Olivia

I Have a Dog

Okay I will try to keep this short but these never end up being short.

I have a dog, at least for now. And probably for quite a while in the future for reasons I will get into later.

I think I’ve mentioned Mila, the dog I couldn’t have and who had a fear aggression thing regarding my friend’s boyfriend, so she had to rehome her. I ended up in mourning for the dog.

Well she’s back. You see we don’t know what happened to the home that she was sent to, but on Friday I got a phone call from the Humane Society and the lady asked if this was “Olivia,” and when I said that was me, she said that they had my dog.

Well, I don’t have a dog. I paid to have Mila chipped and they put my name on the chip. Her new person never took my name off of the chip. So, I called my friend and asked her to call the Humane Society, but my friend no longer had the phone number for the new owner.

So, not wanting her to end up stuck at the Humane Society, I claimed her on Saturday. My friend’s boyfriend is still around, and Mila still doesn’t like him, so I told my dad that for the foreseeable future I’ve got a dog. I’m honestly kind of hoping that for the foreseeable future will become permanently.

And even if I were going to rehome her, I wouldn’t do it now. For one, she just changed hands twice in the last two months. She needs to stay in one place for a while.

The second is that she does not have a lot of training. I daresay she’s pretty much untrained. She doesn’t have any respect for personal space, she isn’t house trained, he has a fairly bad fear aggression problem, she’s afraid of men, she doesn’t know her basic commands. I need to meet with her vet to see if we can put her on a little fluoxetine to help with the anxiety (and possibly the fear of men?) I know that with medication, you want the lowest effective dose, and I’m hoping that the fluoxetine will just be a little help to get her to calm down and see that the things that scare her aren’t really scary.

Three, you can’t find home for a dog right now. All of the local shelters are full to bursting with dogs. Additionally, if I were to rehome her, I’d want references and things. I’d also want updates and visitation. Maybe one weekend with her a month, just to reassure myself that she’s doing okay.

We need to work on all of her issues, but for right now, I think that the house training may be the most important part. She seems not to have any concept of going out to a yard or of signaling that she needs to go for a walk, so I’m attempting to litter box train her. She’s only been here for, what? 31 hours as I write this? So this will take a while, but I’m hopeful that she’ll get it eventually.

I am putting paper towels with her urine on them in the box, then I place her in the box so she can smell her urine there. Then I attempt to clean the urine smell from the floor.

We’re going to introduce her to a safe guy tomorrow. Alex will come by in the afternoon and give her some Easy Cheese on one of those licky mats. The licky mats are supposed to be good for anxious dogs, and I figure that if a young man who smells a lot like me gives her cheese, well, that’s got to help with that form of anxiety. I would hope. Then in the evening, Mila and I will meet him for dinner somewhere outdoors. If we can get her to like Alex, then that’s one guy down, 3,970,238,389 (as of 2021) to go.

This would be a good time for a Germane Amazon Link of a dog training book, if I’d ever read a dog training book. Instead, here’s a Gratuitous Amazon Link of a people-training book: Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual, by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. This is a funny, insightful book about getting over the fears that are stopping you from having what you want in life. I actually have read it a couple of times. Whenever I’m contemplating a big change, I’ll dig it out and read it again. I’m probably due for a reread sometime soon.

The Great Gatsby

Next up chronologically in terms of books I read in the past looks like The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. Now as I mentioned before my mom was a misandrist and she blamed the men in women’s lives for all the troubles. One of her favorites was how F. Scott Fitzgerald drove Zelda crazy.

This next paragraph is the result of hours of research. I recently had someone say something about how bloggers just bullshit and I literally was “They don’t research everything obsessively?”

From what I’ve read, Scott may have taken advantage of any mental instability that Zelda had. It is possible that her behavior was the result of manipulation and gaslighting on the part of her husband, but it is also equally possible that she had what is now known as bipolar disorder. I have two very good friends who have both been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and they do, in fact, act a lot like Zelda is reputed to have acted. And, of course, it’s possible that both are true. That Zelda was unstable and that Scott knew which buttons to push to bring out those behaviors.

I read The Great Gatsby because it’s a classic of American literature and everybody should read it and it’s a fast read and blah blah but also I love Baz Luhrmann’s movies. I wanted to see the Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby, but I figured I should read the book first. As it turns out I haven’t seen the movie yet I. I should do that sometime.

I went on Amazon Prime last night to see if they have it, and ended up watching Marry Me instead. Oops.

Turn out that I’d have to pay to rent it. I did that once and never did rent the movie, so never mind.

