Sunday Coffee – 100 Happy Days, Part 3

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Thistle

Today marks Day 75 or the 3/4 part of this project. I started the challenge due to mental health issues, and honestly, I haven’t found that it has helped. Of course, the mental health issues over the last few months have been due to physical health issues outside my control, so it’s no surprise that a daily photo challenge hasn’t changed anything. On the other hand, I look back over what’s come of the last 75 days with a bit of fondness. At least I have photographs of one happy moment each day. In time, I’m sure I’ll look back on this time with more nostalgia than I would have otherwise, all due to the challenge. Sometimes, that’s all you can ask.

A sampling of photos from this quarter, which ran from October 21st to November 14th, are below, in no particular order:

From 11/9 – Jason brought home powdered sugar donettes! These are one of my favorite guilty pleasures. They’re awful and I love them.

From 10/25 – an eastern tiger swallowtail in my garden (I’ve been trying to spot one of these for MONTHS with no luck, and since we cut down all the mostly-dead flowers, I thought butterfly season was over – then this little one appeared!!)

From 11/7 – This is a multifold happy moment. First, my cousin Byron was in town and wanted to get together for a lunch. Even though it was last minute, a bunch of my cousins and I were able to get there. Second, we ate at a restaurant that Jason and I have been going to since 2006, and haven’t been to in person since the pandemic began. (We’ve had curbside pickup from there, but it was nice to be back in person.) The third reason is a thing discussed at lunch, which is intangible but made me so happy!

From 10/23 – Originally, I thought we would just be planting our aloe in the future succulent garden area, but instead we decided to do the entire mini-succulent garden! Mini-succulents make me so happy!

From 11/12 – LOOK AT THEM HOLDING HANDS!! My babies are so sweet now. And still have no homes. So in the meantime, we just enjoy them. Ms Gherks and Angy-boi decided to take a nap together in the rocker I use most often. Cats always gravitate to the places that smell most like their humans – pillows, most-used chairs, etc. These little ones are no exception. (PS – Angus is like twice as big as Gherkin now that they’ve grown into almost full cat size!) (PPS – Yes, Gherkin’s belly is shaved. She had her spay surgery a couple weeks back.)

As I’ve said in past posts, if you want to follow along and see all the photos, I’m posting them both on Facebook and my Instagram.

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It Could Be Worse, by Beth Probst

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Thistle

Subtitled: A Girlfriend’s Guide for Runners Who Detest Running

The title and subtitle basically describe the book. Beth Probst is a larger-bodied person who took up running as a kind of personal challenge, and uses every kind of running incentive possible to keep herself motivated. She’s funny and relatable, particularly to other larger-bodied runners with slower times and back-of-the-pack placements (me!!). This is not a book that is meant to tell you all the great things about running and convince you to start. It won’t gloss over the awful parts. Instead, it explores Probst’s experiences over the last decade, with many half-marathon runs (and the training plans that may or may not have led up to them). Interspersed throughout are notes from other runners who all run for one reason or another, even though running is hard and can suck and many of us don’t know why we do it or keep doing it. In short, it’s a book that inspires, and lets all us not-so-elite runners know that it’s okay to not be elite.

*****
Side story, only tangentially related to this book: Near the end of the book, Probst talks about her first 10K race. When she gave her time, my immediate thought was, “Oh! That’s really similar to my first (aka only) 10K time.” I didn’t remember my exact time, so I went to my Running page here on the blog. The difference between our times is under five minutes, which I got a bit of a kick out of. But I was also curious about what pace my 10K had been. I remembered that it was 13-something per mile, but not the specifics. Because I didn’t want to do the math, I clicked on the link about the 10K, thinking maybe I’d continue to be lazy and just get the info there. The link goes back to a post from 2019, which itself is a throwback post that was originally written in 2013 (on a prior version of the blog). It’s all about why I decided to run my first/only 10K when I didn’t know if I would be able to walk the entire half-marathon that my friends and I had trained for. As I skimmed through the post, looking for my 10K pace, I came across the following lines:

At the time we started training, I had lost 70 lbs and just crossed the line from obese to overweight. I had never walked longer than about 5.5 miles, but I thought I would be up to the training for an eventual 13.1 miles. [emphasis added]

Oh, readers, can I tell you how startled I was to read these words, originally written in January 2013, about the beginning of training in January 2012? Nearly a decade ago, while I had participated in 5Ks (though hadn’t yet run a full 5K nonstop yet), I’d never walked longer than 5.5 miles. (Why do I know that number? Because I used to walk from my house to the library, then around the library park, then back home, for a total of 5.2 miles, and I knew I’d never gone much longer than that, so I rounded up.) And why is this important? Because last Saturday, weighing 70+ lbs more than when I started that training, I hiked 5.75 miles around Lost Maples. Because over the last however many years, I’ve hiked and walked multiple 5+ mile distances. Because I’ve been so frustrated with my body for how much it hurts after a long hike, thinking that this used to be easy, that I used to do this all the time, when in reality, I only began regularly walking 5+ miles during that HM training, sometime in spring 2012. I am doing more now, morbidly obese, than I did at much smaller weights for most of my life. And that’s an achievement that I need to remember.

