Somehow our house looks more chaotic and full of half-filled bags and boxes as we prepare for a week long vacation to the northwoods. ONE WEEK! You'd think we were packing to move out!
The thing about the place we're headed is that the closest town with a grocery store is twenty minutes down the Gunflint Trail. I mean, I will drive twenty minutes to a store around here. Maybe because we're surrounded by TREES, twenty minutes away feels so much further when we're up north. Half of what we're bringing is food. Almost none of which will be returning with us.
Despite all this, I'm really looking forwrard to the vacation. There is limited wireless, but I usually get up early and make the hike to the Lodge with my computer and spend an hour or so making sure I'm not missing out on any earth-shattering news. So, I'm still reachable, just... only once a day. I'm going to try to post pictures and such--you know, actually keep up with this blog for once!
Bad news: the endoscopy failed. (I was scheduled for an upper GI endoscopy via the nasal sinuses to take a look around my stomach and see what's bleeding. Bad news: turns out I have unusually narrow sinuses, and by the time they'd figured this out my nose was watering so badly that I couldn't breathe when they tried to go in via my throat. So we're rescheduling for a different loction with an anesthetist who can put me under if necessary. NB: I would have been fine with only local anaesthesia if the bloody endscope had fit through my sinuses. Gaah.)
The attack novel I was working on has now hit the 70% mark in first draft—not bad for two months. I am going to keep pushing onwards until it stops, or until the page proofs I'm expecting hit me in the face. They're due at the end of June, so I might finish Starter Pack first ... or not. Starter Pack is an unexpected but welcome spin-off of Ghost Engine (third draft currently on hold at 80% done), which I shall get back to in due course. It seems to have metastasized into a multi-book project.
Neither of the aforementioned novels is finished, nor do they have a US publisher. (Ghost Engine has a UK publisher, who has been Very Patient for the past few years—thanks, Jenni!)
Feel free to talk among yourselves, especially about the implications of Operation Spiders Web, which (from here) looks like the defining moment for a very 21st century revolution in military affairs; one marking the transition from fossil fuel powered force projection to electromotive/computational force projection.
I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.
When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.
We get the sense that the project was constantly escaping from any endeavours to confine it within meshes of 'evidence-based medicine': 'Trying to fit the square peg of reading into the round hole of evidence is where things sometimes get awkward.'
Larfed liek drayne:
In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.
When a woman looked around her for her husband, who had been right behind her on the stairs but was now nowhere to be seen. I was very worried I was facing a repeat of the time not too long ago when I spent an hour looking for a missing patron.
The missing husband turned out not to have been behind his wife on the stairs after all, so mystery solved. The missing patron I spent that hour looking for was found once I thought about where she had to be to have not been found where we looked: row H or J, somewhere near seat 26.
It's Pride again, and time for another queer-themed bundle! At a time when the community is once again under threat, we felt it was more important than ever to showcase the work and the writers that celebrate us. We looked for books that show queerness in all its complexity, with stories that range from pure adventure to profoundly serious, and from across the range of identities that make up our whole. We looked for stories that showcased the many and complex forms that queerness takes — the many ways that we have chosen to be. We looked for stories that engage with threats to the queer world, and for stories that imagine what we might be without threats, for stories that celebrate our joy and our resilience.
And we're pleased to say that we have found those stories, and more. If anything, the hardest part of curating this bundle was narrowing down the field: there are so many writers out there creating intelligent, nuanced, queer science fiction and fantasy that it's incredibly hard to choose among them. This is not to claim that this is a definitive LGBTQIA+ collection —given the ever-growing amount of stellar queer writing being published, we're not sure that's even possible. Instead, we thought of the bundle as a sampler, or perhaps a tasting menu. It includes novels, novellas, single author collections, and anthologies; the genres range from fantasy mysteries to cyberpunk to far future to post apocalyptic fantasy. There are newer works and writers, and some older work you may have missed when they first appeared. It's your chance to read work by some of the best writers working today.
StoryBundle has always allowed its patrons to donate part of their payment to a related charity, and this year we're once again supporting Rainbow Railroad, a NGO that helps LGBTQ+ people escape state-sponsored persecution and violence worldwide. Their work is needed now more than ever, and if you choose, you can pass on part of the bundle's price to them— a gift that can save a life. – Catherine Lundoff and Melissa Scott
* * *
For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you're feeling generous), you'll get the basic bundle of four books in .epub format—WORLDWIDE.
