April 2022 in Review

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Thistle

Obviously, it’s been a crazy month. About 90% of that month involved round-the-clock care of two orphaned kittens. I’m going to make a separate post about kittens and the TNR project, because both have been big in April and could overwhelm this post. The other big part of April is that Jason and I had to cancel our 20th anniversary vacation. Again. This time it was my fault, though – I checked that my passport was valid, but apparently I checked before the last time we had it scheduled (Sept 2021) and it expired in October. I didn’t discover this until we were a month out from the trip, and there wasn’t enough time to get it renewed. So once again, plans have been postponed, and our current plan is go in September. We’ll see. Hopefully we’ll have this 20th anniversary vacation in the books before we hit our 25th anniversary, heh.

Reading and Watching
I read four books this month, including one reread, and other than the reread, my favorite was definitely Tiny but Mighty. On screen, this was a heavy TV month with a lot of junk-watching: The Ultimatum (so many red flags!), The Truth About Pam, Temptation Island, and Murdoch Mysteries (silly, but not junky at least). I also saw Everything Everywhere All At Once in theatre with my youngest son, and that was…a bizarre movie.

Goals
The big one: Our tax refund came in and we paid off all the rest of our consumer debt!

House
Jason buried the electrical line out to our night-camera, so that we weren’t just running a long extension cord through the grass. Also, our ice maker broke and splashed everywhere, so we had to replace that. I can’t even remember if this was the month we had to replace the bottom of the kitchen sink cabinet, or if that was March? Jason’s also working on replacing the top railings of our deck, because the ones we put on last year suddenly warped and ripped away from the walls… Most of this has been tucked into corners as we take care of the kittens. It sounds like a lot but most of it was tiny projects.

Health/Fitness
Unfortunately, this was my largest medical month of 2022 so far, including my first minor surgical procedure (a fine-needle biopsy into my parotid gland) which led to the conclusion that while the mass under my ear isn’t cancerous, it may become so, so I need surgery in the fall that will involve slicing through half of my face and neck, and may leave me with a side effect that involves my left external cheek sweating whenever I eat. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this crap. I was also diagnosed with a secondary autoimmune disorder of sjogren’s syndrome, mostly because of this mass on my parotid gland, plus I had another colitis attack that nearly landed me in the hospital again, and I need xrays on my left hip to see if something is broken. Fun! All that combined with hurting my foot on my only hike of the month (April 3rd, above pic), and I was basically down for the count this month. Ugh.

Favorite Photos
I barely touched my camera this month. I took a lot of photos with my phone, especially of the kittens, but I barely left the house and spent almost no time at all on photography. The one exception is finally taking my youngest’s senior photos (you know, a month before he graduates…). So this first picture is the six non-portrait favorites from April, followed by the three favorites of the 15 or so senior photos I kept from our photoshoot.

Top left to right: Shai around 3 weeks old; Lord Grey post-surgery in the very overgrown and very green spring yard; Hulud at 3 weeks old. Bottom, left to right: Lord of the Succulent Garden; post-bottle snuggles and miniature blep at 12 days old; a lady anole – all the lizards are back out in the garden!!

Gotta say, my photography skills (and camera) are much improved from when I took Ambrose’s senior photos on my iPhone…I can only imagine how much better this will get when I finally sit down to learn true editing skills!

Highlights of April
To be honest, because I wasn’t blogging and I think I only opened my computer like five times this month, I entirely forgot to keep track of these. They were there, but I don’t have a true list, so I’m skipping this.

Coming up in May
Not a vacation. Ugh. But that’s okay because we weren’t sure how we were going to deal with five-week old kittens at that point anyway. So this month will be our last month with the kittens, the end of high school for Laurence, the last full month that Ambrose will be with us before he enters the military, another minimal-if-any blogging month, and hopefully enough busyness and kittens to counteract my normal severe May depression/PTSD!

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April Mini-Reviews

Posted on April 29, 2022 by Thistle

Very little reading happened in April, but here are some mini-reviews of the things that got read in the corners of busyness!

