April 2023 in Review

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Thistle

Well. April was not as bad as I was expecting, to be honest. It wasn’t a great month, but considering how bad April and May tend to feel for me, I’m happy that things have been as even keel as they have! Fingers crossed that this continues!

April was also an eventful month, with five foster kittens, an unexpected surgery for Jojo, Elle getting home from college, neighborhood-wide garage sales, setting up multiple portfolio photoshoots, our young tabbies turning two years old, the garden exploding with life, early voting for city-wide elections, and a bunch of smaller house projects. The only downside to this is that it all occurred within a very narrow list of places, all within my smallest comfort zone. I need to actively widen that circle going forward, or I’ll become far too homebound for my mental health needs!

Reading and Watching
It was a good month for books! I read six this month, half print half audio. I also tried and culled another nine books from my list. (My extra-long TBR pile was starting to get to me, so I ordered a bunch from the library to sort through!) Favorite: The London Séance Society.

I finished watching Love is Blind this month, of course, and had a fun watch party with my friends for the finale and reunion. Our host went so far as to get us our own gold goblets for the party! I also finally watched Wednesday, only six months late. Still haven’t watched any of the movies on my list, some of which have been waiting for 18 months now…

Goals
One of the goals that Jason and I set this year – separate from any personal goals that I have – was to pay off a significant amount of our debt. This includes all debt, from credit cards to mortgage, and the goal was to pay off 10% of the total we started with on January 1st. We knew this was doable, because we were set to get a tax credit bonus for installing solar panels last year, and that entire refund was going straight into the loan for the panels, paying off 25% of that loan. That was part of our initial loan paperwork. However, that alone accounted for under 5% of the total debts, so we would need to make up the rest, which we couldn’t do on minimum payments alone. With the rest of our tax refund and Jason’s work bonus, we were able to do some aggressive payments in March, and in the first weekend of April, we surpassed that 10% mark. Now, that can change if we build up consumer/credit debt, or have to replace a car, etc. The goal is to end the year at least 10% down, and so far, we’re doing well!

House
We finished the bits in the backyard that we started in March, including a raised bed that we planted some dewberry bushes in. Hopefully they grow! I love dewberries and would be so happy to have some growing in our yard, but we’ll see. We still had money left from our yard fund after this was done, so we finally replaced the hideous light fixture in our dining room, and installed a rain shower in the master bathroom (yay!!!). We still had money left, but we had to stop with the house projects. Jojo suddenly needed surgery, which we hadn’t planned on yet, so we took the last of our banked funds to pay for that. It felt nice to have that cushion saved up already, though! We haven’t had that privilege since our previous house collapsed in the summer of 2018!

The Ferals
Miss Sassypants aka Sassafras is still with us. After her first week with us, she’d dropped a tiny bit of weight, so she still wasn’t up to the right size for surgery. The shelter gave us some meds, which she absolutely hated, and which may not do anything at all. The girl is just a dainty eater. The meds are dewormers, but she has no poop-issues, so I’m not sure if they’ll do anything or just make her mad to swallow. Either way, we take her back in again on the 9th, so hopefully she’ll be above her 2 lb goal by then. She’s grown super sweet, though still very timid and jumpy, and hopefully all these good experiences (minus the meds) with humans will help her to transition into a new home well!

Health/Fitness
Mentally, I’m about 50/50 for this April. On the one hand, it’s been cooler than usual for this time of year, so the heat hasn’t been as oppressive, and it wasn’t until late in the month that my brain started to slip into zombie mode. On the other hand, I did eventually slip into zombie mode, and I’ve additionally found myself very homebound this month. This tends to increase my agoraphobia issues. When I finally realized this was happening, I started trying to get out more. Hopefully between that realization, my child coming home from college, and an upcoming vacation in May, I can get beyond the hardest months of the year!

Fitness-wise, and physical-health-wise, this month was awful. I hardly exercised, though I did finally finish up my yoga backlog from 2022. Since there were literally only four videos on that backlog, it’s not a huge win, but I’m still going to give myself a gold star for it! My body has struggled a lot, and I want to be more mobile. I need to work more on that in May. Fingers crossed.

Favorite Photos
I spent a lot more time on the business side of photography this month, so I have far fewer photos to choose favorites from. Outside of portrait sessions, these are my favorites for April.

Top row, left to right: portrait of Alex; iris in bloom; sweet little Bean
Bottom, left to right: spiral upwards; baby Okra; portrait of Spring

Highlights of April
I haven’t been very good at recording my happy moments this month, but here’s what I remembered to write down.

