2026 February Reading Summary

Four years ago I was on here documenting my thoughts on the Try Guys cheating implosion and I guess I’m still not over it, because within the last week or so I had a dream where I was either watching the remaining Try Guys film live or watching a new video where He Who Must Not Be Named was the main guest, only the video was literally just them and their other guests and probably their staff roasting the shit out of him. I don’t remember at this point if I was in the studio or at home. I don’t even remember what anybody said when they were roasting his ass. I don’t know why anybody thinks I hold grudges. 0:)

The weather’s been so up and down here lately. On Monday we got snow, and going into next week it’s supposed to be in the 60s and 70s. One could say the same about my life because I was on an even keel for a while, sort of, but then I got a couple of big problems dropped on my head over the last couple of weeks. One involved my car (and is now resolved) and the other is both sensitive and ongoing until I hear otherwise. The second one necessitated the purchase of new highlighters. I bet they were hoping I wouldn’t have the receipts, but I do and those receipts came highlighted.

In happier news, I was told to get rid of these, so I brought them home when we could no longer sell them. Happy extended holidays to me. I ate a whole bag of those chocolates in one sitting during one of my breaks and I feel nothing.

February Reading Stats

Books Finished:

1. The Apothecary Diaries 1 – Nekokurage
2. The Apothecary Diaries 2 – Nekokurage
3. The Apothecary Diaries 3 – Nekokurage
4. Ninetails – Sally Wen Mao
5. The Apothecary Diaries 4 – Nekokurage
6. The Apothecary Diaries 5 – Nekokurage
7. Selkie – Nataly Gruender
8. The Apothecary Diaries 6 – Nekokurage

Books Abandoned:

1. The Real Jaws: The Attacks that Inspired the Movies – Rachel Lee Perez

Total Pages Read: 2,119

I managed to match January’s Books Finished, but that was literally only because I fell hard for the Apothecary Diaries manga and chewed my way through the first six volumes against the earnest pleading of my bank account. I also tried the light novel as a Kindle sample and was less entranced, besides which I really would prefer to collect only one. One of my coworkers said it’s hard to get into one if you get hooked on the other one first, so I’m taking that for what it is and will not be pursuing the light novels. I just picked up volumes 9 and 10 at work today, gods help me. The addiction is so real that I’ve preemptively added an Apothecary Diaries tag even though this is literally the first time I am talking about it on this blog, because I anticipate that I will be talking a lot about it this year. I bless and curse the customer and the coworker who ganged up and got me to try it. I’m currently on episode 12 of the anime, I think, and lapping it up. I love Jinshi. I LOVE Maomao omg all hail the neurodivergent apothecary queen. I love this series so much that IT ACTUALLY GOT ME TO DRAW AGAIN HOLY SHIT. They just added a little calico and I am losing my mInDdDdDDDDDD <333333

This is a big stinking deal because my Wacom tablet has been gathering dust since probably 2019 or 2020, which was about the time of my last big drawing burst. Newcomers would be forgiven for thinking that I only draw cats, because that’s all I’ve been drawing since last year. More often than not, though, I didn’t draw at all, and a large part of that had to do with the two shithole bakeries that were sucking up all my time and joy. But now I’m out of those bakeries and working in a bookstore which is a LARGE source of joy, and I actually have the energy and the brainspace to think of something else. Enter the Apothecary Diaries, which bit me hard with the fanart bug and I have to stop looking at Pinterest because it keeps giving me spoilers but omg the fanart there is next level. I sat down yesterday to see if I could draw a couple of quick pieces for my reading journal and didn’t get done until probably about 10:30, and all those pearls/beads/fucking whatever on Jinshi’s headdress gave me a sore butt and a hand cramp. My first real fanart in years and I almost make myself blind copy/pasting all those little beads. With all due respect to my people, why the fuck do we wear such stupid hats. I could’ve done without the stupid hat. Literally why didn’t I pick something easier. x(

