Log: November 14, 2025

[welcometohighwater]

It has been a bananas last couple of weeks, which I mostly would not like to repeat at all ever!  It was like one million years of stress.  Last night was the first night I actually slept in all that time.  Woof.  Anyway, moving forward!  Even though there's not too terribly much to update on, given the stress.

READING

• Biggest update: I finished The Grimmer.  Decent, I enjoyed it just fine. Very much the thing, though, where having it compared to another book or another writer's work kind of spoils it for me.  I don't want to know a book's tropes, or what two other pieces of media it's a mix between, or whatever.  I really just want to find out what it is for myself.  While listening to The Grimmer, a lot of me was focused on finding comparisons to the works of John Bellairs--"oh, yeah, this is the sort of story he would have written if!"  Maybe I just want to experience a story without going into it with the burden of expectation.
• Besides that: things continue.  Progressing with Ghost Story at a glacial pace, although I'm starting to get a bit more into it, now that I've actually had time to read some the past couple of days.  "Continuing" in Oathbound (I haven't listened in a couple of weeks, ope, but I will be starting again SOON.  Like.  Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe).  I've picked up a new little collection of Emily Dickinson's poems that I'm thinking of just blazing through for a mental break.

LISTENING

• Podcasts  Maintaining: HftMT, MBMBaM, TAZ, Gumshoes & Dragons.  Have added Arnie Niekamp's new limited project, No Skip Christmas.  An easy and entertaining listen.  I like Christmas music fine, and I've been enjoying this as both a means of finding new, interesting holiday songs (maybe some I can even impress my music-snob, Christmas-music-hating brother with?) and expanding my own Christmas playlist.
• Music  As just mentioned: I have started listening to some Christmas music.  This is primarily not for my personal listening, but for family listening experiences (in the car, etc).  In a place where people are either Crazy For Christmas or truly Grinchy Scrooges about it all, I feel kind of ambivalent about it all.  Is early-to-mid-November way too early to be so steeped in holiday cheer?  Oh, sure, definitely.  But I don't actively hate it so intensely that I'm gonna bitch about it.  The way I see it, Christmas music is a vast improvement over what my mother's radio is usually set to (Christian music).  As for personal listening--I find myself still leaning more towards music than my fiction listening queue.  Well, that's fine.  Adding to my story vibes playlist, perusing my Apple New Music Mix, etc.  The problem with starting to listen to some Christmas music, however, is they're throwing that into my algo.  That's a bit "ew" for me.

WATCHING

• Shoot from the Hip.  That's all.  Yesterday--my first opportunity to de-stress in two weeks--I watched the full hour-and-a-half "Jingle Boys" special.  It was healing.  It was truly relaxing in a way I haven't had in two weeks.

DOING

• The writing, the NaNoWriMo project, got put off.  Indefinitely, possibly (tragic), although I am being TOLD that wouldn't January be a good month to give that a try?  Okay, fine--but they better give it to me, then.  Please, god, let me have it.  In the mean time, I'm listening for my vibes and daydreaming in the shower, A LOT, and getting some bits down on paper now and then and praying I don't lose any of this.
• Biggest doing has been: major progress in reclaiming space in my room (queen bed removed, daybed in place, I've got my desk moved, too, which really if I could get all that straightened out before January, aka, Writing Month, wouldn't THAT be great?) and then working like nuts to get some of the cats in our care adopted out.  We've made good progress on that--we officially have taken the little lady who stole our hearts into our home, and then we've taken three of the other Biggies to their new homes, and are expecting to meet the family of the fourth this weekend.  So we just have Doc left of the first batch--and all three of the Candy Crew, of course, but they're only now two months, so they really need to be a little older to place them, anyway.