mellicious | Entries tagged with holidailies

It's that time again, the time when I actually try to journal online for a month. (I do have paper journals and I try to write at least a paragraph or two in those daily, and I do pretty good about that. So it's not like I'm completely out of practice! It's only the habit of saying everything online that I've gotten out of.)

I'm writing this a day ahead - it's very early Wednesday morning. I have just been watching Willow (the new TV series, not the old movie) and I'm kind of unimpressed. Or maybe it's just that it pales in comparison to Andor, which just ended and which I loved so, so much. I kind of feel like Willow belongs in a different time-slot - although I'm sure most people don't watch TV in the middle of the night as much as I do, and aren't likely to watch streaming shows at any particular time, anyway. (Caring about time-slots just shows my age, I suspect.) But going back to three years ago when The Mandalorian first came out, I've been in the habit of watching the Disney - mostly meaning Star Wars & Marvel - shows at 2am Wednesday mornings, which is usually when they put up the new stuff in my time-zone (presumably because that's midnight Pacific).

Willow feels more like a kids' show, is what I'm trying to get at. Really, it always did - I remember rolling my eyes when we first saw the movie at all those reaction shots of the baby - and then there were the brownies. The baby is grown up now - and in fact I got spoiled regarding who she had grown up to be, so watch out for that! - and the brownies are nowhere in evidence in the first two episodes, which is what's up on D+ currently. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they make an appearance at some point, though.

Willow the movie certainly grew on me - I'm hoping the series will too.

(I was going to add a movie update, but I'll save that for tomorrow.)

As I mentioned yesterday, I think, we wanted to go see the Spider-man movie in a theater one more time, so we went today. I think I'm done needing to see it in a theater now. It must still be doing booming business, we went to the Cinemark, which has 18 screens, and I'm pretty sure Spider-man was showing in over half of them, and the (smallish) room we saw it in was full or very near it, anyway. We were sitting on the front row and it was full, and that's usually the last thing to fill up. (Rob and I are weird, we like to sit up front.)

I feel like I should talk about my favorites of the year or something, but I can't really think that I have one favorite. I already talked earlier this month about the ones from earlier in the year - Nomadland & its fellow contenders, that is - and since the Oscars were late, those have already competed and are done. And I talked about Licorice Pizza, which to my mind was more "interesting" than anything else. What else is supposed to be Oscar contenders this year? I know I've looked at a bunch of "best of 2021" lists as they came out all month, and hardly any of it is anything I had seen. I guess Dune will be in there, and I did like it a lot. Encanto will probably be on the animated list. (It's already on Disney+, and I'll probably watch it again soon.) Usually in January when not much is being released, we revisit the likely nominees as we find them. (Variety has Belfast as the #1 contender - that's something I'm probably interested in seeing. And we've been saying we may pick up Netflix for a few months - we had cancelled it because we weren't watching it that much. And Power of the Dog is one that we'd probably watch there.)

(If you put a gun to my head about a favorite, I'd probably say Dune, followed by Shang-Chi. But if you asked me again tomorrow, I might change my mind!)

2022 so far:
Spider-man: No Way Home (2nd time)

2021 movie list, starting with the most recent we've seen:
Licorice Pizza
Spider-man: No Way Home
Encanto
My Neighbor Totoro (Ghiblifest)
Ghostbusters Afterlife
Eternals
Dune (twice)
Spirited Away (Ghiblifest)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (twice)
The Suicide Squad
The Green Knight
Black Widow
Army of the Dead
The Courier
Raya and the Last Dragon
Nomadland
Judas and the Black Messiah
Promising Young Woman
News of the World

...and Rob saw all of those plus these:
Nightmare Alley
Antlers
Halloween Kills (twice)
Lamb
Malignant (twice)
Candyman
The Night House
Don't Breathe 2
Old
Escape Room 2
The Forever Purge
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
A Quiet Place 2
Spiral
Separation
In the Earth
The Unholy
Nobody
The Father

Happy New Year, y'all. 2021 wasn't a bad year for me personally, but it was a pretty bad year for the world in general, wasn't it? Insurrections, climate change, ugh. So let's hope 2022 is going to be an improvement. (I'm not really holding my breath for that, I'm afraid.)

If I get around to it in time, I'll do a movie wrap-up tomorrow. (I'll probably put it up even if I don't manage to do it in time to post it on Holidailies. The last couple of years I have been posting periodically about movies here even if I don't post about anything else.)

Assuming I don't finish any more books before midnight, the list of new novels I've read this year is going to end at 69. (This is not meant to be a fiction-only list, but apparently the only non-fiction books I finished were a handful of Civil War books that I had already read some years ago. Nothing new.) I highlighted a few things that stood out to me, some of which were actually new books (Winterkeep, Leviathan Falls) and some of which were not new this year but I hadn't gotten around to reading before (News of the World, Lock In).

As far as series go, I really enjoyed the "Lady Julia" series, which are period mysteries, and the "Lily Bard" series, which is categorized as a "dark cozy" mystery series, as I understand it (written by Charlaine Harris, who also wrote the "True Blood" series). I probably read more mysteries this year than I've read in some years, or possibly ever - I can't be sure about that since I only recently started keeping lists of my reading again.

(I really think it's kind of absurd to even post my list at all, but I posted it once before so I figured I would update. I don't ever keep up on Goodreads so this is the only place it's online.) (And I don't consider it a competition. I don't work full-time so I have a lot more reading time than most people.)

