We have reached one of the high points of the Christmas season, and I am going to stop for a moment and say that all the “THANKSGIVING FIRST!!” arguments do not reach me. I am a multi-tasker, and also I have a lot to do. Also, Thanksgiving is not much of a holiday: it’s one meal. It’s not as if I am going to use all of November to anticipate and work on Thanksgiving; I have the time NOW, so I am going to spend it NOW, so that I can enjoy the Christmas tasks instead of running full-tilt from Thanksgiving to Christmas trying to rush everything done. I always wonder, when I see “NOT NOW CHRISTMAS” posts, if those are by people who are not in charge of Making Christmas Happen at their house. Sure, I can wait for each holiday to be over before starting the next one, if all I have to do is sit in a comfy chair and enjoy someone else’s efforts!!

Anyway. Too much coffee and internet already today, clearly. Where was I? Oh yes: the kick-off of my Christmas season is when I get my Kid Assignments from our local food/clothing pantry, which runs a program every year so that families who are struggling to Make Christmas Happen can be paired up with families who have extra Christmas. I was nervous the first time I participated, but this is my fourth (?) year and now it is truly one of my favorite parts of the entire holiday season. Possibly my top-favorite kind of gift-shopping is this particular blend of high-pressure and low-pressure: it’s high pressure because what I buy might be a large part of what these kids get, so I want to get it right; but it’s low-pressure because I can’t possibly know what is right, I can only do my best to guess (and to provide gift receipts), based on the very limited (I think TOO limited) information I get from the organization. Each time I run into a Moment of Anxious Indecision, I can think “I can’t know; I can only choose what I think is best; I will include a gift receipt.” And then I pick what I think is best.

PLUS it justifies my belief that Christmas prep legitimately begins in November: the assignments are handed out in the first third of November, and the gifts must be dropped off by the first third of December, so that other volunteers can wrap them and deliver them to the hundreds of families who participate. People Who Get Christmas Done NEED November. If Thanksgiving is such an insurmountable hurdle in the U.S., let’s move it to October and celebrate it with our friend/neighbor/sibling Canada. I think that seems like a nice idea anyway.

BACK TO THE KIDS. I have been assigned two girls; one is early elementary school and one is late high school. For teenagers I tend to lean more toward the gift cards on their lists plus things that are easy to return; I also call in assistance from my kids, who can tell me about Brands and Cool and so forth. This particular teenager asks for silvery jewelry and nail stuff, and Elizabeth can be my consultant for both, and also I would welcome any input from you, if you have a teenager who likes similar things. I was thinking I would get a nail polish set from, like, Sephora? Or maybe Sephora is what Moms think is cool, and the kids like something else? Jewelry is even trickier, but I’ll get an assortment and a gift receipt. Does anyone know where the cool kids buy their jewelry these days?

Now, the younger one. She wants Pokemon cards and a Pokemon binder. I would like to buy her a good quality Pokemon card binder, with lots of extra pages. I am not sure whether to go for the four-cards-per-page format or the nine-cards-per-page format, and I am hoping some of you have card-collecting kids who can advise on all these things. I am especially hoping for advice on what is the best set of Pokemon cards I can buy. Like, the HOTTEST HOLIDAY CARD SET is what I want to get. Or, if that involves standing in line for hours or bidding on eBay, the SECOND HOTTEST holiday card set.

I want to update on the various frets—and if you have updates on YOUR frets, I would like to hear them.

HENRY SUCCESSFULLY VOTED. He said he was ferried from one elderly volunteer to the next, and he credits the “limitless patience” of a volunteer delightfully named Pearl, who was, in her youth, a student at the same college Henry currently attends, and in fact lived in the same dorm where he currently lives. She got him all set up, and Henry sent a photo of himself with the I Voted sticker. (Wouldn’t it have been great if he’d taken a selfie with Pearl?? That might not be allowed. But WOULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN GREAT??) I feel a little odd about him being registered where he goes to school instead of here at home, but it won’t come up very often, and it sure will make voting easier for him. And if he were to transfer to a different college or something, he could just change his registration, so it’s okay, it’s okay, it doesn’t need to take root as a new fret.

The midterms are over and I am just dazed. I’d thought this was going to be another Lucy-yanking-away-the-football: I’d thought this was going to be yet another situation where the news seizes on any tiny bit of drama in order to Generate Content, and that all the hope for a Blue Wave was going to be, after the fact, discussed as if it never had a chance and we were all fools to think it did. But instead!! …Well, instead, now I have to fret that the Democrats will not DO ANYTHING with this win, that they have become the party of Vigorous Objections and will not know what to do with their newfound ability to Take Actual Action.

