Tag: Alter Ego

Sweet Magnolia Blossom

Work at home Friday and was Mercury in retrograde yesterday? Is it still? My work laptop died yesterday morning when I tried signing into it after I got to work and it took most of the morning for me to get a new replacement one. So, I spent the morning without a computer–which meant outside of seeing my clients, I didn’t really have the ability to do much of anything. I finally got the new one around lunch time, but my day was already off and so was my energy, and since my routine had been disrupted, I had trouble getting back on track. Finally, I just made a list while I was eating lunch and that seemed to work, even though I still felt off all day. The replacement laptop (which is just temporary until they fix the old one) also had some issues with staying connected to my scanner, which was incredibly frustrating and resulted in my admin work taking far longer than it usually does, and I had a lot of documents to scan into patient files. The frustration was real, and I was exhausted when I got home. My brain was basically non-functional by the time I got home, and I actually fell sound asleep in my easy chair around nine-thirty. I didn’t get anything done once I was home–worn out from the endless frustration of the day–and didn’t even remember to charge my phone when I went to bed. I did manage to watch Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (which is lit this season and definitely my favorite of these shows at the moment), though, since that required little to no energy on my part. I hope to get a lot done today, both day job and Gregalicious wise; and we’re going to Costco later after I am done with work duties. (Need to make a list!)

But I slept very well last night, and woke up feeling pretty rested this morning, which is a good thing. The entire place is a disaster area, and I never managed to do anything about the dishes accumulating in the sink and now it’s of course out of control. Heavy heaving sigh. Even my desk is piled high with things that need to be put away. It feels chilly, and per the weather the high will only reach sixty degrees here today. I think I am going to walk to the gym tomorrow morning and get started back up with that again, and hopefully today will be a great clean and organize day for the house. Christmas is coming, and I am really not feeling it very much this year, to be honest, and haven’t for a few years. Paul and I decided to not do gifts again this year–we are divorcing ourselves from the capitalist holiday by refusing to spend much money observing it (we’re going to go see Babygirl in the theater on Christmas day), and I have to say I am gradually growing more radical and anti-capitalist by the day (so much for that you get conservative as you get older bullshit; I grew up as a conservative and my adult hood has been mostly about shedding that foul and utterly inhuman methodology. Profits over people, corporations are people but living breathing humans are not–I could go on and on talking about the class war in this country. I am a radicalized Paw Paw, I guess? I did have a client this week whose birth year was 2006–which was highly traumatizing, and would have been worse if I cared about being old. It was more of a shock to me that kids born after Katrina are eighteen (and older) now. Kids born the year of Katrina will be twenty next year. Twenty years, a third of my life, has passed since that time.

I am also looking forward to some good reading time. Both of my current reads (Winter Counts and White Too Long) are fascinating and well-written, and it’s quite easy to get caught up in the narrative. I’d love to finish both this weekend so I can move on to my next reads (leaning towards Alter Ego by Alex Segura or Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett and The Exvangelicals for my non-fiction). I do want to get caught up on Donna Andrews’ two latest over the holidays, which are rapidly approaching. Soon it will be 2025 and even more insane chaos once the new “administration” is sworn in. The next four years are going to be bad, I think–signs point to yes–but I also survived the 80s and the 90s, so maybe I am a Cher/cockroach.

We started watching Black Doves the other night, and I really enjoyed the first episode. I love Ben Whishaw, and Sara Lancashire is a treasure. I am hoping we’ll be able to spend some more time with it over the course of the weekend. We also should go back to Slow Horses, which we never went back to for some reason; I think we got interrupted by something (a surgery? A funeral? Who knows?) and just never went back to it. I do also want to read the books by Mick Herron (got to love that last name), too. Ah yes, so many books to read. Heavy sigh. I have so many treasures in my TBR pile, as well as treasures from the distant past (I would love to read Anatomy of a Murder and A Summer Place and Summer of ’42 again, plus more of Margaret Millar, Daphne du Maurier, Charlotte Armstrong, and Dorothy B. Hughes) that I will probably never get through them all.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I hope that I have a really productive one. I’ll be back either in the morning or later today, it’s a mystery!

Gorgeous retired Olympic and world champion ice dancer Guillaume Cizeron, who also is a model.

I’m Not Through Loving You Yet

Sunday morning here in the Lost Apartment, and how are you doing , Constant Reader? I feel good this morning, actually; a good night’s sleep and a rest day always seem to have this effect on me. I guess the new reality for me is being worn out by the end of the work week and needing a brain-dead day of rest. I feel good this morning and my coffee is hitting the spot this morning. Yay! I hope this means a productive day around the house. I have work to do that I do need to get done, after all.

