Rhythm of War, by Brandon Sanderson (audio)

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Thistle

I’m not going to write up a summary of this. For one, it’s WAY too complicated. For another, it wouldn’t make any sense to people who haven’t read earlier books, and would spoil earlier books besides.

Let me start by saying this: On first read, I didn’t necessarily like the book. Absolute shocker, yeah? On a book I expected to be my favorite of the year, and the one I’d literally been looking forward to for three years? But yeah. My first impressions were of a book that was generally well-written, and which had lot of interesting new developments, but just felt off for me. I knew this had a lot to do with how I read the book – the first 19 chapters over several months of pre-release, followed by a frantic two-day read of the remaining 900+ pages – and the fact that my favorite character (Shallan) was missing from a giant chunk of the book. I knew that I needed another, slower, audio reread to fully immerse myself into the world and begin to make connections. The reason that I don’t normally swallow 1200-paged books in two days is because then I’m too close to truly see them.

I know that this is a bit of a weird thing and probably has to do with my synesthesia, but I tend to see stories as having shape. And I mean, literally see them that way, as in, when I picture a story, it has physical form that has nothing to do with the traditional book shape, or even the traditional story arc. Rhythm of War, for instance, felt like a glass cube or terrarium with structures inside, all lined up and regular and unable to flow organically because there were walls on all the sides to keep them held in. Frustratingly contained, with new information that got caught in corners but with no resolutions (yet), emotions smothered: a picture-perfect model of a book, rather than the frenetic energy that I’d expected. It’s not anything like those that come before it. And I wasn’t sure that 1) I liked it, and 2) that it would feel the same on a second, longer read.

It didn’t take a second, longer read for me to make the connection. In fact, I was literally 2.5 hours into this 57.5-hour audiobook when it suddenly clicked:

The Way of Kings is Kaladin’s book. Its shape is that of a sluggish heartbeat, pulses upward followed by long, slow, painful persistence. The structure and writing of the book reflected Kaladin’s struggles with depression, and the waves of his moods.

Words of Radiance is Shallan’s book. It is a tapestry, a puzzle with bits weaving in and out in complex layers, all pulling tighter and tighter until a full picture is revealed. If Shallan were a writer rather than an artist, this would be the way she would create. (Notably, this is much closer in structure to my favorite kinds of books, so it’s no surprise that this is my favorite in the series, and the one I could read – and did read – a dozen times in a row without tiring of it!)

Oathbringer is Dalinar’s book. It is a pulsing mass of darkness that rises and rises to an unbearable level of pain and then keeps going. And going. And going. Until one small change, and suddenly…the darkness no longer has a hold. The book’s structure mimics a particular scene in the book, magnified. It feels like a gruesome ultramarathon with the most perfect runner’s high when you cross a certain line.

And this book. Rhythm of War. This was meant to be Venli’s book. It’s Venli’s flashbacks, Venli’s progression, Venli’s book. But from the very beginning, it never felt like hers to me. This is Navani’s book. Navani the queen who holds everything together. Navani the scholar who gives herself no credit. Navani – the woman who organizes the world into lines and who brings order to chaos. Like a story, built inside a terrarium, contained and neat and emotionally controlled.

Cue Awespren.

I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, with earlier books. Sanderson has written them in a way to reflect the primary narrator’s experience of the world, even when that narrator is not on screen. If this isn’t a testament to master craft, I don’t know what is!

And so I go into the majority of my second read of Rhythm of War with a very different attitude and understanding. Yes, I’m sure that I will pick up a thousand things I missed on the first, rushed read. I’m sure I’ll start to make Cosmere connections, and see hints that I skipped over before, and yeah yeah yeah. But this. The experience of the books right down to the shape in which they’re written…that alone just gave Rhythm of War its place among my favorites.

***
As of posting this review, I’m about halfway into my second read of the book via audio. As expected, I’m making a lot more connections now, and some of what I previously thought were loose ends were actually just me being too tired to figure stuff out on first read. It’s as if this time, instead of looking into the terrarium from above, I’m inside it and exploring the ecosystem from within. While it’s too soon to say for sure, it’s very possible that Rhythm of War will move from third to second spot in my hierarchy of favorites in this series. I’m enjoying it so much this time around. Clearly, I shouldn’t binge-read these books when they come out. Also, hurrah for Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, who do the most amazing job with the audiobook and bring the story to life!

Posted in 2020, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Autumn Bucket List Wrap-Up

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Thistle

I certainly set myself up a tall order by creating an Autumn Bucket List that had 27 items on it to be done between Sept 1st and Nov 27th! A lot of them were small, but still! Sheesh. But hey – I got it done! All 27 mini-goals!