A new fret: I mailed the twins’ Halloween care packages on October 21st, using USPS Priority Mail. They were expected to arrive October 24th; they arrived November 4th. They spent TWELVE DAYS sitting in a “distribution center” in the same city where the twins go to school. I know the estimated delivery dates are “not guaranteed,” but I feel like this is a MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCE. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about Christmas mailing. I guess I have to finally figure out how to switch to UPS. I used UPS once, and they added like forty dollars of fees ON TOP OF the shipping costs of two Christmas boxes (something about me using the UPS mailing facility and not having a UPS account?), so I was kind of Never Again, but it looks like I need to reconsider.

I ended up feeling VERY HAPPY that I’d placed that Nuts.com order for Paul’s sister’s birthday. PRE- and MID-ordering, I’d felt some resentment and some stubbornness; AFTER ordering, I was so relieved I hadn’t let that cloud my judgment about What Ought To Be Done. Like: it’s 100% true that Paul should have been the one doing it. But that doesn’t mean Paul’s sister should have her 50th birthday go unmarked—and Paul’s sister is my family too now. I do think Paul feels benevolently toward his sister, and also that Paul is Not Good at gift-thinking or gift-ordering or occasion-remembering. Should Paul be better at all those things? Yes. IS he? No. Are those strengths of mine, and do I in fact LIKE TO DO THEM?? Yes. Would I be DISAPPOINTED on some level if Paul took on some of those tasks? YES. So. I am going to save my resentment and stubbornness for the tasks I DON’T like to do.

Also: Paul’s sister direct-messaged ME to thank me for the box and the card, even though both were marked as being from Paul and me, and she did not message Paul. Paul’s sister knows what’s what.

And if I can tease the next post: I FINALLY SAW A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL WHO IS GOING TO HELP WITH HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY, and I am basically in love with her, and I will tell you more next time. Right now I have to go PICK UP MY NEW PRESCRIPTIONS.

William, yesterday evening, bringing up plans for this evening (the night of the U.S. midterm elections, which could change the course of history in numerous ways): “Mom, I’m assuming your plan is ‘Sleeping Pill at 6:00pm’? That’s probably my plan.” That had NOT been my plan, but now I’m thinking maybe it’s my plan.

Let’s find a distraction, other than emailing my high school boyfriend, which I also did. I would like to talk about How Our Parents Stock Their Showers. I could work on that title, but not right now.

When I visit my parents, there are three total products in the shower—already a sharp contrast to my shower at home, which has somewhere between twenty and thirty, because I am a faithless product wench and will buy almost anything that looks interesting, and because I find “getting to choose which shampoo/conditioner/bodywash to use today” a useful tool in my depression-warding-off toolkit. My parents have:

1. Ivory bar soap
2. Prell shampoo
3. Pantene Sheer Volume conditioner, in the big pump bottle

Items 1 and 2 are EXACTLY THE SAME as what we had all through my childhood. (Two Gen X Kid markers: “watching the beautiful green bubble go up and down in the Prell bottle,” and “admiring the letters pressed into a new bar of Ivory, and noticing as they gradually disappeared.”) I remember when conditioner (then called “creme rinse” if I remember correctly) came to our house in the ’80s, and it CHANGED MY LIFE. Suddenly I could JUST COMB MY HAIR, instead of having to yank through the squeaky Prell tangles. I am pretty sure we had the absolute cheapest one on the market (VO5?) but NO MATTER, it did the trick. (I’d have to ask, but my GUESS is that my mom thinks of Pantene as Expensive Conditioner, and that she skimps when she uses it to make it last longer.)

I will note that my new shorter springier haircut (have we already talked about this? I gave the stylist free rein within certain limits, and she cut off 15 inches and put in tons of layers, and now it’s wavy/bumpy in a way some people react to as if it is curly, but I have seen too many of those “IS YOUR HAIR SLIGHTLY FRIZZY?? IT IS ACTUALLY SECRETLY CURLY!!!” reels to give in to that story)…where was I going with this sentence? Oh yes: my new shorter springier haircut THRIVED on the Prell/Pantene combination. It may have stripped all that was good and holy out of my hair, but my hair was ON BOARD with that. A good hair day every day. I remember experiencing the same thing in the early ’90s, combining disappointing “spiral perms” with Pert Plus: it was the closest those perms ever got to spiraling. All my careful moisturizing and damage-repair just made my hair LANK, but the caustic powers of a shampoo marketed as “odor-fighting” and “for men!” worked MAGIC.

I would like to know, with the intensity of a hundred thousand elections, what YOUR parents keep/kept in THEIR shower, and what you remember about the shower/bath products of your youth—and how it compares to what YOU keep in YOUR shower now.

