The very first Halloween costume that any of our boys ever wore was a full body ladybug getup, back in 2000, when Morrigan was only two weeks old. It was too big for him, of course, and he re-wore it in 2001 for Halloween. Since then, I’ve catalogued costumes every year, and here are my top ten favorites from over the years, plus two bonus photos. In year order:
2003 – Ambrose (age 1) as Clifford and Morrigan (3) as an “airplane driver” as he used to call pilots (ha!).
This is the next installment in the Lady Sherlock series. I can’t really describe the plot without giving away the last two books, and the mysteries in these books are really good, so I definitely don’t want to do that! I’ll keep this short. I loved this volume, probably my favorite of the three. I didn’t see any of the twists coming and couldn’t keep up with the threads of the mystery. I just had to sit back and enjoy the ride. Charlotte Holmes was her delightful self, and the too-often-repeated jokes from Book 2 thankfully went back to manageable levels in this one. I feel like I’m getting a better sense of character from so many of the cast, and I love that clues from previous volumes – things you’d never think of as clues – are being brought into later books. This series is well done and I’m looking forward to whenever the next volume is published.
Another year of Readers Imbibing Peril has drawn to an end. And as usual, I read far more than necessary to complete my Peril the First level of the challenge. There are a few days left, but I doubt I’ll get more in, so I thought I’d go ahead and wrap up now. In total, I read 12 books, if you count one I abandoned about 2/3rds of the way in. In order of how much I liked them, least to best:
12. The Witch Elm – Tana French (audio; abandoned)
11. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein – Kiersten White
10. A Conspiracy in Belgravia – Sherry Thomas (audio)
9. Broken Things – Lauren Oliver
8. A Study in Scarlet Women – Sherry Thomas (audio)
7. The Hollow of Fear – Sherry Thomas (audio)
6. Lethal White – Robert Galbraith (audio)
5. The Muse of Nightmares – Laini Taylor (audio)
4. Lullaby – Jonathan Maberry (audio, short story)
3. The Death of Mrs. Westaway – Ruth Ware
2. Dreadful Company – Vivian Shaw (audio)
1. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern (reread)
Culled from my original list: Maisie Dobbs, The Phantom Tree
Books that I didn’t receive from the library in time to read: A Pocketful of Crows
Other than my reread of The Night Circus, I didn’t really have any 100% standout books this year. I was expecting to, given that Lethal White and The Muse of Nightmares were two of my highly anticipated books of 2018, but neither of them overwhelmingly wowed me. Maybe it was the books I chose for RIP and maybe it was my reading mood. There were certainly good selections. Great selections. I loved Dreadful Company (follow up to Strange Practice), and The Death of Mrs Westaway was a nice surprise. I discovered a fun series and a few books that I didn’t know were out. Mostly good stuff all around, even without a 100% standout book.
How did everyone else enjoy RIP this year? What were your favorite books? Why am I drinking iced coffee in late October? (Because it’s 80+ degrees out right now, she says bitterly.)
Five years ago, Summer Marks was killed in a cult-like ritual that was blamed on her two best friends, Mia and Brynn, and her boyfriend, Owen. All three – only barely teenagers at the time – are branded monsters even though the accusations are never proven, and they still deal with the fallout. None of them are in contact with each other, but as the five year memorial approaches, a new discovery reunites them. The three of them, with help from a couple friends, have to sort through the tangle that was their relationship with Summer. They have to deal with the fantasy world of Lovelorn, pulled from a beloved book, that Summer introduced in their lives.
Imagine being a kid, and being so in love with a place like Narnia that you decide that it must exist, somewhere. You write fanfiction and discuss theories and generally immerse yourself so deep into the story that it’s hard to separate out truth from fiction – especially when Narnia (or in this case, Lovelorn) suddenly appears in front of you. Of course, we’re not talking about a real appearance. This isn’t a fantasy novel. We’re talking about a series of events that appears to be a real appearance, or at least one that three preteen girls choose to believe in. And then one of those girls is dead, dead in a way that mirrors a scene from the fanfic, and suddenly you’re a monster. Notorious. With a target on your back. It’s as my favorite character (Wade) says:
“They turned you into demons. Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. The boy next door. An old book. They made a movie out of you. It was a witch hunt.”
