is Carla's occasional domestic trips to visit family, but it's not worth keeping the card if there's a fee. I checked the statement and it said you can get a refund for the fee if you cancel your card within 30 days of the fee being charged, so thankfully today was only ten days and I was able to cancel. Hopefully I will indeed see the charge reversed soon.
1. I had late afternoon meetings today, but both were by web, so rather than take them at work and then get home later, I came home early and took them at home, which worked out nicely.
2. Carla made egg salad and we had sandwiches for dinner and they were very tasty. Had some zesty yuzu potato chips with them, which I brought home from work the other day, and those were also very tasty.
3. I always see people doing Throwback Thursday photos after I've already uploaded my cat photo for the day, but today I remembered before uploading! Look how cuddly Molly and Chloe were when they were babies!
1. My evening meeting got cancelled today, so that was nice.
2. The rain isn't supposed to start until late night tomorrow, but both yesterday and today have been super overcast. I took an after lunch walk today and it was muggy, which was less than ideal, but still very nice to be able to take a walk without the sun blazing down.
3. Carla wanted to go to Disneyland today and get that bulgogi baked potato one more time before it's gone (hopefully just for the season and will be back again next year), so she went down for a solo trip for lunch and had a really nice time. Since it's between holiday seasons, it's a little less crowded right now, especially on weekdays (I'm sure it got busy with the after school/work crowd but she was gone before then), and it was nice and overcast down there, too.
The 1997 Second Edition of Over the Edge, the acclaimed Atlas Games tabletop roleplaying game of surreal danger on the conspiracy-ridden, reality-bending Mediterranean island of Al Amarja, and more.
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