Day 1 – 2023

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Thistle

Start how you mean to go on, right?

January 1st, 2023:

– I had everything prepared the night before, so that I could get a little extra sleep before I woke up to get ready for my hike. The group for this hike included three longtime friends, so it was nice to spend some time with both them and some folks I’d never met before. The hike itself was a four mile out-and-back that I’m pretty familiar with. It’s not strenuous, mostly level, which is why I chose it. I literally haven’t done more than four miles in a month, much less a day, since April last year. In good news, my back didn’t act up and I was able to complete the hike without an issue! In not-as-good news, I’m definitely feeling it this morning, especially in my feet and calves, heh.

– Post-hike (and post-hike shower, eating, etc), the first thing I did was download the audio and ebook files for the newest Brandon Sanderson book, Tress of the Emerald Sea. This book is part of the Year of Sanderson from the kickstarter last March. The physical copy should show up later this month (or perhaps a bit later than that, re: manufacturing and shipping delays) but obviously my media of choice for Sanderson is audio! It won’t be my first book of the year, but it will definitely be sometime this month!

– Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent editing the photos I took at my grandparents’ memorial on the 31st. I took a lot of care over these, because I not only wanted to capture those moments, but to capture the feel of the memorial – both the grief and the companionship. Some of the photos came out really, really well, and I’m so happy that I could spend part of the first day of the year working on a photo project.

– Halfway through the afternoon, I took a break to visit a friend with Jason. The visit was brief and the reasons were not particularly noteworthy (we were picking up some items she wanted out of her garage that we could use), but while the guys were loading up the stuff, I got to chat with my friend about her planned summer wedding, and it was a nice break to have mid-day!

– I began my first audiobook of the year in the afternoon, which was Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson. It’s an 11-hour audio, and I ended up listening to almost 7 hours of it, first while editing photos, then hanging out with my current foster kitten, Petunia. Jason and Laurence spent the evening out seeing a movie (Babylon – they both loved it, but I was not at all interested in that one!), so I had a quiet night in with my cats and my audiobook. It was perfect.

So yes, I spent my first day exactly as I hope the year goes on: active and social balanced by work on my art / passion, with some quiet time to spend with books and cats.

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2023 Goals

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Thistle

Over the last few years, I’ve let things sort of stack up on top of me. It’s been easy to say, f– this, who cares if this gets done, I’ll do it later; and then just read or watch TV or scroll Tiktok or take naps. Every month in my bullet journal, I have a list of tasks or goals that I want to get done that month. Many of them were originally created months earlier, sometimes years earlier. I’m not doing a good job at evaluating priorities, and the more things pile up, the more I procrastinate. I find it really easy to deal with pileups by just deciding that none of the things matter anymore – like culling a bunch of unread books if my TBR gets too high – and now I’m in a situation where almost everything on my list is either something I can’t or don’t want to cull.

Now that my life is moving in a new direction, I want to actively work to move forward, and part of that work is to whittle down the amount of baggage I’m carrying. So these goals will be focused in two areas: an area where I’m growing and want to continue to grow, and getting all the rest of the Stuff off my plate.

Photography

This is obviously the place where I’m growing. Over the next year, I would like to continue to improve and carve out a steady place for this in my life. These goals are designed to help.

• Continue to hold monthly group practice photo shoots as long as I have the volunteers and availability to do this.

• Drop my daily photo record-keeping, and focus instead on intentional weekly projects. For the last three years, I’ve kept up a daily photo journal, and I’ve found this can be both wonderful and frustrating. It’s too easy to just snap a phone pic of whatever happens to be around in order to get a daily pic, you know? So I want to be more deliberate in 2023. Each week, I want to take a prompt or subject to focus on. I have a few different sources to pull from, including 52 Frames weekly prompts and some photo prompt cards a friend gave me for Christmas in 2021. (Hey! It’s kinda like a Get Off My Plate goal, only better!)

• And because no part of my life hasn’t suffered from procrastination syndrome, I also want to focus on these specific types of shots that were originally listed under last year’s goals:

  • sunrise but not from home – on location, either urban or wild
  • movement photo with central focal point (example: focus on feet while on a swing, so the background moves but the feet remain in focus)
  • astrophotography, particularly of stars, taken with long exposure
  • urban night photography with long exposure to capture light-streaks from cars
  • focus on stationary object while background moves

Get Off My Plate

Not everything on the following list is unpleasant or a chore. They’re just things that were meant to happen long before now, and I haven’t made the time or room for them. (Or, like when it comes to our 20th anniversary vacation that was originally meant to be in May 2020, circumstances caused many, many delays.) My one-word for 2023 is RELEASE, and this is the part of goal-making that surrounds it: to release the baggage and lighten the load, to better enable walking forward.