The premise of Broken Things is really good, and I enjoyed watching these characters try to peel back layers on a mystery that has condemned them to fear, isolation, and permanent stigma. I had to stop myself from skipping ahead to the end to see if my theories were right. I don’t always get along with Oliver’s books, but this one was nice, minus a few too-trope-too-easy moments toward the conclusion. It was the perfect read for a quiet, rainy afternoon.
Walking and yoga are my two favorite kinds of exercise. Dancing and running fall second in line, but walking and yoga take precedence. However, I discovered something important over the last six months.
About this time last year, my walking increased. No surprise – it was suddenly cool enough to walk outside again. Starting in November, I added yoga back in after not really doing much of it for quite some time. From then until May, I averaged 20-25 yoga workouts per month – almost every day. In May, those numbers trailed off, and stayed really low through the summer. Some of that was due to construction – I couldn’t do yoga with construction supplies covering my bedroom floor, or while I had people here working on my house! But the trailing off began before that, and it took me until recently to realize why.
During the cooler months, I start off my day with yoga, and then go for a walk afterwards, giving it time to warm up a little outside. The yoga gets my body ready for walking, and the walk feels really good. Once late spring arrives and it gets too warm to walk mid-morning, I start off my day with the walk, and then I do yoga. Only the walk is always a bit stiff because it takes awhile to warm my muscles up, and because of that stiffness, I have to push a bit harder. And when I push a bit harder, I’m a bit more tired when I get home, and my muscles are already exhausted before I start my yoga video for the day. I’m consequently left fatigued, unable to do many of the poses that I normally have no trouble with, and then I don’t enjoy the yoga at all. Most of the time, I just end up skipping the yoga, which is no good.
There isn’t a good solution to this. If I want to walk during the summer, I’ll just have to endure or skip yoga, or I’ll have to alternate yoga and walking days. I don’t want to give either of them up entirely. Thankfully, the time has arrived when mid-morning walks are possible again (assuming the rain ever stops!), and I can go back to my preferred schedule. I am so, so happy that the next six months will be far more pleasant in terms of exercise! Hopefully next summer, I’ll have a better solution to balance my favorite workouts!
Warning: This post is long and discusses depression, shame, body image, and other related topics that may be triggering to some. I’m very honest about my feelings, particularly about my body, but I’m not looking for confidence boosts or compliments. I appreciate everything that you guys do to lift me up when I’m feeling frustrated and stuck, and I do understand that there are some of you who take inspiration from hearing about my struggles and my refusal to quit. As I’m sure you’ve all experienced, however, a person’s personal struggle and their feelings may not exactly reflect those of the people around them. This post was something I needed to expunge from my thoughts. I feel lighter for writing it, though that doesn’t erase those thoughts and feelings. I process my grief and struggles through writing, though, so I’ve decided to publish this despite it being such a negative post. Please don’t worry about me, I’m okay. I just needed to write a few things.
I’ve suffered from depression since I was ten years old. When I look back over my adult life, from the time I left for college until now, I see very few spots of bright light and happiness. They are so few that I can name them off and make a photo collage. The summer of 1999 when I went on a study abroad program to France. The summers of 2006 and 2007 when I was in contact with my favorite band (and got to meet them in person). January 2011 through June 2013, while I was losing weight (more on this later). January through April 2014, after my abdominal surgery helped me regain my body’s true figure. Two weeks in the summer of 2016 while on vacation, which hardly count since it was vacation. That’s it. The sum of happiness in my adult life. About 3.5 years of the last twenty-one. Continue reading
Chopping down trees – this is a thing I do not like to do. Unless the tree is dangerous or dead, I’d rather keep them up no matter how annoying. At my pre-Boston house, we had two ash trees that would drop so many seeds each year that they would blanket the entire front yard. We basically had to rake up ash seeds, which is extremely difficult. But we still never cut them down.
When we bought this house last year, the front yard was done up nicely. There were five trees providing plenty of shade, and despite the slope, everything looked beautiful. Then a couple things happened. First, there was a hurricane-turned-tropical-storm that blew through San Antonio. Our neighbor had a tree fall where it was sitting on a similarly-sloped lawn, and we decided we needed to build a retaining wall around the tree that was on the most sloped part of our lawn, making sure it could stay upright. Then all the chinaberries began to drop from two of our trees, littering the entire yard and driveway. With that litter came the flies. Thousands of them, feasting on these dropped berries, which is just gross gross gross. Then we realized the sloped yard was eroding, and began to xeriscape. We built carefully around all our trees to make sure none were damaged. We researched local, non-invasive species to plant. And once it was all done, thousands of little tiny plants started sprouting throughout all our new beds, all identical.
