the_rck | Entries tagged with reading

My leg is very slowly getting better. It still feels badly bruised, and even light touches hurt a lot, but it doesn't look bruised. When I hurt my ankle, back in May, it also felt (and still does now) bruised but never showed it. I have no idea what's going on with it all.

I can see some swelling but not a lot. I've been using an Ace bandage, off and on. That helps, off and on. My main conclusion is that knees are awkward. I can't wrap the knee proper or anything above it because that will just slide down the moment I stand up. I have this problem with braces/wraps intended for knees, too. I bought some with the idea that they'd help with stairs, and they kind of do, but I have to reposition them about three times for a single trip to the basement. At least, I do if I want them to be useful.

Scott has done the laundry this weekend because neither of us want me to try the stairs yet.

( Meanderings about library books and story structure )

I like the lighter weight of the new laptop a lot. I feel less like I'm constantly about to drop it. I also like the fact that I can put it to sleep with Chrome open and not have it crash when I try to wake it up.

I am a little sad that I no longer have a functional version of Scrivener. I never really found it useful for writing, but earlier this year (right around when my hands got bad), I had an idea for using it to organize my saved fic prompts and plot bunnies. The recipe template looked promising. I just have no idea how feasible it would be in terms of my own workflow and preferences. The upfront conversion time investment would be massive, and I might never do it because of that.

Shelling out for a Scrivener upgrade simply in order to find out whether or not it'll work better than my current practice (dumping prompts into documents with confusing names and occasionally reorganizing and/or culling them) seems kind of silly right now. Maybe in a year or three.

I let myself get distracted yesterday and didn't finish an Overdrive ebook that I was enjoying. It expired about an hour after I got up today, and I was only 68% through it. Getting the ebook again will take a long time, so I've put a hold on the paper version. There are copies of that on the shelf, so getting one shouldn't take more than two weeks.

( Death of a neighbor. Few details )

UCon has announced that they'll be online this year rather than face to face. I'd been expecting that because the convention is in November. I'm pretty sure that they needed to let the venue know at a good distance out from the date.

We know some of the organizers, and Scott will be helping some of them test a couple of different platforms for running boardgames. They were supposed to play Flash Point last night, but the other person was ill, so it's delayed until tonight. Hopefully, it will happen.

I'm not sure if I'll participate in the convention this year. I'm not sure that I want to fight the technological challenges involved. I would like to run some role playing scenarios, but I'm not convinced that a virtual convention will be as welcoming for that.

I had been thinking to experiment with GMing online, but I put the idea on hold when I started having issues with my hands. The new laptop handles audio and video better than the old one did, though, so it may be time to look at that again.

We actually got our Imperfect Foods box this week. Given that we didn't get a box last week, we weren't sure we would.

I've almost finished a draft of one of my lingering WIP. It's kind of skeletal in terms of sense of place and of anchoring sensory details, but it's more than 11000 words so far. I may edit for description, but I also may not. I think there are only about a dozen people who'll read this one because it's a crossover of two of my previous long series (the two Sky High series) and won't make any sense without those. It's a fairly self-indulgent thing but also fun for me to write.

I'm thinking that I might make a list of my WIP again and ask you all if any of the stories are of particular interest. I think that knowing that a specific person was interested in a specific story might help me finish it. Maybe I'll just stick with the stories that I think will be short(ish) standalones. I'd like to feel like I'm finishing things rather than starting and abandoning dozens more things.

Today will be a day for cooking, I think. Well, some cooking. We haven't finished last week's pot pie yet, so making more has to wait for the dish to be empty and clean. I can bake the squash today, though, and get Scott and Cordelia to chop up the other ingredients. I also want to change our sheets and run 2-3 loads of laundry.

I've been trying to read some of the fics and ebooks that I've previously downloaded for later reading. I've got nearly 600 things that I either haven't read or am not sure whether or not I've read. Some of them are relatively short while others really aren't. I made a bad indexing choice when I created my spreadsheet of ebooks, however, so I can't sort by length right now.

Basically, I appended 'words' or 'pages' to all entries in my length field so that I could distinguish what metric I was using. Ordering things by that field doesn't treat the numbers as numbers, so '197 words' indexes after '18444444 words.' (The fields are author, title, fandom (using Gutenberg as a fandom), length, series, read (y/n/?), and notes.)

I don't think that the cooking chickpeas from dry is a thing that works well for me. My digestive system hasn't been happy any day that I've eaten those, mostly gas issues which isn't usual for me with chickpeas and beans. Possibly soaking them longer would help; the packaging recommended 6-8 hours with a warning that longer would lead to the chickpeas splitting open. I stopped at about 7 hours.

I'm also not sure that I cooked the dratted things long enough. They taste fine and don't crunch any more than I'd expect from canned chickpeas, but there's something off.

I got our sheets changed yesterday and ran two loads of laundry (including the sheets). I had two prescriptions that needed to be picked up, so Scott did the week's shopping.

I got Cordelia started as a volunteer for one of those online archival transcription projects. She likes history a lot, and I sold it as something she could put on college applications. She says it's harder than she thought it would be but that she thinks she's better at it than some of the other volunteers. I can't evaluate the truth of the second part of that sentence, but I'm glad she feels like she's doing okay with it.