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
This is a sci-fi future-world story of a girl who is somehow infected with technology that allows her to kill at will, or kill accidentally when her life is threatened. She’s a young child when this happens, and inadvertently kills her entire village, including her family, when hit by a car. After that, she must make her way alone, growing up as both a pariah and a curiosity. It was a very interesting twist on a coming of age story with a disturbing ending that I’m not quite sure how to interpret.

The Hollows by Mark Edwards (audio)
My previous experience with Edwards was fairly good, so I’m annoyed that this one was sooooooo bad. I thought it was just the narrator, Guy Mott, so I kept listening, because my library didn’t have a copy of the book. And yeah, the narrator wasn’t good (details in a sec) but the book was so poorly written too. The characters were lifeless and flat, and the dialog, especially between the teenagers, was so stilted and try-too-hard that I experienced major secondhand embarrassment. As for the narrator, I’m not sure why he was chosen. Only one character in the book was British, and yeah, his chapters were read first-person, but everyone else was American with POV chapters, and Mott couldn’t do American accents at all. Not only that, but in the 3rd person POV chapters, he would switch around accents for the narration (non-dialog) parts, and one character actually switched from a generic attempt at American accent to a really stereotyped Boston accent in the last third of the book. Wut??

Tiny But Mighty by Hannah Shaw
Subtitled: Kitten Lady’s Guide to Saving the Most Vulnerable Felines
This is the definitive book on kitten care. (As in, shelters across the country use Shaw’s information – from book or the Kitten Lady website – as a resource.) Obviously, I read this book because I needed some guidance on a lot of things as Jason and I began hand-raising two orphaned bottle-baby kittens. This helped a lot, and I highly recommend it for anyone raising young kittens for whatever reason, or for anyone who would like to get involved in fostering, TNR, cat-rescue, etc. It wasn’t just good for this, though. The first two chapters (about 60 pages) are entirely about general information – about community (feral) cats, the cat population, why there’s a kitten season, what to do if you happen to see kittens (it’s not to immediately grab them up!), the true differences between “kill” and “no-kill” shelters (absolute misnomer), etc. There are a LOT of misconceptions about cats, especially community/feral/stray cats, and just these two chapters can really educate people. It’s one of the only things I wish I could assign people as required reading, heh.

*****
Note: I also listened to What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty twice this month. I always listen to this book several times throughout April and May as I deal with PTSD triggers. No need to review, though, as I’ve already done so (above link).

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Necessary Break

Posted on April 4, 2022 by Thistle

Considering my full-time job for the next little while will be these two, I’m letting go of all expectations of blogging, reading books, reading anyone else’s blogs, keeping up with social media, etc. I’ll be back eventually.

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Sunday Coffee – Bottle Babies

Posted on April 3, 2022 by Thistle

Y’all. April Fool’s was insane this year. I still feel like someone has played a joke on me. Never mind the mutilated tailless raccoon in our yard that morning (eek!), or the weird experience of having a biopsy while lying on a medical bed shoved into an office room stuffed with filing cabinets and boxes. This story is about the kittens. Day-old kittens, to be specific.

About 6pm on Friday evening, one of our neighbors stopped by. They live across the street and a few doors down, and apparently, they’ve been feeding two of the cats we’ve seen sporadically in our yard. WilyKit (top in the next photo) and WilyKat (bottom) are practically twins, only he has a black tail tip and she has a white one, plus a few orange patches on her body. Apparently, they were part of a litter of five born to a calico mom a year ago. The other three siblings left home when they were old enough, but the Wily-twins stuck around. WilyKat, despite being male, was the runt of the litter and apparently doesn’t roam as much. In any case, this answers the question of why these two tend to ignore the food we put out – they’re getting their food** elsewhere.

