Every time I think it’s a good week to turn off the heat and open the windows, it goes and snows again. Welcome to Maryland. Our weather makes no sense.
At least the open windows are nice while they’re practical.
March Reading Stats
Books Finished:
- The Apothecary Diaries 7 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 8 – Nekokurage
- Butter – Asako Yuzuki
- The Apothecary Diaries 9 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 10 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 11 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 12 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 13 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 14 – Nekokurage
- The Apothecary Diaries 15 – Nekokurage
- The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox – Katrina Kwan
Books Abandoned:
- The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife – Tim Birkhead
Total Pages Read: 2,311
I’m 0 for 3 with the library books I’ve been picking out lately. I really wanted to love The Great Auk after the last two nonfiction library picks bombed, but I took too long with the first two chapters and I lost interest. My other big problem this month is that I ran through the entire Apothecary Diaries manga series and now I have no more Apothecary Diaries mangas to read until the next one comes out in November. T_T One might reasonably suggest the anime, only I stayed up till 4 one morning finishing it and I need season 3, like, yesterday. But at least my fanart obsession is coming along.
No points for guessing who my favorite character is. >_> There’s more than this, of course, because I never do anything half-assed, but the rest of it’s all on tumblr. This thing was mega dead until I started drawing Apothecary Diaries, and now all of a sudden it’s booming and I’m actually getting likes and reblogs. Of course part of this is just picking the right hashtags, but it makes a nice change. The biggest takeaway from this month of drawing is that I won’t draw if I just write a to-do list ordering myself to draw every day because even I can’t tell me what to do, but I will draw if I have something I desperately want to draw all day every day. It makes a real difference when drawing is treated as a joy rather than just another task.
In other news, I finally watched Hamnet!!! It was amazing!!! It made me cry!!! I expected nothing less!!! I can see why Jessie won that Oscar!!! I haven’t been home much because I have to be conservative with my gas, given that current events and minimum wage do not mix particularly well, but we had something to celebrate so I went home and had pizza and watched Hamnet with my parents, and it was great. I might do a formal review in a bit but I’ll have to rewatch the movie first, oh shucks. The whole cast was amazing and it was a solid adaptation of the book, though there were a few scenes I wish they hadn’t cut out. All in all, a very fine movie. I might have to take advantage of my BN discount and buy the DVD.
In blog-related news, I am currently mulling over the idea of going back to a sporadic posting schedule. I have drafted posts to last me through the end of April, but I’m not sure if I want to keep posting weekly. To be honest, the blog is a huge distraction and it’s starting to feel like just another task, which is kind of a problem when its original purpose was to serve as an outlet for me to rant about my reading. It was never supposed to overshadow every other hobby I have, but the other problem is that all of my hobbies are massive time sinks. Out of those hobbies, this one is the lowest priority because it wasn’t meant to become the primary hobby, only then it became so much work to keep up that it ended up becoming the only hobby for longer than I would like to admit. I need to reassess my priorities and get them back on track, and that means I might just let my content run out and then post only when I have something to say, and not as an obligation. The publication schedule is a blessing and a curse, both wholly self-inflicted. Case in point: I have so much to do this week in the run-up to a major upcoming change, but I’m sitting here banging out this post instead because it’s due tomorrow. I want to get back the joy that I had when I was still writing for WyrdGurls, because then I was writing for the sake of writing and not because some schedule (written by me) was telling me that I had to. It’s not that I don’t still like writing and talking about books, but I have some shit to figure out and there are other things I want to be doing with my time. I don’t want to feel like IÂ have to read and IÂ have to publish reviews every week or else, because that just sucks all the fun right out of it.
Anyway. Since I do still love books and since I do still have a BN employee discount and since I also still have zero self-control, here’s the little haul I managed to squeeze in this month. (Ignore the Harry Potters. I have had those for years, and I am going to sell them because I don’t have room for them anymore and those books do not even slightly hold up.)