I don't particularly set any goals for myself about reading, normally. I read plenty already, I don't have to encourage myself to do that, in general. Left to myself I re-read an awful lot, so that's why I have started keeping up with how much new stuff I read. I did set a goal for myself last year to read 18 books that were new to me, and I passed that ages ago. The only goal I have set myself for the future is to keep reading at least a couple of new things a month. And I made a "to-read" list - it started with an idea I'd seen to do "22 books to read in '22" but I hit 22 and kept going - I have an whole lot of unread books on my Kindle, so I guess you'd have to say getting through some of that list is also a goal.

New-to-me reading in 2021

Winterkeep (Graceling Realms #4)
Star Wars Aftermath
Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia #1)
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
Flying Too High (Miss Fisher #2)
Silent in the Sanctuary (Lady Julia #2)
Silent on the Moors (Lady Julia #3)
Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden #1)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
Shakespeare's Landlord (Lily Bard #1)
Murder in the Heir (Violet Carlyle #1)
Kennington House Murder (Violet Carlyle #2)
Shakespeare's Champion (Lily Bard #2)
Murder at the Folly (Violet Carlyle #3)
A Merry Little Murder (Violet Carlyle #4)
Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia #4)
Murder Among the Roses (Violet Carlyle #5)
Shakespeare's Christmas (Lily Bard #3)
Murder in the Shallows (Violet Carlyle #6)
Shakespeare's Trollop (Lily Bard #4)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric & Desdemona) (I originally had this in with the novellas, but I was mistaken)
Shakespeare's Counselor (Lily Bard #5)
Gin and Murder (Violet Carlyle #7)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia #5)
Night of a Thousand Stars
Obsidian Murder (Violet Carlyle #8)
Murder at the Ladies' Club (Violet Carlyle #9)
Wedding Vows and Murder (Violet Carlyle #10)
The Magic of Found Objects
An Untimely Death (Anna Fairweather #1)
An Unfortunate Demise (Anna Fairweather #2)
What the Dead Leave Behind (A Gilded Age Mystery #1)
An Uninvited Corpse (Anna Fairweather #3)
An Unexpected Misfortune (Anna Fairweather #4)
Shadow Hunter (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #1)
Strange Practice (Dr Greta Helsing #1)
The Schoolmistress of Emerson Pass (Emerson Pass #1)
An Unhappy Murder (Anna Fairweather #5)
An Untidy End (Anna Fairweather #6)
Lock In (Lock In #1)
Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain #1)
Austenland
A Rogue By Any Other Name (Rule of Scoundrels)
Head On (Lock In #2)
When Sorrows Come (October Daye #15)
A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers #2)
Love at First
News of the World
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)
Vanished (McLand & Callahan #1)
The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple #1)
The Other Bennet Sister
If Ever I Should Love You (Spinster Heiresses #1)
A King of Infinite Space (Long Beach Homicide #1)
The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
The Pain Scale (Long Beach Homicide #2)
A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (Long Beach Homicide #3)
Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales #1)
Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide #4)
A Deal with the Elf King (Married to Magic #1)
Bridge to Terabithia
Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales #2)
Someone Perfect (Westcotts)
Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9)
A Dance with the Fae Prince (Married to Magic #2)
Sleigh Bells Ring
In a Holidaze
A Subtle Murder (Rose Beckingham #1)

novellas:

Midsummer Night (Lady Julia)
Silent Night (Lady Julia)
Twelfth Night (Lady Julia)
Bonfire Night (Lady Julia)
All Systems Red (Murderbot)
Knot of Shadows (Penric & Desdemona)
The Lord Sorcier (Regency Faerie Tales)

We went to see Licorice Pizza (me and Rob and my sister and her husband, too) and I honestly don't quite know what to make of it. It was interesting but I didn't love it. My sister thought dating a 15-year-old boy made you a pedophile, and while I don't feel like that's quite true, for a 25-year-old girl to date a 15-year-old boy is pretty damn weird. (And presumably illegal, these days. I guess it wasn't, back then?) Anyway, it's a coming-of-age movie set in the 70s, in case you don't know this part already, and it's well-made - it's Paul Thomas Anderson, of course it is - and the boy is Phillip Seymour Hoffman's son (who was apparently 17 at the time they filmed this) and the girl is Alana Haim, the musician. The rest of the Haim sisters are in it too, playing (guess!) her sisters, and her parents are played by their actual parents. I guess that makes casting easier! The first half of it just rambles and the second half has a bit more plot but it's still hard to figure out where it's meant to be going. I read that Anderson based it at least partly on some stories he'd been told by a guy who had been a child actor (as Hoffman's character is), so maybe it rambles because that's what real life does, I don't know. My brother-in-law hated it so he's going to be pissed if it wins all the Oscars, which they seem to think it might.

(Meanwhile, we're going to go see the Spiderman movie again this weekend.)

I had kind of a trying time at work this week, most everybody is off and our cranky computer system went down again, and every time that happens, our IT department and the vendor that makes the software have difficulty talking to each other - and so this week when everybody is understaffed in the first place it's even worse. I'll be surprised if it gets fixed before Monday. Plus we're on covid protocols again and that made everything a little more difficult - not with the vendor, but with everybody else! But I'm done for the week so it's all somebody else's problem.

Oh, that book I was reading (or not-reading, actually) before, called In a Holidaze, turned out to be a Groundhog Day thing, which didn't really grab me at first, either, but I kept going this time and it was actually pretty good. I won't tell you spoilers other than that, though.

We spent Christmas evening (not Christmas Eve, but the evening of Christmas Day!) trying to teach Rob how to play cards. He had a deprived childhood in some odd ways - he was the third of four boys and I get the feeling they just ran wild in a pack most of the time when they weren't in school. He says they never played cards at all. (This has showed up in other odd ways over the years, too, like before he met me he had never been on an escalator.)