In order of completion:

Buy brown boots: done, 9/1. This has been on my autumn goal list for several years and I still hadn’t managed to do it. Imagine my surprise when this was my first completed goal from the list. Laurence wanted to hit up Goodwill, and I happened to see these. They looked to be the right size, though I couldn’t try them on until I got home (I needed socks, plus I always clean any shoes that aren’t brand new!). They’re a tiny bit tight, but not bad for $10! Probably won’t last more than a season, but hey, I have brown boots!

Participate in RIP: All through September and October, first book finished on 9/2

Annual women’s exam: Done, 9/8

Decorate for Halloween: Done, 9/19 – though I didn’t have a chance to buy a new decoration for our home until two days later. Picture below includes some of my favorite decorations from years past, clustered together on top of the piano this year.

Buy pumpkins: done, 9/23

Install a ghost circle out on the lawn: done, 9/25

Have a family fireside night: done, 9/29, and later again on 10/28

Run the Gourdy’s Pumpkin 5K: done, 9/30

Use up at least a quarter (13 cubes) of my old wax melts: 13th used up on 10/6, though admittedly, five of those were tossed after we discovered that their scent gave us all major headaches. Despite this goal being technically done, I continued to work through as much of the old wax as possible.

Find a new dentist and get my teeth cleaned: Not my favorite thing in the world tbh, but it had been about 16 months since my last cleaning (due to changing insurance, my primary dentist then closing their doors, then covid), so it needed to be done. 10/8

VOTE!!: Took 2 hours and 15 mins to get through the line, but it’s done! 10/14

Finish the next phase of xeriscaping the front yard: This was originally meant to include both a pathway all along the driveway up to the house, plus a paved seating area. However, due to some extra monetary issues this fall, Jason and I decided to do just the pathway along the driveway. Done 10/23

Drink coffee outside on a chilly morning: our first chilly morning was on 10/24. I made it through about about half my coffee before scooting back inside, haha!

Accessorize with a scarf; Accessorize with one of my beanies: Both of these goals ended up completed on 10/27, the first day we had a major cold front come through (as in, not getting out of the 40s all day). I met with Natalie and showed her to the gorgeous Big Tree that I’ve discussed in the past, because I knew she would find the place exactly what she needed, and I was so stressed that spending some time in nature with her was exactly what I needed. Even though it was 40s-feels-like-30s, it was a wonderful couple of hours spent out there together. (PS – Nat took the photo – and that’s not quite half of the trunk of the tree…)

Make hot chocolate: homemade hot chocolate on 10/28 for national chocolate day! Made over an outdoor fire, no less!

Run the Dia de los Muertos Night Run 5K: done, 10/29

Dress up for Halloween; Celebrate Halloween however covid allows this year: I’ve combined these two because they’re interrelated. And because I had a two-day celebration on the 30th and 31st. It started with a girls’ night out by the Pearl – a small group of hikers walking along the riverwalk with masks, followed by an outdoor dinner by an Ofrenda. I wore my cat domino mask for part of the night. My original intention for Halloween was to go as a black cat and give out candy in a socially-distanced way. However, my hiking group put together a haunted hike at my favorite local trails, so I volunteered to be one of the leaders. The domino mask would have limited my vision too much, so I recycled my skeleton costume from 2018 for the hike (with a sugar skull face mask!). I also put together Tootsie Pop ghosts to stand in a block of foam so that we could give out treats to kids without any contact.

Make pumpkin muffins: done 11/3, and they were yummy!

Decorate for Thanksgiving: done 11/3. Actually, I’m not quite sure why I made this a goal. This literally involves removing all the Halloween decor that doesn’t also extend to general autumn decor. The only Thanksgiving-only decoration we have is a wicker cornucopia that is on its last legs… In any case, Jason and I put the Halloween stuff away while we waited for election results to roll in. (That first night. Because, you know, it took five days to get an actual result.)

Prep Christmas cards: done 11/10

Donate blood: done 11/16

Host a personal celebration for the Rhythm of War release: RoW released on 11/17. Unfortunately, I woke up at 4am that day, but on the bright side, that meant I could download the audiobook early! (A big deal when at the last release, the Audible servers literally crashed due to the number of downloads!) I started my listen from after the pre-release chapters, and continued until I could go to BN when they opened. Got my copy, spent some time talking to the folks there (also big fans who had their own copies set aside!), and headed home. Pretty much spent the next two days doing nothing BUT read, but Jason made me chocolate chip cookies and I delighted in those while ignoring the rest of the world for two days. Heh. Oh! And of course I dressed up for the release in my Kaladin/Syl shirt!

Plan and begin buying Christmas gifts: Took longer than I wanted, but Jason and I finally started making up lists and purchases on 11/21.