  • met our insurance deductible very early in the month, to our surprise
  • surpassed our debt-payoff goals for the year by April 1st, woohoo! This, and the accompanying bump to our paycheck because we’ve paid off our 401k loan, finally gives us the clean slate we’ve needed since our finances collapsed in 2018.
  • getting my art wall started – it’s sparse, but I can see where it’ll be one day, and I have time to curate the art I choose to hang there
  • bookworm princess photoshoot with my friend’s daughter, Ashley
  • the first time Sassafras purred
  • one of our irises bloomed – the first time any of them have since we planted them in 2020!
  • scheduling a collaborative shoot with a costume-designer from Austin
  • finally replacing the godawful “chandelier” that came in our dining room with some decent lighting
  • a new rain shower head in my bathroom
  • LIB watch party complete with golden goblets
  • the Veggie Tails kittens all got adopted within two days of going onto the adoption floor, yay!
  • Elle getting home safely for the summer (with pink hair for bonus fun!)
  • Murderbot party (ha!)
  • a lovely meet-and-greet with my hiking group, meeting so many new folks and seeing many old friends

Coming up in May
PLANNIVERSARY!!!!!! That’s right – assuming nothing goes amiss in the short time left, Jason and I will finally go on our 20th anniversary vacation, only 3.5 years after our 20th anniversary and only 3 years after Covid got our original plans delayed a half-dozen times… (We were meant to sail out of Seattle in May 2020.) There’s also a possibility that Morrigan and Katy will be traveling to SA toward the end of the month, overlapping a little with our vacation, but hopefully we’ll be able to see them briefly before they return to Kansas!

Note: It’s unlikely I will be blogging super regularly in May, potentially through August, as is often my pattern. That will all depend on reading mood and writing slumps and all the typical things. So if I get sporadic or even disappear for a bit, I’ll be back like always.

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Sunday Coffee – Universal Yums

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Thistle

Years ago, I put a subscription to Universal Yums on my Christmas wish list. I didn’t figure anyone would ever gift it to me, but the idea of a food-based subscription box was intriguing and I wanted to remember to get it at some point. Then this past Christmas, Jason bought me a year’s subscription – ironically now that the kids are gone, and we’ll be going through each months’ snacks alone!

Every month, Universal Yums features snacks from different countries around the world. I’ve now gone through four boxes/countries (with a fifth that just arrived), so I thought I should take time to do a little review. Jason chose the medium-sized box from the three available, which costs ~$25/mo and includes about a dozen snacks. He got to chose the country for the first box, and after that, it’s a mystery until it arrives. That first month, he chose India, and since then we’ve received boxes featuring Austria, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Belgium. (The box from Belgium is our most recent arrival, so won’t be included in this review, though see a note about it at the end of this post.)

Thoughts:

First: I’m a little annoyed by how much Europe has been featured so far. I really hope that further boxes will go further afield, and let us try more variety. Many of the European boxes have been really similar in terms of content.

Second: The boxes consist of about 75% sweets, 25% salty snacks. India was the one exception so far, featuring about 50/50 ratio. I’m sure that’s what sells better, but I do hope we get a few more salty/savory snacks in future boxes!

Third: There is a really good variety of chocolate and non-chocolate sweet items. It makes for a decent mix that both Jason and I enjoy. There has rarely been an item that neither of us enjoy, or that neither of us can eat due to allergies (etc).

Fourth: So far, my favorite box has been the one from Austria, my favorite item has come from the Brazil box, and the box I could eat the least from was India. (I’m not a big fan of Indian sweets. As for the savory items, I loved the flavors – especially the Tikka Masala chips – but I’m allergic to peppers, so I could only eat a tiny bit of anything that used dried peppers before my mouth was ripped to shreds. Boo.)

Fifth: From each month, my favorite items have been:

  • India (excluding the aforementioned chips since I could only eat a couple): Frooti apricot hard candies, which had a delightful little zing and fizz
  • Austria: Hauswirth chocolates with apricot filling (like an apricot jelly coated in chocolate)
  • Brazil: Pit Stop provolone crackers – These tasted almost exactly like the old Nabisco bacon crackers that were discontinued ages ago, and I’ve been craving them ever since! Definitely my very favorite item so far.
  • Netherlands: Max & Alex stroopwafel, which I softened over coffee. I’ve had a stroopwafel before but it was awful, crunchy and overly sweet, so it must have been American. This one was so much better!! Not too sweet, and I could taste the richness of the spices and caramel. I dunked it in my coffee bite by bite!