So we taught him to play Spades earlier tonight. The way my sister plays Spades is somewhat more complex (more like full-on bridge) than the way I remember playing it in the 9th-grade cafeteria, but it was still the same game, really. (Card-playing was very in for adults in the 60s & into the 70s, in general, and for some reason, for a year or two when I was in the lower grades of high school - which would have been 1973-74, maybe - it trickled down to the teenagers of our little town. Then it mostly just went away, as fads do.) Anyway, it took him a while to get the hang of it, but he was doing really well by the time we gave in for the night.

(Our parents, on the other hand, taught us to play bridge, probably even before I was in 9th grade. I think it was maybe when we were still in grade school, and it was a bit over our heads, at the time. Plus our dad had a notoriously bad temper and would yell at us - my mom included - when we messed up. Spades in the cafeteria was a lot more fun. I imagine Rob and his brothers had a pretty good time running wild, too, and didn't care how much card-playing they missed.)

Added: I failed to mention above that my brother-in-law was also there - I feel like it was wrong not to even mention his existence. Besides, without him we wouldn't have had a fourth for Spades. He grew up in Mexico City and he said his mom played bridge, too, but he didn't act like he'd played cards a great deal, either. But he didn't seem quite as ignorant of what to do as Rob was. Rob didn't even seem to know, y'know, how to hold the cards, and that you really needed to sort them into suits so you don't get confused. The basics. (I guess it says something about our life that we've been married nearly 35 years and this never really came up before.)

It's still Christmas Eve my time as I'm writing this, but it'll be Christmas Day by the time I post it, no doubt, so merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it - and I guess, happy Saturday to the rest of you!

(I'm totally going to have my sense of the days of the week messed up until after 2022 starts, I can tell already. Normally I work on Fridays but I'm off, and next week I'm working different days than I normally do, so I'm just accepting in advance that I'm gonna be confused.)

So even though we're not actually religious, we still celebrate Christmas at least in sort of a half-assed way - not as much as a way of avoiding the religious bits as just to make it less stressful. So today (meaning Christmas Eve) we stayed home, but tomorrow we're going over to my sister & bro-in-law's, but we're just having subs and stuff like that. (Rob seemed slightly put-out by this, and he got us a lasagne to have today at home - but I know he doesn't really want to be the one who cooks any more than P & I do!) And we're only doing sort of token gifts tomorrow. I have a bunch of FabFitFun leftovers I'm giving my sister, because I got several of those boxes this past year, and we got chocolates for the b-i-l, something we know he likes. Rob found a Mandalorian pillow somewhere! that was one of my surprise gifts, and there was a big bag of something heavy that's meant for tomorrow, he said. (I'm guessing it's Dollar Tree finds.) I have a Black Friday find for him - an electric wine-bottle opener - and his main gift is some gigantic (and literally ridiculously heavy) comic-book anthologies that he had asked for. (My main gift was getting my hair professionally cut and colored, because I said when I stopped working full-time that I wasn't going to have it colored any more. So making it my Christmas gift absolves me of having to feel guilty about going back on that.)

Rob had never seen Mean Girls, and I thought of it because of that one scene with the Christmas pageant, and so we watched that, earlier. I think he enjoyed it pretty well. I said it's really something you need to see anyway just to understand those "fetch" jokes, etc. (Then we watched part of Willow, also - and there was a little promo with Warwick Davis up about the new Willow show which apparently is going to be out sometime next year. I knew they were doing it but I didn't know what the ETA on it was.)

Sunday we think we're going to go see Licorice Pizza, and we are agreed we both want to see Spider-man again at some point. I guess that will probably have to be next weekend, since I'm working during the week. Rob is off all next week, so he may go see Nightmare Alley one of those days when I'm working, since I can't work up too much interest in that one.

Current Mood: festive

I don't know if today (Monday) is the shortest day of the year or if it's tomorrow, but it's one or the other. I happened to look out my balcony windows, which face west, right after sunset - it was allllmost completely dark by 6:00 - there was a very faint glow left around the tree-line, but not much. So maybe tomorrow the day will be just as short, but at least after that we know they'll start getting longer again!

Added: I looked it up - the actual time of the solstice is apparently about 10 in the morning (my time, which is Central), which I think means Tuesday's sunset will be ever-so-slightly later than Monday's, right?

Let's see, as far as reading: I finished Sleigh Bells Ring, which was very low-key and nothing at all like most Hallmark movies that I've seen. Whoever wrote that blurb I read maybe thought amping up the drama would sell better? Anyway, it was pretty good. And I finished the book I've been reading off & on with the Regency Christmas novellas, which was called Under the Mistletoe. (That story I liked so much about the teacher and the viscount is "The Best Gift.") I have some more Regency short novels and maybe some more story compilations on my Kindle, too, so I may try to shoehorn some more of that stuff in while I'm still in the mood for it!

Somebody at work gave us both those holiday necklaces with the big blinking lights, and I draped them on the TV and put a picture on Instagram, if you care to look. (Mostly my Instagram is full of nail polish, but I'm trying to remember to take pictures of other things!)

Oh, I almost forgot - I meant to talk about those candles I bought from an Etsy seller, which came last week and which I really like so far. I bought the one 8-oz candle and a couple of samplers with 4 2-oz. candles in tins in each set. (You can see the bigger one and one of the tins sitting in front of my TV in that picture I linked to above.) Those two both smell really good - the small one is Wizarding Christmas (which just smells sort of generically Christmas to me, but in a good way - it says pine, fir, orange, and ginger) and the bigger one is At the Lamppost (I assume that's meant as a Narnia reference) and it smells like trees. My brain keeps insisting that it smells like snowy trees. It's blue spruce and birch, the label says. Those are trees that I associate with winter, I guess - I don't think either of those grows down here, much, so that's probably why I associate them with snow.