(yard, before)
As it turns out, chinaberry trees are pernicious and highly invasive. Wherever they drop berries, new trees will grow, and when you pull the seedlings, new trees will grow from the same damn berry over and over and over again. And we had thousands of these berries in our yard. Back when there was grass, the seedlings would get mowed and we never even noticed them. But we did notice the way that grass didn’t keep growing in our yard, and how the lawn was slowly turning into a dirt pit. We thought it was erosion, and that was some of it, but some of it was just that the berries acidified the soil and made it impossible for grass to grow and hold the dirt down. Every week post-xeriscaping I would pull these weeds, and yet they kept taking root. They would grow in the most unlikely places, like under rocks as the one in this picture.
When the berries started dropping again this year, we bit the bullet and called someone to chop down both of our chinaberry trees. In researching, these and hackberry trees are the only two that San Antonio recommends cutting down even if the trees aren’t sick or a danger to structures. They are that invasive. We couldn’t really afford the cost – not to mention needing to plant a new tree to eventually replace the shade to our yard and house – but we did it.
Our yard looks very different now, and we have to restructure our xeriscaping around where the new tree will go. I suppose it’s good that we were having to do this restructuring anyway due to the plumbing issues, and that there was nothing permanent for these trees to destroy as they came down. It’s frustrating nonetheless, and we just hope we can find a good place to plant the new tree, far enough from structures, driveway, plumbing, and the previous chinaberry tree roots. And we hope that the trees won’t just start growing back, given their pernicious nature. In the meantime, we’ve chosen a native, non-invasive species to put in our yard, a live oak. It’ll be years before it’s fully grown, but that’s totally worth it for a tree that won’t cause all the trouble that those chinaberries caused!
Annabelle is running. Running from her past. Running from her future. Just running. From Seattle to DC, her grandpa as her support team in his old RV, her friends at home a self-appointed publicity team. She’s not running for a cause, but her journey is embraced across the country nonetheless. And as Annabelle’s miles pile up and she meets supporters along the way, she begins to unravel the trauma that changed her life the year before.
It’s been several years since I’ve read a Deb Caletti novel. Honestly? I worried that I’d outgrown her stories the way I’ve outgrown many of the YA authors I loved a decade ago. It happens. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure this was my kind of book. I wanted to try, though. As I said, it’s been a few years.
A couple chapters in, I wasn’t sure I would keep reading, but now for a different reason. This book was stressful. In our current political climate, it’s difficult to read a story of a young woman who loses control of her personal autonomy. It’s difficult to read about violence against women, and bullying, and male dominance, and entitlement, and the taking of a future purely out of selfish pettiness.
This was a very good book. It discusses some deadly serious subjects and charged political issues, but handles them with grace and subtlety. (As much as that is possible, anyway.) The psychological changes that Annabelle undergoes are gradual and believable. The events of her past are uncovered slowly, revealing a series of warning signs that are all too easy to overlook.
Because that is the crux of the issue: Women are taught to be nice, to forgive everything, to empathize. Unless a man is showing blatant, overt hostility (and sometimes not even then), we’re taught to ignore the warning signs and give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the man is sensitive or awkward or just needs someone to care for and understand him. We’re taught to disregard our intuition in favor of the man’s needs or feelings, even when that intuition is screaming RUN RUN RUN, and when we act on our intuition, we’re dismissed as “paranoid.” All the while, too many women don’t act on those instincts, and suffer the consequences of not being “paranoid.” None of this is okay.
And it was not okay for Annabelle, for her friends, for her family. One person in this book characterizes such psychological and physical violation against women as “a permanent life sentence.” The book, to me, is encapsulated in this one incredibly powerful paragraph:
“I live in this system, you know, you do, we do, where the control and the shutting up is such a regular thing that we sometimes don’t even see it. Where there are rules and rights for him and rules and rights for her and they are different rules and rights. The system says who gets to control who, and who is entitled to power and protection and who isn’t, and every day I run because I just don’t know what to do about it or how to change it.”
It was a very hard book to read, but entirely worth it. My love for Caletti’s writing and stories is confirmed. I never should have doubted.