I do not think Henry is registered to vote. He is vigorously intending to vote, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to. Our state has a site where you can check your status, and I checked his status, and it does not recognize him, and I think this means he is not registered or that he is incorrectly registered. BUT: he and I recently had a mini-Come-To-Jesus about an error I made in overstepping the parenting boundaries. And I feel like he might consider “looking up his voting status” to be overstepping in a similar way. But it is two days until the midterms in the U.S., and I know probably one single vote doesn’t make the difference, but WHAT IF IT DOES?? WHAT IF IT DOES?? I have already done the maximum Nonchalant Hints, including sending all the kids the link to the site where they can check their own status, and casually suggesting they do so.

I’m finding I can’t really focus on anything until the midterms are over. I am in a holding pattern.

I asked the twins in mid-October what their Thanksgiving-break schedules were like, so we could figure that out while train tickets were still available. I realized today that although Elizabeth answered me, Edward never did, and so the issue had gotten stuck in the Waiting To Hear Back part of my brain. I texted again today, and Edward answered, and when I went to buy their train tickets I found there were no tickets available for either the way home or the way back. So I will need to go fetch them on Tuesday/Wednesday, and Wednesday is usually Day One of Thanksgiving cooking. This is not a big deal. It’s not a big deal! It’s just one year. Maybe someone else can do some of the cooking. Or I can make the Wednesday things on Thanksgiving Day instead and it’ll just be a little more harried than usual! Or I can skip them this year, or purchase equivalents. And I LIKE driving to get the kids, even in Holiday Traffic! It’s fine! It’s fine!

I was visiting my parents for a week, and when I came home there was…kind of a lot for me to do. Things I would expect the two grown-ups left behind to handle. And the things I’d specifically asked them to do while I was gone, like scooping the litter box, had been done at an Extremely Poor level. Like, so badly that it’s hard to know how to correct it for the future. Like, how to begin. “So…the goal when scooping the litter box…is to remove everything the cat left there. We do that by using this SCOOP to…SCOOP…all of that OUT. Of the litter box.” It has been disheartening. It makes me feel as if I can’t leave the house without HIRING someone to take over for me. Honestly I have spent the last couple of days wondering if the next time I leave, I should just hire the same person I hire when none of us are here. “No, just ignore the two grown men. Work around them. Thank you. I love you.”

Rob has gotten a new job, and it sounds like a side-hustle rather than a job, and it is working to train AI, and you might already know how I feel about that. Furthermore, when I nonchalantly asked if this would affect the health insurance he gets through the state, he DID NOT KNOW AND HAD NOT CHECKED, AND DID NOT KNOW HE NEEDED TO CHECK, AND ALSO THOUGHT HE COULD JUST LET THAT COAST.

Would you like to share a fret?

Paul’s sister’s 50th birthday is coming up. On one hand, I would like to do something special for her—or really anything at all, special or no. On the other hand:

1. I resent that that seems to be EXCLUSIVELY MY DOMAIN, even though she is PAUL’S sister. I asked Paul for ideas TWICE, and both times he was unhelpful. And in case you think I mean he didn’t come up with ideas that I liked or whatever, let me clarify that he came up with zero ideas of any kind. He also had not remembered that this was her 50th, and in fact had to do the math out loud to validate my claim.

2. I mean, I’ll also note she did nothing for her brother’s 50th, literally nothing. But increasingly, based on his approach toward her over the decades, that seems fully fair.

So maybe I should do nothing? Maybe I should leave the two of them to the relationship they seem to have chosen?

But I feel a weight on our side of the balance scales. We have a better life in most measurable ways. She has SIGNIFICANTLY fewer people than I do; she has SIGNIFICANTLY less money than we do. And although I have made her sound indifferent here, she gets in touch with me every Christmas to confer about gifts for the kids, and sends thoughtful gift boxes with presents and baked/canned things. I hate that these tasks fall almost exclusively to women; her mom, too, contacted only ME about gifts. But…if she got in touch with Paul, she’d get zero ideas of any kind. And so the cycle goes.

The main issue is that I feel like I don’t know her well enough to figure it out for myself. Flowers are a classic choice—but she is a gardener, the kind who cans her own produce, so maybe she would think of cut flowers as dead things. Chocolates are another classic choice, but she’s mentioned in the past that she likes salty more than sweet, and white chocolate more than milk/dark. Perhaps a fancy assortment of nuts and white-chocolate-covered things?

Maybe just a card. Maybe a card with a gift card. Maybe just do the flowers, since I don’t have any specific knowledge that she objects to them—and even if she did object to them, she’d know I didn’t know that, and would presumably take the thought behind the gesture. No—I think my favorite is the assortment of nuts and white-chocolate-covered things. It’s treats, but also it is FOOD.

[Follow-up: I ordered a BUNCH of things from Nuts.com: anything white-chocolate-covered, plus a bunch of interesting salty snackies, plus some fall-flavored pecans and so forth.]