We went to see Spider-man:NWH and despite me saying a day or two ago that I don't identify with Peter Parker, I really liked it. I'm not going to say any more about it right now, though. (Tom Holland is pretty much grown-up now, even if Peter Parker's not, quite, so that may have helped.)

I started reading that book I was talking about before, In a Holidaze, and it turns out that it starts on December 26th - so it's really a post-Christmas book -- unless it goes on until the next Christmas, or something (which is possible, I don't know.) Anyway, I decided I would be better served to read the other contemporary holiday romance I bought (Sleigh Bells Ring, I think it was) now and save that other one til later. (And I've got more of those Regency Christmas things to get through, too.)

I finally finished another book I've been reading and that's called A Dance with the Fae Prince. I liked it. I have a definite weakness for stuff about elves and fairies. It's a sequel in an indirect way to a book called A Deal with the Elf King, which I also liked, but I felt like this second one was written with more assurance, somehow. It has a pretty twisty plot and I never quite figured out where it was going until it got there - always nice. (The heroine had a mysterious mother who died long ago, and I was sure that was going to figure into it eventually, but I never quite figured out how it was going to work out until right at the end.)

I had been working on a paper list of all my books, but then I didn't keep very good track of what I sent to Goodwill lately (because we did a big cleaning/de-hoarding project this fall). While that was going on, I also read some books that were paperbacks in bad shape and those I just tore up as I went, so I wouldn't be tempted to keep them. I have a ton of books on the Kindle and I'm trying to shift even more to that, just so I won't be destashing books I really would otherwise want to keep. I have books I've bought three or four times because I threw the previous copy out, or took it to Goodwill. I like reading on the Kindle just as well as paper, or really, even better, and they don't take up any space. (I am not giving up on the paper book-list but I think a spreadsheet is also in order, so it can be re-sorted at need!)

I have several holiday romance novels/novellas, so I'm prioritizing reading those, before Christmas passes and I decide I'm out of the mood to read them. I'm very much a mood-based reader, which is one reason I usually have several things going at once. (Me, talking to myself: "No, I'm not in the mood to read that right now, what else have we got?") I have some Regency ones, and something that was recommended called In a Holidaze - I assume it's a romance although I actually know nothing about it at all. If I looked at the info when I bought it I've already forgotten what it said.

I also bought the set of novellas that goes with that Thanksgiving one that I liked - I think the overall title is Holidays with the Wongs. There's the Thanksgiving one and and one for Christmas, Chinese New Year, and something else... Valentine's Day? New Year's Eve? Again, I read the titles but that last one didn't stick.

I also bought one more $1.99 romance from Amazon - I was about to say I don't remember the title but I just found where I wrote it down - it's Sleigh Bells Ring. It was in either an Amazon Books e-mail or a Book Riot because those are the only book e-mails I get right now. (And I buy too much stuff already so I sure don't need any more!) I remember thinking that this one sounded like a Hallmark movie - the convoluted plot, the good-looking but annoying boss/new neighbor/whatever, etc.

I enjoy Hallmark movies occasionally. Lest you think I'm a sad, unromantic, Christmas-hating old lady, I will tell you that I was pretty much in tears due to a story I read yesterday involving a lonely teacher, an orphan, and a viscount, all discovering the magic of Christmas together. (Do Americans other than Regency/Bridgerton fans even know what a viscount is? much less how to pronounce it - I only know that last part from some BBC Jane Austen adaptations, I think!) Anyway, my problem with Hallmark (and y'know, all those other channels that do the same thing) is that the plots rarely make any sense whatsoever. I'm not incredibly picky about this, even, but just a little logic goes a long way with me. I suspect the main problem is that they churn these things out so fast that they don't have time to worry over little stuff like the script. So I have to space my Hallmark (/Lifetime/etc.) movie-watching out so I don't start tearing my hair out.

I'll just go back to my reading instead.

I'm not really managing the daily thing here, but at least I'm posting, right?

(possible spoilers below, although I'm trying to be relatively careful)

Let's see, well, since I stay up really really late, I got to watch Hawkeye twice before I went to bed. I really liked the conversation between Kate & Yelena, that was funny. (That's not really a spoiler, as I see it, since if you're watching you already know Yelena's there from last week. And it was pretty much common knowledge that she was going to appear at some point, if you've been paying attention to Marvel fandom generally.)

I did kind of emit a little squeak, at least, about that picture at the end.

I've liked all the Marvel series this year, but I like Hawkeye enough that I'm thinking about whether I like it better than WandaVision. Maybe not, I liked WandaVision a lot, but I like Hawkeye a lot, too. Loki still reigns supreme, though. - And I guess Falcon & the Winter Soldier is at the bottom, although I liked it quite a bit, too. (I actually watched most of it a few days ago, as a matter of fact. I can't remember exactly what prompted me to do that.) What If...? kind of seems like a different class of thing because it's episodic (well, mostly) and animated. I can't think where I'd put it with the live-action ones, But I liked it a lot too.

Spider-man has never been my favorite Marvel thing, but we still have tickets to see No Way Home this weekend. (I don't dislike Spider-man, I just don't identify with him that much. Except Miles Morales, he's the exception there. In fact I think I've watched Into the Spider-verse like three times lately.) Even if I hated Spider-man, I'd probably still go see NWH because it's Marvel, and we know there's all kind of crossovers. You miss too much if you miss anything Avengers-related.

About Anne Rice: When we got married and merged our book collections, we each had matching paperback editions of Interview with the Vampire - the one pictured here. That kind of thing is when you know you've found your soul-mate. (Also? we gave one of them away, which I've always kind of regretted.) I actually never read anything else of hers, except some of the erotica, but Interview with the Vampire was world-changing, in its way. I even loved the movie, in its own separate (ultra-kitschy) way. Plus, y'know, young Brad Pitt. But that was later.

