April: in which I realize I have a violin keychain lying on my couch and randomly clip it onto one of my Kindle pouches. That keychain has been there ever since I took it off one of the bags that have since been listed on Poshmark, but I forgot I had it until my eye happened to land on it the other night.
Moar developments: I threw out my back yesterday but am recovering with a speed that has me shook (just in time for tomorrow’s all-day bakery shift, oh boy). This post almost got pushed back to Monday on account of my back making me uninspired, but then I took a nap and I woke up full of beans, so here we are, posting on time. I also learned that my mechanical keyboard has little feet, and I finally tried KBBQ Spam, which was okay. I really wanted to love it but it’s the wrong flavor for me. :< I’ve got another can of it in the pantry, maybe I’ll put it into my favorite Spam pasta. On the bright side, I now have no need to patronize Walmart, which appears to be the only local source of the KBBQ Spam.
Other than that, I am now working part-time at a bakery because the job market really is that shit and I’m questioning whether I want to keep trying for a design job at all even though I have significant experience in nothing else and can’t think what else I would do. I’m making some cautious forays into proofreading jobs and I bloody hope one of them works out because I am anxiety-ridden and sick of this shit. It’s a bad sign when even retail jobs (the other field in which I have extensive experience) won’t call you back.
April Reading Stats
Books Finished:
- Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton
- The Treasure in the Royal Tower (Nancy Drew #128) – Carolyn Keene
- The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – J.K. Rowling
Total Pages Read: 1,241
The sole bright spot in April: I finally finished Goblet of Fire two months after I started it. I genuinely do not remember having a hard time getting through that book in high school, but now it just seems overly long and slightly agonizing, though I do like it in comparison to what’s coming next. I also revisited an old favorite, also known as the only Nancy Drew book I’ve ever read, and Sunrise on the Reaping gave me a whopping Hunger Games hangover, which I attempted to cure by restarting the original trilogy. I have a review now for the first Hunger Games but I’m not completely happy with it, so it’s going to need some editing because there’s a couple of points I missed, but other than that I feel fine about this reread. I have yet to start on my GoF review, and I’m not looking forward to it.
And here is Circe rereading Jurassic Park with me, because in this house we love dinosaurs and we prepare for our series reads.
And here is Circe rewatching my latest hyperfixation, the 25th anniversary Les Mis concert with Norm Lewis as Javert he is my favorite, because I like to think I’m raising me a cultured cat. She likes to listen when I play the piano and piano music has seemed to help her enormously when we have to go on car trips, so maybe she enjoyed Les Mis as well. As for me, the hyperfixation is so strong that I downloaded a sample of the book on my Kindle, only to find that the first several chapters are about the Bishop of Digne. I really was not prepared for this.
In non-reading-related news, my parents made me binge The Brothers Sun and we watched the whole thing in one day and didn’t get to bed till about three and I’m hooked. I am torn between sadness that it got canceled and relief that I don’t have to live in agony waiting for the next season. I always love Michelle Yeoh, but I also loved Justin Chien and Sam Song Li, who so perfectly play two estranged brothers who suddenly get thrown back into each other’s lives but immediately start trolling the shit out of each other (when their mom’s not looking, of course). Of course I especially loved the inclusion of one my all-time favorite seasons of Bake Off, and Charles’s churro obsession certainly didn’t hurt. I now want a churro. The ones he made at the end looked amazing. T_T
Off-topic: the title and some of the themes are making me wonder if the show was loosely inspired by The Brothers Karamazov.
Currently Reading
Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No progress this month.
The Stardust Thief
Chelsea Abdullah
Current rating: 4.5-5 stars. Loving this reread. Can’t wait to get to Ashfire King.
The Lost World
Michael Crichton
I made the mistake of starting this after midnight and immediately got a mouthful of chaos askdf;kssfgdh Ian plz it was 12:53 in the morning ;_; No major thoughts so far because I’m only on page 13 and did not read at all while I was visiting my parents the last couple of days, but I am interested to see the gap between Crichton’s Sarah Harding and the Sarah Harding who ultimately made it onto the screen. I am seriously hoping they are significantly different from each other.
April Noms
How to get me out of the house with a back ache: offer me first-class Italian food. This year we celebrated our spring birthdays at our favorite Italian restaurant, it was a struggle but I dragged myself out even with my back screaming every step of the way, and now I got leftover risotto and a couple of slices of bread in the fridge and I have no regrets. I have been fortunate with this particular back pain episode, in that I have a lot more mobility than I typically do at this stage, but I would go out in worse condition for a bite of that strawberry panna cotta. I spent yesterday afternoon lying on the floor trying to stretch my back and going back and forth on whether I would make it to dinner, and all I can say is that I made the right decision. Also my unexpected downtime gave me an afternoon free to set up my new phone and transfer over all my data from the old phone in a surprisingly easy process, so clouds and silver linings, etc. I have been spending my time since then finding out which of my logins transferred and which ones didn’t.
The rest of the foods were cooked by me, because on the whole I have been doing so well staying in and feeding myself. From the top: salmon bibimbap, with a return of last month’s potato soup (didn’t take me long to decide to make another pot), kimchi tuna stew, and Chinese egg fried rice, both from Future Neighbor. All of those leftovers are now gone and I am sad. :’) For the potato soup, this month’s batch was made with chicken broth, and, while it gave it a completely different flavor, I wasn’t mad. Next time I want to try making it with dashi and a little bit of miso. Honestly, with this soup, I don’t see how I can go wrong. The kimchi tuna stew was born out of sheer necessity because I have two open jars of kimchi in the fridge and at least one of them is expired, lol. I wouldn’t have gone for the second one, but I had Heather and Michaella coming over and I wasn’t about to feed them expired kimchi, so now I’m looking for ways to finish off all this kimchi. (And expired kimchi is fine, or at any rate I haven’t gotten sick.) Next on my list: stir-fried pork belly and kimchi, because I also have a lot of pork belly in my freezer that needs to get cooked. I thought I’d used up the last of it in February’s yaki udon but then I found a bunch of it stashed in the back. There’s no need to look for any sort of pattern here. At least I don’t have to spend a lot on food. >_>
Circe’s Corner
We love a cozy queen. This month I finally got suckered by the Kitty Kurlz videos and bought her a couple, which she has yet to play with. I’m hoping she’ll start playing with it the way the kitties in the video play with it if I leave it out long enough. I must say, I was expecting it to be significantly larger based on the Kurlz shown in the videos, but they might have linked several Kurlz together. They even offered me free shipping on a pack of yarn balls, which I promptly fell for because I am a sucker.