The Map and the Territory by A.M. Tuomala
We're Here - The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2023 edited by Darcie Little Badger and series editor Charles Payseur
Point of Dreams by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein
If you pay at least the bonus price of just $25, you get all four of the regular books, plus TEN more books, for a total of 14!
Be the Sea by Clara Ward
Fallen by Melissa Scott
A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert
Luminescent Machinations by Rhiannan Rasmussen and dave ring
Fairs' Point by Melissa Scott
So You Want to be A Robot by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
Price of a Thousand Blessings by Ginn Hale
Reforged by Seth Haddon
Welcome to Boy.Net by Lyda Morehouse
Power to Yield by Bogi Takács
This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com . It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get a DRM-free .epub for all books!
It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.
Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.
Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.
Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.
Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.
Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to Rainbow Railroad!
Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you'll get the bonus books!
StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle,
Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.
========== I would love for this to be a huge success for all our authors (and for Rainbow Railroad) so even if it's not for you, please consider passing this information/link (https://storybundle.com/pride) on to someone who you think might enjoy it!
An arduous journey in a prince's entourage offers a courier escape from immediate, judicial danger, at the cost of an entirely different assortment of dangers.
Recent college graduate Mason, peering through the Gov Docs stacks at Wesleyan University
We have actually been home for a while, but, for some reason, this time I feel like I've been struggling to catch up with everything. Our house is currently a warren of boxes--all of them somehow containing everything Mason had brought with him, bought, or otherwise accumulated, over the past four years as a student. As I noted while we were still on the road, we shipped most of his stuff back via the United States Postal Service. A fine service, I might add. Still, by far, the cheapest and most efficient way to send things. I hate seeing it in crisis. (And it clearly is. I spend a lot of time at post offices and all of them are chronically understaffed right now--from Middletown, CT to Minnesota.)
On the road, however, I managed to listen to a lot of audio books. I finished up the last of the Singing Hills Cycle novellas. Then, because I had to wait to get to the hotel to download the book I actually wanted next, I ended listening to David Levine's Arabella of Mars, which I wanted to be more queer than it was, but oh well. The book I'd wanted was Martha Well's Exit Strategy, which I had apparently forgotten to read when I was reading through the Murderbot Dairies some time ago (or maybe it wasn't out yet, but somehow I missed it.) Then, to fill in a short gap I listened to another novella: A Strange Bird by Jeff Vandermeer. Apparently I needed to have read the Borne Series, which I had not. I mean, I would say that it stood on its own, honestly? Though I could tell in the second half that there was a bigger story in the City that I didn't fully grasp. It was weird in the way of Vandermeer's stories, though. A bit depressing, too. I have since started, but have been slow to get into. Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs. But, as you will see below. I've been a bit scattered and distracted.
Mason (right) and his partner Jas (left) in their robes on the steps of the Chapel at Wesleyan
I am probably feeling so very rushed an unsettled for a number of reasons. Firstly, we are actually headed off to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail (for my non-Minnesotan friends: Think Cabin in the Woods. Only with 99.9% fewer demonic sacrifices.) We'll be up there for a week--from Saturday to Saturday--and it is, in essence, Mason's graduation gift to him from us, but it does mean another day on the road! I was just talking to Shawn and it's kind of amazing that (if we drove with no stops) it will take us about as long to get to the Lodge as it did to drive from Youngstown, OH to Valparaiso, IN. Minnesota is a BIG state. Saint Paul is kind of in the middle of the state, and it will take us that long to drive the same distance we drove through all of Ohio and most of Indiana. INSANE. I mean, when you look on a map all of Minnesota is North and South Dakota length and then some.
Anyway, I don't mind the driving. Our family usually finds fun places to stop and hunt for agates or just take in the view of Lake Superior. This time, however, we may be going past some active fires, which I can't say I'm excited to see.
The air quality has been bad here, y'all.
But, I'm stressing out because the idea of packing my clothes again just seems like a LOT.