Celebrate Thanksgiving however covid allows; Make traditional Thanksgiving foods if celebrations must be immediate family only: Just like at Halloween, I’m combining these last two goals as they’re interrelated. Covid definitely affected how things had to be handled this year, and we had no major family gathering. Instead, I spent the day before Thanksgiving in a pre-holiday hike with five wonderful ladies. On the day proper, my family made all the traditional foods that my family wanted. My requests included turkey breast, craptastic store-bought stuffing (ha!), and cranberry orange muffins (which I made myself! The only thing I made. Because I am definitely not the house chef!). There were, of course, a lot more than just those foods. And plenty of leftovers.

Beyond food, we watched the Macy’s parade in the morning, and then football all afternoon. We FaceTimed with Morrigan in the evening, took family photos, etc. Then the day after Thanksgiving, my mom, stepdad, and sister came to the house for an outdoor, socially-distant celebration. We all brought our own food and sat in different corners of our garage, with the door open. (It was pouring rain, or we’d have sat on the deck!) With masks on, we were practically yelling our conversations across the room, ha! But nonetheless, it was a nice couple of hours. Sadly, I didn’t get any pictures. Oh well. I’m just so glad I got to see everyone. I’ve only seen the three of them each twice since the pandemic began.

*****

This project was a lot of fun and most of these goals on here were 100% doable even if there were tons of them. I like busy autumns! And I think I’m going to continue making roughly seasonable goals for myself by drawing and coloring them in, the same way I did for summer and fall. Though…winter won’t have nearly so many. Because come on. Heh.

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Quarantine Diaries – Weeks 36 and 37

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Thistle

Well. Things are getting dire out there, aren’t they? We really need a national mask mandate, some stronger lockdowns, real financial help for both people and businesses, and a vaccine. Speaking of the latter, there seems to be several vaccines getting close to ready. We’re to the point here where a vaccine distribution committee has been created for SA and a plan begun for the eventual release, whenever it comes. I really hope there’s continued good news on that. Last I heard, general population looks to be receiving the vaccine closer to April next year, but even getting the vaccine out to healthcare workers and the vulnerable populations would vastly improve this situation!

Week 36 – Nov 13 to 19
71,377 cases, 1,309 deaths, 321 seven-day rolling average (up 38/day), 9.4% positivity rate (up 1%). As expected, hospital admissions, ICU patients, and patients on ventilators have all continued their steady increase. We’re at about a third of the level we were at back in July when we peaked.

It really hit home this week how badly things have been going in the more rural areas of the country, especially in the Midwest, which didn’t have as many covid cases over the summer as the metro areas. My in-laws’ county, where my boys and I stayed in July when things got really bad here, has had an astonishingly horrific surge. That month I was there, they went from 31 total cases when I arrived to 96 when I left. Even then, they were starting to creep up. But now, they’re at 3,023 cases, which doesn’t sound like much until you factor in the low population: 6.7% of the entire county’s population has contracted covid since the pandemic began. To put that in perspective, if that were the percentage here, our case total would be around 134,000 – almost twice as high as it actually is. It is now much, much worse up where they live and rapidly rising – a single week ago, that percentage was 4.4% of the county and under 2000 cases… (Hard to see, but in the photo below, the one really dark county in northwest WI is theirs.)

(Source: NYTimes)

At home in SA, cases are still going up here, but not to the extent of other locations. Nearby Kerrville had the virus rip through one of their nursing homes, killing seven already. A new study has found that one in six Texans are infected, and the governor is currently refusing to tighten restrictions (or let local governments tighten restrictions). HEB (the local grocery) has started to put product limits back on typical hoarding items like toilet paper, because yes, the hoarding has started again. Nine kids from Laurence’s high school tested positive for covid this week, which makes several dozen since limited in-person learning began. (We continue to school from home!) One bit of good news: Jason and I donated blood again, and our free covid antibody tests came back negative, so it’s likely we’ve not had any asymptomatic covid. Oh! And Jason’s employer is donating $3.5 million to local relief organizations like the food bank and Haven for Hope (helping the homeless), which is awesome.

Week 37 – Nov 20 to 26
76,750 cases, 1,343 deaths, 764 seven-day rolling average (!!!), 10% positivity rate (up 0.6%). Note: Other than the positivity rate (which always reports on Mondays), these numbers are as of Wednesday instead of the end of the week, due to the holiday yesterday. That rolling average – which only reflects six new days of cases – is up an average of 443 daily. It’s more than double what it was last week. If we’d gotten a number for the seventh day of the week, likely that daily case load would have been over 900. We’re seeing exponential increase, both in our numbers and in the hospitals. –>

So…shit. Very suddenly, our totals have gone insane after weeks of holding back the tide. It started on the 20th, with an emergency notice on our phones that our covid daily count was over 900 – more than we’ve seen in any single day since mid-July, and well over twice even our highest recent daily counts. Each day this week has continued to have high case numbers, including numbers higher than the alert, so it’s not an isolated reporting incident. I don’t know if the surge is related to Halloween, or Election Day, or just the trickling in from cases around the state (which is having record-breaking daily numbers – over 20k in one day on Nov 24th!!!). It’s certainly not what we wanted to see, especially in a holiday week! The city currently has a curfew in place starting last night through Monday morning, to try to prevent social gatherings over the holiday weekend. I doubt it’ll do much good, but good on them for trying!