I seem to have regressed to an earlier age. This isn’t entirely bad, though it also isn’t entirely good. I am fangirling hard and plotting future fanarts, though thankfully not future fanfics. I have the biggest crush (or squish) on Jinshi, and I never get crushes or squishes. My obsession with him is on par with my teenage obsession with Sesshōmaru. He is living rent-free in my head. It’s bad. As a teenager I was continuously drawing, starting with Pokémon and Sailor Moon fanart before progressing to Inu Yasha, Ranma 1/2, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Eventually I started trying to draw my own mangas and they were garbage, but they were still better than what I’ve been doing recently, which is nothing. In my twenties I hyperfixated on the slightly more original stories I was writing with a friend. One obsession fed the other: I was writing the stories and drawing the characters in them, and so it went in an endless loop that kept me churning out drawings. I won’t say anything I produced at that time was good. But, again, it was better than now. Over time I got pulled into a contract gig that would later turn into my first and so far only full-time permanent design position, and that job was so stressful and so demanding that I forgot about drawing. It wasn’t until I was kicked out the door six years later that I realized I had forgotten everything that makes me who I am. I have since spent the last two years trying to figure out who the hell I am and what exactly I want to do, and I still don’t have an answer. But I do know that I still like to draw.

Now: I used to draw exclusively people (because after a while I stopped drawing horses when I fell out of my horse phase), but lately I do not like the way I draw people, and this has a lot to do with not knowing exactly how I draw people. Which is why I started drawing cats out of the blue last year, and I have no regrets. But this current Apothecary Diaries fixation has put me back into the people-drawing mindframe, and I’m really hoping I can take advantage of it for as long as it lasts. I still don’t like how I draw people, but I can see myself absolutely killing it at fanart, and it’s long past time for a reboot. To my mind, this means going back to the beginning, which means fanart. Lots and lots of fanart. I have no idea how long this will last, but I want to try to rebuild my old drawing habits (the way I meant to do last year, and the year before that) and I think this will be more motivating and more sustainable than trying and failing to draw my own characters.

They never understood you; they were always too fearful to, anyway.

Sally Wen Mao
Ninetails

In non-manga news, I loved Ninetails; predictably, my favorite story was “A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality,” followed closely by “Lotus Stench” because I 100% can see me and Lori living in an apartment as a hungry ghost and an angry fox spirit. (I’m the fox. Obviously.) The only two I really did not like were “Turtle Head Epidemic” and “The Crush,” the second one mostly because I couldn’t relate and didn’t get it. (: Anyway, the whole thing put me on a real fox kick, so I guess it’s lucky The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox (Katrina Kwan) just came out. And I kinda wanna reread The Fox Wife (Yangsze Choo) AGAIN, ngl.

I had a more mixed experience with Selkie, which is unfortunate because it was my birthday book and I really wanted to love it. It didn’t blow my mind, but I do love folklore and I love sea creatures and this had both, so it wasn’t a bad time. It’s making me want to rewatch Song of the Sea. I’d read it again, it’s just that I wish it had ended a bit differently.

Currently Reading

Butter
Asako Yuzuki
Current rating: still 4 stars. I did not, in fact, finish it by EOD Sunday. I had to restart the book, and I am now trying to finish it by EOD Friday. I really really REALLY want to be finished with this book, especially as Yuzuki’s new book is already out. I am not allowed to start another fiction book until I finish Butter.

Reading Journal Update

My current reading journal is going well! The Apothecary fanart gave me the ego boost I needed, because I want to include more of my own drawings in this journal rather than relying on digital stickers and illustrations from Freepik. There’s nothing wrong with Freepik, it just doesn’t feel so much like my journal if all of my assets come from other people. I want it to look like I was doodling in the margins, which I absolutely would be doing if this were a physical journal.

Speaking of physical journals, I’m going to be trying to keep one, because I figured for $2 I could find a use for an extra planner. I want to try physical journaling alongside my main digital journal to see which one I like better, though I have a feeling which one’s going to win. Still, let it never be said that I did not try. At the very least I have a home now for all the stickers that didn’t fit in my Kindle case.