• Watch or cull the following movies, some of which have been on my list for well over a year:

  • Luca
  • Encanto
  • The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
  • Jurassic World

• See these specific doctors that I’m long overdue for:

  • ob/gyn
  • dermatologist
  • dentist

• Read/cull all of my 2023 book priorities (34) **Note: This is much higher than normal for me, but I don’t mind because only 13 are already published. The remaining 21 are 2023 releases.

• Finally take our Alaskan cruise to celebrate our 20th anniversary (Dec 2019) – scheduled for May 2023

• Try 10 new-to-me products, companies, or events
Note: This may not seem like a “get off my plate” goal but I have a long-running list of locations, products, etc that I’ve wanted to try for ages. The caveat of this goal is that only hanging items are allowed to count toward it, unless none remain.

• Finish getting off Facebook

• Print a monthly photo book

• Fully clean out the garage (including items to sell)

• Finish my 2022 backlog of yoga videos, without any pressure to continue on with 2023 new releases (4)

• Use up the rest of my wax melts (21)

Optional

The following are more “get off my plate” goals, but either depend on circumstance or other folks or the right finances to complete, so they’re optional.

• Paint portions of the house: living room, entryway, hallway, my room

• Finish front and back yards

• Complete 5+ goals from my 50×50 list – or perhaps cull the goal list altogether, if need be

• Catch up and then cull my current massage membership

*****
You may notice that I haven’t included any major health or fitness goals this year. I don’t have plans to try to eat more produce, walk a certain number of miles, add more strength training, lose a certain amount of weight, etc. My work with my doctors on managing my conditions and medications will continue, and I’m going to let that unfold as organically as possible. I don’t want to add further weight to the gigantic amount of baggage I’m already carrying. This is the year of unpacking the boxes and doing the stuff that already needed to be done, not a year for planning new stuff to do.

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Closing the Door on 2022

Posted on December 31, 2022 by Thistle

This year could really be broken into three sections for me. The first would be from Jan 1 to April 1, a time when I was both dealing with personal/family-related trauma while also trying to find a good medicine fit for my new autoimmune diagnoses. It was my most active time of the year, but not necessarily the happiest time of the year. Then there was the Period of Cats, starting late on April 1st when suddenly Jason and I had two bottle baby kittens to raise. This kicked off an extended summer through the end of August where 99% of my focus was on my feline fosters. This period was littered with political anger, more family trauma, a huge downturn in health, and the first hints of what would come in the third part of the year, September onwards. This became my empty-nesting period, where I began adjusting to a new way of life. Simultaneously, I finally made some real strides in my health during this period, leading to more mobility, less pain, and improved social life.

Cats
Obviously, cats were a huge influence on my 2022. Jason and I TNRed four neighborhood cats in addition to rescuing an entire litter of five. Shai and Hulud were bottle babies from their second day of life, and their siblings – Tipsy, Penny, and Tillie – were caught, vetted, socialized, and put up for adoption once they were old enough to be weaned. All five babies found new homes, and with their mother now spayed, we can count on no more babies from that quarter! The whole experience taught us so much, gave us a friend in the neighbor we worked with, and set up my fostering journey through a local rescue.

((most of) the 2022 fosters!)

There were obviously some negative foster experiences and some things I had to learn throughout the year, but altogether, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. I fostered a total of 17 18** cats and kittens. Every single one of them** grew into healthy babies – a big feat for some of them, who were super sick when they came to us! – and found forever homes! And yeah, sometimes fostering is really hard: not knowing if a sick kitten will live through the night, saying goodbye to a kitten who has entirely stolen your heart, having so many scratches on your legs that people think you’re self-harming…ha! Still, it’s worth it. 100%. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, and I can’t wait to continue in 2023!

**Petunia became our 18th foster on December 27th, so the photo isn’t updated and of course she hasn’t gone on to be spayed and adopted yet.