Our shy skittish cat jumped up onto my lap—and, in doing so, knocked against the rickety side-table, so that first my dinner plate and fork crashed to the ground; and then, a brief moment later, my 850-page book—or perhaps the crashes were the other way around, it’s difficult to reconstruct. In any case, the cat transformed from cat to whirlwind, and I have a spiral of long parallel scratches tracing my lower arm from outer wrist to inner elbow. They’re almost pretty; I could imagine getting that pattern tattooed. Luckily I had trimmed his nails just a few days ago, while he was gabapentin’d for a vet appointment, so the scratches are more welts than slices, with only three relatively small (though still satisfyingly dramatic) places that required band-aids.

This is the cat who just finished a second course of expensive medication for FIP. He saw the vet, who said his kidney is back to normal size (good!) and his weight is back up (good!) and his physical exam is back to normal (good!) and his bloodwork shows his anemia is resolved (good!). Unfortunately the bloodwork also shows poor kidney numbers, which could mean the FIP did permanent damage or could mean the FIP is ongoing or could mean there’s something else going on (nothing good); and the bloodwork also shows his globulins are…I think it was that they continued to be HIGH, and in any case I know it was QUITE NOT GOOD, because the vet went from celebratory (she’d HUGGED me when she measured his kidney) to subdued.

We are doing a third round of the medication, even though I’d previously said that if the second round didn’t work, I would be done. For one thing, it is only recently that “one round” (84 days) of medication became two rounds (42 days seemed sufficient for most cats), so REALLY we could say we completed ONE old-fashioned 84-day round and now are doing another half-round. For another thing, I spoke frankly to the vet and said I didn’t want to be crass but that I was wondering at what point do we stop sending good money after bad. And she was extremely understanding, and re-phrased it better than I had (I appreciated that she included a section about how we might feel one way about the money if the cat lived, and another way entirely if he did not), and said that of course OF COURSE we could stop treatment at any time and she would not consider that a Wrong Decision—but that if I wanted her opinion she felt that, based on his improvement so far, another round of the medication was reasonable and justified. She said of course OF COURSE we couldn’t know it would work, and that if it did NOT work, then we would probably want to have The Talk. But she felt there was good reason to hope. So we are doing another round of medication.

A complicating factor is that this FIP treatment is so new, they don’t have good data to draw from. She said that of the cats in their practice who had undergone the treatment, all of them had either died or else recovered completely with 1-2 rounds of treatment, so she had nothing to go on. I said, “So we are doing science RIGHT NOW,” and she said “We are doing science RIGHT NOW.”

The three college kids had a long weekend, so they are home and we’ll take them all back to school tomorrow. While they were home, I made appointments for them to get flu/Covid shots. Except that wasn’t the first step. The first step was I texted the three of them, saying “I wish to make you appointments for flu/Covid shots while you’re home.” Then I waited to see if there were objections.

This tentative approach comes from their ages: Henry is 19 now, and the twins are 21. It’s not just that they’re legal adults: if, when they were, say, 16, they had strong opinions about something medical, I wouldn’t have immediately/inevitably been like “NO, I AM THE PARENT.” But Henry in particular has drawn a sharp line at legal adulthood; and he is alert, in a way none of his siblings have been, to Me Making Decisions That Are Technically His To Make (though not, I notice idly, alert to the idea of Paying Bills That Are Technically His To Pay). So I am trying to be careful of that line that matters to him, and to avoid overstepping, and to show I am AWARE of that line. (I do find this in-between stage so frustrating: either take care of it yourself or else don’t object to me doing it!! Gah!!)

But on the other hand, because we have an immunocompromised household member, vaccination is not really a “you’re an adult, do what you want” decision to me. So if I had suggested the vaccination appointments, and any of the three kids had said no, I don’t know what the next step would have been. (I was particularly dreading the “Oh, I’ll go to the on-campus clinic”—since NOT ONE SINGLE TIME has that resulted in a kid of mine actually attending the on-campus clinic. What it ALWAYS results in is me taking them for the shots over Thanksgiving break.) So I was glad no one said no. Elizabeth texted “Fine with me,” neither of the other kids responded; I waited 24 hours and then went ahead and booked the appointments. When they arrived home, I clarified with them in person that I hadn’t heard back from two of them, so I’d gone ahead and made the appointments, but that they were adults and…This is where Elizabeth clicks an imaginary remote control at me and says “Skip skip skip.”