She has also started trying to learn some French. One of her friends is taking it and needs a study buddy. I don't know if that will go anywhere because she's embarrassed to do any of the spoken bits if Scott or I might hear her.

Scott did a watch-along of the Babylon 5 pilot and first episode last night with some people he knows from Facebook. The rest of the group will be doing it regularly, but they're aiming for evenings, so Scott won't be able to participate because he'll be at work.

My goals for the day include cleaning out the fridge to get rid of leftovers that are more than three weeks old. I also want to make a chicken pot pie. I'm not sure exactly what I'll put into it beyond the chicken and a lot of carrots (Imperfect Foods keeps sending us carrots). Possibly, Scott will chop an onion for me.

I'd like to finish my story for the Wayback Exchange. There are a couple of exchanges that I'm considering treats for and others I'm considering signing up for. Fandom 5K is in the middle of the sign up period, and there's a Naruto exchange-- Exchange no Jutsu! --that's currently in nominations.

I have several ebooks from the library and need to spend some time on those. A couple of them, I may not bother to finish because, while they're not actively bad, they're not really my thing. I have to keep reminding myself that I have options enough that I don't have to accept things that aren't good fits. When I was in high school, I was desperate enough for books that I'd finish things just because they were available.

I've also been working on catching up on reading WIP that I've subscribed to. I've got several subscriptions that have 10+ chapters piled up and waiting to be read. I keep looking at the size of the backlog and finding a cat to wax instead.

I've also got some phone calls I need to make. I haven't heard from my father, and I still haven't called to request c-pap supplies. I'm pretty sure there are other calls I should make, too, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

Oh, I know. I want to look into scheduling a tune up for our AC. The company that we use has emailed to say that they're still operating, having been designated as essential services. The question is whether or not such a thing can be done with safe social distancing. A lot of their technicians are older than I am.

I've got a book on CD from the library. 11 of the 12 CDs read fine on my laptop (via USB connection), but I can only get the 8th CD to play in our DVD/CD player in the living room. Even there, most of it won't play. I'm not sure why because the disk looks clean and unmarred. I hope the rest of the book is intelligible without CD 8.

I've got a DVD that can't be renewed and two books that can't be. I won't finish all of them. I'm going to prioritize the DVD because it has a longer waitlist than either of the books. I've also got about half a dozen comics/graphic novels that I might manage tonight or tomorrow morning.

I'm a little groggy this afternoon. Cordelia woke me at 8:30 this morning. At that point, I'd had less than six hours of sleep. I ended up taking another half tablet of halcion and got another three and a half hours of sleep. Scott told me that I should sleep as long as I needed to, but then he also got cranky about the fact that we had a deadline for being able to do a test drive today.

We just got in under the wire on the test drive; we arrived at the dealership at 2 p.m. We tried a Subaru Legacy 2020; our old car was a 2016 Legacy. The 2020, according to Scott, drives like the 2016. I can still get in and out without issues, and Scott doesn't have to duck low in order to see out the front. We'd have liked to have the option to get something used, but we're on a very tight timeline. We've only got a couple of weeks left on the insurance paid rental.

I've been spending a lot of time reading long fics. Many of them are incomplete (probably permanently), and many are only mediocre. I just haven't had the wherewithal to work at anything.

I haven't read much of anything here on DreamWidth this month. I'm not going to backread at this point because there's just too much. Even thinking about it is anxiety inducing.

I've lost several days this week to not feeling well and to diving headlong into some extremely long fics. The reading helped time pass but was kind of bad from the point of view of me going to sleep on time.

I have my assignment for the Wayback Exchange. I think I can write a good story for it as it's mainly a request for worldbuilding. I need to review canon for that. I also need to review canon for my Fandom Trumps Hate story. That will be a crossover of one canon I'm pretty comfortable writing with another that I've never tried writing before.

Yesterday, I was very conservative about what I ate, and I drank a lot of Gatorade. I also went back to bed less than an hour after Scott and Cordelia left. I slept with a lot of dreams full of anxiety and awareness of how my body was hurting (just the usual stuff). I'm considering doing it again this morning, but as it's Thursday, I probably won't. I need to shower, and I need to get ready for the cleaning lady to arrive in the early afternoon.

I've been trying to find a balance between spending time in the living room in order to watch some TV and movies and the slow creep of pain from being there. I could probably manage to be out there longer if I didn't try to use my laptop while watching things, but I would rather just skip watching things and use my laptop in the bedroom than watch anything at all without access.

Mostly, I'd like to spend time out there in the evenings because it would mean being social. I miss that.

We got the absentee ballot mailed. Postage was 71 cents which made me and Scott both wonder about ballots with insufficient postage because nothing in the instructions indicates that the dratted things are too heavy for a single stamp to cover it. That seems like very basic information that would be easy to provide because what goes into the return packet won't vary from election to election. More stuff printed on the ballot won't make a difference between one standard stamp and two.