Health
At the end of 2021, I honestly thought things were looking up in terms of health. I finally had a diagnosis, after all! It’s never so simple, though. Diagnoses change. Medicines fail. Bodies rebel. For a short time in that first section of 2022, I regained a certain amount of mobility, but lost it again over the summer. The summer also saw another spurt of weight gain, roughly 10 lbs, before my doctor put me on Mounjaro at the end of August. This is the first year in ages where I’m ending the year at a lower weight than I began it. The Mounjaro really flipped a switch in my body, and not only has it allowed some weight loss, it has taken away several of the other symptoms that I’ve been seeing specialists for for years. Consequently, I’ve had far fewer medical appointments in the latter half of the year, around 75 for the whole of 2022 (compared to over 120 in 2021!). Mounjaro also helped me to start regaining mobility. I’m not back to where I was pre-system-crash (Nov 2021), but I’m slowly adding more fitness and movement into my days. It’s funny, though, to look back on a few years ago, when I was exercising 200-250 days a year. (This year? 82 days. And 20 of those were in January…) Still, I have high hopes for where things are going as we move into the new year.

Photography
Obviously this is a big one. I don’t have much to say except that I learned so much, both in technique and by finally entering the photo-editing-software-RAW-files world. I’m still learning tons and excited about the process, and I’ve had my first official clients this year. To wrap up this bit, I’m going to collage out my favorite of the favorites this year, the very best photos (or technically, the photos that bring me the most joy):

Family
I’m not going to recap the negative parts of this section, particularly the ongoing schism in my family. I’ve said too much about them and given too much mental energy to the situation in 2022 already. Sadly, two members of my family passed away this year, my last remaining grandparent and my aunt/godmother. Other than these bits of sadness, my family has done really well. Laurence left for college in Canada this fall and has been settling into his new life. Ambrose joined the Air Force, got married to their best friend in September, and was stationed in Korea after tech school. Morrigan and his fiancé adopted two kittens in May, and managed to coax back to health the one who started fading pretty early on. Jason and I have been adjusting to this new just-us life, and it’s going pretty well. Honestly, I wish that this could have all been spread out over a few years rather than packing most of it into a few months over the summer, but that’s what happens sometimes! In any case, we’ve done what we can to help our children succeed, and hopefully continue to succeed going into the new year.

The Best Parts of 2022
This year, I’m not going to make a true “top ten” list, because many of this year’s best moments were ephemeral, repeating, or difficult to pin down to a specific “moment.” So these are really the best-of-the-best in highlights, I suppose. In no particular order:

  • various at-home gatherings with friends, including a vision board party, birthday parties, TV/movie watch parties, nerdy board game nights, pool parties, and holiday parties
  • so many cat things: newborn hisses, Hulud sucking on her paw, bottle babies suckling on my fingers, nighttime cuddles with kittens sleeping under my chin, a sweet little Gremlin boy who always looked like he was going to murder someone (probably you) very soon, Lord Grey slowly learning to trust me, the thrill of seeing an adoption halo show up on your former foster’s photo, bringing several kittens back from the brink of death, experiencing wobbly kittens for the first time, newborn kittens with their eyes just starting to crack open in funny ways, reuniting lost cats with their families, escape-artist kittens who just want to see the whole world (aka the rest of the house), watching Angus befriend every foster he can (except Hulud, who he hated for some bizarre reason), saving several community cats from the birthing cycle
  • hiking with friends outside of the official group setting – especially special trips to Ink’s Lake, Guadalupe State Park, and McKinney Falls
  • my nocturnal zoo: raccoons, skunks, foxes, armadillos, possums, and then baby-versions of all these guys!
  • everything about Halloween, from handing out extra Ding Dongs to the six-foot-tall nerdy teen carrying his loot in a pillow case, to the older kid who wanted the box of sardines on the tray instead of candy, to the community cat who befriended us as we sat outside that evening
  • Brandon Sanderson’s “Year of Sanderson” announcement in March (plus I can’t wait to start experiencing this with the first box in January!)
  • Muslim Culture Fest in Austin with friends – getting henna applied, buying from small businesses and artists, the most delicious food, even the car rides back and forth with Alia and Sisa
  • all the photo things: meeting the woman at the craft fair who became my first client, the Ghourlies and Witchuals photoshoots with friends, the first time I discovered the power of RAW files, upgrading some of my equipment, getting some incredible photos of my favorite butterfly (queen!), finding so many great photographers on TT to follow, Morrigan asking if I’ll take his wedding photos
  • all the Christmas stuff: having Laurence home on winter break, doing all the normal Gignacery Christmas rituals, Morrigan and Katy visiting for a few days, seeing Ambrose via video-chat, and the extended run of events that played out over the following week rather than stuffed into two days

I’m going to end this post with something I don’t think I’ve done before, which is write out a few of my hopes for the new year. In 2023, I hope to close the door on so many of the things that have weighed me down for the last few years. I want to continuing expanding my knowledge and experience in photography, as well as continue to rescue and foster cats/kittens. I have great hope for improved health and a return to fitness schedule that I’m more comfortable with. Unlike 2022, which felt like a year where I was drowning but grabbing onto every bouy I could see, angry and determined to make lemonade out of a hundred thousand lemons if that’s what it effing took, I want to thrive in 2023. I want to pull myself out of the muck that’s held me immobile since late 2020, and spend some time dancing among the rainbows.

