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Today we tried again to get vaccinations, but when we got there, at least 8 people were ahead of us, and the estimated wait was half an hour. When we came home, I scheduled us for next Wednesday; presumably people with appointments are seen on a more timely basis than the walk-ins. I guess the reason it was so easy for me last year was that I waited until late December for my flu shot and January for my Covid shot.

It was definitely good that we went today, though, because on our walk to the store we chatted a bit with my next-door neighbor, who was up on his roof tidying it up before the rains start. I’d heard him talking right outside my bedroom window yesterday or the day before (our houses are maybe ten feet apart), so I asked about it, and it turns out they have to repair the foundation of their house, which will require bringing in some machinery and probably will be noisy. Having learned about this, I was able to ask that they not do it on a few important-to-me upcoming days, days when I would be less than happy about getting only 3-4 hours of sleep (my birthday and the next symphony concert). He was entirely accommodating about that, and I’m going to go out there some day soon to make sure there aren’t any blackberry vines in the way of the workers’ passage. He thinks it won’t last very many days, but I certainly look forward to learning more about the plans. (Too bad I’m so bad at sleeping in J’s house.)

Although I’m quite interested to learn the results, I wasn’t looking forward to the blood testing experience since I used to faint (or nearly so) when I was younger. J had a break between meetings and drove me to the clinic, and it was all quite straightforward. They let me lean back in a (rather awkward) chair, and I had no light-headedness at all.

Beyond that, I got some work done, went for a walk at sunset and took photos, and watched the first episode in a new PBS series about especially talented performers. This first episode was on Itzhak Perlman, and (health permitting) he’ll be here in Eugene in just over three months!

Midnight Bargain, by C.L. Polk. This was my third time reading this tremendously fun Regency-type fantasy novel. Beatrice is on the marriage market, and her family desperately needs her to find a wealthy husband. And a gorgeous, wealthy, and above all, sympathetic and understanding man falls in love with her, almost instantly. The only problem – Beatrice doesn’t want to get married. She wants to be a wizard, and that means teaming up with a sorcerous spirit who can work magic for her in exchange for getting to experience all of life’s physical pleasures, like ballroom dancing, running barefoot through the sand, a kiss from a lover. The problem is that unborn babies are especially desirable targets for these spirits, and that can be disastrous. Her society’s answer is to put a collar on married women of childbearing years to make them invulnerable to magic (and meanwhile dampening their own sensuality and emotions). Beatrice, the man she loves, and his independent-minded sister have to solve this problem before she’s forced to marry someone else. It is such a pleasure to spend time in this fantasy-Regency world – I wish Polk would write a sequel.

I like when it’s the time of year that I just want to keep my legs under the covers when I wake up for the day, and that in the evening I can wrap a nice fuzzy blanket around myself without overheating. It’s also extra-pretty outside, with the fall color and often nice sunsets, and the grass is all green again from the first rains.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I read this for a book club. I’d read lots of Bradbury as a child (my mom was a fan), and this book was more literary than I remembered the others being (but I could have been too young to notice back then), but the book is also blessedly short (I am not a big fan of dystopias). Our main character is a fireman in a future world where buildings don’t normally catch on fire – their job isn’t to put out fires, but to cause them, specifically to burn down places where people have been reading or storing books. He’s been giving it some thought, though, and thinks that maybe that’s not right. The rest of the book tells us what he does and what results.

There was one particularly violent scene where our protagonist is doing violent things but there’s a sentence in passive voice, and it struck me that he wasn’t really taking ownership of his actions. It reminded me of The Stranger by Camus, when I read it in high school – these things just seemed to happen, with no particular thought, and he’s not taking responsibility. In this book, the character even decides/realizes eventually that a person he’s killed had wanted him to do it. Are we supposed to see this as part of their world’s legacy in taking away the books? I wasn’t convinced, but maybe that was the intention? Something to discuss when book club meets!

This afternoon I went to the library, and the other Safeway, then J and I tried to get flu shots at our own Safeway, but they don’t do walk-ins on the weekend. Lovely weather, lovely fall colors.

Our football game didn’t start until 8 pm, and a large number of Nebraska fans came all the way here, perhaps because our #2 quarterback had played for Nebraska before transferring to Oregon. (The #1 quarterback is still recovering from his head injury but was on the sidelines looking good.) As it happened, the coach had the #3 quarterback start today; he’s local. Almost nothing besides errors happened in the first half, for either team, and I made good progress on my newspaper backlog. In the third quarter I read a while with the TV in the background. In the fourth quarter, though, they brought in the #2 quarterback, and it was as if the team woke up – and they managed to win the game with just a few seconds to spare.