I got my own flu/Covid shots at the same time the kids got theirs. This was yesterday. I’d been planning to get the two shots on different days, but then realized I have a trip to see my parents soon and really should have gotten both shots LAST week, but certainly should get them NOW. Every year I am interested to hear what the side effects are like (it’s one of the reasons I usually like to get the shots on different days: because I want to know which effects went with which shot), so I will say that I got one in each arm yesterday at 3:00 in the afternoon, and about 12 hours later was waking up with chills, muscle aches, joint pain, and queasiness. “A nice vigorous immune response!,” I thought to myself, attempting positivity as I tried to make myself get out of bed to get another blanket, when I was too cold to sleep and also too cold to get out from under the blanket I already had. I dozed intermittently and uncomfortably until morning, when I got up, teetered painfully to the bathroom, drank a big glass of water, took two ibuprofen and part of a caffeine tablet, texted Paul to ask him to bring me some saltines, and got back into bed. An hour after that, I felt up to showering. It’s midday now, and I still feel sore and chilly, not much appetite, and I took more ibuprofen when the first dose wore off; but I’m up and around and doing things, not huddled miserably under the covers. So for me, this was a fairly normal year, maybe on the milder side. I’m interested to hear what your experience was, if you’ve gotten either/both shots this year.

I need a mildly dressy outfit for an upcoming restaurant situation, and I hate clothes-shopping. I was shopping online at Old Navy for other things (I need longer sweatpants—the ones I’ve been wearing are capri-length, and my full-length ones are too small), and saw a bunch of new arrivals that looked really good to me AND they were on sale. I bought this outfit:

(image from OldNavy.com)

The reviews for the pants were so good! And you can’t tell from that little picture, but they’re a cool classy autumnal plaid:

(image from OldNavy.com)

After I placed the order, I realized that several of the reviews had been from teachers saying these were such good teaching pants. I further realized that on my frame, the pants were not going to look coolly slouchy and elegant like they did on the model, and in fact I was probably going to look like a teacher, and that that would not be the right look for the restaurant. But I figured they’d be good for whatever my next job would be. Maybe I will be a substitute teacher, or a receptionist, and they will be perfect for that! Also, I look cute in polo shirts and keyhole necklines, so at least I’d have the shirt to wear with something else if the pants didn’t work out. And the shirt was available in Tall, so I would not have to accidentally peep my midriff like the poor model!

Then I ordered this bell-sleeved lace cardigan, figuring it would be good for dressying up some of my less-dressy clothes; maybe it would work with the pants, or with one of my skirts, or I could wear it over one of my frumpy shapeless dresses to give it some shape/style:

(image from OldNavy.com)

And oh! This shirt/blouse would be perfect with the two skirts I have that don’t go with anything, and maybe also with the pants if the polo doesn’t work out! I bought it in two colors, wine and black:

(image from OldNavy.com)

While I was at it, I got another pair of jeans, because I hate all my jeans, and these look like the ones I used to have that I didn’t hate as much, and so I wore them until they unfortunately wore out:

(image from OldNavy.com)

I was really excited about this order! And it was a disaster. I tried on everything tonight, and it was the kind of try-on session where you go into it thinking “It’s about whether the clothes work for my body, not the other way around!,” and you come out of it thinking “Sure, for other people, but in this case the problem is clearly my body. And also my haircut, my glasses, and my posture.”

The elegant slouchy plaid pants were shapeless, bunchy, unflattering, and several inches too long. They felt too big, but not in a way that ordering a size smaller would fix.

The polo—I don’t know how even a size 2 model made that look anything less than frumpy. I even tried it on a second time, thinking it COULDN’T have been that bad, but it was. I looked like those photos of moms in the ’70s smoking cigarettes and having bad haircuts and being depressed.

The lace cardigan was frumpy and also was not a cardigan (it didn’t claim to be one; I’d inadvertently assumed it opened up the front); and I didn’t look at the fabric content but it was astonishingly HOT: I thought I was having a stress hot-flash, but no, it was the cardigan. (I looked it up just now: 97% polyester, 3% spandex.) Also, I don’t know if this will make sense, but it didn’t look right with my glasses. Actually, a LOT of dressy clothes feel to me like they don’t look right with glasses.

The ruffle-neck blouses made me look like my grandmother on her frumpiest day. I could not believe how badly they fit and how they emphasized everything I would want to de-emphasize, while fully failing to emphasize anything I have going for me.

And the jeans were no worse than any of the other jeans I already have and don’t like, except that the pockets were like three inches deep. ALL PANTS POCKETS must be deep enough for a PHONE, and that is the RULE.

And then, just to add to the disaster, the boring comfy sweatpants I bought for walking (not pictured, because they were too boring), which DO NOT HAVE TO LOOK FASHIONABLE, also looked frumpy and baggy and made me feel bad. I do not CARE what I look like on my walks!! But these sweatpants looked bad enough that they MADE me care. They might have just been too big, but TOO LATE, THEY ARE PART OF THE FAILURE.