I’m looking forward to seeing what further boxes we get! Hopefully soon, we can travel to wider variety of cultures and snack choices.

Note on Belgium: I’m not sure what was up with this box, but several of the items came melted into a giant mush, and others smell and taste long past expiration. We haven’t tried everything, but there have been multiple items that have been flat-out inedible, and we’ve contacted customer service to see what’s up with this.

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Nightbirds, by Kate Armstrong (audio)

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Thistle

Magic is forbidden by the church, but it lives on deep inside certain women, kept hidden by rich families to do their bidding with a kiss. On the surface, this is the story of three teenage girls forced into a gilded cage that they all view differently, hunted by zealots who want to destroy them. On a deeper level, this is the tale of men willing to do anything to strip power from women and keep it for themselves.

I should probably be able to say more than that about Nightbirds, but honestly, I struggled to get my brain to engage with this one. The story started slow, and I got two of the main characters confused for a long time. When I finally figured things out, I became invested in the story, but there was a point where I thought I might abandon the book early on. I’m glad I kept going and I look forward to reading the next volume, whenever it released, but I have a feeling that I’m going to need to revisit this one first. April/May is often the time when my brain tends to disengage with books, and I often find myself in situations like this, finishing several chapters without taking in a word (in print or audio). Probably why I tend to take a break from books altogether around this time – I just haven’t wanted to do that this year. So my main takeaway from Nightbirds was that 1) it was a good book, even though I didn’t quite connect with it, and 2) hopefully upon reread, I will more fully appreciate the deeper notes of the story.

Performance: The audiobook was read by Saskia Maarleveld, and I had no problems with her reading. When I was confused between the two characters, I wondered why she was voicing them so differently, since I thought they were the same person. But that’s on me. Heh.

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Wellness Wednesday – Doctors Who Don’t Listen

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Thistle

I haven’t done one of these Wellness Wednesday posts in awhile, mostly because I haven’t really had a lot to talk about, health-wise. But something big has happened this month, and I need to get it off my chest. (Warning: long post.)

Until recently, there was only one option for rheumatology in San Antonio. Back in 2021, my doctor referred me to a particular specialist at that clinic, and there was a 6-7 month wait list, so I didn’t get in until November that year. The following month, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and in January 2022, started on a medication called Enbrel that was meant to lower inflammation numbers and improve my overall condition. The specialist saw me for those two visits in Nov and Dec 2021, but since then, I mostly see her PA, and I’ve seen the specialist again only once back in August 2022. For the most part, I’m okay with seeing the PAs of specialists – they tend to listen more and have more time and empathy for the patient. My primary care doctor, in fact, is a PA. Unfortunately, my rheumatologist’s PA is horrible.

Continue reading →

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The London Séance Society, by Sarah Penner

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Thistle

Lenna is a scientist at heart, but after her sister’s murder, she travels to Paris to meet with a renown spiritualist, Vaudeline. Vaudeline has fled London due to the danger posed by unscrupulous fraudsters there. With Lenna at her side, Vaudeline is brought back to Britain to investigate not only the death of Lenna’s sister, but the murder of the head of the London Séance Society.

I tried to keep my synopsis as bare-bones as possible, because the less you know going into this one, the better it will be. This book is a historical paranormal fantasy, gentle sapphic romance, and murder mystery all wrapped up into one, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with it. I enjoyed Penner’s debut, The Lost Apothecary, when I read it two years ago, but this one? I loved this one. It had everything I could have wanted in a book. The pacing was perfect. The characters were well-drawn and three-dimensional. The relationships were realistic and subtle. The mystery was uncovered slowly, the reader figuring things out along with the characters. I loved the back and forth narration between Lenna’s chapters and those of Mr. Morley, one of the heads of department at the London Séance Society. They provided two very different tones and helped to add dimension to the book. Honestly, it was just everything I could have wished for!

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Sunday Coffee – Random Tidbits

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Thistle

It’s April, and my brain is all over the place, so here are a few of the random thoughts and weird happenings going on right now.

I got an ad from a lingerie company the other day that said I should treat my mom for Mother’s Day from their company. Do folks really buy lingerie for their mothers? Because that seems wildly bizarre to me. I mean, more power to anyone who has this kind of relationship with their mother, but no thank you.

