Just a Quick Note About Today

November 3, 2020 1 of 8

It’s now 9:45 am. I’m working from 11 to 7 today and so I have to hustle off to the shower in 15 minutes, so I’m going to have to make this quick.

Today is the Presidential election. I’m terrified that Trump will win again. I mean, we survived the last four years, and Trump is guided by his id more than either of the egos, so I don’t know if the next four would *necessarily* be worse, but I was really hoping they’d, you know, be better.

When I get off work tonight, the polls on the east coast will already be closed and preliminary results will be coming in. So I’m going to close most of my tabs that have anyone talking about current events on them, which leaves me with, um, fiction books, longform articles and old YouTube videos, I think.

I was going to start my content creator topic tonight, but looking at their current videos would be a spoiler, so maybe I’ll do some book blogging. I don’t know yet, but I’ll see what I do once I get there.

Will I make it to 8 posts tonight? Doubtful, but, once again, I’ll try.

A quick Gratuitous Amazon Link. This was the first book in the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Follow me to Ground, by Sue Rainsford. This one is also excellent, but creepy. Ada is not human. She and her father are some kind of mystical constructs that use a patch of dirt, called Ground, to heal the local villagers of their illnesses. Everything is going well enough, but then Ada falls in love with a villager named Samson. This link is the hard copy.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite — WTF?

November 2, 2020 2 of 8

So for some unknown reason the biweekly events in HPWU have been quite a bit harder lately. The other events are kind of more of a challenge, too.

I mean, I can get that as your central player base gets stronger, keeping the challenges pretty easy may cause them to lose interest, but then there’s the casual players like me and the newbies. I finally finished the most recent brilliant event but if I succeed at the weekend event, I’ll be very surprised.

And I’m not the only person who feels that way. During the first brilliant event for October I was, like, I need to up my game on this . . . game and went looking for information and found a lot of people complaining. A number of them said that they used to be gung-ho about this game but now they just get their ten coins for the day and stop.

I think I know that feeling.

I’m not ready to give up yet. but that time may be coming. A new brilliant event starts tomorrow. Let’s see how I feel in a week once that’s over.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. The Bone Shard Daughter is another Fantastic Strangelings book club book. Like A Deadly Education, it’s the first in a series but is also a self-contained story. It took me a while to get into this one, probably because it jumped around so much. We started with one character and then after a few pages went to another and so on. It took me quite a while to really get a feel for what was going on. I really enjoyed it once I did, though. This link is to the hard copy.

I Have a New Hobby

November 2, 2020 1 of 8

Okay, maybe it’s not technically a hobby, but it is a long-enough-term project that if I end up developing an enjoyment of it, it might count.

Back when I was married, I would get very hot under heavier beadspreads. I would end up sleeping on top of the covers with a thin blanket, rather than under them. I would even develop a rash that looked like a heat rash.

So, once I was single, I went out and bought a big white cotton blanket and dyed it blue-green to coordinate with my bedroom. The blanket was kind of small, so thinking that I might have shrunk it when I dyed it, I bought another in a different color and just left it. I don’t know if I was right about the shrinking but it was larger.

Gratuitous photo time! I’m going through my old photos looking for any that I can edit into something useful. As you can probably tell, this is the Lincoln Memorial. My next two gratuitous photos will also be from my 2010 trip to DC. I wish I’d gotten some better photos of, i think it was Tian Tian. Oh, well. I’ll do what I can with what I have.

Now I’m forgetting. There may have been another blanket along the line that I tossed after I lost Velcro, because as he aged, he needed to pull himself up onto the bed by his claws.

Anyway, eventually I got this kind of sage green blanket, which was also bigger than the teal one. I used this one for *years.* It started to fall apart and I just turned it so that that part wasn’t where I was sleeping and kept going.

Well, I finally gave up on it recently and while I was thinking how much space this thing would take up in my garbage can (it’s huge!), I realized that it’s made of discrete pieces of yarn and decided to unravel it and use that yarn to make a new blanket.

I had no idea how much work would go into unraveling this blanket. I’ve been working on it on and off for a couple of weeks now and I barely have anything unraveled.

I’m probably going to have to will this project to my grandchildren.

I used to knit in front of the television. My new hobby is going to be unraveling a blanket while watching YouTube.

I’m staying in a hotel on Thursday night, so maybe I’ll bring it with me and take a picture and then when I’m in a different hotel on Saturday, I’ll take another picture and see if there’s any progress at all.

Gratuitous Amazon Link! For this post, my book is Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh. After a seven-year absence, Brosh returned with this book and while I hope she doesn’t disappear for seven years again, this was worth the wait. This one is the Kindle version.