So much has happened this week, after months with little news. The San Antonio Symphony announced that they’ll reopen for (limited-seating) performances starting in February, after they closed last March. This is particularly important for my family as that’s my stepmom’s full time job, so she’s been essentially unemployed for almost a year now except for side gigs. Someone here in SA had a double lung transplant after covid destroyed their lungs. I didn’t even know that was possible! The blood bank has grown critically low on blood, with less than a two-day total supply and less than a one-day supply of Type 0 blood (used in trauma/ER situations). Makes me glad Jason and I both gave last week (we’re Type 0), even if we can only contribute a trickle compared to what’s needed.

Let’s see. More stuff: Doctors are starting to speak out about local patients who refuse to believe they have covid even while unable to get out of their hospital beds, like we’ve heard from reports in other parts of the country. One business here – after having 18 citations since March – finally had their occupancy certificate revoked by the city. A strip club, no surprise there! It’s only the third business that the city has forcefully closed since March. Then there are the updates from the various school districts, which all show exponential growth in cases. Our district, as of November 15th, reported 136 students and 81 staff infected, a jump of 53 students and 28 staff in two weeks. That doesn’t even begin to count what might have happened during the more recent surge in cases. Over half the student cases are from grades 7-12, as one might expect. Teens are not always the most responsible about things like mask-wearing!

On a more personal note: That county percentage up in WI that I mentioned last week? It has continued to grow, and is now at 7.7% of the total county population. Other parts of Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota – where all of Jason’s family live – are similarly effected. And it has finally touched home. Jason’s younger sister, Chelsea, tested positive this week. So far, she just has mild symptoms, and hopefully all stays well. But two days before the test – pre-symptomatic – she had a surprise visit from my mother-in-law, my other sis-in-law, and my niece. They stayed outside and hopefully they were all careful, but both my MIL and SIL are particularly vulnerable with multiple autoimmune disorders, so this is really scary. And on top of that, the vulnerable SIL (Tenille, Jason’s older sister) has a double whammy, because her husband Jesse had close contact with someone who tested positive. Tenille and my niece got tested (negative for now, but early post-exposure), and both are currently staying with my in-laws while Jesse quarantines at home. It’s very scary times for the family right now, but as of last night, everyone was well.

(Chelsea, Tenille, Chris, me – Christmas 2016)

Returning back to San Antonio, my family went into stricter home lockdown after the big alert came through. We were already heading that direction as numbers increased, but this accelerated it. It was the first week in a few months that Jason and the boys reverted to virtual for their Sunday D&D game. Ambrose’s friend Tyler had been coming over, masks worn and distance kept, since SA got things under control, because we knew his family was taking the same precautions as us. Even though that last part hasn’t changed, we can’t risk in-person visits anymore. So that’s Ambrose’s support bubble basically gone again (Tyler’s family is like his second home). I’m putting stricter mask precautions on the hikes that I host, and might stop hosting and attending altogether depending on how things go. I’d hate to give up that social support and outdoor exercise, and our group has done a wonderful job of keeping safe, but it’s still scary to contemplate.

Week 37 ended with a lonely little immediate-family-only Thanksgiving. As I said in my Sunday Coffee post, we didn’t do any of the big gatherings we normally do for the holiday. However, my sister did decide to come down for a couple days, and collectively we decided that she and my mom (and possibly my stepdad, we’re not sure what he’ll choose yet) would come to our house for an outdoor, safe, masked, distant visit. Either we’ll be outside on the newly built deck, or if it’s raining (something like 70% chance), we’ve cleared out the garage and will be able to sit far enough apart in there with the garage door open. Everyone is bringing their own food so no sharing of utensils etc will be needed, and other than when we’re eating, we’ll be wearing masks. It’s the safest thing we can do while still seeing each other. This is a calculated risk that I’m willing to take. Family is important, so we’re trying to balance being with family vs keeping family safe by staying away.

Moving forward
Hunkering down, making decisions about things like hosting hikes, avoiding businesses more than usual, hoping things aren’t going to get exponentially worse by Christmas (but pretty sure that they will, especially given the record numbers of flights in the US from this past weekend…).