*****
So back to the review. It Could Be Worse is a short book, coming in just under 100 pages. It’s self-published, so there are a few problems that you notice with these kinds of books (off formatting, grammatical errors, etc). Setting that aside, the book has a lot of good info in it. Tips about shoes, motivation, gear, running groups, training plans, etc. Probst won’t try to sell running as easy, or as a weight loss plan, or as the perfect way to transform your life into Hollywood glamour. Instead, it’s down to earth and very real, conversational and, as I said above, relatable. It’s not the book I would start with if you’re trying to get into running – I personally recommend Run to the Finish by Amanda Brooks for that – but a good one to read if running isn’t the center of your life. It’s a good one to read if each run is a struggle, each day requires a fresh dose of determination, and you really don’t know why you keep running, though you do. AKA readers (and runners) like me.

Posted in 2021, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Revisiting Mansfield

Posted on November 9, 2021 by Thistle

Many years ago, I read Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Of Austen’s novels, it’s one of my favorites, in particular because of one interesting thing that has stuck with me for over a decade. Fanny Price, the novel’s heroine, goes back to her childhood home at one point. Her family still lives there, and she’s aching to return to a place of familiarity and comfort. Instead, she finds that the home she’s longed for is not a true reality. Everything is smaller, shabbier, dirtier, and more chaotic. While Fanny has spent years feeling unloved and unwanted with richer relatives, the place she’s thought of as “home” has become dark, depressing, and foreign to her. She doesn’t realize how much she’s changed until she sees how she no longer fits into her old life.

That’s the thing: You can’t go back. Anyone who has ever gone back to a location that lives shining in their memory has experienced the dissonance between that memory and the reality of that location. Because memories are wrapped up in far more than truth. They carry nuance, nostalgia, trauma, sensory triggers, time-specific circumstances, and a scrubbing out of the mundane. The more shining and wonderful a location is in a memory, the more likely it won’t live up in reality.

I am a person who lives in the past. I retain very strong sensory memories of times, events, and places, and I spend a lot of time longing for what was rather than looking forward or being in the present. And like Fanny Price, I’ve experienced the slap in the face that is going backwards into our past. Sometimes that slap in the face is exactly what I need to realize that I don’t want what was in the past anymore, and it helps me to move forward. To let go, especially of grief and longing.

So let’s talk about The House.

(June ’14)

Recently, I wrote about being sucker-punched when I opened my Trulia app and saw that my old home was for sale. I struggled badly with that fact, even though I knew in my heart that all things considered, I wouldn’t want to go back to that house. Still, I wanted to walk through it. I wanted to see it, to be in the house that was home for my family for so many years, the place where my kids grew into adolescence, where Jason finished school, where my cousin and I would write every week, where I learned to run, where we hosted so many birthday and holiday parties, where so many of our memories lay. Yes, I remembered Fanny Price and Mansfield Park. I knew that it would be different. You can’t help what you want, though. I thought maybe it would help me to get some much-needed closure.

(Feb ’07)

I’m not going to talk about the events that led up to this next part, because they involve the privacy of some folks I love, but long story short, I scheduled a showing at my old home.

There was one big thing that scared me the most about this trip. When I first walked into this house in 2006, not expecting anything, I was immediately overcome with an intense feeling of rightness. I worried that the same would happen this weekend, and that walking into the house and feeling that rightness would undo all my resolve to stay where I currently am.

But I didn’t feel that when I walked in. The new owners changed a lot – floors, paint, replacing the sliding back door with French doors, adding an island in the kitchen, expanding the concrete porch, adding a large shed, etc. TBH, they didn’t do a good job with a lot of those things. The paint often didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, or was smeared onto the ceiling. One of the French doors had an inch gap between the top of the door and the trim. Each room had a different kind of flooring, and the thresholds between them weren’t actually attached (I tripped on one!). One spot of the wall must have had a crack, because there was an entire INCH of mudding built up in layers over it, not even painted, a glaring eyesore in the middle of the living room.