Apparently, WilyKit was pregnant, and had her own litter of five babies on the 31st, under this neighbor’s deck. By Friday evening, the neighbor hadn’t seen WilyKit for 24 hours, and the babies were screaming. She retrieved them and began to call around for shelter help – except all the shelters are already full from kitten season! So her neighbor told her that we were the cat people (ha!) and she came to us.

The situation was complicated – did she simply not see Mom? Or had Mom actually disappeared/been hurt/abandoned the babies? The neighbor took the five kittens to the vet, who cleared them as healthy but warned that they needed to eat soon. When she returned home, WilyKit had reappeared. I’ve mentioned before, though – WilyKit is extremely skittish, and she ran off immediately. Over the next three hours, she came back, grabbed up a baby, and ran off to relocate them. She did this three times, then never came back for the last two. We had to make a judgement call – had we not waited long enough? Or had we waited too long? Day-old kittens aren’t supposed to go more than three hours max without eating, and by this point, they’d gone at least six or seven hours without food. It was 11pm, the temps were rapidly cooling, and it had been an hour since WilyKit last appeared. So we made the decision to bring them home and bottle-feed them overnight.

Thankfully, they made it through the night and we were able to improve their body temp and activity levels from when we got them home. Throughout the day yesterday, we tried to reunite the babies with their siblings and mom. In the evening, WilyKit came to eat at her normal time. The babies were out where she could investigate them and take them back, but she only sniffed them and went to eat. She spent most of the next hour in the area, eating and bathing herself and soaking in the sun. A couple times, she sniffed at the babies but otherwise completely ignored them, and then left. She came back after we’d brought them back home, and was in no distress, nor looking for her missing kittens. I guess she took the ones she could handle, and left these behind.

So we have bottle babies now. Bottle babies with eyes still closed and umbilical cords still attached. They’ve thankfully learned how to latch onto the bottle fairly well, and we’re checking their weight before/after each feeding. There’s a lot about newborn kittens that is very new to us, like stimulating them to use the bathroom, regulating their temperature, etc. Hopefully we can get some support from one of the local shelters. (They offered support to the neighbor, but she works 10 hours a day so couldn’t be home to bottle-feed.) This is not the adventure I planned to have in April, but I’m really glad J and I are able to help, and no babies will die of starvation out in someone’s yard!

**Everyone in this part of the neighborhood knows about the situation with the hoarding house and the abundance of cats running around. Everyone knows the big dad-cat we call King. These cats have dispersed everywhere they can, but that means that a bunch of different people are all feeding the cats. Like the Wily-twins being fed by this particular neighbor. How many other houses are feeding these community cats? Probably quite a few. That explains why they’re all so fat, heh. So when the bottle-baby situation is dealt with, I need to get on Nextdoor and figure out who all is feeding cats, so I can coordinate to TNR all these babies! There are too many situations like the one this litter is going through, and we need to stop the breeding cycle!

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March 2022 in Review

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Thistle

March was basically a three-part split: First, all the birthdays. Honestly, neither Laurence nor I did much for our birthdays, just kinda stuck to a few fun things and home-family. That’s one thing about the pandemic – we’ve gotten used to not having big birthdays, I suppose. Second, sleep issues. I talked about that in depth in my last post, so I’ll leave this here. Third, the feral colony. We first put out food for the colony we’re trying to adopt on Feb 28th, and since then, we’ve catalogued a number of regular visitors to our yard. There are a couple roaming male cats, two younger cats that probably belong to the colony four doors down, an overnight visitor that we’ve only seen twice, and one little grey girl who has made our yard her home base. We set up a security camera to record overnight footage, and while it doesn’t always capture everything, we have a pretty good idea of what kinds of creatures hang around at night. (Note: We don’t leave out food overnight.) This has probably been the biggest influence of my month, and I’ve literally spent hours watching these cats, planning out and ordering supplies, etc.

Reading and Watching
My brain is so half-asleep these days that I could barely focus on books, and honestly couldn’t really make it through even a single tv show without falling asleep either. So I don’t have much to say. I ended up reading three books, with The Book of Cold Cases coming ahead as the favorite for March.