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December 2022 in Review

Posted on December 29, 2022 by Thistle

So I have this weird thing about not posting the former year’s stuff in the new year. Something about leaving it behind. I don’t know. In any case, this can get tricky, because technically you can’t review a month (or a year) until said month/year is over. It’s only a few days off, though, so I’m going to go ahead and post this, and simply update it with my daily photo collage and any new highlights, news, etc as necessary.

In general, I’ve quite enjoyed December. I got to see a lot of friends and family, including having Laurence back from college and having Morrigan and Katy come in for a few days around Christmas. I took it easy for the month, spending my time mostly on events and gatherings that I enjoyed, without stressing too much about to-do lists. Of course, I also spent a lot of time procrastinating before December, so there were a few days where I had to rush to manage all my Christmas stuff way later than normal, heh. But because I tried to do that all in a few days, I certainly did feel productive!

Christmas itself was delightful. Like I said, two of our kids (plus our amazing future daughter-in-law) were at home with us, and we video-conferenced with our third in Korea. We met Morrigan’s two kittens and had a very laid back year for us because normal events ended up spread out over a longer period of time. That polar vortex caused a bit of anxiety, but our power and water stayed on this year, plus it meant that we got a cold Christmas! (Some years we have an 85-degree Christmas, so this is def better!) We kept plenty of food and an insulated shelter (that sadly went unused) out for the feral cats, and both Lord Grey and the little calico we’ve been trying to trap made it through the cold weather. I was very worried about them out in those temps! Jason went all out on Christmas gifts this year, and I’m so very excited about so many of the things I received. (Honestly, I think he wanted to make up for the fact that there’s been a rift in my family, which is really sweet of him.) I’m especially excited for the cat stroller that I hope to get my babies used to!

Reading and Watching
I read four books this month, despite my original plan to read a whole heck of a lot. That’s just not me in December. The books will keep to the new year! I didn’t watch much this month either, other than our annual rewatch of traditional Gignacery Christmas movies (Rudolph, and Pee Wee’s Christmas Special, heh). I did work on a puzzle while Jason and Laurence watched Die Hard. I didn’t actually want to see that movie, so I listened to it in the same room, ha! I mean, it’s Alan Rickman. I can listen to Alan Rickman pretty much anywhere under any circumstance.

(fave: Kiss Her Once for Me)

Goals
I made my 2023 goals this month, rather than focusing on the dying embers of 2022.

The Ferals
I didn’t think I would have much to say about cats this month. I was wrong. During December, the last of our former fosters got adopted out. Lord Grey, our little feral, began to mew at us and trust us a lot more. A calico that I’d caught on overnight camera a few times began to come to the yard daily the week before Christmas, and as best as I can confirm through FB and Next Door, she’s an unfixed stray. We began trap-training her (or attempting to!) after Christmas, and hopefully soon she’ll never have babies again! King – the giant tomcat who was Shai and Hulud’s father – has been sniffing around and following the calico in and out of the yard, so I know he’s on the prowl. I really wish we could TNR him but we need a bigger trap! Lastly, even though I said I wouldn’t have any more fosters in 2022, I broke. It had been a month since we’d had any kittens in the house, and a little singleton came up who just needed to spend a couple weeks gaining weight! Her name is Petunia and she’s the sweetest, cuddliest, bestest kitty ever. And honestly, I’m kinda glad that I’m going to start the new year with a foster!!

House
Oy. It was not a fun one in house issues. First, our kitchen lights – which were apparently connected to each other so that if one failed, they’d all fail – failed. We had to pull them out (they were old tube florescents) and temporarily replace them with LED fixtures. Eventually, we have to figure out a solution that doesn’t involved super-recessed lights. Then Jason tried to fix a leak in the main bathtub, which was a disaster that involved an entire old pipe bursting all over the bathroom and water gushing everywhere. We had to call out plumbers to rip the whole thing out. Then when they did that, they found signs of old termite activity behind the walls, and we had to call someone out to verify that there was no active infestation. Thankfully, there wasn’t, so the plumbers were able to finish their job, and now we need to get parts of the bathroom re-drywalled (also by a professional!). That last part is still being scheduled, so likely won’t be until January.