Oh, I should take this moment to recommend the non-Old-Navy capri-length sweatpants I’ve been wearing, because I DO feel cute in those, AND I have just noticed they come in a full-length version, so I’m going to order those and return the Old Navy ones.

(image from Amazon.com)

I bought these when I was going to physical therapy for my knee and wanted something to wear that was not pajama bottoms (though I also did feel free to wear pajama bottoms). When I wear them now for my morning walks, I feel cute and sporty. And they have pockets that can hold a phone—not generously, but the phone does not fall out. They have a working drawstring; I have tied a knot on each end, because otherwise one or the other disappears within the drawstring tunnel. For sizing: I am currently wearing an 18/20 (non-W) in jeans and I have these in an XXL and they are at the upper limit of perfect: not baggy or roomy at all, but the snugness looks right for workout apparel; I bought them when I was wearing more like a 16 and they were also perfect at that size but, as you’d imagine, a somewhat less-fitted perfect fit.

Talking about these cute capri sweatpants is making me feel a little better. THEY look cute on me! Maybe I will also find restaurant clothes that look cute on me.

But on the other hand, when I needed a dress for one of Paul’s work events a few years ago, I went shopping with a fashionable friend and we went to like eight different stores and I tried on like 50 dresses and dressy outfits, and only one was even remotely okay, and now it’s too small, and also in my memory I looked silly. So. I mean, that’s why I tried pants this time! And a blouse for the skirts I have that are okay! But FAILURE, FAILURE, FAILURE! I look terrible in all clothes!!!

Perhaps I will wear the cute capri sweatpants. Oh! I can wear them with my unexpectedly-flattering champagne-sequined tank-top!

It has continued to feel odd, and I have continued to feel resentful about, going to a library not my own. It’s a smaller library, but it’s a member of the same grouping of libraries that shares materials, so I can still access anything in the same system. It’s been odd to need to drive to a library to pick up my holds, instead of just picking them up on my way out at the end of my shift. The new library doesn’t feel like Mine at all, but it is starting to feel like, for example, my third-favorite grocery store: I’m getting to know where things are, and there are a few small things that are an advantage over the favorite. The library workers are nice enough, but after a few attempts to start up those slight relationships, I’ve been using the self-checkout instead. It was too weird and cringe to deal with someone doing what used to be my job.

ANYWAY. I should have been keeping track, because I have been having parallel reading streaks of HUGE SUCCESS and ABSOLUTE FAILURE, one after another in both streaks, and always too many books in the piles. I’m trying to remember what I’ve recently checked out and returned, but there have been like EIGHT where I gave it a good 30-50 pages and then gave up; and a couple more where I read a page or two and thought NOPE.

Oh! I tried one that so many people have recommended, and I have forgotten the title and author, but it involves two young attractive and charming gentlemen, and an alternate universe including bureaucratic magic, and a delightful and heart-warming enemies-to-lovers trope. But WAY too early in the narrative I got to a point where one of the charming gentlemen referred idly and casually and non-plot-essentially to, forgive me for making you read this, his c*ck twitching, and I fully noped out at that exact moment. Just no thank you to all of that.

I tried a “summer read” by a local author, much lauded and also thrillingly chosen by one of the celebrities who has a book club, and I don’t remember why I almost immediately rejected it, but I almost immediately rejected it. Then I repented of my haste, took it back out of the return pile, and tried it again, REALLY TRIED, several dozen additional pages. Still no. How nice to get it briskly to the next person on the LENGTHY hold list!

There were two non-fiction books, one about laundry and one about being a daughter—both of which appealed to me, and neither of which I could get through, or even into. I tried skipping and skimming ahead to the good parts and that still didn’t help.

I tried Kitchen Confidential, after seeing so many positive reviews about the author’s heartbreaking story and how wonderful a person he was, and I could not get into it, and in fact felt increasing rage at his stories of how cool it was that the mostly-male kitchen staff got to drink and do drugs and have sex with every “waitress” and many of the (female) customers, and how much he wanted to be part of that world, and how he achieved it—peppered with his Best Chuckling Anecdotes about, for example, how the whole staff saw a literal bride on her wedding day having sex with the head chef out behind the restaurant, describing the bride as “bent obligingly over a trash can” or whatever it was (I returned the book before recording the exact quote, so that is from unwanted memory), and how THAT was the moment he thought I WANT TO BE A CHEF—no thank you and gross, and I don’t even want to know how many times he’s told that story, or what sort of reaction he thought it should get.