Blind Dates with a Book: Part II

This display has gone away, and I am sad. Blind date picks for the month of February:

1. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art – James Nestor
2. The Girl with the Louding Voice – Abi Daré
3. The Stranger – Albert Camus
4. The Year of the Witching – Alexis Henderson
5. House of Hunger – Alexis Henderson
6. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
7. Legends & Lattes – Travis Baldree
8. The Last Unicorn – Peter S. Beagle
9. Butter – Asako Yuzuki
10. Circe – Madeline Miller
11. Daughter of the Moon Goddess – Sue Lynn Tan
12. The Office of Historical Corrections – Danielle Evans
13. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
14. When Women Were Dragons – Kelly Barnhill
15. Orbital – Samantha Harvey
16. The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro
17. Black Sun – Rebecca Roanhorse
18. Shady Hollow – Juneau Black
19. The Cat Who Saved Books – Sōsuke Natsukawa

I had to get close-ups of House of Hunger and The Stranger, because I am living for those stickers we had. The judgy owls are my new besties. They just look so horrified. (And I was very pleased that House of Hunger sold almost immediately. Like I think within literal minutes of my putting it out on the display. I hope the customer who bought it loved it.)

February Eats

Birthday Happenings

My birthday happened to fall on a weekday and I was working, and half my family was gone for most of the month anyway, so it was a solo celebration this year. I managed to get a ruined activity book for free and indulged with a couple of books and some bakery treats. Those kimchi croquettes are delicious, and I am newly addicted to the chocolate-filled chocolate chip cookies. For dinner I rolled out my mom’s old teriyaki chicken, which I haven’t made in maybe a decade. That sauce did not thicken up the way I remember it doing in college. I sure hope I can find the printed recipe, which I’m pretty sure I have because I do remember recording it for myself before I got my first kitchen. It’s such a simple recipe that it’s stayed stuck in my head all these years and I’m not really sure what went wrong. It was still as good as I remembered it, though. With the chicken I had spinach gomaae (note to self: next time use more spinach) and kinpira carrot with the extra sesame dressing from the spinach. The spinach marks the first time I used my mortar and pestle for something other than cat meds. I also got my favorite chocolate cake slice from Wegmans, and later I found out that Lidl would give me a free birthday treat. The extra donut was not free, but it was cheap and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted so they both hopped into my bag.

For the family dinner we went to a new Sichuan place, which is sister to the Sichuan bistro that’s been down the street from me for years and which I’ve never tried, but now I might have to because I loved this place. My favorites were the spicy boiled fish and the salted egg yolk ribs. The restaurant seemed a bit on the understaffed and disorganized side, but I already wanna go back. In the meantime I have two portions of the leftover fish in the freezer and the remains of the third container in the fridge for dinner tonight. One of my favorite leftover Chinese soup/stew hacks is adding glass noodles, which I am going to do as soon as I finish this post.

Then after dinner we had cake (more Wegmans chocolate cake; the leftovers are still in my fridge :D) and watched a Chinese movie called Nobody. Kinda wanna draw fanart for this one too, ngl. I had to go and order Journey to the West when I went to work I think the literal next day. I had originally wanted to get the unabridged version, but it turns out that’s upwards of 1,000 pages and sold as a four-volume set on Amazon, and both the price and the page count are a little steep for a work I don’t already know. I will be seeing how I get on with the abridged Penguin version before I try to invest in a more complete version.

General Happenings

The highlight of this month was mashing together a couple of different recipes to create the perfect beef stew, which incidentally also works as a curry (Lori’s idea) if you drop in a block of Vermont’s finest. I grew up eating Golden, but Vermont is currently my favorite. This handily solves my craving for beef curry, and I will be making both the stew and the curry again. The stew is basically the ground beef stew I made back in October, just with stew meat instead of ground beef and cooked longer, and with the meat juices thrown back in with the vegetables (because those little assholes were steaming themselves dry, and I happened to have the meat juices within grabbing range). I can now say that I prefer it with the stew meat. In this iteration I didn’t add potatoes because I wanted to eat it with mashed potatoes and that seemed too redundant even for me, but potatoes will definitely be used when I make it again as a curry.