(July ’10)

(Mar ’06)

Beyond DIY issues, the whole place was dingy. A couple of kids lived there, judging from the bedrooms, so it makes sense that a lot of the lower walls had a buildup of hand-dirt. That happens over time. So…if you want to sell a house, or get your deposit back in a rental, you scrub the walls, right? Yeah, there was no scrubbing here. There were grubby walls and dirt build-up on baseboards and in corners. There was trim where paint had been peeled off in long strips, or scratched away. Then there was just the time-based decay that was never taken care of by the current owners – texture falling off the ceiling and walls in clumps, cracks and chips around seams of drywall (which happened ALL THE TIME in that house, well before we lived there!) – that sort of thing. It was an old house before we moved in, an older house when we moved out, and even older now. It needs more care than it’s currently had.

(Nov ’13)

(Dec ’10)

Between all the dirt and the very dark colors on the walls, the whole house looked much, much smaller than I remember. Remember Fanny Price, though – how much of the smallness and darkness is in contrast with my shiny memories? It was definitely a mixture of things. The paint, lighting, and weird furniture layouts contributed to the feeling of diminishment. But there was also just the contrast of memory vs reality. For example, I went back to look at one of the two walk-in closets of the master bedroom and was surprised to see that the walkway between the two sides was so narrow that clothes would brush both shoulders of a thin person. Looking back, I probably got used to stepping in sideways anyway, since my clothes were on one side and J’s were on the other. Then there were the bedrooms, which I thought were roughly the same as our current house (which is only about 50 sq ft bigger, after all). But no, the smallest bedroom was much smaller than the one here, and the medium-sized was about the same as the smallest here. The layout of that old house really helped to make it feel bigger, but again, it had lost a lot of that from the way the new owners had redesigned.

(Sept ’12)

It was nice to see some things in person. That stupid little chicken that I mentioned in the Sucker-Punched link above. Three months before we put the house on the market, Jason accidentally put a hot pan on the kitchen counter, making a ring of burns – and that was still there, ha! Our beautiful tree that we planted a decade ago, as well as the lemon tree that remains a weird shrubby lemon bush.

And honestly, it was nice to walk through and feel, not like home, but cramped. Because while I never meant to, I’ve outgrown this home. Would I have done so had we continued living there? Likely not. My family would have grown and evolved with the home, the way you do. Our paths diverged in July 2014, however, and we are no longer a perfect match. And that’s okay. I feel okay about that now. This walkthrough allowed me to let go of any future regrets surrounding this sale of the house, and makes me look on our approaching second anniversary in this house (early December) with more anticipation. I feel like I’ve hit the top of a particular mountain, to reach the other side. No more climb, no more looking back, no more what-ifs. Not a slap in the face, but an informed and gentle kind of closure.

(July ’08)

This isn’t my home anymore. It was my home for 8.5 years, a lovely home filled with lovely memories, and I won’t allow those memories or photos or years to be changed by the reality of 2021’s version of the house. But I’ll also no longer allow wishing, longing, nostalgia, photographs, or what-ifs color today’s home. I’m on neutral ground now – a place I haven’t been for a very, very long time. It feels wonderful to lay down that stone – not through concerted effort, but because I no longer feel the need to carry it.

A special thank you to the person who made this happen for me. I can’t express how deeply grateful I am.

Posted in Book Talk, Personal | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Nonfiction November

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Thistle

I’m not officially participating in Nonfiction November, or looking at the prompts etc, but for years I’ve associated November blogging with two things: NaNoWriMo and Nonfiction November. I’m not doing NaNo again this year – there’s a high likelihood that I’ll never do it again, tbh – and I’ve been very nonfiction-oriented this year, so I’m unofficially following along.

Nonfiction typically makes up about 10% of my reading each year. Given that I’ve found a good average of about 50ish books per year, that means 5 nonfiction. This year, I’ve already read 11. That’s over 25% of the 40 books I’ve read this year. That’s very out of the norm for me, but hey, I tend to read in waves, so I’ll just run with it. The last time I had a big nonfiction kick was in 2015, when 19 of the 71 books I read that year were nf (about 27%). Also, three of the six books I called favorites that year – plus all three runner-ups – were nf. Very unusual for me! And 2021 is shaping up to be similar, at least in terms of percentages. I haven’t as of yet read any life-changing nf this time around.