The only other overlap I remember from our book collections is that we both had incomplete collections of those Star Trek books that were "novelizations" of the various episodes of the original series. I think between us we have an almost-complete set of those (we were both missing the first one). We still have those although I doubt that either one of us has looked at them in years.

35 years later (we've been married for 35 years next spring, how is that possible) we're still soulmates about pretty much all this pop-culture stuff, with some notable exceptions (I don't share his love for horror movies being the most obvious one, but there are others - it works both ways). Even then I listen to him about horror movies and he listens to me babble on about various things he's not really into, as well.

We both love all the Marvel series that have been on Disney+ this year. (This time last year I was babbling on about the Mandalorian, and so far I haven't babbled about Hawkeye, etc., here, but that's probably coming. Be warned.)

We went to see Encanto last night, the Pixar movie. It was very cute, we both liked it.

Rob would have gone to see West Side Story if I had wanted to, but I never have cared much for the old movie, and so I was just not enthusiastic about a new one. I like some of the music, but I don't know why, it's just never been a favorite. (I think I thought the whole Jets vs Sharks things was stupid, for one thing.)

I never have been a huge fan of Romeo & Juliet either, and that's basically the plot of WSS, so maybe it has something to do with that. Also the play was written before I was born and I think the movie came out in 1961, right? which is a year after I was born, so by the time I got old enough to pay attention it was old news and it was kind of one of those things parents talked about and kids were bored by.

(I looked and the new movie only made $10M, which is a huge flop by Spielberg standards. But it'll hang around til after Christmas and I bet it'll do better in the end. We might even get around to going eventually, who knows.)

We were supposed to go eat Chinese with my sister and my brother-in-law Saturday night, but she had her Covid booster Friday and she wasn't feeling well. It seems like everybody has one Covid shot that's like that, to some degree. So Rob & I went and had Tex-Mex instead, and I'm sure we'll all go get Chinese next week. (It's kind of weird getting used to the idea that they live here now and going out to eat with them is presumably not going to be a once-or-twice-a-year thing any more.)

So now here's my updated 2021 movie list, newest to oldest:
Encanto
My Neighbor Totoro (Ghiblifest)
Ghostbusters Afterlife
Eternals
Dune (twice)
Spirited Away (Ghiblifest)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (twice)
The Suicide Squad
The Green Knight
Black Widow
Army of the Dead
The Courier
Raya and the Last Dragon
Nomadland
Judas and the Black Messiah
Promising Young Woman
News of the World

...and Rob saw all of those plus these:
Antlers
Halloween Kills (twice)
Lamb
Malignant (twice)
Candyman
The Night House
Don't Breathe 2
Old
Escape Room 2
The Forever Purge
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
A Quiet Place 2
Spiral
Separation
In the Earth
The Unholy
Nobody
The Father

(I only started keeping track of Rob's movies a few years ago, but his list always entertains me, somehow.)

I'm past the 80% mark on Leviathan Falls, but I had to stop to look up a poem. I knew most of it, but I couldn't have told you who wrote it or whether it was a poem in itself or if it was part of something bigger.

I'm sure a lot of you will know this one, too. The quote in the book is "My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night." (There are characters trading information between brains, that's about as much as I can say about the context without getting all spoilery. Really, there is no particular context.)

Anyway, my brain came up with this: "My candle burns at both its ends/It will not last the night/But oh my [something] and oh my [something]/It gives a lovely light."

For those of you who don't know the answer to this already, it's Edna St. Vincent Millay, "First Fig" (1920), and this is the entire poem:

"My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light."

(OK, back to my book, now that my curiosity is satisfied.)

Added, an hour or two later: I finished the book. I liked it. I'll have to see if I have more to say about it after I've digested it a bit!

We went over to see my sister's new house last weekend. They were still unpacking, of course - they only moved in two days before Thanksgiving - but they've made good progress. The house is far smaller than the one they moved out of, but it's plenty big for the two of them. This is the house that I was talking about before, that they built new, right? It's not anything fancy from the outside at all. P said they could have upgraded the outside, but they decided they'd rather spend that money on the inside instead.

Their house in San Antonio went on the market, like, yesterday, and she said they already had an offer on it that was above the asking price. And the realtors showed it back-to-back all day. So that stuff we keep hearing about the real estate market seems to be pretty much correct. (Plus it's a really nice house. If I wanted to live in San Antonio and I had the money to buy a house like that, I'd want it.)

Also, P had asked me a month or more ago about doctors and healthcare in general, and I said, well, if your insurance will allow it, in this area you really can't do better than the healthcare system that my husband and I both work for, because they have branches all over the damn place around here, including the little town they just moved to. And today she went to one of them for the first time - it was the OB/Gyn, to be exact, and she really liked her. Which is really good, because I think I have an appointment with that same doctor next month, as it turns out. (My old OB doctor left since my last appointment!)

See part 1. I'm skipping around a bit.

(Note, again, that I made the font color gray because my Dreamwidth journal has a dark background and it was the only way I could get it to cooperate. If you have trouble reading, try highlighting the text.)

12. Would you ever go out in public wearing pajamas?

If I wore them, maybe, but I don’t.

13. Have you ever had a lemonade stand?.

Not on my own account - I’m really lacking in entrepreneurial spirit, generally. I think my sister may have had one and I helped out a bit.

14. Do you think you look older or younger than your real age?

Since I started going gray, I think I look my age. I used to get people telling me I looked much younger than my age, but this is another one of those things where I don’t think most people are really good judges, either. This may be because people in sort of the 30-50 year old range (i.e., not real young but not yet visibly aging much) are harder to sort out.