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Wellness Wednesday – Disbelief of Doctors

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Thistle

I am frustrated. Back in September, I mentioned a new medication I was taking that had suddenly made it so that I could sleep through the night without sleeping meds. For the first time in nine years. This medicine, originally intended for people with type 2 diabetes, does something to regulate insulin, and has been shown to help women with PCOS to lose weight. I actually tried this medicine a year ago, but we pushed rapidly upwards from the pre-dose to the small and then larger doses way too quickly, and I ended up with a terrible number of side effects: nausea, food aversions, stomach cramps, mild weight gain (about 3 lbs total over two months), severe depression (as if my antidepressant no longer worked), constant bouts of hypoglycemia, fatigue. Roughly a month after getting off the injections – it takes 5 weeks for the medicine to get out of your system – I was able to start feeling and eating normally again, rather than living on simple carbs and liquid food.

Now, don’t ask me WHY my doctor and I decided to try again, much slower and more cautious. The thing is, the first two weeks – when I was on the pre-dose level – I DID have positive results. But that dose is not meant to be therapeutic. You’re supposed to take it for at least four weeks before moving up to higher doses, and it was possible that my doctor’s instructions to cut that to two weeks could have caused the problems. So I went in slowly, and for four weeks in September, I took the 0.25 mg dose. While it made no difference at all in my appetite, ability to eat, or weight, I began sleeping through the night without sleeping pills – as if that tiny, pre-therapeutic dose did just enough to regulate my insulin that I wouldn’t wake up at 2-4am like usual.

And then I moved up to the 0.5 mg dose.

Oy. Since the beginning of October, my dosing levels have alternated between the two levels as my doctor said it would be fine to go back and forth as my body got used to the higher one. The last seven weeks have had three higher doses (weeks 1 2 and 4), three lower, and the most recent one with no dose at all. Because Bad Stuff has been happening:

  • All sleep benefits disappeared, because I began waking up at 2-4am STARVING due to the low number of calories I ate during the day.
  • My appetite was severely diminished – the supposed desired effect – so that I was eating roughly a third to half of normal calories. Eating beyond that caused severe heartburn, so I couldn’t eat a bit more at night to prevent middle-of-the-night blood sugar drops.
  • While I had no food aversions this time, I couldn’t eat high fiber foods (like raw veggies) without severe stomach cramps.
  • Depression got worse, as if my antidepressant wasn’t helping anymore. Again.
  • I began to swell severely all over my body. Everything from feet/hands to face and even my tongue is swollen. No matter how much I drink, my body keeps retaining massive amounts of water.
  • Probably related to the water, but also related to the WAY too low level of calories, I gained 10 lbs over these seven weeks. After holding my weight steady for the last few YEARS.

I got off the injections. It takes five weeks for the medicine to get out of your system, and frankly, I want it to get the F out of my body NOW, so I didn’t just drop to the lower level. The sleep benefits of the pre-therapeutic dose were nice, but the rest of this is nothing but hassle and pain and frustration.

Yet, I’ve been hesitant to approach my doctor, because I knew exactly how she would react. And she did: It’s “just not possible” to gain fat while eating a low-calorie diet, she says. I should take a few weeks off the meds and then start again, forcing myself to keep on a low-calorie, low-carb four-small-meals-a-day-no-matter-what regimen. If I really felt it was necessary (eye roll implicit in her words), she could order some blood work, but she was too busy to see me herself and would need to send me to a different doctor in the clinic if I wanted an actual appointment.

Yes, friends, this was the better of my two primary care doctors. Does it matter to her that I’ve explained, in detail, that calories mean absolutely nothing to my weight (gain or loss) when something is WRONG in my body, and that this has been the case since 1998? No. I’ve explained that if my carbs drop below 50% of my daily macros, I experience heavy inflammation, overactive bladder, constant feelings of dehydration, irregular menstrual cycles, extreme fatigue, worsening insomnia, and crippling pain for days after any intense cardio or resistance training (not due to muscle soreness – this pain is in my organs and joints). She still wants me to follow a low-carb diet, which I did for seven years straight to the extreme detriment of my body! I’ve also explained to her that I spend 4-5 hours exercising each week – ST, yoga, running, walking, hiking, boxing, dancing, whatever my body feels like doing that week – and her recommendation is that I should START exercising, maybe doing some bouncing on an individual trampoline because that’s low impact. Sigh.

She clearly doesn’t believe anything I say. It doesn’t fit into her medical world view. But I know my body. I know that for the 11 years that I had tooth infections from 1998 to 2009, I would go long periods of time maintaining my weight and then suddenly gain or lose 20-30 lbs in less than a month. I know that I had severe allergy reactions to mountain cedar (a big seasonal allergen in SA) when allergy tests showed I wasn’t allergic, and when I’ve literally had NO reaction to cedar in the 11 years since 2009 (not to mention all the years before 1998). I know that I experienced symptoms that appeared to align with bipolar II disorder during those years, only it wouldn’t improve with medications, and when the last of the infections was cleaned out, all those symptoms went away permanently. I KNOW WHEN SOMETHING IS WRONG IN MY BODY. I know, because bodies aren’t SUPPOSED to suddenly gain 80 lbs in under a year when you’re doing everything the same as all the years you when you had no problem maintaining your healthy weight. But I’ve never ONCE found a doctor that frickin’ believes me. Not. Once.