It’s unlikely that the only thing I’ll read this November is nonfiction, but I do have quite a few on my possibilities list:

  • It Could Be Worse: A Girlfriend’s Guide for Runners who Detest Running – Beth Probst (in progress)
  • Being Human – Robert Sapolsky (in progress)
  • Coffeeland – Augustine Sedgewick
  • Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health – Alessio Fasano
  • The Body is Not an Apology – Sonya Renee Taylor
  • Understanding Exposure – Bryan Peterson (in progress)
  • Exercised – Daniel Lieberman

That may seem like a small list to most folks, but that’s literally more nonfiction than I usually read in a year, so there’s that…

Anyway, wish me luck! Happy Nonfiction November!

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One Great Lie, by Deb Caletti

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Thistle

Charlotte has won the scholarship of her dreams, to spend her summer in Venice with a writer’s group under the tutelage of one of her favorite authors, Luca Bruni. Things are more complicated than they first appear when she arrives, however. Luca is mercurial and flirty and quick to temper. They all want his approval – as well as his contacts, his recommendation, his good word put in for their writing – but where does the line get drawn? How far is Charlotte willing to go to make it in the publishing world, and can she really trust in her own talent when the person praising her is the same one who wants more in return?

This is a story of powerful men who wield that power over the people under them, particularly women. It’s not a spoiler to say that Luca Bruni is a lecherous man who uses his influence to seduce younger women who desperately want to break into the writing world. While Charlotte may not have seen that from the very first chapter, it’s very clear to the reader that that’s what this book is going to be about. We’re not talking about flat-out black-and-white sexual assault. We’re talking careful manipulation, grooming, these young women in their late teens and early twenties trying to walk the line between not angering their mentor but also not letting him get too close. We’re talking about the way different people react when such allegations come to light, and the way powerful men get away with so much, while the women they destroy become tarnished and hated if they speak out. We’re talking about the way some women choose to acquiesce to those powerful men’s desires in order to advance their career, and how such acquiescence is seen as determination or grit, rather than for the true assault that it is.

Running through this story is those of creative women who have been silenced through the centuries. Thrown into convents, killed by lovers, art and words stolen and claimed by men. The novel feels like a treatise on the oppression of women, wrapped in the vulnerability of one young woman’s heart. It’s beautifully written, and incredibly powerful, and definitely could be triggering to some people. Absolutely wonderful read that, as usual for Caletti, ripped me to pieces inside.

Posted in 2021, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Wellness Wednesday – The Thing About My Body

Posted on November 3, 2021 by Thistle

A month ago, I went on a week-long vacation through multiple state and national parks. It was an amazing vacation. Jason and I had lots of fun and saw incredible things. We were active, outdoors, and having adventures.

But this is the social media side of vacation. The happy photos. The triumphant photos. What this doesn’t show is the struggles. The difficulty of doing these things in a large body. The fear when you don’t know if you’re going to make it back up out of that chasm you just climbed down into. The need to stop to gulp in air even though it feels like you’re hardly moving. The pain of sore feet, the ache of an overworked heart, the flushed skin and joint stiffness that gets worse the longer you go.

I’m being facetious here, putting up the unflattering photos to contrast the first set, but this IS the reality. In reality, lowering yourself onto a sled without just plopping onto your butt while the sand shifts around you is HARD when your body is very heavy and your joints are stiff and your boobs block your ability to see your feet. Trying to climb up a mountain, even with a gradual elevation, makes your heart race and your lungs gasp. Hip stiffness and belly fat make it difficult to lift your leg high enough to climb up that four-foot-high boulder. Your feet and back HURT when you “walk” (aka mostly stand) as you leisurely make your way around the 1.5-mile path through caves. In reality, when you realize you’ve chosen poorly on your first hike in a week of adventures, you start choosing the safer, easier trails even though you really want to go with the fun, life-changing paths. (And this doesn’t even begin to discuss the psychology and cultural biases and medical care issues – that’s an entirely different issue!)

It’s very disheartening, and it’s not just while on vacation or trying to exercise. Feet hurt when you need to stand in line for a long time. (And yeah, this happens at all sizes, but I’ve been every size within a 100-lb range in the last decade alone, and I can tell you it’s MUCH WORSE the heavier you get.) Excess fat and skin get in the way of everything. When you’re big-chested like me, your breasts get in the way even when you’re thin, but it’s particularly bad at this size. It takes an incredible amount of strength just to move the excess weight on your body around, and stay mobile. If you aren’t at a BMI considered “morbidly obese” (BMI of 40+), figure out what that weight would be for you and then try to carry around the difference between that weight and your current body weight. For me, I carry a lot of that weight on my upper back and shoulders because of the way my body is built. So imagine slinging that extra weight, whether it’s 20 lbs or 100 lbs, across your shoulders and then hiking up a mountain. It’s tough. And yet that’s every day of my existence as a larger-bodied person.