15. Where have you lived throughout your life?

I’ve only ever lived in Texas, mostly in the south & southeast Houston suburbs (and in Galveston, which is the same general area, just a little further out). When I was small we lived in West Texas for a couple of years. I was big enough to remember that - I remember prairie dogs, and the cotton field that was behind our house, among other things. And then a decade or so later, I went to UT, and hung around for a few years afterward - so I was in Austin from the late 70s to the mid-80s.Those are the only two times in my life when I've lived away from this general area I'm in now.

16. Do you want any piercings?

I have pierced ears and that’s plenty.

17. What’s your mouse pad look like?

It’s this one, which I bought a few months ago. Disclaimer: the designer, “Ellie Monroe,” is actually my sister (that's not her real name, of course). But I really like this mouse-pad - I like the design, plus it’s really well-made - and I paid for it myself. I didn’t even tell her I bought it until a good while later. (Really, I feel like mouse-pads should be unnecessary, but the surface of my desk doesn’t seem to lend itself to doing without!)

22. Do you still use a radio or just use your phone/computer for music?

My car radio went out in, like, 2014, and I never bothered to get it fixed. I just use the phone. I listen to podcasts more than I actually listen to music, these days.

23. What kind of socks do you prefer to wear?

None. I hate wearing socks. Luckily I live where it’s not often really necessary.

24. Do you have any family heirlooms?

I have quite a bit of my mother’s stuff, and her parents' and some of my grandmother’s on the other side too. I don’t know that there’s anything really tremendously valuable but I have a lot of their stuff, for sure. I’m not sure that the things that they would have said are heirlooms are the ones I value most. I am very partial to my (maternal) grandma’s very brightly-colored flowered china that my uncle brought back from Vietnam for her. Our dining room furniture came from the other grandma. And then I have a large number of my mother’s quilts, and I watched her make most of them, so I know exactly how much work went into them. And boy, family pictures out the wazoo. I have to force myself to part with that stuff gradually.

I've been making lists of the movies we've seen for years now, but I never tried to do books - at least, I haven't kept a list since I was in college, anyway, and that was long, long ago. From then until sometime last year, I hadn't been keeping lists of my reading at all, but then I started a reading journal. Part of that was keeping a list of what I was reading, what I finished and didn't, and out of that, what I read that is new to me, because I re-read a lot. I read so much that I really don't worry too much about numbers of books read, in general, but since I re-read so much, I decided that my goal should be to read at least two new books (new-to-me, I mean, not necessarily newly published) each month.

The full "new-to-me" list is below. It's pretty long - much more than two a month - but I got to reading a bunch of series mysteries, and some of those were very short, practically novellas. (There is a list of things that were officially called novellas, too, down at the very bottom.)

I didn't type out all the re-reading I did but here are some highlights:

Lord of the Rings - and I took a crap-ton of notes, too, which is why it took me like two months
the whole Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series
Bruce Catton's two books about Grant (Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command)
the whole October Daye series
a lot of Bujold - but only one Miles book (it was Captain Vorpatril's Alliance); other than that mostly the Five Gods stuff incl. Penric & Desdemona
The Magicians trilogy
the first trilogy of the Foreigner series
Expanse 1-7 (I'm working on 8 now)
the whole Graceling Realms series (including several re-reads of Winterkeep)
a bunch of romance novels

You have to remember - or actually, you may not know, because I don't guess I've mentioned it here! that I had knee surgery over the summer and I had three weeks at home where I had nothing much to do but read and limp around the apartment. My handwritten list of what I was reading in July and August - squeezed into the front of my reading planner - is so small it's barely legible.

Re fiction vs nonfiction: well, as I mentioned before, I've been working my way through the giant Shelby Foote trilogy, but I'm only about halfway through that and I imagine that will go on into 2022. Apparently I didn't read any long-form nonfiction at all this year that wasn't about the Civil War - or at least, if there was anything else, I didn't finish it!

New-to-me reading in 2021
(The boldface books are things that were previously on my to-read list.)

Winterkeep (Graceling Realms #4)
Star Wars Aftermath
Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia #1)
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
Flying Too High (Miss Flisher #2)
Silent in the Sanctuary (Lady Julia #2)
Silent on the Moors (Lady Julia #3)
Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden #1)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
Shakespeare's Landlord (Lily Bard #1)
Murder in the Heir (Violet Carlyle #1)
Kennington House Murder (Violet Carlyle #2)
Shakespeare's Champion (Lily Bard #2)
Murder at the Folly (Violet Carlyle #3)
A Merry Little Murder (Violet Carlyle #4)
Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia #4)
Murder Among the Roses (Violet Carlyle #5)
Shakespeare's Christmas (Lily Bard #3)
Murder in the Shallows (Violet Carlyle #6)
Shakespeare's Trollop (Lily Bard #4)
Shakespeare's Counselor (Lily Bard #5)
Gin and Murder (Violet Carlyle #7)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia #5)
Night of a Thousand Stars
Obsidian Murder (Violet Carlyle #8)
Murder at the Ladies' Club (Violet Carlyle #9)
Wedding Vows and Murder (Violet Carlyle #10)
The Magic of Found Objects
An Untimely Death (Anna Fairweather #1)
An Unfortunate Demise (Anna Fairweather #2)
What the Dead Leave Behind (A Gilded Age Mystery #1)
An Uninvited Corpse (Anna Fairweather #3)
An Unexpected Misfortune (Anna Fairweather #4)
Shadow Hunter (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #1)
Strange Practice (Dr Greta Helsing #1)
The Schoolmistress of Emerson Pass (Emerson Pass #1)
An Unhappy Murder (Anna Fairweather #5)
An Untidy End (Anna Fairweather #6)
Lock In (Lock In #1)
Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain #1)
Austenland
A Rogue By Any Other Name (Rule of Scoundrels)
Head On (Lock In #2)
When Sorrows Come (October Daye #15)
A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers #2)
Love at First
News of the World
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)
Vanished (McLand & Callahan #1)
The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple #1)
The Other Bennet Sister
If Ever I Should Love You (Spinster Heiresses #1)
A King of Infinite Space (Long Beach Homicide #1)
The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
The Pain Scale (Long Beach Homicide #2)
A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (Long Beach Homicide #3)
Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales #1)
Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide #4)
A Deal with the Elf King (Married to Magic #1)
Bridge to Terabithia
Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales #2)
Someone Perfect (Westcotts)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric & Desdemona) (I originally had this in with the novellas, but apparently it's too long for that and is actually a novel!)