Which is why I’ve always had to do things myself. Which is why I was hesitant to even tell my doctor what was going on at the moment. Which is why I tend to avoid doctors unless it’s an unrelated symptom (or possibly-unrelated symptom). Because who is going to connect them all? Six years now of:

  1. sudden unexplained weight gain and later inability to lose weight despite rigorous protocols
  2. anosmia that lasted for months and then turned into dysgeusia which has continued for over two years, and which only improves if I take a steroid treatment to lessen inflammation
  3. inflammation (with markers off the charts for years now)
  4. autoimmune antibodies showing up all over the place but which don’t match any known pattern
  5. PCOS symptoms that don’t react to various PCOS treatments and I’d guess would disappear altogether if we fixed the true source of the problem
  6. hives that appear if I take probiotics and then last for months, plus also showing up at random times over the last six years, often in conjunction with medicines to treat above symptoms
  7. injuries that take well more than the normal healing time to recover, and never recover completely (like that broken foot from 2015 that took until 2017 to fully heal enough to walk on properly – doctors called it “a catastrophic failure to heal” – and which STILL flares up with pain on a regular basis)

I could go on, but this is the general point. My body does stupid stuff to get my attention when something is wrong, but my body is also not very good at telling me where the wrongness is. And doctors never believe a damn thing I say, nor connect all the random seemingly-unconnected symptoms. So yeah. I’m frustrated, and frankly I wish I’d just kept my mouth shut and stopped taking these injections and just never brought things up to the doctor at all.

Also: it’s time to change doctors. Again. Maybe the next one will be better.

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Smoke and Mirrors, by Elly Griffiths (audio)

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Thistle

In this second book of the Magic Men** series, two children are found dead in the snow, a line of candy leading to them as if in parody of Hansel and Gretel. Fairy tales play a major thematic part of the investigation, all the way back to a previous child murder from forty years ago.

This book was far more interesting than the first in the series, and there were so many different clues and misdirects that I had absolutely no idea where the mystery itself was going. I wouldn’t have even begun to guess who ended up being the murderer! I had tons of theories, growing increasingly wild, but none of them even got close. Like the previous book, it was a bit lighter and less thick than Griffiths’ other mysteries, but still fun!

**This series has multiple names: Magic Men, or the Brighton Mysteries, or the Stephens & Mephisto Mysteries. The first is the shortest to type, so I’m going with that. Heh.

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Sunday Coffee – Thanksgiving

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Thistle

It’s Thanksgiving week, and to be honest, it couldn’t be worse timing. The country is in a massive wave of covid, with nearly 200,000 new cases a day, making July’s spike look like peanuts. This has been going poorly for weeks, and San Antonio has been faring relatively well…until now. Two days ago, our case numbers suddenly skyrocketed, and we all got emergency warnings on our phones about levels that hadn’t been seen since mid-July.

Now, we weren’t planning on having a huge traditional Thanksgiving celebration anyway. I have a very large extended family, and most years, we have an early Thanksgiving gathering with my mom’s side of the family the weekend before. It would have been yesterday, but it didn’t happen of course. And then on the day-of, we would normally go to my aunt and uncle’s house for a celebration with my dad’s side of the family. Again, that’s not going to happen, not in the current environment and definitely not now that our area is starting to spike.

But we were planning a few small things. We were going to make traditional foods just for us. My sister was thinking of coming to town and even isolated herself completely for a few weeks beforehand to be extra safe. We were going to hang out on our back deck, outside, far enough apart to again be extra safe. My mom and stepdad might have come over as well, though those plans weren’t finalized. At some point, we might have gotten together outdoors with my dad and stepmom and half-sister, maybe for a walk on the trails. It’s looking like all of that might be canceled, though. Our meagre attempts to be with family at this time of year, as safely as possible, just gone.

I know this is the way it has to be. I know. I’m going to spend some time mourning anyway. I have no idea when I’m going to see my family again, and my oldest son isn’t even coming home from college for the holiday. (He’s decided to stay up in Kansas over the long winter break, with a short week down here at Christmas.) Those are sad things. Covid has made a lot of sad things this year.

But I’m also going to take some time to be thankful this week for the things we have. None of us have been sick. (Fingers crossed it stays that way!) My kids have options for virtual schooling. Jason has a job that can be done from home, so we haven’t had to worry about income issues or him potentially getting exposed at work. I have a social support network that I can lean on when I’m sad.