Goals
The big goal I got to cross off this month was related to finances. Jason’s bonus this year allowed us to pay off a large chunk of our unsecured debt, and once our tax refund comes through, we’ll be able to pay off the rest. That will leave us with just the mortgage, car payments, and Jason’s school loans in terms of debts. We’d made fairly good progress on this last year until we ran into 1) four car accidents including three totaled cars, 2) a very expensive hospital stay, and 3) rescuing, socializing, and vetting four kittens. But if we can get this all paid off in the next few weeks, we’ll be in really good shape for the first time since the major house-explosion in 2018. (For newer readers, a briefing: In 2018, some unscrupulous, lazy work by roofers led to more than half our former house being replaced from scratch, for a grand total of over $20k AFTER what insurance paid.)

House
We continued to focus on the garden this month, getting everything planted before it got too late in the season. The mistflower bed is entirely planted now, and while we decided to put in a few butterfly-attracting perennials into the nectarine bed, we mostly distributed wildflower seeds this year. Wildflower seeds also went into the live oak bed. Seeds are more affordable and will provide enjoyment for a season until we have the money to transform each of these beds into something more permanent.

Health and Fitness
I talked about sleep apnea and its affects on my health in my most recent post, and honestly, that’s been the biggest factor of March. When you don’t sleep properly, nothing else can really happen. I’m not leaving the house because I’m napping all the time. Some (most) days, the inflammation from my RA is so bad that my entire body hurts just laying there, every joint throbbing in pain, and until my cpap arrives, we can’t tell if that means I need a different medicine or if the inflammation is being affected by the lack of sleep. I have so little energy that I can barely move around, much less exercise. I’m eating more than normal to provide extra energy for my body. The whole cycle is awful. So anyway, I may not be doing much in terms of any other part of my health right now, but I forgive all those lapses while I deal with a very major systemic problem. I’ll get back to it when I’m sleeping again.

(the seven hikes of March)

Favorite Photos
Heh. Nearly all my photos this month are of Lady Grey, the cat that’s made our yard her home. When I barely leave the house, I really don’t take too many photos, so there aren’t a whole lot of favorites this time around.

Top, left to right: Laurence as an adult, looking like he belongs on a 90s album cover; the biggest bully among the birds; mystic spire bloom. Bottom, l to r: deer seen at Hardberger Park; columbines in bloom; Eastern Phoebe. Full versions of all these photos can be seen on my instagram stories.

Highlights of March
Once again, the biggest highlight of the month has been everything involved with the feral colony: nicknaming the cats, seeing the nocturnal animals in our yard, starting a project that will be really good for the future of these poor creatures! Otherwise, here were the other fun things:

  • Brandon Sanderson’s awesome announcement and accompanying kickstarter!
  • finally making it to Guadalupe River State Park (after four last-minute cancellations outside my control in the last year!)
  • Gherkin proving just how smart she is !!!
  • starting to see more butterflies in my yard again
  • new upgraded camera!
  • the nectarine tree bloomed – we weren’t sure it would since we kinda messed up with it last year, but it’s definitely still living!
  • my fowl language mug, ha! –>
  • and another Sanderson announcement at the end of the month: a preview of the rough-draft prologue of Stormlight 5!
  • I finally managed to get a copy of Cain’s Jawbone!

Coming up in April
Normally April is a pretty melancholy month for me, with the change in weather turning miserably hot, but I’m honestly looking forward to it this year. Not the weather change, but I hope that in April, two things will happen: I’ll get my cpap and begin to sleep properly again, and we’ll get our tax refund and finish paying off all consumer debt. I’m a little worried about the impending covid spike, particularly how it might affect the vacation J and I have planned for early May, but we’ll see how that all goes.