***
Not a month after Atticus underwent dental surgery, Jojo needs dental surgery too. I won’t include a photo of what they found inside his mouth, because it is really gross. I noticed he had a giant lump that felt like a swollen lymph node on the side of his neck, so we took him in. Jojo is of course one of our spiciest cat-kids, so he had to be sedated to even get a look inside his mouth. A giant mass had grown up and around his back molars. They gave him antibiotics and steroids, and after those have enough time to fight off any potential infection, he goes back in to have a bunch of teeth pulled and the mass biopsied to make sure it’s benign. As he’s only five years old, they don’t think it’s cancer, but best to be sure. If anyone wants to know what it looks like, do an image search for cats with FORL. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***
They always say people get diagnosed with ADHD too easily, but this is absolutely not the case. Jason has ADHD. He was diagnosed with it as an adolescent, his father has it, and at least one of his siblings has it. Additionally, at least two of our children have it, though so far neither of them can get a doctor to treat them for it. Apparently the current state of ADHD diagnosis is to try treating with antidepressants first, which seems utterly ridiculous to me. Anyway, Jason has been trying to get diagnosed and properly medicated for this for about 18 months now. He’s been to multiple psychiatrists, and they all refuse to treat him with anything other than antidepressants. They also keep shunting him off sideways to new doctors. Like for instance, his most recent psychiatrist saw him three times. For both the second and third visits, he waited in the lobby for two hours past his appointment time and saw the doctor for short visits, but she claims he waits so long because she spends that entire waiting time scouring his charts, and then charges over $300 for the visit. Total scam. This last time, she made him wait two hours, told him she was looking over his charts, then told him she didn’t think she was a good fit and suggested he see someone else. W. T. F.

***
I have a new rain shower head. Jason installed it yesterday afternoon, so I haven’t used it yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I’ve wanted a rain shower for a very long time, so I hope it lives up to everything I’ve been hoping for!

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The Longest Race, by Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon (audio)

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Thistle

Subtitled: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team

From the subtitle of this book, I expected it to be part memoir, part exposé about the Nike Oregon Project. While it is that, the balance between these two parts is uneven, with memoir being about 80%. Goucher was mostly kept isolated from the other athletes at the NIP, so she was a bit oblivious to what was happening for a good number of years. There was also a culture of don’t-ask-questions, do-what-you’re-told, and she obeyed that. Terrible things were done to the athletes, including Goucher, sometimes with the athletes’ willingness and sometimes not. But this book was mostly about how Goucher dealt with her own part of things, how she existed within the culture, rather than about the culture itself. After having read and loved Lauren Fleshman’s book that was part memoir, part exposé on running culture around women, this follow-up was disappointing. I’m not saying it was badly done or anything – I’m just not a memoir person generally so this wasn’t the book for me.

Performance: This book was read by the author (while the introduction was read by Mary Pilon, the co-author). In general, books read by the author tend to be poorly performed unless the author has some experience in acting/performance. In this instance, Goucher read the book much as you would typically hear from a student reading a passage aloud for a classroom. Every sentence ended with the same cadence, and there were weird halting moments between words mid-sentence, in places where no pauses should have been. As a read-aloud, it was fine, but it was not an audio performance. I honestly recommend reading the print version if you’re interested in this one.

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Fosters: From Veggies to Sassafras

Posted on April 20, 2023 by Thistle

Five weeks ago, the animal shelter called to ask me if I could take over care for a litter of four bottle babies. They were about 4-5 weeks old and only a week out from weaning, so I agreed. This is just about the only way I can take on bottle babies, given my sleep disorder and Jason’s work schedule. I honestly wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to take another bottle baby unless they landed on my doorstep in an emergency situation like Shai and Hulud did. It was quite sweet to suddenly have four littles scrambling for their bottle again.

(Clockwise from top left: Sprout, Broccoli, Bean, Okra)

Our Veggie Tails were quite a lot of work. Unlike most cats, it took them weeks to figure out how to use the litterbox properly. They also had diarrhea issues that required four different meds to clear up. Because of their early life traumas (which led them to being orphaned at about a week old), they were extremely malnourished and had a lot of catching up to do in the weight department – especially Okra, the runt of the litter. He weighed only 350 grams when he arrived at our house, almost 200 grams smaller than he should have been for that age, and about 100 grams smaller than his siblings.