This week’s Friday movie had a “haunted” theme, and I was still tired from yesterday and not ambitious about subjecting myself to movie-stress, so voting was complicated. I definitely didn’t want to watch Scream 2, and although I’m sure I should see The Sixth Sense, I didn’t know if I had the stamina for it. My preference was Casper, but very few people were voting for it. However! There’s a rule that if there’s a tie for first among the three movies, then the third-place movie wins. At first, I thought, if people really want to watch Scream 2, then I should just find a different way to entertain myself. But then people kept mentioning that they were voting for The Sixth Sense just to keep Scream 2 from winning, whereas they actually wanted Casper. So I watched closely, and as it got to the deadline, Scream 2 and The Sixth Sense each had 8 votes, and Casper had 2 votes… so Casper won! And I didn’t even have to cast my vote to create the tie.

Anyway, it turned out that Casper was fine, if you didn’t think about it very much. The house had cool architecture, and there was a pretty piano theme. After the movie, I read for a while, then I watched J start playing the new Castlevania game, Belmont’s Curse.

Finally! I have a primary care provider again. The doctor I’d had for 20+ years had to retire prematurely after a family health care tragedy, back in 2014. Eventually I found a convenient and nice nurse practitioner, but when I tried to make an appointment to see her a second time it turned out she’d gone to work for the school district, and her practice no longer did primary care. Then the next time I tried to find a PCP it was the pandemic, and none could be found. So finally I found this one.

Unfortunately, his appointment times for new patients are earlier in the day than I’m quite comfortable with. If I’d slept properly I could have driven myself, but my sleep was quite messed up last night (as happens lately whenever the time I wake up actually matters – otherwise I fall asleep within five minutes and sleep great). J’s dentist appointment got moved to earlier in the day, and he was able to drive me to my appointment.

I get to have bloodwork! I’ve always wanted to have bloodwork.

Afterwards I napped for three hours but still wasn’t sufficiently caught up on sleep for the symphony, which I’d quite been looking forward to. Well, yes and no – I wanted to hear the Stravinsky “Firebird” suite in the first half but was indifferent to the Dvorak New World symphony as I’ve heard it so much. J offered to drop me off at the concert hall on his way to sword class, but I didn’t know whether I had the stamina for the whole concert, so I stayed home and listened to “The Firebird” on YouTube instead. After dinner I decided to go buy some bread at Market of Choice… and it was playing on the radio, too! Not even inspired by our local symphony programming, as it was the L.A. Phil looking for something to put with “The Rite of Spring,” which I’m listening to now.

Empress of Dust, by Alex Kingsley. Bastion Cycle #1. At this year’s Worldcon, the author was one of the most interesting speakers in one of the most interesting panels, so I looked them up and ordered this book. Very entertaining! Hundreds of years in the future, after North America has been reshaped by massive earthquakes, there is one city that is working to reclaim humanity’s place on the planet, and the rest of the land is desert roamed by giant crabs and various bizarre arthropod/lizard creatures.

In the city, marginalized young adults are turned out into the desert in teams of four “scavengers,” whose job is to locate ancient buildings and bring back potentially useful bits of technology. Harvard is a member of one such scavenger team, the “Ivies,” but he’s rather delicate and shy and far too curious about the strange creatures of the desert. The story is very well paced and often surprising. We also get the backstories for three of the team members, which gives the book more depth. The fourth member, who is a relatively macho male, is also treated with sympathy rather than dismissed as problematic. I greatly enjoyed the book, and I’m looking forward to reading more – I have the second in hand already.

Minor comments: (1) I could see that there’s a real advantage when writing about a small group if there’s a nonbinary character, as there’s much less pronoun confusion when one person is “she,” one is “he,” and one is “they.” (2) Although the book is not self-published, it could have used a bit more copyediting. It is much better in that regard than self-published books tend to be, though, and I did smile every time I read that someone was going to sleep on a “palette.”

Finally, today, I got to do lots of things! I’d had a cold that lasted more than two weeks, plus minor food poisoning, and then when I was presumably all well again the heating part of my heat pump came on during the night for two nights, and all the dust it stirred up gave me quite a headache. But! Last night I turned the heat pump setting as low as I could, and today, no headache!