The above collage is from a year ago, before the weird medication from my ex-doctor caused me to start gaining weight again. I weighed 30 lbs less in those photos, which are a combination of both flattering and unflattering so that it’s not just the highlight reel. Before a year ago, I’d kept at that same weight and those same measurements for about 4.5 years, since the weird 18-month gain of 75 lbs that no doctor could explain. (It abruptly ended in March 2016, out of no where, with no changes on my part, the same way it began.) And at that weight I maintained for 4.5 years, things weren’t always comfortable. My feet did tire faster, my body was less mobile than I liked, my joints hurt from time to time, etc. But I didn’t also hesitate to climb trails with heavy elevation, or scramble up high boulders, or run for miles in my local park. I’d worked hard to build the strength to support that size of body, since no matter what I did, I couldn’t decrease my size or weight.

I am intimately familiar with a very large weight range on my body. I can tell you exactly what weight line I cross when people treat me like a human being (under the line) or not (above). I know the line where back pain from my breasts increases/decreases significantly. I know where my body feels healthiest (and hey, I’m still considered “overweight” at this (pictured) size by BMI and doctors), and every spot on the scale at which my body holds onto weight for awhile as it physically adjusts to loss or gain. I know at which weight I begin to struggle with hormone issues and hypoglycemia. And I know the weight at which everything in my body spins wildly out of control. That last one comes about 8 lbs higher than where I was a year ago, and about 10 lbs under what is considered “morbidly obese” for my body. This is when my liver enzymes, cholesterol, glucose, estrogen, blood pressure, and heart rate start to go out of whack. Because believe it or not, I was perfectly healthy in those photos from a year ago, despite being obese. And I am NOT healthy now, no matter how well I eat or how much I exercise.

Here’s the thing. I want to lose weight – or more accurately, size. If I replace fat weight with muscle weight and get smaller, that’s fine. The weight on the scale isn’t the important part. Anyway. I want to get smaller. I want to be able to get on an airplane again without fear of the difficulty squeezing into a seat. I want to be able to see my feet when I look down. I want to run or hike difficult trails without destroying my heart or joints or feet. I want to be able to shop in regular stores for clothes. I want to stop having conversations about my size (with myself, and with others). I want to FEEL GOOD again. None of this is about a goal weight. Sure, it would be nice to lose 100 lbs and be back to where my body feels best, like in the above picture. But if I lost 70 lbs and my body was in good health and shape (photo with green shirt), I’d be good with that. Hell, I could lose 30 lbs and be back to where I was a year ago and I’d be much, much happier – and healthier.

Unfortunately, no amount of wishing and wanting is going to change what my body is doing. And also unfortunately, no amount of doing all the things you’re supposed to do to lose weight is going to change what my body is doing, either. When something is wrong inside my body, it no longer acts like a body. Doctors can tell me all they want that it’s “impossible” for me to gain weight while on a medication that makes me eat less than 1000 calories a day, or when my large intestine is so inflamed that everything I eat goes right through me within an hour for weeks on end. “Impossible” isn’t a word my body knows. My body holds up a Go to Jail Do Not Pass Go Do Not Collect $200 card if something has gone wrong inside it, and until I figure out The Thing That Is Wrong, weight loss = the only kind of “impossible” my body will recognize.

And this is frustrating as all hell, because I don’t know what tf to do about it. I can eat well, track my food, exercise regularly, blah blah blah, but nope, nothing I do changes a damn thing. This has me angry and hopeless and determined and despairing all at once. I feel like I’m bouncing around in an ever-shrinking room and can’t find a way out.

So I keep going to doctors. In the next month, I’m scheduled for an endoscopy, biopsy, colonoscopy, thyroid ultrasound, and fibroscan, in addition to my regular lab work. Soon I’ll also finally see the rheumatologist I scheduled with all the way back in April, as well as a urogynecologist. It’s possible food allergy tests will be performed alongside the plethora of GI procedures (that will all come the week before Thanksgiving, yay?), and if not, it’s back to the allergist for those. I can’t even begin to count the number of doctors, specialists, and procedures I’ve had done in 2021. With no results whatsoever so far. Sigh.

But you know, I just have to keep going. Keep eating well, keep exercising, trying to build strength and prevent injury, keep going to doctors, keep seeking answers, keep looking for the key that will unlock my body’s ability to be a body again. All the while trying to manage that emotional bouncing chamber that keeps shrinking around me.