The other thing that has me generally unsettled is that we just found out that Shawn's brother Keven has a lump on his kidney. The doctors are fairly certain it's cancer and they're already talking about chemo and all the works. Keven didn't used to be my favorite brother (Shawn has two), but in the past several years Keven has gotten some diagonises and meds and therapy. He's not anything like a changed man, but now he's tolerable and curmudgeonly in a more charming and amusing way.
And, now, it seems, the gods have kicked him in the teeth.
Keven only just got his first tests, so it's not necessarily any kind of immediate death sentence. But, fuck. You know?
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) on Monday, countries including China, Thailand and Singapore have recently reported a notable increase in COVID-19 cases. While the situation in Korea remains relatively stable, the agency warned that a summer resurgence is possible due to international travel and regional outbreaks.
The NB.1.8.1 variant — now dominant in the affected countries — is known for its strong transmissibility and immune-evasive properties, although its severity and fatality rate remain relatively low. The KDCA is advising high-risk travelers to these countries to get vaccinated before departure.
I was taking to a felow customer when I stopped for sandwiches while strolling around downtown Albany last night, and when I commented on the deepeness of the verdure around me--I can't get enough of it--he said that it's been a very wet season here.
I took a walk along the Hudson, stopping at a little side canal, or whatever they are called, when I saw a bridge and inviting shadows (the sun was overly warm and the hair humid and kind of dirty). I snapped this shot:
If it works right, and you embiggen, look just above the top branch of the fallen tree. I'd spotted a pair of geeze swimming toward it, and thought they'd make a splendid shot framed by the two branches. But they never emerged from behind the top one, some twenty feet below me and upstream. I could see the ripples from them paddling, but no sign of the geese.
When I looked closer, I just spotted a black and white goose head peeking at me from beyond that branch. They were clearly waiting for the monster to lurk somewhere else.
And now I'm on my way northwards toward Montreal, which I should reach this evening.
KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025): somehow not among my top KJCs.
Finished Bitch in a Bonnet Vol 2, perhaps even better than vol 1.
Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House (1949): not quite sure why this got to be picked as a Virago Modern Classic: WO WO Iron Heel of THEM i.e. the 1945 Labour Government, moan whinge, etc etc; also several rather repetitious passages of older generation maundering to themselves about the dire prospects that await the younger members.
Finished Dragon's Teeth, the last parts of which were quite the wild ride.
Latest Slightly Foxed, a bit underwhelmed, well, they can't always be talking about things that really interest/excite me or rouse fond memories I suppose.
On the go
Have started Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate (Lanny Budd, #4) (1943) simply because I had very strong 'what happens next? urges after the end of Dragon's Teeth, but that gets answered in the first few chapters, and I think that in this one we're already getting strong hints that Lanny is about to head southwards to Spain, just in time for things to start getting violent. I might take a break.
I have just started a romance by an author I have vaguely heard well of and was a Kobo deal but don't think it's for me.
Up next
Dunno: perhaps that Gail Godwin memoir.
***
*Even barely woken up I was not at all sure that this was not all one of those cunning scams that is in fact a fraudster telling you they are your bank/credit card co, but it turned out it was actually about somebody making fraudulent charges - in really odd small ways - on my card, when I got onto the website and found the number to ring - the number being called from with automated menu bearing no resemblance to the one on my card, ahem - went through all the procedures and card is being cancelled and new one sent. SIGH. This is second credit card hoohah in two days, yesterday got text re upcoming due payment for which bill has so far failed to arrive, for the one for which logging into website involves dangers untold and hardships unnumbered and having the mobile app. (Eventually all resolved.)
Ideally something I can get through the NYPL or the Queens Public Library (I haven't yet re-upped my Brooklyn Public Library card. I ought to go do that this weekend or the week after.)
I suppose I should set a good example and rec something to all of you first. Lemme see....
I did recently enjoy both Long Live Evil and How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying!
I have been struggling a bit with real life, and, as always, am behind on everything. But: The Wild Road will be available on the 17th of June, 2025 (I am practicing 2025 because apparently some part of my brain falls back into 2024 mode. Usually I’ve beaten it out of my head by this time in the year, but, well. 2025.) I won’t be at my usual desk until the 19th of June, which I’ve been told is terrible planning. And it is, but it wasn’t entirely planned >.<. I have a preview of the book, which you can find here. Usually I try to put it up a month before pub date. Did I mention that things have been … Continue reading →
In an uncommon turn for famed author Card, he presents a very special boy in very difficult circumstances faced with great responsibility. What will the Young People make of it?