Despite all the issues, the Veggies ended up thriving. By their last night with us, all four siblings ended up over 1000 grams, well past the two-pound mark they needed to make for surgery. Our five weeks with them gave us a really good idea of their personalities, too. Sprout was the leader and protector, less cuddly and more independent, so it felt like you were chosen every time she asked to be snuggled and actually started purring. Bean was a lover and preferred to cuddle than to play, and he and Sprout were extremely attached to each other (hopefully they get adopted together!). Broccoli was an explorer and an adrenaline junkie, who frequently stood on her hind legs and waved her arms around to “scare” whatever toy she was attacking. Okra was a total goofball with no spacial awareness – he’d easily roll off a lap or run into a table leg – and a healthy dose of Drama King, the kind of cat who would begin screaming in “pain” during wrestle sessions before he was even touched. All four were as sweet as can be, and we will miss them.

(Clockwise from top left: Broccoli, Sprout, Okra, Bean)

Which brings me to…Sassafras.

The Veggies were the last big litter we could take for the spring, because Elle (Laurence) will be returning home next week for the summer and we’ll no longer have our big foster room. We can foster a singleton or duo in Jason’s room, but it’s a small room so no full litters, and we need a little more time between litters to clean things. (My room, sadly, can’t be used to foster except very short term with healthy kittens because it’s carpeted.) In addition to the change in house circumstances, Jason and I have our upcoming Planniversary vacation, and we can’t take in fosters that will need to be here longer than the intervening time. We also know that sometimes a batch of kittens will need “only a week” of foster, and that week will snowball into a month or more, like with Petunia.

On Monday, a singleton who needed fostering for only a week showed up on the daily email. Her name was Sassafras, and I volunteered to bring her home, even though the timing would overlap with our Veggie Tails by a couple days. When I picked her up, they told me that 1) she’d only come in to the shelter a few hours before, so they knew nothing about her history; 2) she weighed 1.9 lbs so she just needed to gain a little weight, though I also needed to monitor her for any potential illnesses/parasites/etc; and 3) she was extremely shy and a little hissy, but not mean. This last bit ended up being exactly right. Sassafras was terrified of humans and would hiss a little, but not attack. Which meant that our main goal over the week we’re supposed to have her is to get her socialized.

A week is not a lot of time and honestly, I kinda wish we could opt for two weeks. We’ve had to put her in a large playpen because otherwise she’ll hide under furniture and never come out. She’s gotten used to Jason because the room smells like him, so at night she’ll sit beside him a little. She’s also gotten to the point where she’ll purr if we touch her, but she’ll also hiss before we touch her, so she’s just very confused about what’s going on right now. She needs time. However, I have no control over the timing of this. The thing I worry about most is that someone will snatch her up because she’s a beautiful siamese kitten, not knowing that it’s going to take some work to help her feel comfortable and safe. So wish us luck with her, that she’ll either socialize quickly or the shelter will give us more time. One way or another, hopefully Miss SassyPants will be a sweet happy little Sassafras before she hits the adoption floor!

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April Self Portrait: PTSD

Posted on April 18, 2023 by Thistle

I’m not sure how to start this post. Y’all. April’s self-portrait went wildly off the rails. Fully transparent here – not every photoshoot works, not every setting works out, things happen, things fail. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do exactly for April’s shoot. I knew what I wanted to wear. I’d found an old prom dress at a thrift store a few months back, and I bought a crop shirt with puffy sleeves and a vest to go over the top of it. What I would have loved was a dark academia type setting, outdoors along a stone wall, a corridor of some sort. However, the only places in town that I know like that wouldn’t be ideal for self-portraits, where I have to be both behind and in front of the camera. I thought about the side yard of my house, paved with bricks and rocks, with an old wooden fence on one side, and I said, hmm, why not? It wasn’t right, but it was something.

Jason was at the thrift store for unrelated reasons, and I asked him if there were any interesting chairs there that I might be able to use for a shoot. He actually found a really cute one! I still had the books out from the recent bookworm princess photoshoot. I’d straightened my hair, put on my outfit, and in a weird mood that I didn’t yet recognize, I made up my face to look sickly and deadish. Everything was cobbled together with only a vague plan, and to make things worse, the timing was completely off. I planned to go out late enough that the side yard would no longer have golden light, but would still have light enough for photos. I had two light sticks that I was going to use to color in with extra directional color, one white, one blue, but they were only meant to add to the effect, not become the sole light sources of the shoot. Through a series of unfortunate coincidences, though, Jason and I got everything set up half an hour later than expected, and I lost light quickly. I also chose the wrong lens for the confines of the space. The majority of the photos came out terribly, and I felt so angry by the end of the shoot. Angry, and worthless as a photographer, and hideous in my body, and ashamed of the entire evening. (Note: The above collage is a sampling of the bad photos – I chose to edit them the same way as the good photos, to show that while you can do a lot with editing, you can’t save a bad photo.)