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October 2021 in Review

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Thistle

October! Spooky month, the month of temperature changes, a month that I normally shove a lot into and overextend myself. Happy to say that I didn’t do the latter this year. I knew I’d be coming back from vacation early on, and I didn’t want to try to do too much. I’m glad I didn’t, because it’s been a rather difficult month in terms of my brain. Things haven’t been hard externally, but a big chunk of October was spent changing my anti-anxiety medication, and any time you change medication like that, you have days of brain fog and adjustment. My doctor and I have gone slow, though, so it hasn’t been too bad. Side effects have been minimal – which is good, as the last time this medication had to be adjusted, my previous doctor went too fast and the side effects were some of the worst I’ve had! Brain zaps = no fun!

Even with my attempts to keep things slow, it was a busy month. Vacation, obviously, in the first few days. Laurence was in full-on rehearsal mode for the play he was in, with nights extending past 7pm almost every day, and then the play opened up on the 27th. There were a bunch of doctor visits, especially in the second half of the month. We had two family birthdays as well, including my oldest son’s 21st birthday. And at the end of the month, we did a fundraising walk for the ALS foundation with my friend Natalie and her husband, who developed the first early symptoms of ALS in March and has progressed far more rapidly than anyone can explain. Add to that the new phase of gardening (more below), Gherkin’s spay surgery (though sadly, her new family pulled out of the adoption, boo!), Halloween, and my personal attempts to improve my health this month, and it’s been…a lot more than I wanted it to be. I don’t regret it, though. I’m just looking forward to getting through all the medical portions so I can go back to focusing on better things!

Books
I actually read quite a lot in October because it was full-steam ahead on my TBR culling project. Did I enjoy all eight books I read? Nope. I was quite angry with some of them, and probably I ought to have quit reading at least two. But I did enjoy some, and my favorites of the month are definitely The Ex Hex (in terms of enjoyment) and One Great Lie (in terms of enrichment).

Goals
A big part of me is already looking ahead to next year’s goals, especially as I’ve basically given up on 2021’s. I also don’t want to (aka shouldn’t) start making goals because I have no idea where I’ll be medically at the beginning of 2022. I’m dealing with so many issues and starting to get swamped by them. It feels like drowning on dry land, physically and mentally. I actually took several photos this month trying to portray the feeling.

Health
More doctor’s appointments, more scheduled procedures, more medication changes. Also, I’m tired. Very, very tired.

House
The weather is starting to turn toward cooler temps, hurrah! We finally got someone to come put gutters on the back of our house (previous company we were working with kept saying they’d come, but after three months of not coming, we gave up on them). Once that was done, we were able to plan for the next phase of work on our yard. There’s still quite a bit to do! We had a few priorities to start with this month: planting the overcrowded aloe into the ground; getting more plants to fill out the front beds; and working to stabilize the side yard against erosion. And this went fairly according to plan. The succulent garden is planted now (far more than I originally intended or planned for!), and there are a few new plants to help fill in the front beds (not enough, but some), and parts of the side yard have been stabilized. I’ll post more about the succulent garden in its own dedicated post.

Favorite photos
These are excluding any photos from vacation, since those were already shared in other posts. As always, these photos are taken by me and aren’t always the best photography, just the ones I liked best for one reason or another.

Top, left to right: Jojo and the candy; fire; Angy-boi cuddles
Middle, l to r: drowning on dry land; he put himself into the recycling
Bottom, l to r: moon; Ghost in the window; fairy watching over the garden

Highlights of October
Again, these will exclude vacation or they’d be overrun, heh.

  • seeing my babies on returning home from vacation!
  • new couch (the old one actually had its arms fall off!) and a new armchair for my bedroom
  • getting my 3rd covid dose!
  • finally getting the Halloween decor up
  • good news from Jason’s employer
  • starting a new phase of xeriscaping our yards
  • cold fronts!
  • getting good photos of the moon
  • seeing an easter tiger swallowtail, which I hadn’t yet seen in the garden
  • the ALS walk with Nat and Chris
  • Laurence’s play, which was highly disturbing (a retelling of Dracula called The Transylvanian Clockworks, in which L played Dr Van Helsing, a gaslighting and murderous old psychiatrist)
  • seeing my mom for the first time in ages, and watching her play with the kittens – Angus, who normally avoids strangers the most, came right out to her to play and get pets. I’ve literally never seen him do this with anyone not in our household!
  • giving out full size candy bars on Halloween!

Coming up in November
This will be a heavy medical month for me. I’m not looking forward to having three intestinal procedures done a week before Thanksgiving, eek. But it is what it is. Hopefully they’ll at least figure something out. I also hope we can find new homes for our little kitties soon.