I do hope that soon, we can be together again. Christmas is coming and I know it won’t be the same this year, which is going to be doubly hard as it already wasn’t the same last year due to other family circumstances. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve seen some of the people in my family now, and for a group that’s as tightly connected as ours, this has been rough. We’re all still hanging in there, though. And I’m going to try my best to appreciate that this Thanksgiving week.

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The Zig Zag Girl, by Elly Griffiths (audio)

Posted on November 20, 2020 by Thistle

From GoodReads: Brighton, 1950. When the body of a girl is found, cut into three, Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick, the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend of Edgar’s. They served together in the war as part of a shadowy unit called the Magic Men. Max is still on the circuit, touring seaside towns in the company of ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls. Changing times mean that variety is not what it once was, yet Max is reluctant to leave this world to help Edgar investigate. But when the dead girl turns out to be known to him, Max changes his mind. Another death, another magic trick: Edgar and Max become convinced that the answer to the murders lies in their army days. When Edgar receives a letter warning of another ‘trick’, the Wolf Trap, he knows that they are all in danger…

Likely this review will be shorter than that description. 1) I only realized recently that Elly Griffiths had another mystery series out, with five books published. 2) The first three of those books are available to me for free from the Audible Plus catalog, yay! 3) While I didn’t find this book as engaging as Griffith’s Ruth Galloway series, it was a fun read, and I’ll likely read the rest of the series. 4) The theatre/magic bits made the story quite interesting and were what I enjoyed most. 5) I kept getting tripped up by the characters’ “back in the war” comments because it felt like the war was 20+ years behind them rather than the rather close 5-ish years. 6) The culprit was fairly easily spotted early on, though I admit that I had another candidate I thought more likely. 7) James Langton narrates, and I quite liked his performance.

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Wellness Wednesday – Grounding, Hunger, Change

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Thistle

In mid-October, when my extended family was in a crisis in four different ways, my anxiety went through the roof and I began a combination of not-eating mixed with drinking 5-6 tumblers of iced coffee per day. This was bad for me. It clearly showed angry results with my first month of real weight gain in 2020.

To combat this, and in my first step toward cutting all coffee by the end of November (or at least down to one cup per day), I stopped buying and making iced coffee several weeks ago. If I wanted coffee after this point, I either had to make hot coffee, or go down to Dunkin’ for iced. This would keep me from binging on the stuff. Many days, I’ve gone down to Dunkin’ for an afternoon coffee. It’s not an ideal solution, but with one exception, I’ve only had two cups of coffee daily since Nov 1st.

On November 2nd, on my way home from a chiropractor visit, I strongly considered taking the exit that would take me to Dunkin’ even though it was 4pm and I usually don’t drink coffee that late. Plus, I’d already had my two allotted drinks for the day. I felt extremely anxious, and ever since transferring my anxiety-drink from wine to iced coffee over a year ago, anxiety immediately makes me crave the latter. I didn’t know WHY I felt anxious, though, and since I had a few minutes before reaching that particular exit on the highway, I sat with the emotion for a bit. Then I realized: I didn’t feel anxious. I felt hungry. The hunger was giving me anxiety.

I’ve talked recently about how I began using coffee as an appetite suppressant back in 2014, and how it completely messed up my metabolic system, causing massive weight gain. To this day, if I drink too much coffee, or drink it at the wrong time of day – ie, to stave off eating when I get hungry – I tend toward hypoglycemia attacks and weight gain. This is the reason I’m cutting it back and eventually out completely. Clearly, coffee isn’t good for my system. But it’s also not terribly good for my mental health, either. Which leads me to two things: grounding, and hunger.

There is very little in common between wine and iced coffee, and yet, I was able to successfully transfer from one to the other to combat anxiety. It was an intuitive process and not one that I worked to do on purpose. When I look back on it, I know exactly what made the switch successful: the straw. Sounds silly, but neurologically, it’s not. Sucking through a straw activates particular parts of your nervous system, and the thicker the substance (so the harder you have to work), the more this activates. (We used to have Ambrose drink yogurt from through a straw for occupational therapy when he was two years old and had sensory processing disorder.) When you have anxiety, your nervous system is in overdrive, and by giving it stimuli, you can help to calm the system. It’s no different from putting ice on your skin or doing tapping rhythms for grounding. Drinking water through a straw didn’t help me, because there’s just about no resistance to water, but there was just enough with iced coffee thickened with half-and-half to provide a mild grounding experience. This, in addition to the stimulation of the drink itself, was the key to the wine-to-coffee anxiety switch.