I was tired yesterday, both mentally and physically. I managed to get the errands run; made groceries at two different stores (!), dropped a box of books off at the library sale, and picked up my copy of Alter Ego by Alex Segura, which I am very excited about. I loved Secret Identity, and there’s no reason to think Alter Ego won’t be better; reviewers are loving it all over the country, and I’m probably going to move it up on the TBR list to the on-deck position behind my current read. So many good books! Which is, as always, a delightful problem to have. Whee! I am very excited about this. I am going to get back into reading fiction, now that I’ve finished The Demon of Unrest–my. new non-fiction read is probably not going to be as smoothly flowing a narrative (White Too Long). I have so many great fiction reads to get to! A plethora of riches to be sure. I am going to work today on some things, and I am going to work on the house some, too. It always seems to be a mess for some reason which is beyond me, but go figure, right?

We watched some of the Grand Prix of Figure Skating finals, which saw US skaters win gold medals in three disciplines–men’s, women’s, ice dance–which I don’t think has ever happened before? This bodes well for the World Championships in March, and it’s been awhile since anyone could say that, really.

I also wound up watching some football games idly, while I read short stories for a contest I am judging. I guess if you were pulling for either team, the games were exciting; Georgia beat Texas in overtime; Clemson needed a desperation field goal in the closing seconds to beat SMU; and even Penn State-Oregon was dramatic. Now on to the bowls and play-offs, which is going to seem very weird. I’m not really sure how I feel about this entirely new, semi-pro look college football is going for, and how it really has always been about greed. Which is a shame–but it always was a farce when it came to all that “amateur athlete” bullshit anyway. Players always got paid, and colleges always looked for ways to justify it or cover it up or exploit loopholes in the rules. It was also interesting seeing SMU in the ACC title game, too–SMU was the only school under the old rules to ever get the death penalty for too much cheating, and it killed the program for decades…so the NCAA became reluctant to use it again. (Ironically, the next college that would have–should have–gotten the death penalty was ALABAMA in the 90’s–and they weren’t ever going to do anything to Alabama that might kill that program.)

When I took the box of books to the library sale yesterday, they asked me if there were any mass-market paperbacks in the box because they aren’t taking those now. They’ve told me that before–and I’ve had to take books out of the boxes before. I still put some in there, just to see if they’ll say no to them, and if they don’t, it does get them out of the house. When did mass-market paperbacks become so anathema to American readers? I loved them when I was younger; they used to be as cheap as seventy-five cents when I was a kid, and I remember their prices gradually increasing until it was silly to not pay the dollar or so mor to get it in trade paperback, which were usually sturdier and more solid editions. Now it’s more along the lines of “the print isn’t big enough” for me, and I suppose ebooks have replaced the mass market editions. I always wanted to write something with my name on the spine in mass market, but never succeeded in getting there–and now they are being phased out completely. That’s a shame.

I was thinking about mass market paperbacks because I was moving books around in the laundry room and came across two editions that are two important books to my younger self; two that I’ve always wanted to revisit as companion pieces to each other: The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, and Dress Gray by Lucien Truscott IV. The former is set at Carolina Military Institute in South Carolina (aka The Citadel), the latter at West Point. I read Dress Gray first, living in Kansas and picked it up at the grocery store, I think. It was a murder mystery set at the military academy, and the victim was a closeted gay cadet. I remember really loving the book, and I don’t remember why I picked up The Lords of Discipline, other than I know we’d already moved to California before I read it. I think I’d watched The Great Santini and wanted to read the book, but the Waldenbooks at the mall only had Lords in stock, so I got it instead, and became a huge Pat Conroy fan. I do want to revisit both books; I’ve been wanting to write a crime novel set at an Alabama military high school–that all-male environment I’ve always found so interesting–but that won’t happen for awhile, at least.

The manhunt for the man who killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO continues, and with every new bit of information released he becomes even more of a folk-hero. Some have started calling him the Adjuster, which is funny, but I saw someone call him Robin Hoody yesterday and that, I think, is my absolute favorite thus far. He’s almost taking on a Batman-like lore amongst the American people; few things this century have united the country as much as approval of this murder has. That says something about the mood of the country, and if I were a politician or a corporate executive whose business model is fucking over the working class, I’d be pretty fucking nervous right now. There’s a bit of a sense of 1789 Paris and 1917 St. Petersburg in the air, and now that corporations and the uber-rich have been screwing us all over for decades with no relief anywhere in sight–if anything, a sense they are going to make it worse for all of us–and no, it wouldn’t surprise me if revolts started up, or more murders of the exploitive class.

It doesn’t hurt if the uber-rich begin to understand that it’s actually not in their own best interest to fuck around with the working class, either.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; stranger things have happened.