In book successes, I am on the final book of a trilogy, each book of which is the thickness of a loaf of bread and the weight of a bag of flour: it’s the Fitz and the Fool trilogy by Robin Hobb. And I DEEPLY NEEDED the MULTIPLE SWOONINGLY FERVENT recommendations I had seen for this series, because the first 100 or so pages of the first book were ROUGH. All “and, half-dressed in my leather deerskin trousers and with loose white blousen unbuttoned, I strode to collect my sword and paellis, feeling The Swift upon me, as in days of old, for I was one of the Spox’eni and could hear the ancient stones, and…” and whatever. Good lord. Insufferable. Just tell us what’s happening, and do it normal. Look at the cover:

Does this look like a book your Swistle would enjoy?

But I persevered, and if I remember correctly it was right around the hundred-page mark that I found a plotline that seized my attention. And then Edward had his surgery, and I was keeping him company in the hospital for days, with hours and hours of time on my hands for reading, and it was good to have a plentiful supply of material. There were still FAR too many sentences that started with “For,” and FAR too much maudlin wallowing. The main guy has some significant mistakes and losses, and let’s say you would be willing (even EAGER) to hear him regret and rue those mistakes/losses for, say, X times; the book has him regretting and ruing 20X times, so that you will be skimming and thinking “My good sir, WE KNOW, could we GET ON WITH IT”—and, after awhile, it will be so many repetitions that you will stop looking at the character and start looking incredulously at the author. And also: in general we dwell too much on This Guy and his perspective and experiences, and on his imprecisely-intimate special friend (a lot of tell-don’t-show with that) and that special friend’s health and trauma, when the real interesting character to me was the one who grabbed my interest at around 100 pages in. Here I am, though, looking forward to the third cement block of the series, so.

MEANWHILE: waiting for the third book to be delivered to me from another library in the system, I saw a mention online of the book Spindle’s End, by Robin McKinley.

(image from Amazon.com)

The mention included an excerpt (a photo of the first page), and I read it, and I was grabbed. I was surprised, when I requested it through the library, to see it was categorized as YA. I would like to like YA, but I have given it many tries and I almost never like it. I did like this book, and I didn’t see any reason why it would be categorized as YA. Okay, it involves an Ordinary Youth finding out that they are in fact Very Very Exceptionally Special; there were also some parts where something was obvious, and it was for some reason not obvious to the characters involved, and it kept being Not Obvious to them LONG past the point of credulity. But none of that is exclusive to YA! In fact all those things happen in the Fitz and the Fool trilogy I was just talking about, especially the part where something Obvious keeps being Not Obvious to the characters, to the point where I wondered if the author were concussed! (…I realize I am not selling the series here, so you will have to trust that no one reads three books of 800+ pages each unless they like them very much.)

Anyway, I found Spindle’s End enchanting. It’s a retelling of a fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty), and that is a category of book I am so sick of, but I’d loved the excerpt I read, so I tried it anyway, and I’m so glad I did. There were some satisfying resolutions (and initiations) of plot issues that left me WEEPING. I will read more by this author. Well, I will read more by this author when I am finished with the third book of this other trilogy, which will be in weeks and weeks. Could an editor have simply carved away SOME of the…?

While waiting for Micaiah Johnson’s new book The Unhaunting, I read her book Those Beyond the Wall and really liked it.

(image from Amazon.com)

Dystopian, violent, but relationship-based. If you liked The Space Between Worlds: this is a stand-alone, but it takes place in the same time/world, with some of the same characters. I found it less mind-blowing than The Space Between Worlds, but that’s often true of the second book in the same world. Do you like enemies-to-lovers? So does this author, but nobody’s anything TWITCHES.

Like EIGHT YEARS AGO I read and enjoyed Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. On a recent library trip I saw his new book called Vigil, and I liked the description (another afterlifey plotline) and checked it out.

(image from Amazon.com)

I did not SOB as I did while reading Lincoln in the Bardo, but I liked it a lot. It is very Of The Moment, if you can tolerate books that are Of The Moment. A spirit is on a mission to comfort the dying, and she is paired with a dying oil baron, and she finds the task…challenging. There are many paragraphs of him justifying the terrible things he has done to the world by his actions and, even more so, by his marketing spin, convincing others that climate change is nothing to worry about. …I’m talking you out of reading it. It is MORE focused, I would say, on the spirit, and on the intrusive thoughts she has of her own life, while she is trying to be spiritual and otherworldly. Well, no, it is more focused on the way someone who has sold his soul for money and power KNOWS he has done wrong AND ALSO justifies that wrong—and HOW he justifies it, and how ugly that justification is. It was satisfying to read, while also making me angry-cry.

SO MANY PEOPLE recommended The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion series, it’s amazing I could even try one—but the buzz got to me, and I tried one. In fact: the waiting list in my library system was so long, I BOUGHT the first one, IN HARDCOVER, so that I could donate it to the library system after I finished it, since they obviously needed more copies.