Then you add in the hunger component. After using coffee as an appetite suppressant for years, and becoming more and more disordered in my relationship with food, hunger has become an anxiety trigger. It didn’t used to be. I wrote multiple posts back when I was losing weight the first time about the importance of hunger cues. An excerpt from one of these posts said:

Too often, hunger becomes the enemy of those of us trying to lose weight. We wish we simply didn’t have to deal with hunger, because if we didn’t get hungry, we wouldn’t want to eat so much, right? But hunger is NOT the enemy. Hunger – REAL hunger – is a signal from our bodies that we need fuel. Hunger keeps us alive. Hunger tells us that we aren’t starving (or in starvation mode). Hunger is an amazing, wonderful thing, and an incredibly USEFUL tool on our weight loss journeys, if only we learn how to recognize it.

But back in 2014, my anxiety, hunger cues, trauma, intuitive eating, disordered eating, and coffee consumption got all folded in together, and I stopped being able to recognize what my body was trying to tell me. And now, apparently, getting hungry outside of planned mealtimes is an immediate nosedive into anxiety. Coffee was both my go-to for unwanted hunger and for anxiety, so it’s a double whammy to overcome in order to quit the habit(s).

So. It’s time to do a little work, and transfer across my current anxiety drink from iced coffee to something else. (It doesn’t even have to be a drink, though likely that would be the easiest transfer.) I don’t know what I can use, yet. I can’t stand tea of any kind, I don’t want highly sugared drinks, and I can’t seem to find any iced milk drinks that aren’t of the coffee/tea variety (milk drinks would be best in terms of straw-tension). But this is the goal, in addition to re-learning to recognize true hunger cues again as I cut away the drink that intentionally buries them.

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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by VE Schwab

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Thistle

Three hundred years ago, Addie made a deal with a devil: her freedom to live life as she chooses in exchange for her soul when she’s ready to die. She didn’t realize the catch – loosening her ties for total freedom means that she can leave no mark. No one remembers her. No one knows her name. And then one day, someone does.

Let me start by saying that this book is worth every bit of the hype. I put it off, worried that I’d be the one person who wouldn’t like it. Nope. I savored every page over the ten days that I languidly read it, and I wish I’d spread out the last hundred pages or so for longer as I read them way too fast. There was so much good here. The writing was exquisite and immersive. The characterization was awesome, with people who were flawed and not always good but also lovable. The ending was perfect, in a really tricky situation. This will definitely end up being in my top books of the year.

There were a few things that struck me. First, while the books are very different, I saw a lot of parallels between Addie and The Night Circus. There is a certain dreamlike quality to both books, weaving in and out of time and history. There’s even a scene where Addie and Henry walk through an interactive art exhibit** that reminded me of the tent-mazes in the Circus. It’s not just that, though. On a personal level, both books were ones that reminded me of the joy involved in writing and creation. I read both while taking a break from writing, and both made me want to start again. They’re inspiring and beautiful and spoke directly to my core.

Second. There’s a particular scene where Henry takes Addie to the whisper gallery in Grand Central Station (for those who don’t know: you can whisper at the wall in one corner and have it sound perfectly audible on the other side of the room). He’s taking her to a spot she’s never known or experienced, something new in her 300+ years. It annoyed me at first, because how could she have missed this? I mean, this is a famous thing. It is literally mentioned on Wikipedia and on the Grand Central website as a thing to see there. My sister took me there on my first ever trip to NYC. So in all the many years Addie has been exploring the city, how did she not know? But then I had a realization: If someone had wanted to take her to this whisper gallery, they would forget her before they reached the other side of the room and began to talk via the audio arch. Yeah, it’s not particularly realistic that she wouldn’t have heard of this place, but it’s almost certain she never could have experienced it. So even though the scene stretched believability, I appreciated it all the same.

Last, because I don’t want to drone on too long about this book: the ending was incredible. The relationship between Addie and the “darkness” (the devil she made her deal with) is complex and interesting. I really worried about the different directions it might go. Without going into anything spoilery, the resolution between them was just as complex and interesting as the rest of their history. I cheered for Addie’s ingenuity, and while I mourned some of what was lost, I loved the perspective of time from the viewpoint of someone who has navigated three centuries of experience. It was just perfect.

I can see myself reading this book many times. Definitely need to check out an audio version to see if that will be equally brilliant. I love love love when I can add books like this one to my collection, and I’m so happy that I didn’t let the hype deter me!

**In the week since I finished this book, I discovered that there’s an interactive art installation here in SA that is very similar to the one in this book. I definitely need to go there when this whole covid thing is under control!

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Sunday Coffee – Theories: Rhythm of War

Posted on November 15, 2020 by Thistle

Note: This post will contain spoilers for earlier volumes of the Stormlight Archive (including Dawnshard), as well as spoilers for the pre-released chapters from Rhythm of War. Do not continue if you don’t want to read spoilers!

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