More food happenings:

1. Catching up with Diane and her husband at our favorite Mexican restaurant! <3
2. Tuna casserole. I love casseroles. Must try the tuna pasta bake recipe next.
3. Stir-fried tofu and Spam. The first thing cooked in that pan I stole from my mom last month.
4. Kimchi sujebi. Delicious. 10/10 will try to make from scratch. Still have one serving left in the fridge. Expired, naturally, because that’s how I roll.
5. Second batch of snickerdoodles. Still chewy after sitting in the jar for idk how many weeks now. I really gotta get better at eating things.
6. The aforementioned beef stew and curry variant.
7. Teriyaki chicken bibimbap.
8. Finally investigated Lidl. Some of their stuff is cheap as shit, which I like. I’ve been visiting them a lot lately.
9. Lentil soup with harissa?!?!?! Already plotting to make another pot tomorrow because I ate up the last of it on Monday. The recipe called for kielbasa, but I couldn’t find any at Wegmans (and was probably looking in the wrong spot) so substituted chorizo. It was delicious. Next up: trying the powdered harissa instead of the paste, because the recipe seems to call for the powder. I didn’t know that at the time I bought the paste but do not object to the opportunity to experiment.
10. idk if this counts as a girl dinner when leftover miso soup isn’t exactly a staple in my fridge but fuck it I’m gonna call it a girl dinner. Leftover miso soup, leftover rice, frozen boiled dumplings with soy sauce poured over them. If it works it works.
11. Tried Trader Joe’s orange chicken and actually liked it, though I was annoyed to find that it doesn’t really lend itself to single portions. But I’d still buy it again.
12. Cheesy one-pan beef and potatoes, and I had to sign up for a Kitchn account to print the recipe but I’m not entirely mad because I found a bunch of other good-looking recipes while I was nosing around. I literally only found out about this recipe because I happened to see it displayed on the screen of one of the sample Nooks at work and took a picture of it. No, I’m not kidding.
13. Lunch with my parents at a Japanese place near their house. I just ate the last of the curry, regretfully, yesterday.
14. It hasn’t exactly been the best of times, which is why I ended up at the bakery, again, this past Friday. That birthday chocolate-filled cookie really didn’t do me any favors, in that it got me addicted to the chocolate-filled cookies.

Kitty Corner

My little empress has not been eating her food lately. 🙁 She still acts hungry and she will still eat some of her food, but she’s been leaving a lot of it and I don’t know what’s wrong. The vet called me today to suggest an abdominal ultrasound, and I think we’re going to have to go with that. For a while I was really hoping it was just that she was tired of her food. I’d be tired of the same shit every day too. She’s gone through phases like this before and come out the other side with a renewed appetite. But this one has been going on for a while, and better safe than sorry. It’s never a good sign when she stops gobbling like a hog. I hope it’s nothing. But also, if we get the ultrasound and it turns out that everything’s fine and we blew all that money just to find out that she really is just sick of her food, I’m gonna be pissed. I think her insurance will probably cover it, but it’s the principle of the thing. And I’m also mad at her, AGAIN, because she destroyed her third bookmark. I mean, technically the bookmark is still usable, but she’s on a spree and she is going to the kitty orphanage I really mean it this time >:(

UPDATE, LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES AFTER I DRAFTED THIS POST

Okay, so what the hell do I know. I finished the post draft and got up to get her the dinner for which she was vociferously agitating and I gave her the wet food she’s been refusing to eat and she’s eating it. She might even eat the whole serving. She was heading that way the last time I checked. I gave her a smaller portion because she hasn’t been eating it, but now I might have to give her more if she finishes this one off. I don’t understand this cat. I don’t know where she’s coming from or where she’s going to. Still gonna get that ultrasound, though.