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Sunday Coffee – Wrapping Up RIP XVI + Halloween!!

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Thistle

It was a weird RIP season for me. I really started reading much earlier than usual (and technically before the challenge started), and then ended up culling most of the books on my original list. Normally, I read tons of books in September and October, because this challenge kinda invigorates me, but that didn’t happen this year. In the end, I only read eight books for RIP (and only if you count the few I read prior to the challenge officially starting). In order of when I finished:

  • Survive the Night – Riley Sager
  • All Our Hidden Gifts – Caroline O’Donoghue
  • Devil’s Night – Todd Ritter
  • The Drowning Kind – Jennifer McMahon
  • Ghosts of the Tsunami – Richard Lloyd Parry
  • The Haunting of Gillespie House – Darcy Coates
  • The Ex Hex – Erin Sterling
  • The Postscript Murders – Elly Griffiths

And of those eight, it was a pretty mixed bag, with five that I enjoyed and three that I didn’t. Even those I enjoyed broke down into two that I loved and three that were good but not phenomenal. Beyond those eight, I literally cut another nine from the list, read one from the list that didn’t end up being RIPish at all, and was unable to get my hands on four in time for this challenge. Oh well. Best books of the challenge? All Our Hidden Gifts and The Ex Hex.

As for bingo…

I hadn’t actually looked at this card since the challenge started, so I’m pleasantly surprised by how many categories I ticked off! No vampires or masks or creepy fungus (I read that book last year, ha!), wasn’t into the group book, and I don’t cook so I didn’t make any meals. But I got 19 categories plus the middle freebie, for quite a few bingos along the way!

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As for Halloween itself, it’s been a rather enjoyable, if subdued, spooky season. Decor got up a little late, but it happened. Pumpkins also acquired late, but acquired. Jason bought me Day of the Dead mugs and a spooky light projector and ghost lights for my bedroom. Laurence and his friends decided to go trick-or-treating dressed up as witches (complete with pointy hats and black skirts). I didn’t read as many spooky books as usual, nor did I watch many spooky movies. But I discovered a new spooky podcast (Uncanny), and I’m hosting a spooky haunted Halloween hike tonight in addition to giving out treats. We had fire pit s’mores on cool nights and took amazing photos of the full moon. For a year when my mental health hasn’t been great, this slow-speed holiday season was kind of exactly what I needed.

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Quarantine Diaries – Weeks 83-85

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Thistle

So I’ll be honest. There’s been very little news. We’re in a lull portion of the waves of this pandemic. Not much to report. I’m sure there’ll be another upswing again with people refusing to get vaccinated. Another variant will come roaring in and upend everything. In the meantime, I’m once again closing out this series the way I did in June. Maybe in a month I’ll start again, or maybe I won’t have to. Who knows? But as for now, this is the news from the last three weeks.

Week 83 – Oct 8 – 14
Week 84 – Oct 15 – 21
Week 85 – Oct 22 – 28

The following numbers are current, and I’m not going to backdate them with three individual weeks’ worth of data. Things have been calm and steady enough to combine the info. All numbers are as of 10/28 unless otherwise specified.

  • Cases: 321,013 (+6,828 in three weeks)
  • Deaths: 4,814 (+255 in three weeks)
  • Seven-day rolling average: 200
  • Positivity rate: 1.9%
  • Cases per 100k: 12
  • Hospitalizations: 241 patients; 100 in ICU
  • Vaccinations: 92% eligible and 76% total population have one dose; 76% eligible and 64% total population are fully vaxxed

(I forgot to track the numbers from our school these last few weeks.)

The biggest news from the last few weeks is another move by Abbott to become Dictator of Texas. All that stuff about how government shouldn’t control businesses? Yeah that only works for Abbott if the government control is doing things he doesn’t like. Literally, in August he said, “Private businesses don’t need government running their business,” and then he put out an order this month that prohibits ALL private businesses in Texas from vaccine mandates. This is, of course, in direct contradiction to the new federal mandates that say vaccine mandates are a requirement for any business with 100+ employees. As you might imagine, lawsuits are already flying everywhere, and frankly, a lot of businesses in TX already gave Abbott a one-fingered salute and said they would ignore him. He’s a f-cking embarrassment to the state and the country. VOTE HIM OUT. Ugh.

He’s also called a special session to pass a law to this effect, after which he’ll rescind his “emergency” order. And the special session will pass it, because the GoP controls every part of TX government, due to gerrymandering. (Which has, off-topic, now gotten worse, after the government voted to change the lines to give heavily democratic areas and populations of color less of a say in representatives. That, also, has been pelted with a bajillion lawsuits.)

