2025 August Reading Summary

We’ve finally made it to the -ber months and my bakery says it’s fall and provided fall-themed pastries to back it up, so it must be true. Summer is dead, long live fall. I can’t wait to freeze.

In other news, this month I learned that turkey avocado sandwiches are extremely dangerous and require invasive supervision.

The sandwich in question:

Better safe than sorry, I guess.

August Reading Stats

Books Finished:

1. Stone Mattress – Margaret Atwood
2. Cat + Gamer 8 – Wataru Nadatani

Total Pages Read: 443

I thought last month was the worst I’d ever done, but then this month said hold my lemonade. :’) I thought Stone Mattress was going to jump-start my reading motivation, and it sort of did, but then I finished it and I immediately dropped back into my reading slump because apparently nothing is going to defeat this thing. Instead of reading I have of course been watching a lot of TV and in fact I just got introduced to Pokémon Concierge, which is about a burned out corporate girlie who moves to an island to play with Pokémon for a living, and, like, why can’t my mid-career crisis have gone like that? Anyway, my brother and I binged the whole thing this afternoon and now I’m back to wishing Pokémon were real.

Pokémon aside, the last couple of months I’ve neglected my reading because I’ve been distracted by the Fantastic Beasts and Jurassic Park series. This month the fixation was Netflix’s Trigger, mostly because of this asshole.

LOOK AT HIS SMILE ;o; long story short I’ve been calling him husband for at least a month (e.g., “Don’t be troublesome, husband,” though god knows he never listens to me) even though two people so far have advised me to divorce him. Look, it’s not his fault. He’s deeply traumatized. I can fix him. He’s pretty. I am a brand-new Kim Young-kwang stan with a raging obsession that grew exponentially worse when I learned that he has two cats, and I now want to watch Evilive, in which he also plays an unhateably hot villain. Like, yeah, I know I’m ace, but I’m not blind.

My one reading-related accomplishment this month was remembering that the library exists and borrowing four books, though two of them have since gone back unread because, you know, husband. Not pictured: Sansei and Sensibility, which was picked up on a later visit. I managed to renew Her Lost Words, but I had to download a Kindle sample of All the Ever Afters when it didn’t give me the option to renew. Nevertheless, a renewed interest in the library is a hopeful step in what I sincerely hope will be my reading redemption arc. I’ve been feeling more energized and optimistic since the advent of fall, or rather the advent of September, so anything can happen.

In other news related to me actually reading something, Cat + Gamer came to an end and I am very sad. On the one hand, I’m sort of glad I don’t have to buy thirty more volumes of this series (sixty if you count the matching Kindle copies) because this shit is not cheap. But on the other hand, this series is so wonderful and I really wish it could have gone on just a little bit longer. However, the ending was sweet and fitting and the kitty cats are absolute purrfection, so I have no complaints.

Currently Reading

Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No progress this month.

Sansei and Sensibility
Karen Tei Yamashita
No current rating. This is a collection of short stories, and I’ve been moving through them at the speed of molasses. Hoping I can speed my way through the rest of the book before the ninth, which is when it’s due.

Her Lost Words
Stephanie Marie Thornton
No current rating. I love books about books, which this certainly is, and it’s off to a more or less promising start. It’s a bit slow at the moment, and I can’t say I care for the relationships between the living female characters; however, I’m not even thirty pages in, so I’m giving it at least another chapter before I start thinking about DNFing.

Impossible Creatures
Katherine Rundell
I’d forgotten how much I love this book. I’d also forgotten book 2 is coming out 9/11, and I now have no idea why I thought 9/20 was the release date. Trying to speed through this one as well before my preorder gets here.

Bakery Update

After last month’s exceedingly grim update, I am pleased to announce that I have in fact settled into the new bakery, like I was hoping I would, and I am doing just fine, and apparently last month’s despair was the product of a spectacularly awful first week and just generally getting eaten alive by depression. I have still restarted my job hunt because I don’t want to be doing fast food forever, but for the time being I’m doing okay. During the first month every shift seemed to drag, though that might be because time always drags for me in the summer anyway. This past week every shift went by so fast and I don’t trust it, but I’ll take it for as long as it lasts. I think it helps that I’ve been in the job long enough to figure out how to keep busy; and my quality of life has also drastically improved since I started parking in the paid garage. I spent the first several weeks parking in the free garage down the street, which meant a ten-minute walk to get to work, and I hadn’t originally planned to pay for parking. BUT ONE MORNING my free garage was closed, so I ended up in the paid garage and I got used to the good life and I’m never going back.

And of course people are people and there are good days and bad days – the Friday before Labor Day was horrific – but every day is not sheer unadulterated misery, the way it was at the old bakery. You take the victories where you can get them. Yesterday was even good: I managed to leave a couple hours early and I grabbed some sandwiches and cake on the way out, and believe me when I say the tiramisu cake is life-changing. After trying a sample, I was ready to cry if there wasn’t any cake for me to buy at the end of the day, like, don’t dangle the precious in front of me and then take it away.