I went to two libraries, a bookstore, a hardware store, and a supermarket. I acquired six library books, two classical CDs from a dollar bin, a pretty card for my sister’s birthday (photo of hollyhocks), a glass storage bowl suitable for use in the freezer, a “telescopic cobweb duster,” and some salmon. When I got home I ate the salmon and did a good job in my annual cleaning of the cobwebs that collect in the eaves around my front porch – it was so easy that I’ll probably do it a lot more often. We also signed the card, and I mailed it to my sister. Later, J – who could have had jury duty today but did not, hooray – and I went to Safeway and had to spend $200 to get the optimal discount. It was a lot of work. But then we were done and could relax.

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton. I read this before, in 2020 and in 2023, and I’m sure I’ll read it many more times – it’s a classic, and absolutely delightful. It’s a story of several families in a Trollope-style society, with problems of courtship, inheritance, social justice, and personal achievement, and all of the characters are dragons. They fly around like dragons (except for the clerics and servants, whose wings are bound), they eat flesh like dragons (especially one’s deceased parents)… they are definitely, physiologically dragons, but the women love to wear cute little hats, and everyone is concerned about their social standing.

Let’s see if I can find my favorite line from this time… okay, Avan is visiting the courthouse for the first time, which has “a huge, cavernous entrance, carved all around with hearts, flowers, and other abstract expressions of justice.” Avan is mildly terrified, knowing that even though his legal case is well founded, the judges could choose to eat anyone they please. Then as they’re going further into the building, “They were facing a flight of granite steps topped by three huge steps, with another threatening carving of hearts surrounded by flowers and coils of fleece set over it.” Ha ha! Their symbolism is rather different from ours.

My only quibble with the book is that one of the main characters is named “Sher,” and most of the time I read a sentence starting with his name, I read it as “She” and have to reread it more carefully. Of course this doesn’t affect the audiobook audience at all.

I had higher hopes for today than what I managed to get done – trimming a rose bush that’s crowding J’s walkway, walking after dark to the track beside the neighborhood school and back. Unfortunately, I woke up with a very impressive sinus headache. Apparently my new heat pump’s transition to “heating” isn’t going as nicely as last year. I’ve changed the filter now, and I hope that will take care of it – otherwise I’ll have to turn it off at night and hope my blankets will suffice. Meanwhile, my bedroom is currently at 74˚F, which is at least a bit cooler than it was in the afternoon.

J is on the plane back from Los Angeles now. He hadn’t found any cousins to spend the day with, so he walked from the convention center area through a very concrete-looking neighborhood, then through the USC campus, and finally to the museum area. He couldn’t get tickets to the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, nor a reservation for its rooftop Skywalker Grill, and there were about 100 people ahead of him in line for the non-reservation bar seating, so he ate a snack in the regular café, then spent the afternoon in the Museum of Natural History.

This evening I finally did something I’d intended to do last year but never got around to – I managed to get myself to watch one of the Worldcon panels I’d missed. I hadn’t gotten to see Robert Jackson Bennett at all, so I really wanted to see this one, which also had Martha Wells – and Brenda Clough, who gave Martha a sock toy of Murderbot! It turns out Brenda C. lives in Portland, and her last name is pronounced “cluff.” The other two, whom I hadn’t heard of before, were Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett and Inez Ray. The topic was, “Reading Is Political,” and the authors, who are all reasonably similar to me in terms of political leanings, had lots to say. They generally agreed that none of us today is likely to become Harriet Beecher Stowe and change the world dramatically with our writing, but it’s good for us to write for our own sakes, and (in their cases, not mine) to create art, because even though political change takes thousands of people, we can each do our parts. At least twice Martha strongly recommended Malka Older, whom I know as the author of what I considered a fairly flawed work of fiction, that mystery set in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Maybe I should look at her earlier works?

I felt reasonably okay today! A bit tired, a bit stuffy – but well enough to walk to the school and back, and no need for napping. I watched the second half of the football game and got through another month of newspapers. I also watched an episode of Cinema Nomad (Ghana) and rewatched an old favorite episode of Boruto: “Love and Potato Chips.” Mostly I did cozy things.

J’s Magic tournament didn’t go well for him or DG, but they’re playing in one tomorrow that they probably care about more. They visited the La Brea tar pits, and they ate in two restaurants, including a fancy vegan one in Hollywood.