Today is the day you can go into your local bookshop and buy all three Aud novels in lovely matching editions. And you should do that. Why? Well, look at the photo: the cats are trying to point something out to you.
Do you see it? Not? Okay, how about now?
And if you still can’t see it then, well, never mind. Just enjoy these quotes instead.
Women's higher education in London dates from the late 1840s, with the foundation of Bedford College by the Unitarian benefactor, Elisabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford was initially a teaching institution independent of the University of London, which was itself an examining institution, established in 1836. Over the next three decades, London University examinations were available only to male students. Demands for women to sit examinations (and receive degrees) increased in the 1860s. After initial resistance a compromise was reached. In August 1868 the University announced that female students aged 17 or over would be admitted to the University to sit a new kind of assessment: the 'General Examination for Women'.
It is often assumed that industrial Britain, with its large factories and mines employing thousands of people, left little space for individuals running their own businesses. But not everyone was employed as a worker for others. Some exercised a level of agency operating on their own as business proprietors, even if they were also often very constrained. Over most of the second half of the 19th century as industrialisation accelerated, the self-employed remained a significant proportion of the population – about 15 percent of the total economically active. It was only in the mid-20th century that the proportion plummeted to around eight percent.
What women in ‘home duties’ were precisely engaged in still remains a mystery, reflecting the regular obstruction of women’s everyday activity from the record across history. For some, surely ‘home duties’ reflected hard physical labour (particularly in washing), as well as hours of childcare exceeding the length of the factory day. For others, particularly the aspirational bourgeois, the activities of “home duties” involved little actual housework. 5.1 percent of wives in home duties had servants to assist them, a rate which doubled for clerks’ wives to 11.7 percent. For them, household “work” involved little physical action. Though this may have given some of these women the opportunity to spend their hours in cultural activities or socialising, for others it possibly reflected crushing boredom.
Though I wonder to what extent these women were doing something, more informally, that would be invisible to the census and formal measures generally that contributed to the household economy - I'm thinking of the neighbour in my childhood who cut hair at home - ads in interwar women's mags for various money-making home-based schemes - writers one has heard whose sales were a significant factor in the overall family income - etc
[H]istorians such as Jeroen Duindam show that there were never explicitly separate spheres for men and women when working for the state in the early nineteenth-century. Drawing a line separating ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ diplomats in the early nineteenth-century, simply based on their gender alone, does not do these women justice.
***
And I am very happy to see this receiving recognition, though how far has something which got reprinted after 30 years be considered languishing in obscurity, huh? as opposed to having created a persistent fanbase: A Matter of Oaths – Helen Wright.
Pretty much every time I read a news story about Louisiana, I'm glad that I left Louisiana and am reinforced in my determination to never move back. Today is no exception: The Louisiana House has passed a bill banning chemtrails. You know, chemtrails? Those imaginary, thoroughly-debunked streams of chemicals that conspiracy theorists allege are sprayed from airplanes because they're too uninformed to understand the science behind contrails? Yeah, well, according to Louisiana legislators, those are no longer being used for mind control but instead are being used to control the weather, and Louisiana's not having it! (Because, of course, secret societies spreading chemicals through the air for nefarious ends are well known for their scrupulous adherence to state laws.)
On the bright side, they did at least have to foresight to include an exception stating that this law would not apply to "the injection, release, or dispersal of fire retardant or fire suppressant substances for purposes of extinguishing or suppressing fire, or to the aerial application of seeds, fertilizers, or pesticides for agriculture or forestry purposes." Of course, the exception would never have been necessary if they hadn't introduced their stupid law in the first place, so even the bright side isn't all that bright.
ETA: After Hurricane Katrina, A. and I did everything we could to convince her family not to return to New Orleans, but they insisted on going back. They don't seem happy to be there, and from time to time the idea of them moving will come up in conversation, but the combination of inertia and economics seems to have trapped them there. For the longest time A.'s mother would share any positive news story out of Louisiana, in an attempt to try to convince us to move back. She seems to have stopped doing that, but I don't know if this represents a change in her feelings about Louisiana or just an acknowledgement of the unlikelihood of changing our minds.