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Wellness Wednesday – Sleep Apnea

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Thistle

Back at the end of February, I had a sleep study meant to confirm my personal suspected diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea. While previous sleep studies had said there was no apnea, I began to struggle to breathe at night in December, a physical blockage causing sudden stops in the flow of air. I saw an ENT this month who confirmed that there was nothing physically causing obstruction, and that most likely my soft palate was relaxing at night to block the passage to my nose (obstructive sleep apnea). Sleep study results finally came in to confirm this, so I scheduled with a pulmonologist. I saw him yesterday, and he’s sending in the RX for the cpap machine to the insurance for approval and referral to whatever company they use for medical equipment. He says I have roughly 2-4 weeks until the cpap is ready for me. (For a moment, I thought he was going to say 2-4 months, and I was going to cry.)

The big problem with sleep apnea is that I’m waking up a few dozen times in the night. Thankfully I don’t have insomnia anymore, so I basically just go in and out of sleep. I never get any restful sleep, though, and I’ve had many days when I get up at 7 to take my kid to school, fall asleep again at 10am, wake up for lunch, and then taken another nap in the afternoon. It’s awful. I even almost fell asleep while at my massage this month, and after about 8pm, I’m basically operating in half-sleep mode. The memories of any discussion or experiences after dinner feel dreamlike, and I’m never entirely sure what has happened. My REM sleep has been equally disrupted, so I have these vivid bursts of dreaming combined with hyper-realistic mundane snippets of dreams that I then have to determine if they’re real. Like for instance, I recently had to ask Jason if he had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for that day because I had a memory of him telling me he’d made one, but didn’t know if that was real or a dream. (Turned out it was a dream.) Literally the memory was him telling me this while I was making my morning coffee, a snippet of a few seconds time, with nothing before or after to distinguish it from any other morning. This is what the apnea is doing to me.

I can’t exercise. I’m too exhausted most days to even take a five minute walk. I have to plan my time very carefully, because if I have any plan on any given day, I need to make sure that there’s nothing else important scheduled the rest of that day. Makes it hard to get to all my doctor’s appointments, and to get the housework done, and to do any blogging, etc. Not to mention that the lack of restful sleep has made my RA worse, and I can hardly manage the most basic of movements these days…sigh.

Let’s just say that I can’t wait for the cpap to arrive. I hate the idea of sleeping with a machine on my face, but GAH do I ever want that thing yesterday.

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Kind of like reviews, but not?

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Thistle

I mentioned back on my birthday post that Brandon Sanderson had announced a special kickstarter that involved twelve months of surprises, including eight swag boxes and four books he wrote in secret during the pandemic. In the weeks since that announcement, Sanderson’s newsletter has released the titles and preview chapters for each of the four novels. Three are in the Cosmere, one is not.

[The Cosmere is a universe that links together many of Sanderson’s books. There are some underlying elements that created and continue to influence the different parts of the Cosmere. The magic systems, though unique to each location, have commonalities the tie them all together. Additionally, there are ways to travel between worlds, and certain characters are known as world-hoppers. The most famous (or infamous) world-hopper is Hoid, who shows up in most (all?) of the Cosmere books, whether in major or minor capacity. Each series or single-book in the Cosmere can be read without reference to the greater whole, but it’s so much more fun to cross-reference, gather clues, and connect the Cosmere books.]

I’m not one of those people who avoided reading the title or preview chapters of these books, and I’m going to give my brief thoughts on each one below. If you’re one of those people who don’t even want to know what these books are called at this point, it’s time to turn away now. (But honestly, I don’t think I have many Cosmere-fans as readers?)

Continue reading →

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Sunday Coffee – Oops

Posted on March 27, 2022 by Thistle

Hmm. It wasn’t my intention to disappear. I’d say I don’t really know what happened, except I do.

One: I haven’t really had much to talk about. Nothing in my life that I usually talk about here has had anything noteworthy come up, and my brain has been too preoccupied with other things to read or write.

Two: I’ve changed up my morning routine. It used to be that I’d get up, make coffee, and then spend some time going through my social media, email, and blog stuff as I woke up. Now, I get up, make coffee, and spend that time scanning through the overnight footage from the outdoor camera. That’s really where my brain has been the last few weeks: the feral colony.