novellas:

Midsummer Night (Lady Julia)
Silent Night (Lady Julia)
Twelfth Night (Lady Julia)
Bonfire Night (Lady Julia)
All Systems Red (Murderbot)
Knot of Shadows (Penric & Desdemona)
The Lord Sorcier (Regency Faerie Tales)

The last Expanse book* came out last week, and I had pre-ordered it so I already have it, but I haven't started it yet. I decided I need to read the two books before it first.

(*so the authors say, apparently they have a contract to do some new series after this!)

For those of you who don't read these, this new book is the ninth book in the series, and they fall loosely into three trilogies. (Or, I don't know, book 4 always feels sort of like a semi-standalone to me, but 1-3 definitely more or less go together and so do 5 and 6.) I re-read the earlier ones this year already (1-6, that is) but I decided to stop there and wait until closer to time for the new one. I got through #7 a few days ago - that one's called Persepolis Rising - and I'm still in the early part of book 8 - Tiamat's Wrath. I don't really know why I feel like I must read the new one the minute it comes out, anyway, but I keep feeling like I'm "late" - it's silly, really. Besides, I actually had pre-orders for two books that came out that same day, it turned out, and I did read the other one practically on the spot, because it was a romance novel and I knew it'd go fast. (Mary Balogh, Someone Perfect, if you want to know!)

At work the other day, I read a chapter or two of a book I found on Kindle Unlimited - something called The Dublin Trilogy and the first book was The Man With One of Those Faces (I may be capitalizing that all wrong, sorry). I think that's a hilarious title, and the book is pretty funny. We'll see if I manage to finish it. Actually I have a rule - which I was obviously breaking - that I'm only allowed to re-read things I've already read at work, and not read anything new, on the theory that I'm less likely to get heavily involved with something I've read before. My work involves a lot of interruptions, but we're allowed to do other stuff when it's slow. I've been re-reading Shelby Foote - The Civil War: a narrative, which is three big volumes. That seemed to be something I was less likely to get too involved with - I know how it ends, after all. I have actually gotten through the first volume and on to the second one, although actually the second one might be more dangerous at that because I'm to the point in 1863 where the big stuff is coming up - ~~The Wilderness~~Chancellorsville** and Vicksburg and Gettysburg.

I've also been reading more hard sci-fi, which is the Foreigner series by Cherryh. I have read a bunch of those before, but it had been at least a couple of years. I'm probably only reading 1-6. This one also falls into loose trilogies, as far as I've read, but I got bored with it after the third or fourth trilogy where it quit being hard sci-fi at all, really, and became stuff about atevi politics. I think I looked on Amazon and there's something like 17 books now, and I think I just can't, unless somebody who's read them wants to make a case that they get better again at some point!

(I really bounce around between multiple genres - I like hard sci-fi and I like fairy tales and I like at least some romance - particularly Regency romances, if they're well-written. I went on a big kick of reading mysteries earlier this year and I've even read some contemporary romance, which I normally rarely do. I've read some police procedurals lately as well.)

**I just caught myself on this mistake several days late. The Wilderness and Chancellorsville were two Civil War battles that happened about a year apart, in Virginia in 1863 and 1864. I should have thought to check, really - they were fought on basically the same ground, or at least overlapping ground. The one in 1863 is called Chancellorsville (which is a town) and the one in 1864 is called The Wilderness, which was literally a wild area near Chancellorsville. (The South won the battle both times, but Hooker was in charge in 1863, and the army retreated afterwards. By 1864 Grant was in charge, and he did not retreat afterwards, but kept his troops moving forward.)

Miriam (

fauxklore on Dreamwidth) posted a set of prompts - what I usually call a quiz - and I always used to like doing these back in the Livejournal days so I thought I would tackle them. There were more than this, but this is as far as I've gotten. If I get further later there will be more!

(Note that I made the font color gray because my Dreamwidth journal has a black background. If you can't read it, try changing the font color.)

1. Have you ever been caught outdoors away from shelter during a thunderstorm?

Hmm. I want to say yes, but I don’t remember ever being seriously afraid of being struck by lightning, if that’s what this is meant to be asking about. Just getting wet was common enough that I took it for granted.

2. Did you ever build furniture forts as a child?

I remember using the dining room table as some kind of fort, but moving furniture around to make a fort? Not that I recall. I don’t think my mom would have let us. (We were two girls. We didn’t have boys around the house to come up with really serious troublemaking.)

3. Do you use any medicines daily?

Of course. I’m 61 and I am a cancer survivor, among other issues. I have one of those AM/PM pill things and I use it.

4. When was the last time you used a disposable camera?

Long ago. I think maybe the last time was at somebody’s wedding, long enough ago that their children are now teenagers.

5. When was the last time you flew on a plane?

I’m honestly not sure, but it was some years ago, 2014, maybe? I just decided at some point around then that I wasn’t going to fly any more. I’m claustrophobic and flying just has gotten too triggery for me. Back in the old days when It wasn’t a cattle car I could deal with it, but not any more. My husband flies to Ohio once a year or so and I just make the reservations for him and wave goodbye.