2026 Resolution Update
I am pleased to report that I crossed off a major resolution last week, and that was to update the profile picture I’ve had on my About Me page ever since this blog first launched. If anybody is keeping track, that was 2020. :’) What with the whole Apothecary Diaries drawing craze, I was able to slip in this side drawing without my hyperfixation ever noticing the difference.
It took a bit longer than I was expecting to come together because I changed our pose a couple of times, but I am so happy with the final result. And, as with all of my selfies, it doesn’t look much like me, but I’ve made my peace with that. Maybe someday I’ll remember to add my freckles. Below are some progress shots, starting with the original pose and progressing through various stages of completion, including that one time I turned the canvas sideways and kept checking my own wrist to see what my tattoo looked like because I was too lazy to hunt for a picture (or to take a new one). In the very last shot, I turned off the wrong layer and got a demon cat, though Lori pointed out that this is simply what she looks like before breakfast.
As a side note, that cat is insanely hard to color accurately and I never really appreciated that before I did this piece because I’ve never done her in full color before. I’ve only ever drawn her with a blue colored pencil and now I don’t know why I was whining about how hard it was to convey calico patches in varying shades of blue. Reviewing actual photos of her, her body patches should probably be lighter, but I’m done and I frankly don’t care enough to fix it. The point is she’s made it onto the About Me page, where she belongs.
March Eats
It’s been a month of refraining from Starbucks and then going insane at Starbucks in the last couple of weeks and rediscovering Frappuccinos, and also it turns out I actually like lavender chai even though I’m not really a lavender person. Biggest cooking stand-out was the baked macaroni and cheese which was ridiculous in that it took me the better part of a month to finish a pound of macaroni, we are making a half recipe next time, that was insane. The next-longest leftover was the stir-fried canned sardines, which were good but I don’t know if I need to make them again in a hurry. That one’s going to be a half recipe next time too. It was good with both rice and pasta, though, so I’m keeping the recipe.
The social highlight was a visit from Lauren, whom I normally greet with baked goods. This time we had those viral three-ingredient peanut butter cookies and peanut butter brownies, both of which were a hit, and we ordered Bonchon. The cookies were so good and so easy that I’ve already made them again, this time using the cinnamon sugar left over from the last time I made snickerdoodles, and holy shit. One note from the original recipe: it turns out the dough is a lot stickier than I was anticipating and my fork patterns were not delightful, and I actually like them better as fudgy little peanut butter bombs anyway, so now I just roll them into balls and let them do their thing in the oven.
As for the random spices, I saw them at Giant and thought they were funny.
Things I Ate Because Butter Told Me To
Things I never needed to know before I read Butter #1997038934: H Mart sells tarako spaghetti sauce in little single-serving packets. Each package has two packets, so I still have one serving left and I’m trying to decide when to deploy it. I don’t even like fish eggs on a normal day but Yuzuki-sensei told me to try tarako on spaghetti with butter, and this isn’t exactly the same because it is an actual sauce rather than just a plain spoonful of tarako, but it is analogous, and it is delicious. As for why I bought the sauce instead of plain tarako: I did not need an entire plastic tub of something I probably wouldn’t love, so I didn’t even try to get the real thing.
I also finally tried cream stew, which never appealed to me (until I read Butter) and shiobata ramen, which was good but I don’t think I’ll need to do it again. This fucking book has sent me on a tasting journey. It might actually get me to bake a quatre quarts, which is mildly annoying when that’s pretty much just a fancy name for a lemon pound cake. My favorite thing to come out of that book so far has to be the buttered rice with soy sauce. I have a full menu in my reading journal, including boxed cream stew and from-scratch cream stew. And that, too, was good with spaghetti, even if I prefer it with rice.
Kitty Corner
Circe has started eating again. Like a fluffy little calico pig. I don’t know. I don’t know what to say anymore. We went to the vet today to check her thyroid levels. TBD whether she still needs that abdominal ultrasound I was threatening her with last month.
Photos 2 and 3 were taken by Lauren, first when she was getting screeched at when we were at table and then when she was getting glared at because she’d taken somebody’s accustomed spot on the bedroom couch. Girl you don’t even use that spot wyd staring at mommy’s guest ;o;