Health/Fitness
Here’s a crazy thing: the medication that I’m on is currently on backorder in several different doses with a nationwide shortage. I was meant to move up to the next dose in mid-December, but instead had to move backwards to the entry dose just to stay on the medicine at all! Beyond that, I’ve mostly been trying to slowly recover after having covid at the end of November, doing a little yoga here and there but otherwise not pushing myself too hard. Jason and I took a long walk on our anniversary and saw the Big Tree (including the fire damage), and it reminded me just how unused to walking my feet have become, ha! Maybe if I start walking my cats around the block in their new stroller, I’ll get my feet back to normal, ha!

Favorite Photos
There is a possibility that I’ll redo this section once December is over, if new favorites appear over the next couple days. Why is that different than just waiting to post? I couldn’t tell you. It just is. **ETA: The second photo is indeed updated, as I added two new photos from my grandparents’ memorial on the 31st.

Top, left to right: side-eye under the tree; a Queen; my Jason
Bottom, left to right: on the deck; in bloom; dove by morning

Top, left to right: a homemade plaque left at the Big Tree (not ours, btw – we’re Leave No Trace people); Phoenix (Morrigan and Katy’s kitten) up high; the little grey fox-kitten
Bottom, left to right: portrait of my cousin Joc; in memoriam; Angus in the Christmas sunbeams

Highlights of December
Like I said, it’s been a good month!

  • my new puzzle advent calendar
  • Lord Grey hanging out on the deck! and then getting more comfortable with us more generally!
  • Dexter and Deedee both got adopted in early December; doesn’t look like together, sadly, but at least they both got adopted quickly // Also, Panini (mother of our bistro babies) finally showed up on the list and got adopted within days!
  • hired for my second photoshoot!
  • much improved bloodwork after 14 weeks of Mounjaro!
  • cookie party at a friend’s house
  • new laptop to replace the one that’s almost five years old, and OH MY it makes photo editing so much better and faster!!!
  • dinner out with friends
  • Laurence is home!!!
  • finished my 2023 vision board! (first pic in the blog post)
  • a friend of mine got engaged!
  • holiday gift exchange party with my hiker friends
  • the ridiculousness that is playing Anomia with Laurence
  • making and decorating sugar cookies for Christmas
  • visiting the Big Tree and discovering that someone has left a large painted rock in front of it to say, “Respect the Domain of Father Oak” (pictured above)
  • seeing Morrigan for the first time since Jan 2021 and getting to spend a few days with him, Katy, and their two kittens who are sooooo cute! –>
  • getting to talk (and see via facetime) to Ambrose on Christmas Eve (their Christmas morning)
  • uncontrollable laughter as the family read out the Christmas stories written by the kids over the years, including stories from when they were as young as four years old, and then more uncontrollable laughter as we recounted these stories to my dad, stepmom, and half-sister the next day
  • a new foster kitten – yes, I know, I know…
  • the absolute best chicken-potato curry puff pastry handpies, mmmm
  • finding an interesting Beaujolais Nouveau on sale at HEB, and discovering that it presents bright red almost like raspberry juice, and very distinctly tastes of vanilla – then discovering that this year’s batch of BN is considered one of the best and very limited due to weather conditions; then getting a few more clearance bottles off the rack to enjoy in the future! (ours is pictured center at that link)
  • a lovely memorial service for my grandparents
  • beautiful photos of different members of my family
  • game night with friends for New Year’s

Coming up in January
A new year, hopefully a wonderful new year!

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2022 in Books

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Thistle

As things have been since the pandemic began, I’ve been really lackadaisical when it comes to reading all year. Honestly, I’m not sure when this trend will end, but it is what it is. I read 50 books in 2022, including 3 rereads and a further 3 books that I abandoned past the halfway point. Here are a few further bookish stats from the year:

Book Type: 44 fiction – 6 nonfiction
Fiction Type: 25 speculative – 19 realistic
Media: 27 text – 22 audio – 1 visual
Audience: 40 adult – 9 YA – 1 children’s
Authors: 38 women – 7 men – 1 nonbinary – 4 combo/multiple

New to me authors: 19
Most read authors: Brandon Sanderson (6 including the 3 he co-wrote with Janci Patterson) – Note that this total also includes two rereads, but even if I exclude those, Sanderson still has the most with 4 this year.