(image from Amazon.com)

I thought it was lightweight and silly, and that the plot/characters were ridiculous to the point of being annoying/nonsensical. I donated it to the library with no feelings of wanting to keep it. Then I kept thinking about it. Then I put the second one on hold and, after a few weeks of waiting, BOUGHT THAT ONE TOO, and read it, and donated it to the library as well. The hold lists for the third and fourth volumes were much shorter, and since I’d put myself on hold for those at the same time as I tried to reserve the second volume, I got them not too much after I was ready for them. Now I am on hold for volumes five and six.

It IS a silly story. The plotlines ARE ridiculous. But it is also sweet and funny, and I enjoy the unabashed selection of stereotypical love interests: there is the serious young fiery minister, the handsome scoundrel, the terrible tormenting boy from her youth who grew up to be hot and nice and rich, the brooding artistic tenant, the literal handsome duke, and so on. Just love interests as far as the eye can see, and how fun for us all. I don’t think I will want to watch the inevitable TV series, though: the main character is just a little too quirky and messy-haired and whoops-did-I-say-that-out-loud, and I don’t want to see that in motion.

Did you know, if you have a lot of cats who share litter boxes, and you need to bring in a sample from the litter box for the vet, and you’d really like that sample to be from The Specific Cat in Question, you can FEED YOUR CATS CRAYON SHAVINGS so that you can tell whose litter box sample is whose?? What a world. What a world.

In related news, I have spent time today whittling curls of four different, brightly-colored crayons into bowls, and mixing the shavings with highly-enticing CANNED FOOD, because I need a sample from ANOTHER possibly-ill cat.

To review. We have FOUR cats. Two are ORANGE and OLD. The other two are BLACK and YOUNG. One of the two young black cats is being treated for what is probably FIP (Feline Infectious Peritonitis, which until recently was 100% fatal, but now there is a Very Expensive Prescription that usually cures it). He SEEMS to be recovering beautifully, but his kidney-size and his bloodwork tell a different story, and the vet has warned us that the kidneys and the bloodwork “don’t paint a rosy picture.” It is not unlikely that we will finish his course of FIP medication, which cost many hundreds of dollars but who can put a price on a life (I can and will, when it is a housecat), and when the medication is over, he will die. We have been adjusting to this. We thought he was going to die in August while we were on our road trip, and that the kids would have to oversee the euthanasia, so we are glad for the extra time, and glad for the vet keeping us aware that the improvement may be an illusion. Not, perhaps, quite so glad to spend so much money and THEN have him die ANYWAY, but all of life is a gamble etc.

Now the OTHER young black cat is having symptoms, intestinal. The FIP cat’s situation made me skittish, so I brought the second cat in when maybe otherwise I wouldn’t have. A just-in-case ultrasound revealed thickening in the intestine (interestingly, it’s in the ileum, which is the same place Edward’s Crohn’s disease manifested) and swollen intestinal lymph nodes, which can be several things, including IBD and cancer. The just-in-case bloodwork was ALL beautiful, except for elevated levels of calcium; the vet says that can be from LOTS of things—almost all of which were ruled out by the bloodwork and ultrasound, leaving, well, cancer.

The first young cat, the one with FIP, is skittish and beautiful and flouncy and has never really gotten to know us. He is more of a character actor in our household—“mostly decorative,” in the words of one of my friends. We refer to him affectionately as a prissy little bitch. We love him and would of course be very sad if he had to be put down, but we would not be devastated; it would be A Very Sad Thing, but very sad things happen.

The second young cat, the one who might have cancer, is another story. I got him as a four-month-old kitten, and it was a “HE chose ME” shelter story, where I went in for one cat and came out with him instead. He is more like a dog, in that he is HIGHLY interactive with us, and he follows us, especially me; and he learns and knows our routines and likes them to be followed correctly, and he is upset when there are derivations from the norm. He’s very verbal, and has many vocalizations including greeting, complaining, grousing, inquiring, demanding, yelling, calling, etc. He arrives to say hello after my alarm goes off in the morning, and he walks ahead of me up the stairs to bed at night, and in between he follows me from room to room and sits somewhere near me. We call him The Baby. I am able to turn my mind to the idea that he will die someday, perhaps a dozen years from now; I am not really able to turn my mind to the idea that he might die soon.

The vet says it’s too early to call it. It could still be, maybe, some sort of unlikely parasite that hasn’t shown up in any of the samples we’ve had done; we can try another sample, one we KNOW is from him (usually they just assume any sample from the litter box represents all the cats, because parasites are so contagious) and also a de-wormer just in case. It could still be, maybe, a food sensitivity? It could still be, maybe—well, frankly to me it sounds like the vet is reaching. In the meantime we are trying an expensive prescription high-fiber food. Each time I tap my credit card, I am reminded of one of my friends, who is retired and has enough to live on, but who works ten hours a week for “Dog Money.”