It never occurred to me that people would be worried about playing wrong. Would-be gatekeepers complaining that people play wrong, sure. I am sure that started in 1974. But I didn't consider performance anxiety.
Today I got latest readership summary on my first master's thesis, on British educational policy, 1901-03. Apparently during the month of May, my thesis was download 10 times: Six times in Brazil and once each in Ecuador, Germany, the US, and Uzbekistan(?!). I wonder how many of those are going into training AI? (But like A. said "At least if they're using it for that, you know they're training the AI on something well-researched." Which is true — I spent hours sitting in the library reading Hansard's Parliamentary Debates on microform.)
For those in the tags who are confused about the release date (as indeed I was at first): it’s the Roman numerals that flash during the trailer. XII, XII, XXV. 12/12/25, December 12 2025.
Wish it was going to be out Thanksgiving weekend but I will take it!
so…it occurred to me that since this does give a lot of Southern Gothic vibes…are we gonna get some Benoit Blanc backstory? Like will this be one of those plots where the detective has to investigate his own past to solve the crime? Cause that’d be awesome.
And I may have noticed that I need something new to listen to.
Now, I've said this before and I'll definitely say it again, but audiodramas are, hands-down, the gayest media I have ever consumed. So, in honor of the occasion, three lists:
I’m a wheelchair user with a variety of health conditions: in terms of Covid, a vulnerable member of the population. Tonight I’ll be signing at Phinney Books and going to the pub next door afterwards. Unless I test positive in the next few hours I won’t be wearing a mask. On Wednesday I fly to Kansas City for the Nebula Awards. On the plane I’ll be wearing a mask. In the bar at the convention probably not. Why?
I mask depending on:
Data. How prevalent is Covid locally? Current wastewater levels are a very good proxy; Kansas City’s levels, as of yesterday, were Very Low.
Situation and circumstance. How crowded is it? Does the bar/hotel/banquet room have good air filtration? Will I be eating or drinking?
My risk/reward ratio.
The vulnerability of those around me.
Let’s focus on that last one. First, I will not be in the bar or any other public place unmasked if have not just tested negative. Testing negative means there are no perceptible levels of virus in my airways. That means that I am vanishingly unlikely to be able to infect anyone else. (And, yes, I generally do test more than once—if I have symptoms I test all the time—it always ends up being allergies. But I do it anyway.)
Remember, we’re talking about a bar, here. Not visiting an ill or fragile person in their home, a person who for a variety of reasons cannot mask, or in the ICU, etc. In these situations ‘vanishingly unlikely’ isn’t enough. I mask. In ordinary clinical settings—the ophthalmologist, the neurologist, the internist, etc—I tend to mask, mainly to protect myself (lots of sick people in doctors’ offices) but not always.
So assuming there is no reasonable risk to anyone else, the who choice of whether to wear a mask comes down to my own risk/reward ratio. If viral prevalence is low or very low, if the bar is well-ventilated, if there’s reasonable space between tables, and if the bar is full of people I really want to talk to and beer I want to drink, then the reward easily outweighs the risk. And of course the point of a bar is to drink—and you can’t drink beer through a mask.
This is a purely informational post. I’m not the least bit interested in arguing with anyone on this topic. (Fighty comments will be deleted—you don’t have to agree, but don’t be obnoxious and do not, not lecture.) This is what works for me. I have never had Covid. I intend to keep it that way.
I'm currently reading the May 2025 issue of Artforum and wanted to share with you some of the things I learned and, in the process, demonstrate how my mind connects things. One of the current exhibitions reviewed in this issue is of paintings by Alex Israel at Gagosian Beverly Hills, which was accompanied by a reproduction of Israel's 2024 painting "Gas Station."
Upon learning that this gas station actually exists, my thoughts immediately went to William Gibson's short story "The Gernsback Continuum" (published in Burning Chrome).