Shortest book: Community Cats (127 pgs)
Longest book: Any Way the Wind Blows (574 pgs)
Shortest audio: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (2:37)
Longest audio: The Ink Black Heart (32:42)

A few bookish things: 

  • 1 translation (Swedish)
  • 4 chunksters
  • 1 collection
  • 3 books that I wish I’d abandoned
  • 5 books out of my comfort zone
  • total pages read: 8,988
  • total audio listened to: 262 hours and 38 mins
  • most and least popular on Goodreads (excluding rereads) are The Paris Apartment (~250k) and Community Cats (23) **as of 12/27
  • highest and lowest rated on GR are Tiny But Mighty (4.75) and Horror Hotel (3.36) **as of 12/27

Best bookish experience: Brandon Sanderson’s announcement and accompanying kickstarter for his four secret novels and a year of Sanderson material and swag coming in 2023!

Best book-related discovery: I do not want to go mountaineering (ha!). I know that sounds silly, but as an avid hiker, I’ve discovered through books that mountaineering is just a step (or five) too far for me.

***************

Best of the Year

So I have two things to say about this. First, even books that were stand-out to me while reading ended up fading to nothing by the time I’m writing this, just because of the way my brain is processing books these days. I’ve had to kind of look back and guess what my favorites would have been had my brain been fully into reading. Second, the book that stands out the most, the one that I really ended up loving far more than expected, is one that I wish wasn’t in my best-of-the-year. That book is The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith, aka JK Rowling, aka one of the biggest slimeballs in modern fiction. It has been really hard to separate the author from the work, and I’ve only attempted it because I was several books into the series (one I really loved) before discovering the slimeball nature of the author. In setting aside my loathing of the author, the book itself was really, really good, and not at all what people (who haven’t read it) have been reporting it to be (in plot, theme, or message). It has stayed with me for months, and I’ve had to concede that it’s probably my favorite of the year. Other favorites include:

  • The Second Blind Son: gorgeous writing, brilliant story, such a comfort to return to this world
  • The Change: I don’t think I’ve ever read a book as bad-ass as this one!
  • Runner up: A Stitch in Time: genre-bending in the best way
  • Runner up: The Book of Cold Cases: there are parts of this book that I still can’t stop thinking about!

Abandoned Books

I abandoned three books this year. The first was Cackle, which I wrote about toward the beginning of the year. The second was a book called Hotel Magnifique, which had this weird promise of being like both Caraval and The Night Circus. Having read both of those books, I don’t feel like they have anything in common except a general (VERY general) setting, and in the end, HM ended up far more like Caraval, which I hated. The main character (of HM) does nothing but get people in trouble and has the oddest luck, both good and bad. There’s also a lot of “let’s use the main character’s ignorance as a way to world-build.” The whole book was frustrating and I eventually gave it up. The last abandoned book was a short nonfic called Haunted History of Old San Antonio, which I also write about separately.

Most Fun to Read

  • Love & Other Disasters: sapphic romance by way of GBBO? Yes, please!
  • Curfew: This almost made my best-of runner-ups, another bad-ass book about a society that actually protects its women
  • The Change: menopause = development of magic powers that allow women to protect other women? This is another yes, please!
  • A Stitch in Time: I have never been so excited to find a new author as I was reading this delightful time traveling mystery-romance!

Most Beautiful Writing

  • The Hacienda: At first I struggled to catch the rhythm of the writing, but once I did, I was immersed in the most beautiful poetic lilt.
  • The Locked Room: Rather than the writing itself being beautiful, it’s the incredibly evocative way that Griffiths brought the early days of the pandemic flooding back to your senses that landed this book under this category!

Most Disappointing and/or Distasteful

  • The House Across the Lake: Can we say “distasteful use of indigenous tropes to flood in a horror element to the book”? Gag.
  • Any Way the Wind Blows: I literally thought my copy was missing the last few pages, it was so incomplete.
  • You’re Invited: I thought I was getting a look into Sri Lankan culture, but instead ended up with played out stereotypes and shock-writing and an extremely predictable story.

Best Settings, Vividness, and/or Visceral Moments

  • The Book of Cold Cases: There’s this moment with the narrator has her first paranormal experience, and in the days that follow, her brain doesn’t just accept it. Instead, she’s constantly whipping around, expecting objects to be moving behind her or to see something impossible. It was the most realistic description of a reaction to the paranormal that I’ve ever read.
  • Remote Control: When Fatima becomes Sankofa, and her experience of the village post transformation – I can’t say more without spoilers, but this was an extremely visceral bit of description
  • Breathless: I felt like I was on that mountain, with little air, with the cold and the fear and the next-to-dying nature of above-8k-meters mountaineering – I could definitely tell the author had lived through the visceral experience of climbing a mountain
  • The Locked Room: I discussed above, but Griffiths really managed to bring in that chaotic, confusing, and claustrophobic feel of the early days of Covid.