First up: egg salad. I’d never had egg salad before and I’ve decided that it’s not my favorite, but I’m not sorry I tried it. The title of “favorite” still goes to the chicken salad sandwich.

Another perk: regular breaks. I realize this is the bare minimum, but, again, the last bakery did not meet the bare minimum in most respects, and scheduled breaks were not a thing. At the new bakery I’ve been using my break times to read, or I’ve been trying. Sometimes I succeed.

And finally, last but not least: it’s shameful to admit it, but my improved morale has partly to do with finding a good work bag to go into the bakery with me every morning, because I am nothing if not extremely shallow. Look, at least I didn’t go out and buy this one just for the sake of buying a new bag. This one has been languishing on a hook on my door for years. I think I might’ve bought it sometime in the range of 2014-2016. All I know for sure is that it came from a Japanese market in Seattle, and it’s been with me for at least ten years. And then I was changing wallets and I dredged out a couple of old keychains I’d forgotten I had, and I ended up having to buy a pack of carabiners because if this bag has one fault it is its lack of convenient keychain-holders, but it all worked out in the end.

That keychain remains as true today as it was the day I bought it.

August Adventures

Sometimes we’re real good, and sometimes we DoorDash KFC. It was way too salty and I regret it. It didn’t even come with the lemonade I ordered.

This month’s non-DoorDash food adventures:

1. Pic 1: I’ve been working on cleaning out the odds and ends I’ve squirreled away in my freezer, because believe me when I say that thing was filled beyond its intended capacity. First to go in the month of August was the kielbasa I got a while ago from Whole Foods, though I’m not sure that should count when I also replaced it with a bag of frozen biscuits.
2. Pics 2-3: I now have Safeway adventures. This visit I happened to have an iced latte on me, so I got to use the shopping cart cupholder for the first time in my life (and also actually noticed said cupholder, also for the first time in my life) and discovered that Safeway now carries lap cheong. This was a very important discovery. I already had a half-finished pack in the freezer, but that ended up not mattering. See also: squirrel.
3. Pics 4-5: Made chicken curry for a change instead of pork curry and managed to finish off a box of curry seasoning. Only two or three more to go. Some of the leftovers got poured over scrambled eggs, as suggested by Inga Lam. It was good, but I found that I prefer it with a fried egg.
4. Pics 6-7: I’m sorry to say that my friends must not love me very much because not a single one of them has sat me down and force-fed me Indomie. :’) This was another Inga Lam influence and I cannot believe it took me so long to finally try Indomie. There’s all kinds of interesting Indomie flavors to explore, so this’ll be fun.
5. Pic 8: Finally had the time, money, and energy to host. Resorted to mac and cheese lasagna, a college potluck staple that I haven’t made in years. Note to self: next time cook the macaroni less.
6. Pics 9-11: I have been cracking through my kimchi at an unbelievable rate (it really goes fast when you cook with it) and this convinced me that I should definitely keep three jars of kimchi in my fridge. The empty jar in pic 9 has since been replaced, thanks to my mom, not that this stopped me from preemptively replacing it with a different brand. As for that baby radish kimchi: I finally got to go to H Mart for the first time in possibly months and the baby radishes were making eyes at me, and they hopped into my shopping cart and wouldn’t leave. I was hoping I would love them, but they’re not my favorite. I will try cooking with them.
7. Pic 12: I have been seeing giant green onions in every Korean vlog I’ve ever watched and I finally found them at Lotte. I just wanted to cook with them at least once. So happy I was able to find some, I wasn’t sure if they were available in the States.
8. Pics 13-20: August birthday dinner, noodle-themed. Dishes included three different appetizers; cold sesame noodles with ham, eggs, and cucumber; vodka pasta with homemade penne; Hong Kong-style pan-fried noodles, which seem to have become my signature dish; tableside tiramisu; and pad see ew, made the next day and eaten down to the platter before I remembered to take a picture. Everyone always complains that there are never enough fried noodles so this time I made a double batch and we actually had leftovers for once. If only I had had the foresight to also make a double batch of the pad see ew.
9. Pic 21: My mom and I ordered pizza and watched The Thursday Murder Club on my final day at home. It was great. I am so sad that all my leftover pizza is gone.
10. Pics 22-23: A couple of random things from a day trip up to Philly. That purse would’ve been irresistible if the gray cat had been a tuxedo, because then it would’ve been Circe, Archie, and Hato all in a row. On the other hand it was expensive as shit so maybe it’s just as well it didn’t work out. On the bright side, that same store had a lot of Totoro keychains and it was hard picking just one, but I had to give it to No Face Totoro.

Kitty Corner

Some assorted pics of Circe and Hato, starting with Circe’s last trip to the vet to measure her thyroid levels. She fought me and three techs and she still got her blood drawn, and she was BIG mad. It wasn’t a very happy visit for anyone, and it didn’t help that there were a lot of technical difficulties with the needles. I have since gotten a tub of dairy-free ice cream, which I hope will let me trick her into taking gaba the next time we have to go in. Fingers crossed.