I then returned to the review, where the final paragraph begins with this sentence: "The works' very status as paintings—as art in a gallery—aligns them, moreover, with the long tradition of veduta painting, that of architectural scenes that don't necessarily demand forensic accuracy, edging sometimes into outright fantasy." Having never heard of veduta painting, I immediately looked it up (link here), and discovered I was familiar with this style of painting (the name comes from the Italian for "view"), just not with the word. From that page, I followed the link to capriccio, which is a form of architectural fantasy art and, again, something I was familiar with but hadn't known the name of. As it happened, one of the images illustrating the Wikipedia entry for "capriccio" was a piece by Giovanni Battista Piranesi called "Le Carceri d'Invenzione (The Prisons of Invention)."
This picture immediately caught my eye, because it reminded me of M.C. Escher's works, particularly "Relativity" and "House of Stairs".
This sort of connection-making, going from Alex Israel to William Gibson to Giovanni Battista Piranesi to M.C. Escher, bouncing back and forth over several centuries, is very much how my mind works. I'm constantly feeding in new bits of knowledge, which then bounce off of each other, make connections, and enable me to produce new things.
1999: Both the new Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales have their first meetings, the Millennium Dome (certainly not a name that will rapidly date) is completed, and hard-working programmers strive to limit the effects of the Millennium Bug, unaware success will be rewarded with mass amnesia.
Time on My Hands: A Novel with Photographs by Peter Delacorte 0 (0.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read,, underline for never heard of it.
Which 1999 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read? Dreaming in Smoke by Tricia Sullivan Cavalcade by Alison Sinclair Earth Made of Glass by John Barnes The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod The Extremes by Christopher Priest Time on My Hands: A Novel with Photographs by Peter Delacorte
This is the same little squirrel that's been trying to break into my bedroom for the better part of the past ten days. Once it actually got into the house it was immediately chased by a cat and had cause to regret all its life choices.
We removed the cat and opened the front door very wide and absented ourselves from the area, so we think it's gone now.
I think it's a baby. Not just because it's so small, but because the other window squirrels will shamelessly stand up or bang on the glass if they think they can catch my eye, but when this one realized I was there it hunkered down very small and actually turned its face away a little.
I hope it's all right now that it's outside where it belongs.
Today I already had the fret of a physio appointment re the neck & shoulder issue coming up in early afternoon.
During the morning I had an email from online pharmacy that ooops, migraine prophylaxis drug I have been taking for some years (and which I apprehend one is not supposed to cease abruptly) they are having supply problems with. Log in to account to contact them.
(This involved a certain amount of faff with their chat client, which froze my browser.)
a)Various options involving see if I can source it from local pharmacy and they will send prescription.
b)Wait and see if they can acquire supply.
c)Contact GP about possible substitute.
I discovered that at least one local pharmacy did have it in stock, so went for first option.
Though on reflection thought I would at least see if other local pharmacy, which was not responding to call to number on NHS site, and which was more or less on the way back from physio appt, also had it.
They did, and also the staff there are a lot more agreeable than the last time I had occasion to visit it.
I hope this was just a temporary supply blip....
Physio resulted in Yet Another Set of Exercises, which we may hope do not set off massive excruciating lower back pain, and also a repeat appointment in a fortnight, with this therapist and their supervisor -
Modified yay, even if it is a) at 1 pm and b) at the uphill all the way health centre.
I like to look at online real estate listings to see how people use interior spaces. I've come to the conclusions that:
A: Few people use more than 2000 square feet effectively. Above that, they seem to run out of ideas about how to use each room*. B: Lots of houses have gratuitous features whose purpose seems to be to make them unusable to mobility impaired people. C: (this is the stupid one) Townhouses are fine but I hate the idea of a duplex. For some reason, having to cooperate with 50 people bothers me more than having to get along with one specific person or family.
* More libraries is always the right answer.
There was a place for sale just up the road from me whose entire basement was given over to sturdy-looking bookcases.
"'But to do a sequel, the studios want to have, you know, cars flying in the air. They want to have people doing flip-flops and fighting action scenes,' Stormare said."
I think I agree with Keanu. We already have the John Wick franchise. IT IS AWESOME. But we don't need the Keanu-as-Constantine franchise to turn into another John Wick franchise.
I hope they resolve this soon because I am DROOLING at the chance to see Stormare play Lucifer again.
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