I’m not going to go into a big thing of it again, since I just wrote about all that a few weeks ago. The biggest update we’ve had is that Lady Grey (or perhaps Lord Grey, right now we’re just assuming) has essentially declared this her home base. She comes by half a dozen times a day, spends time rolling around and bathing in the dirt piles behind the succulent garden, chases birds along the fence-line, and has generally declared this spot hers. She knows the feeding schedule, and is getting more and more comfortable in our yard. We’ve put out a shelter for rainy nights, and we hope she’ll take advantage of that soon. In the meantime, we’ve ordered a trap, but unfortunately, due to supply chain issues, it’ll take some time to arrive.

Another current preoccupation has been the garden. We’re right in the middle of planting season, and over the last few weeks, we’ve been planning, tilling, prepping the soil, and planting. The mistflower bed is now completely set. The nectarine garden has a few butterfly-attracting plants in it (like butterfly milkweed), we tied the honeysuckle up a cone trellis, and the rest of the soil was seeded with sun-loving wildflower seeds. We also moved the jessamine to a new location, as it wasn’t doing very well in the mistflower bed. We have a few more plants to acquire and get into the ground, plus we’re in the process of tilling and seeding the live oak garden. If we’re lucky, we’ll have time to make some raised veg beds on the side of the house, but I have a feeling that project will have to wait either until fall or next spring.

Lastly, I’ve been doing deep-dives into longterm health issues, looking back through journals, organizing information from the last eight years to help get some ideas about what else I can do. My mobility hasn’t been great this month – the good effects of the new medication seemed to taper off slightly after six weeks – so I’ve spent the time I’d normally spend in fitness doing this instead. It’s too early in the process for me to talk about anything I’ve found, but I have some hope.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been. I’m not sure if/when I’ll start posting regularly again, but I’m at least going to try to touch base here on Sundays until I get back into a rhythm!

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Sunday Coffee – Most Anticipated Books

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Thistle

A few days ago, I saw an article on Goodreads about the most anticipated books coming out this spring. I looked it over, and there was literally only two I’d heard of, including one (The Book of Cold Cases) that I’ve already read. So I decided to make my own list. These are the books that I’m most looking forward to releasing over the next few months, in no particular order:

How to Be a Wallflower by Eloisa James – I’m an absolute sucker for James’ romances!

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas – Other than the fact that this book should be titled La Hacienda, everything about this book sounds delicious!

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths – I’m not sure if this is book 13 or 14 or what in the Ruth Galloway mysteries, but each one is a joy and I cannot wait to get my hands on this!

The City of Dusk by Tara Sim – Queer adult high fantasy – I have high hopes!

Ordinary Monsters by JM Miro – Victorian London is not my cup of tea, but I’m a sucker for the marketing and this looks like it could be great portentous fun!

The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager – I admit, Sager’s books are a bit hit or miss with me, and this one sounds a lot like Stillhouse Lake, so I hope it ends up good?

The Gifts that Bind Us by Caroline O’Donoghue – Loved the first book, definitely looking forward to this one!

Any other books coming out over the next few months that I should check out?

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The Paris Apartment, by Lucy Foley

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Thistle

Five floors, nine residents, one missing. Jess arrives to join her brothers in his Paris apartment, but he’s gone. None of the other apartment residents seems to know what happened to Ben, but they also don’t seem to be telling the truth. Something is rotten beneath the upscale exterior of this building.

I don’t have much to say about this book. It was a fun thriller with some twists I didn’t guess until literally a page or two before the reveals, and with no sudden extra twist to ruin everything at the end. None of the characters were particularly likable, so if that’s not your kind of thriller, don’t bother. That doesn’t bother me, though, and I enjoyed the round-robin style narration hopping from Jess to each of the other residents to tell the story.

There’s one trigger warning I have to give, though, and unfortunately it would also potentially be a spoiler, so highlight at your discretion: (highlight to read) TW for sex trafficking (end).

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