My oldest child is now officially an adult. He can vote, and plans to next week when early voting starts. He’s finished college applications and has been accepted to his top choice (Kansas University). In the spring, he’ll be getting his first job to save money for college. It’s crazy to think he’s been in our lives now for 18 years. It just doesn’t feel that long. Welcome to the world of adulthood, oldest child of mine.
It’s been an interesting month so far. On the first, I found a lump in my left breast. On the third, my doctor confirmed that there was something there, though she suspected it was fibrocystic tissue possibly related to perimenopause. On the eighth, I had an ultrasound and mammogram, where they (thankfully) found nothing abnormal. So that first week was a rollercoaster of emotions that ended in relief.
Then last week, I had blood drawn for my semi-annual health checkup. The last time I did this, I had mostly good improvements from the previous autumn. This time around, I was expecting bad bad bad. After months of living on restaurants and microwavable meals, hardly able to exercise, and dealing with stress and weight gain on top of that, I knew my numbers would be much worse than in April. I was surprised, then, to get my lab results and discover mostly positive changes. All aspects of my cholesterol were better than before, some the best they’ve ever been. My glucose numbers are up slightly, but still within normal range and right close to where they usually stay. My insulin is back to normal for the first time in years, and my inflammation levels have gone from very elevated to only mildly elevated. My iron levels are smack in the middle of normal instead of being super high. My liver-function numbers are doing fantastic. Everything looks great, with one exception that ties in to the first part of this post.
Both my estrogen and progesterone levels are at post-menopausal levels. The progesterone in particular came in at nearly the bottom of post-menopausal range. My doctor already suspected I was in perimenopause despite only being 39 years old. That would explain a few symptoms I’ve had, as well as the development of fibrocystic tissue. It also ties in with family history of early menopause (usually by mid-40s). But I’m not menopausal or post-menopausal yet, not by a long shot. Those numbers shouldn’t be nearly as low as they are. This means two things: First, these numbers are likely being affected by my PCOS, and I need to work with my Ob/Gyn to get them back to normal. I have an appointment in January for specific hormone work after specific blood tests to come in December. Second, these out-of-whack hormones are possibly affecting my health in many ways, from difficulty losing weight to the bizarre changes to my senses of smell and taste over the last nine months.
[Side-note backstory: In January, I lost my sense of smell completely (anosmia). I thought it was related to a series of illnesses that lasted until I got strong antibiotics in April, but my sense of smell didn’t return until June 1st, when I came home to find my house torn to pieces and plaster dust everywhere. After that, the only thing I could smell for two months was plaster, and any food with a high fat content tasted spoiled/rancid. I actually threw out a jar of peanut butter, thinking it had gone bad. This isn’t the same as when you’re sick and things taste weird. This was a full-blown change in sensory perception. My doctor put me on prednisone for something else, and since then I can’t eat 90% of dairy products because they taste like copper. (That’s a common side effect, but it’s supposed to go away after you finish the medicine. It’s been three months since I finished.) Then one day, very sudden, the plaster went away and everything smelled like undercooked sweet bread. Rancid and copper tastes stayed. Then after another month, another sudden shift occurred and the only thing I could smell was sewage. That’s where I stand today. If there’s a strong odor of gasoline or pizza or rain, it smells like sewage. If it doesn’t smell like sewage, then I can’t smell it at all. Obviously, this is a problem, and I’m at a loss to explain it. I thought it might have been my previous antidepressant because I lost my sense of smell after we increased the dosage, but I’ve been off that medicine for nearly four months and nothing has changed.]
I saw my primary care doctor yesterday to discuss the lab results. Unfortunately, he was called away on an emergency and I had to see a different doctor in the practice, but I still told him about the anosmia after he went through my lab results. My next step – sigh – is to get a brain MRI to make sure there are no physical obstructions in my brain, pituitary gland, or sinus region. The anosmia might also indicate the development of full-blown hemochromatosis (a genetic high blood iron disorder that runs in my family, and which I’ve been tested genetically-inclined-to-develop with two abnormal markers in my DNA). I had no idea that changes in sensory perceptions could be caused by hemochromatosis, and since my iron, ferritin, and iron-binding levels are all on the lower end of normal right now, I’m pretty sure that’s not it. But I’m also hoping that this brain MRI thing comes back negative. It’s kind of a scary time for my health right now!