6. How many first cousins do you have?

I’m counting my parents' siblings and their children - my dad grew up in a fairly big family, that's the issue - and I come up with six first cousins (3 of whom were adopted, not that that makes any real difference. Family is family).

7. What’s the longest period of time you’ve gone without sleep?

I’m not sure. More than 24 hours, for sure. But at some point I just pass out, even though I’m a bad sleeper in general.

8. Did the house you grew up in have a big yard?

Well, we moved around a good bit when I was a kid, but the house we lived in longest was a suburban corner lot that’s far bigger than most houses have nowadays. My sister's new house has a tiny back yard, and the front yard isn't much bigger.

9. What has been the most difficult class you’ve ever taken?

I had issues with math as a teenager, algebra in particular. I think it was mostly that I didn’t have the patience to sit and work it all out. I think now that I had undiagnosed ADD, because I never had a lot of trouble with anything I was interested in. (I also think nobody ever bothered to explain what algebra was actually good for.)

10. What’s something that’s much more difficult than a lot of people realize?

I can’t think of anything in particular, although I don’t think most people are very good judges of things like that. I think they tend to overestimate or underestimate. (“Well, I did it so you should be able to, too!”)

I'm writing this at work. It's slow. There are people here but nothing's going on that requires my attention, at least for the moment. We close at 9 on Fridays so it'll be time to start closing up before I know it.

Writing is a less expensive way to pass the time than what I was doing before, which was browsing Etsy. I bought a beaded bracelet and $40 worth of candles before I knew it. Oh well, I missed the Bath & Body Works sale that they always have in early December (it was today, but everything online was sold out before I thought to check), and I'm sure I would have spent at least as much there if I had had the chance. And hey, on Etsy you're (presumably) buying from a small seller, so that's good. (For the record, I bought the candles from From the Page, which as you might guess is book-themed.)

I was late to work because the traffic stopped dead about half a mile from my house and stayed that way for darn near 15 minutes. By the time it finally got moving whatever the problem was had been solved, apparently - that is to say there was no wreck to be gawked at or anything. But that kind of thing is pretty unusual in my little suburb. Getting to work involves getting on the freeway, for me, but by the time I finally got to the freeway the traffic there was problem-free.

My sister is sending me text updates on the progress of the unpacking. She says she's totally exhausted at the end of the day each day but she's also enjoying the process. I guess we're going to try to go check in person this weekend at some point.

Hmm, I don't know if I got around to talking about this at all last year... Well, ok, I scrolled back and I did mention in August last year that my sister (I usually just call her P) and her husband had bought a house in our hometown. But I guess that was all I said here about it, except for another passing mention on Christmas Eve. What happened was that they were building this house, and everything was going along fine, and all the sudden the builder called them and asked for a meeting, I guess, and what they said was that the powers that be - whoever that might be in this case - had decided the house was in the flood plain. (I have never owned a home, so I know next to nothing about this stuff, except I know if affects your insurance.) I guess that meant it was much more possible that it would flood than they had anticipated, does that sound right? Well, so the builder was of course extremely apologetic, and I guess they were given various options, one of which was the option to just walk away and get their money back, and that's exactly what they did. My very uninformed decision was that that sounded like the right thing to do, given that we're close to the coast here and flooding is always an issue around here.

Naturally they were very upset and so they went back home to San Antonio and thought things over for a while. And honestly, I don't even remember how long the question of whether they were going to try again sat there undecided - I was deliberately trying not to push myself into the issue! - but finally P called me and said, well, we came back down, and we ended up buying another house. - This was just the same deal as the first one, a house that hadn't yet been built, but in a different subdivision and with a different builder. (The first builder was a very respected, well-known one, as I understand it, which is partly why it was so surprising to me when things went so spectacularly wrong. The second one was a somewhat smaller, more local company.)

Anyway, it took a while but the second house finally got all built and closed on and all that just a couple of weeks ago, and they are here, not much more than 10 miles from where I live. They are still getting unpacked and stuff so I'm giving them space - actually I think E, her husband, has gone back to sell the old house. They were very lucky to be able to keep his house in SA (which he had before they got married) while all this got ironed out, and it's a nice house and they should get a nice price for it, under the circumstances. (Everybody keeps saying real estate is a seller's market right now.)

I haven't even seen this house yet, except she sent me a picture of the front of it, which is not especially impressive. But I know P wouldn't have had anything to do with it if it didn't look much better on the inside. (She loves interior design and that kind of stuff. She is in her element.)

We had dinner with them on Thanksgiving, at a restaurant - it almost got called off because P texted me and said, "We can't even find our clothes!" but they eventually found at least some of them and we had a lovely dinner. (If you follow me on Twitter, this was where I was talking about having turkey in an Italian restaurant. But it turned out fine.)

I am not sure what it's going to be like having her nearby. I tried to figure it out and I think the closest we lived to each other since we left home was something like fifty miles or more - us in Galveston, them (her previous husband, it was then) way the hell out on the other side of Houston. I think the last time I lived at our childhood home was 1980, and that was just for the summer, and she would have been about to leave for college herself. Well, anyway, it's going to be interesting!! I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes. We are practically all the family each other has, now, except for her grown son - my nephew - who lives out of state and doesn't visit and rarely even calls - and some cousins.

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Entries tagged with holidailies

Happy Holidailies

2021 movies, plus one for '22

Happy reading!

Post-Christmas crankiness

Christmas cards

Christmas (Eve) gifts

Solstice, etc.

In a Holidaze

Holiday romance

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Weekend update

A half-remembered poem

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A quiz! part 2

2021 reading

Reading material

a quiz, part 1

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