This week’s Friday “movie” was a real treat, although it wasn’t actually a movie. Rather, it was the ten 11-minute episodes that comprise Over the Garden Wall, an animated story about two brothers wandering in a forest, encountering strange and sometimes creepy people and animals, as they try to make their way home. Its creator had helped with Adventure Time, and the animation has some similarities, although the look of Over the Garden Wall is more sophisticated and often beautiful. The younger brother, Greg, is absolutely delightful – and quite a handful for the older boy, who is voiced by Elijah Wood. The story is quite creative, and it’s obvious that there’s more to discover when watching it again, which I probably will be doing soon, as J. also wants to see it. (He went to L.A. today for another Magic regional championship.)

What Is Populism?, by Jan-Werner Müller. The author, an expert on political populism, explains that populist movements – unlike others that critique elites and insist on the voice of the people – typically claim that the group they represent is the “true” people, the “real” ones. They deny a voice to groups that are marginalized or otherwise different from themselves. He goes on to explain the damage that they can do when in power, such as redesigning the constitution to ensure that their voice remains privileged in the future.

One of the most important ways that other political parties can compete with populist movements is to ensure that their perspectives matter. They can do this both by designing policies that minimize their grounds for complaint (treating their concerns as valid) and also by taking care to include them symbolically. That doesn’t mean token representation, but rather to emphasize via the media that they are important and valued. In other words, the other political parties must ensure that the group that insists it has a grievance is included (in policies) and feels included (in how the larger group conveys itself symbolically). It’s a short book, worth reading, although the seven points collected at the end are a fine summary for someone who doesn’t need to read about the examples.

I’m still not quite over the mild respiratory virus that’s been hanging on for two full weeks at this point – I didn’t do anything more physically ambitious than walk to the neighborhood store for an onion. J’s likewise not entirely well yet – he’s pretty tired – but his day was more full and more interesting than mine. He drove to a work party in Salem, 70 miles north of here, where he ate some Mexican food, did some bowling with coworkers, and played a few arcade games. Then he drove home and actually got some work done, when he’d have much rather napped, and then he went to the game store to practice with his deck for this weekend’s Magic regional championship. He doesn’t like to play the formats where you bring a deck with you, and he doesn’t like to practice online like almost everybody else does, so it was great that he went 6-0 this evening (that is, he won six games and thus three matches). When he got home, we watched a couple of One Piece episodes, then he went to bed nearly an hour earlier than usual.

Murder at Donwell Abbey, by Vanessa Kelly. Emma Knightley Mysteries #2. A servant appears to have fallen to her death during a party at the Knightley home, and, just like the last time a dead body turned up in their community, Emma Knightley wants to help solve the mystery. If a person enjoys spending time with a slightly more mature version of Emma, and a slightly more constructive version of Miss Bates, and all the rest, these books can be a fine way to do that. I have to note, however, that in this one there was a major plot hole: an exasperatingly obvious thing that everyone overlooked for far too long. Oh well.

Sethra Lavode, by Steven Brust. Viscount of Adrilankha #3. In this book, Brust wraps up the story of the insurrection against the Empress Zerika and ties up various loose ends, so that the world can be how it is in the Vlad books ~250 years later. The first time I read it, I was disappointed because I expected, from the title, to get to learn more about the fascinating character Sethra Lavode, or at least to have much of the story be about her. This time, knowing that wasn’t the case, I could at least be grateful for Sethra’s appearances and role in the story, which were generally as substantial as anyone’s with the exception of Morrolan, who was featured in the previous book. (And am I starting to write like Paarfi now?) I also recognize now that there are narrative reasons to remove the characters who don’t survive the story – a hazard of writing prequels, I suppose.

Today was AA’s birthday, and we were looking forward to playing Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit with her and DG, which is our usual way of celebrating her birthday. DG is travelling tomorrow or the next day, though, and he didn’t want to risk catching J’s cold, so we’ve postponed the event. Meanwhile, J actually felt pretty well, and it was warm and nice out, so he did a bike ride by the river. And then it turned out that I had food poisoning or something similar, so I wouldn’t have been able to go anyway. I’m feeling good enough at the moment, though, and I got to do some reading, and we watched more of Castlevania and One Piece.

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Laura

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Another Green World

formerly eve_prime's bits and trifles

Recent Entries

Upcoming noise...

Blood tests, sunset, Perlman

Book completed

The cozy time of year

Book completed

Saturday things

Movie voting

Health care, “Firebird”

Book completed

Glad to get to do things

Book completed

Minor grumbles

“Reading Is Political”

Saturday - pretty good!

Over the Garden Wall

Book completed

In which I am relatively unambitious

Book completed

Book completed

A sunny Sunday

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