Best Relationships

  • the mountaineers and the Sherpas, Breathless: I don’t know if this is always true in real life, but the narrator of this book and several of the other mountaineers were so respectful of the Sherpas helping them (aka keeping them alive), and I loved that, especially in a world where “the help” is often treated invisibly at best, like garbage at worst.
  • the three female friends, The Change: We all deserve to have a circle of friends this supportive and loyal!
  • Harbinder and her roommate, Bleeding Heart Yard: Oh, she is so, so clueless that her roommate (and crush) wants to be more than friends…

Books that Changed Me

  • How to Take Awesome Photos of Cats: Taught me a series of photo-editing tricks that I was later able to expand on, greatly improving my photography skills in general.
  • Tiny But Mighty: I learned so much from this book, which helped me keep several kittens alive when I had zero experience in caring for ones that young!

(oh the irony of these authors being married to each other…)

Physical Books I Bought / Kept From My 2022 Reads

***************
Once again, let’s hope that next year will be a better one in books. Though honestly, if I continue to read around 50 books a year with just a few that stand out over time, I’m okay with that. Better than the years of 200 a year and very little sticking around longterm…

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Sunday Coffee – Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Thistle

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, hope and peace to you! Whatever you celebrate (or don’t celebrate), I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend in your part of the world!

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Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Thistle

The Cuyahoga branch of Orsk – a knockoff Ikea – has never performed as well as other branches. Now, damage is occurring overnight, and Amy is roped into a night shift to catch whoever is prowling the store when closed. Only, these prowlers aren’t exactly alive, and they aren’t exactly friendly…

One moral of the story: Maybe don’t build on top of sites that lend themselves toward demonic haunting activity, like, say, asylums or labor prisons or burial grounds. Because haunted houses are bad enough. Haunted big box stores are worse. Another moral: Big box stores are also kinda creepy without the paranormal bits, and often they aren’t all that great at taking care of their employees, even when said employees are indoctrinated with company spirit.

I honestly don’t have a lot to say about this one. My previous experience with Hendrix wasn’t great, but a friend encouraged me to give this one a try, so I did. It was good. Silly, over the top, but funny in a good way. Maybe a bit too much gore for me in the second half, but not so bad that I had to stop reading. Plus it’s nice to see through the comedic elements to the anti-consumerist, capitalist satire underneath.

PS – Read the item descriptions that precede each chapter. They’re some of the best parts.

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23 Years

Posted on December 22, 2022 by Thistle

How it started:

How it’s going:

Happy 23rd anniversary, my love.

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Sunday Coffee – slowly not-so-feral

Posted on December 18, 2022 by Thistle

I’m honestly not sure when I last talked about Lord Grey on this blog. Brief recap: Lord Grey was a kitten when we first saw him in early August 2021. We tried to lure him and trap him in order to socialize him and save him from feral life, but after a couple days, he disappeared and we didn’t see him again. Not til late Feb 2022, that is. When we first started seeing a bunch of new feral cats in our yard, displaced by nearby construction, I started putting out food and set up video cameras to try to evaluate what we needed to do to get the situation under control. Lord Grey was the first cat to partake of the food, and immediately adopted our yard as his home base. We did trap him and take him in to be TNRed, only to discover that someone had already gotten him fixed, but not ear-tipped or microchipped or anything. He was definitely a feral cat, not an indoor/outdoor pet. So we allowed him to become our responsibility, feeding him twice a day, as he got more comfortable around our yard.

(Aug 2021, Feb 2022)

Comfortable around our yard doesn’t equal comfortable with us, however. The second he would see one of us, he would run right out the hole in the fence and hide until we were gone. Only in the last month or two did we notice that when Jason brought food to him, he would run out the hole and immediate stick his head back in to watch from a safe distance. Only in the last month or two did he allow me to go out onto our deck and watch/film him as he ate, rather than running away. After eight months, that was progress!

(throughout 2022)

However, just this month, Lord Grey has made astonishing strides in trust, and given me hope that we may one day have a closer relationship with this baby.

First, back on the third, he chased a squirrel up onto our deck. It’s the first time (that we know of) that he’s been on our deck, and after the squirrel got away, he decided to stay. He was very interested in our cats, who were watching him out the back french doors, and he didn’t even run when I brought out my camera and began taking photos of him. He saw me pet our cats, which I honestly think is what brought on a bit more trust for these later incidents.