I did a second trial of primidone yesterday. I took half a tablet at about 5 p.m. I didn't have problems immediately; they kind of crept up on me. By 8 or 9, I was coughing if I laughed or walked from one end of the house to another. It kind of felt like I had something tight and heavy wrapping my ribcage. I didn't wheeze, but I'd say the medication sets off my asthma.

I ended up using an albuterol inhaler at about 10, and the tightness kind of evaporated. Using the inhaler was a gamble because, while it does let me breathe better, it makes me shake more and can send my anxiety sky high. I think I had enough sedation from the primidone to counteract most of the usual side effects, though, as all that happened was that I started breathing easier.

I slept about eight hours. My dreams were all anxiety dreams, pretty standard stuff. We'd moved to a new house, and I didn't know where anything was or how to find food. There was a cafe, but I couldn't find a place to sit and didn't have any money and really had to be somewhere else very soon. Scott kept disappearing, and I needed to figure out the buses, but no one else thought those were important.

I have no idea why we'd have bought a house without me seeing it first, and a house wedged between a Target and a strip mall seems like a terrible choice (but possibly less expensive?). I know that anxiety dreams make even less sense than waking anxiety, but I kind of wish my dreaming brain would have me doing something more interesting and story-like.

I woke about 8 a.m. and then crashed hard about 10 a.m. even though I'd eaten and had caffeine. I'm still groggy after stronger caffeine. Scott got me a Wendy's burger, and I'm hoping that will help as it tends to be my last ditch defense against falling over.

I have two library books due today that I can't renew. I'm not done with either and don't have time to finish even one of them. I can't place new holds on them until after I return them, so I'm going to have to try to remember to do that. I've got two graphic novels that aren't due this week but that I could feasibly finish reading and return today.

I didn't end up getting most of the things done yesterday that I wanted to. Fortunately, I should have most of the weekend for this stuff.

I put away laundry, ran the dishwasher, and made two meatloaves (we had that much ground turkey. It was still good, but it had been thawed for long enough that I really needed to cook it). I need to wash another load of laundry, do two beta reads, help with the grocery shopping, and manage whatever else comes up.

I'd like to answer some DW comments, but I may have to admit that there are dozens that I'm not ever going to respond to. I apologize for that.

Scott thinks the ground turkey may have been off. I didn't try the meatloaf because I made it late enough in the day that the stuff in it might make me sick when I went to bed. Right now, we're waiting to see how Cordelia feels when she gets up as she also had some last night.

I've been having trouble judging meat products as spoiled/not spoiled recently, so I might have been wrong. I thought the ground turkey smelled okay, and, during the last week, a lot of things have been smelling spoiled to me that aren't (lunch meat, turkey bacon, pre-cooked sausages). I know there's something wrong in that direction, but it didn't occur to me that I might think something was okay that was actually spoiled.

The other stuff I put in was rolled oats, sesame oil, a freshly opened jar of garlic Alfredo sauce, rosemary, dill, and salt.

I also haven't done anything toward finding a beta reader for my Worldbuilding Exchange story. I really do need a second set of eyes on it because it's peculiar in style/flow. It makes sense to me but might not to anyone else. I'd call it poetry (free verse), but it's really lacking in the sort of imagery that I would consider critical for that classification.

I've got several things that I want to finish reading or start reading today. Tomorrow is library day, and if I read a couple of chapters of each of the library books I haven't yet started, I'll likely end up returning some of them unfinished. They're just sitting on the shelf right now.

Cordelia's English class this semester will be doing three different works of literature-- Romeo and Juliet, a collection of Hemingway's short stories, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I haven't read the Achebe, but generically approve of something not by a white guy. I'm not sure that they'll learn as much from a full book of Hemingway short stories as they would from shorts by different authors (and maybe some of those different authors could be not-white-guys? Maybe?).

I'm against Romeo and Juliet in high school because part of understanding the play is understanding that young teens do sometimes act like that. Most kids I know look at the play and feel superior because they would never, ever do those stupid things. They miss the fact that they're pretty much all likely to do other such things.

I'm not against Shakespeare in high school, but I'd go for Macbeth or Julius Caesar or possibly one of the English history plays with a discussion on propaganda and patronage and fictionalizing history. Most of the comedies are bad choices unless one has time to stage at least half the play. The comedies have more moving pieces and rely more on shared assumptions between text and reader/viewer. Understanding the comedies, really understanding them, requires a lot more history (just history of theater and literature) than the damned history plays do.

Of course, I'm very fundamentally opposed to teaching literature without context. I think that a big part of what makes literature interesting is seeing how it looks different from different cultural angles. Part of that is teaching that pretty much everything will have a different effect on different individuals. There is no such thing as universally appealing art.

I should probably see if I can dig up a copy of "Shakespeare in the Bush" to toss at Cordelia. She'd likely refuse to read it, but I think that what's in there matters more than being able to recognize blank verse or to recognize alliteration or archaic dirty jokes (not that that last is utterly without value).

I suppose that Romeo and Juliet, Hemingway, and Things Fall Apart are likely to be on AP tests or something. I just want the kids to learn tools for understanding their world and each other. I also think that reading in general is more important than reading specific texts and that writing coherently and grammatically is more important than reading.