Usually, I come out of these self-portrait shoots feeling really good. Some of the shots can be really frustrating, because I’m not a model and it’s difficult to be both in front of and behind the camera simultaneously, but generally I find some good balance by the end of a shoot. Not so this time. I went to bed angry and upset, had restless dreams all night long, and decided that I couldn’t live with the results. I was going to need a redo.

My hair was still relatively straight. The morning light would be a similar softness as evening for a short while, so I put on my makeup – less ghoulish this second time – and got things set up again. I grabbed a different lens, and didn’t bother with the light sticks since it was daylight and they would’ve just gotten in the way. Somehow overnight, things had finally solidified in my mind, and I realized that far from the original idea I had of dark academia – since I didn’t have an appropriate setting for that – I was trying to personify the way I feel in April and May. Long time friends and readers will know that this is the time of year that I suffer from intense depression, agoraphobia, and PTSD. The unconscious way I’d put together my makeup, to look dead and bruised and sickly, married up with how I’ve been feeling for weeks. And with that better idea of the vibe I was going for, combined with better light and a different lens, the secondary self-portrait shoot went well.

These aren’t pretty pictures. They aren’t meant to be. They’re highly stylized to complement the feeling I wanted to get across, and they feel heavy, drained, lethargic. I didn’t originally set out to take photos of depression and PTSD, but honestly it was pretty cathartic to create them.

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Sunday Coffee – Wednesday

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Thistle

Back in November, I meant to watch Wednesday when it first came out. Jason and I were going to watch it together, because it was coming out during Thanksgiving week when he was going to be off work. Except then we both came down with covid, and once he went back to work, there was just never time over the weekends with Christmas approaching and our youngest coming home for a month. Then we began to see negative reviews of the show, and Jason decided he wasn’t really interested anymore. I was more preoccupied with other shows, and have been feeling mostly in a mood for rewatches rather than new stuff for months now. But I decided that it really had been too long, and it was time to watch the show, or cross it off my list.

Y’all. This show was like if Tim Burton and Disney Kids had a baby. It was so CGI-heavy (not for the monsters or paranormal stuff, but just the general colors and skin-shaping and everything) that it could almost have been entirely computer generated. The Addams’ family was always going to be over the top, but I was put off by how the weird stereotypes that everyone portrayed in addition to the Addams stereotypes. I know a lot of people complained about the shift from the traditional version of the story where it’s the one family different from the rest of the world, but I didn’t mind exploring new territory. What threw me off was the exaggerative nature of every aspect as the show began – like watching a modern-day version of the Black Hole Sun music video.

Obviously, I didn’t start by enjoying the show, and I wasn’t sure I was going to continue because it actually made me really uncomfortable, the stereotypes were so strong. Then I met Xavier, the one kid on campus who wasn’t exaggerated, and who basically played the straight man to bounce everyone else’s larger-than-life characters off of. That was a relief, but in itself wouldn’t have been enough to keep me watching. One straight man in a sea of caricatures can only do so much to balance things. But this particular character looked familiar, and so I looked him up on IMDB.

As it turns out, Xavier is played by Percy Hynes White, who in 2014/15 played a kid named Simon Brooks in eight episodes of Murdoch Mysteries. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail on who Simon is, only to say that he’s important to one of the major characters of the show in a near-family type of way. As watchers, we get to know him and grow fond of him, and it’s sad when he moves away and is no longer on the show. Simon is roughly pre-teen aged in Murdoch, but obviously is far more grown up now a decade later, playing a high-school-aged Xavier. Some people change a lot between those ages, but this kid looks just like himself, and so immediately I felt a kinship to him.

As I said above, I’ve been far more into rewatching shows, and this tends to be my nature 75% of the time. Murdoch is one of my comfort series, familiar and friendly. And as stupid as it is, that little drop of comforting familiarity in Simon-now-Xavier made all the difference to me with Wednesday. The characters thankfully grew slightly less caricatured over time, and the storyline settled into an interesting mystery. While it won’t be a favorite show that I rewatch often, I’m glad I didn’t give up on it.

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