About a week later, when I went to give him his afternoon food, he didn’t run to the hole in the deck immediately. He watched me approach, gave a big stretch, and then walked over to the next tree between his food bowl and the hole. There, he stopped, and he just watched me as I fed him. It was literally the first time ever that he hasn’t left the yard when one of us fed him!

Since then, I’ve tried to take every afternoon feeding super slow. I click my tongue at him, rattle his food so he knows it’s coming, walk slowly, etc. He has taken to retreating in stages, and most days he stops just at the hole in the fence, which is a few feet further than the tree where he stopped the first day. However, this past Thursday, not only did he stop at the tree, but 1) he didn’t even run to the tree until I was five feet from him, despite him watching me the whole time, and 2) he mewed at me several times while at the tree. I mewed back at him, and we had a conversation!

(left: standing by the hole; right: halfway between tree and hole; no pics yet of him at the tree, but he’s stayed there twice now)

Y’all, this is BIG. If you don’t know, feral cats do not use meowing with humans. To communicate with humans is a big step forward in trust, and I found out that it’s even more than that. With me, he used this really high-pitched meow, and when I told Jason, he was surprised, because a few times recently, he’s also mewed at J – only his meow was low and croaky. It’s like he’s imitating the voices that we use to talk to him. Jason feeds him in the morning and when he talks, his voice is croaky and froggy. I talk to him in the afternoon, in a high pitched baby voice. Lord Grey is mimicking us as he tries to communicate. Oh my heart!

I really do hope that one day we can help this baby to fully trust us. We want to be able to give him love and make sure he is safe and healthy. A few months ago, he showed up with these weird scrapes all over his fur and we didn’t know if he’d gotten scraped by a physical object, sheering hair away, or if he’d gotten into something like ringworm or mange. (No blood, just lighter, scalier patches on his fur.) There was no way to treat the latter, though, and thankfully the scrapes grew out so it seems like he just had some hair sheered away. We want him to trust us enough to treat any injuries or illnesses, to give him shelter on cold nights, to get pets and love (as he seems to be a solo kitty, lacking any community to shelter with). It’s been almost a year since we began feeding him daily, and we’re finally making progress!

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Kiss Her Once for Me, by Alison Cochrun

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Thistle

Ellie’s carefully crafted life plans went down the toilet after last Christmas, when she spent a day falling in love only to it meant nothing to the other woman. Soon, she was fired from her dream job, and now struggles to stay afloat as another Christmas looms ahead. She has no idea what possessed drunk-her to agree to a mad plan of a fake engagement, and things get much, much worse when she discovers that her fake-fiancé is the brother of the woman from last Christmas.

Y’all. You know how I was just saying that I have an entire pile of books sitting on my shelf and I needed to do a little December readathon to get through them? I am soooooo tempted to just end my reading year with this little gem of a queer romantic comedy. It was so perfect: Portland, every flavor of the alphabet-mafia-rainbow, Christmas, hilarious one-liners, sexual tension, tugged heart strings, such relatable parent-based trauma and fear of failure…it was really just so perfect. It would be the best way to end the reading year, even if I know that at least one book I planned to read after this will be one I also love. Still. Maybe that book can just wait, and my 2023 TBR pile can just be 10-15 books longer than it usually is, and I can have my quiet December playing this lovely story in my head rather than moving on to the next thing.

Seriously. I’m not usually one for Christmas books, or cheesy rom-coms, but this book wins. I’ll leave y’all with some of my favorite lines:

Jack nods curtly. “Yes. It seems like we’ve had some kind of miscommunication about what happened last year. Miscommunications are for the straights,” she says with self-righteous indignation. “We are going to talk this out.”

“You know what’s actually harsh? The fact that you never watch the TikToks I send you–”

I’m about 90 percent sure a drunk napkin contract is not a legally binding document, but that remaining 10 percent is wreaking havoc on my anxiety.

[The dog] flops down in the snow and rolls back and forth, making the dog equivalent of a snow angel. “So that’s Paul Hollywood.”
“He’s less dignified than he seems on Bake Off.”
“They say you should never meet your heroes.”

The thing is, I used to dream about someone who would always choose me above everything else. There was romance in that dream, sure. I wanted someone who would see all my flaws and still lean in and tell me I’m beautiful. … I wanted someone who would see the whole mess of me…and wouldn’t get freaked out or turned off. Someone who would kiss me anyway.
So yes. It was a romantic delusion. But beneath the desire to be cherished was the ever-present thrum of my desire to be chosen. I wanted someone who would pick me to be their family.

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