Not much else beyond that in the news. The TX Supreme Court temporarily blocked SAISD’s vaccine mandate just hours before it would go into effect, pending trial outcome. Local covid briefings have dropped down to once a week. Jail inmates are getting a $100 commissary card incentive for getting vaccinated, and that is working very well as an incentive. Mix-and-match covid boosters have been approved, and many of my friends are getting theirs. Kids’ vaccines are coming very soon. And there’s studies on a new anti-viral pill that might help combat covid cases, which is good news.

Closer to home, there’s also not much news, but the news I do have is sad. I mentioned a few posts back that a friend’s loved one was in the hospital with covid pneumonia despite being fully vaccinated. Unfortunately, that loved one passed away early this month. This was a completely preventable death, if people had just gotten their damn vaccines, which makes it even more tragic. I also heard from a cousin this month. She’s so immunocompromised that her doctor got her both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine back in the spring, even though she’d already had covid in January. And with all that, she got covid again last month. This. This is why people need to get the vaccine – because people like her are so susceptible.

But, you know, you can’t make people be kind. You can’t make them want to do the right thing. And this is where the divide in our country comes from: the people on one side saying that this is why we need to force the right thing (or at least make it very difficult not to do the right thing, with vaccine mandates in businesses, and vaccine passports, etc); and the people on the other side who say we should all have the freedom to be a$$holes if we want to be. Eyeroll.

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Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, by Ben Montgomery (audio)

Posted on October 28, 2021 by Thistle

Emma Gatewood through-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1955, at the age of 67. She was a robust woman who trained by walking ten miles a day for months leading up to the hike, and who knew how to survive on the bare minimums after decades of hard living. As she went along the trail, she gained notoriety, and eventually became known as the Queen of the AT. Much of what she said and did during that walk influenced policies going forward about the AT, and helped to turn it into the trail that it is today. This book is a mini-biography, focusing primarily on Emma’s hike, but also going back through her life and into history in general.

TW: domestic violence

I’m in two minds about this one. On the one hand, I admire Gatewood and the things she accomplished, not just on that hike but throughout her life. She was a very fascinating person that could run rings around most of us. I’m also enthralled by the Appalachian Trail, and have been for many years. I doubt I’ll ever be able to hike it, especially not thru-hiking, but it calls to me. (Likely because I spent time in nearby mountains as a child, in North Carolina, and remember those times very fondly.) So reading about all that was great.

Less great was the deviations that the author kept taking. It was like there wasn’t enough information to write a full book about Gatewood’s hike across the AT, so there were tangents about her earlier life, the history of the AT, the liquor laws that affected much of the Appalachian areas, the controversies of other people’s hikes, extensive information about hurricanes over many years, etc. If I’d been reading a physical book, I would have skipped those sections. With the audiobook, I just wanted to scream get on with it!

Toward the end of the book, the author suddenly inserted himself, apparently going along Gatewood’s hike as accurately as possible (a difficulty, as the Trail itself has been reshaped and moved in places). There’s a possibility that he mentions this at the beginning of the book, but by the time I’d gotten to the end, I’d completely forgotten, and it really pulled me out of the book to have the sudden insertion. Especially as the author decided to refer to himself with words like “pantywaist,” which have such sexist connotations that I literally winced.

So I found the content – when it was on point – to be interesting, and the writing to be pretty cringeworthy. Also cringeworthy: the narration. The audiobook is read by Patrick Lawlor. It’s my first experience with him, and his style isn’t one I enjoyed. I actually encountered a similar narrator a few years back when I read Real Food Fake Food, and described it in my review as a cross between a game show and a shocker news program. That’s a spot-on description for this one, too. But while it was just annoying in RFFF, it was kinda horrific in this one. You know how, in fiction, a big action scene is often narrated in higher tones, faster pace, and with enthusiastic vocalizations? It helps get the reader into the story, and ramps up the tension. Well…this book did the same…only the “action” parts…well, they were when Emma’s husband was beating her. The narrator sounded excited and frankly almost turned on while reading these sections, and it was utterly horrifying. Add in all the really exaggerated southern drawls, and it’s safe to say that I downright hated the audio narration. (Why didn’t I return it to Audible and read the print version? Because frickin’ Audible is making it 1000x more difficult to return books these days, and so I just dealt with it. But this is beside the point.)

In the end, I half-recommend this book. Skip the audio, and read the book if you don’t mind the sort of biography that goes off on tangents and skips around in time. But skip the book if that sort of thing bothers you. Just make sure to go read something about Emma Gatewood, because she’s downright incredible.

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