One of the funniest things was a review of the movie where the reviewer said that Luhrmann totally misunderstood the message of The Great Gatsby because the movie is this big party and when the party’s over all that’s left is to pick the champagne bottles and cigarette butts out of the pool. Like, everything I had at that point read about The Great Gatsby made it sound to me like that was exactly the point.

Here’s the quote, from Connie Ogle at the Miami Herald: [T]he movie leaves you cold and weary and vaguely disgusted, like you’ve just spent a night of debauchery at Gatsby’s mansion, and now the sun is up, and it’s time to fish the cigarette butts and champagne bottles out of the pool.”

And, yeah, that is how reading the book made me feel. So Baz Luhrmann: 1, Connie Ogle: 0.

I also have a large problem with the show vs. tell of this book. Tell is winning by a lot, particularly when Nick follows up the story of Gatsby’s life with “Moreover he told it to me at a time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him.” When does the conversation happen? We don’t know. At least if we had this conversation, I missed it. There was just the infodump and a sentence telling us when they had had this conversation.

The actual activity of the plot is so fast that you blink and you miss it. Skip the next couple of paragraphs if you don’t want to be spoiled for a hundred-year-old novel.

Nick moves to New York for a job. He ends up living near his cousin Daisy, who has married a gauche nouveau-riche guy, Tom. One of their neighbors is an enigmatic millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who had a romance with Daisy in their younger years and is basically stalking her.

They attend some parties. We find that Tom has a girlfriend, the married Myrtle. They attend more parties. We get long lists of the names of attendees. Gatsby finally tries to get Daisy to run away with him. Daisy hits Myrtle with a car, killing her. Gatsby takes the fall for it. Myrtle’s husband, George, shoots Gatsby in his pool. Nick decides that everyone in New York is a dishonest, greedy, asshole and leaves.

The end.

It’s all very heavy with symbolism, like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the giant eyes on the billboard, and Nick’s “you can never go home again” philosophy. Which is amusing when you consider that Nick is about to go home.

One of my friends was talking about which circle of Dante’s hell people who preferred Hemingway to Fitzgerald would end up in and I asked for permission to be put in the circle with the virtuous unbelievers because I don’t like either. My friend, amused, obliged. Needless to say there will be no Germane Amazon Link and, rather, we will have the Gratuitous Amazon Link of The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan, the first book in the Kane Chronicles trilogy.

What’s With This Damn Heat Wave?

The heat is getting to me. I am not a heat person. I never have been. When I was a kid my mom made me take tennis classes. I mean, it kind of made sense. My physical coordination as a kid was terrible. Small motor, large motor, hand-eye, you name it, it sucked.

We lived in the south suburbs of Chicago, and not one of the pricey ones. We had a district psychologist and a school speech pathologist, but there was not a whole lot of other support for individual differences. The treatment for dyspraxia is occupational therapy. Since no one had this knowledge and this was the days before the Web and Google, my teachers and mom figured that it was just a matter of forcing me to work on these skills. Generally in front of an audience, like with tennis lessons.

Also my mom fantasized about us getting out of the south suburbs and moving someplace else in the suburbs, where I’d be more in touch with people who play tennis as a hobby. She envisioned me in my tennis whites with my friends Miffy and Muffy or whatever playing tennis and sipping on lemonade at the tennis club after after the match. That is totally not me, but you know we have our dreams.

One of my dreams is of being a professional writer someday. I hope I will be more lucky with my dreams for me than she was with her dreams for me.

Come to think of it, she wanted me to be professional writer, too. But I digress.

One day my mom decided to come with me for my tennis lesson. I don’t know if she was showing an interest in the tennis lessons, or if she was going to prove to me that it wasn’t too hot to do something that frustrating in front of an audience. Not only was this the days before Google. This was the days before people brought water bottles with them everywhere. So I got dehydrated and hot and miserable and I started to show signs of heat-related illness, so my mom realized that I wasn’t just being a whiny little kid. So she took me home from tennis lessons and put me in a cool bath three my body temperature down and after that she never maybe go to tennis lessons if the temperature was over 90 (which wasn’t that often. I mean, the temperature around there peaked at 76 today. .

Anyway so I’ve never been one for heat, and boy is it hot!

The atmosphere of the planet used to have more carbon dioxide than it does now. Like, a lot more. We’re talking close to 10 times as much. There are so few large dinosaur fossils at the equator because it was an inhospitable climate for for large lizards. It was so hot that vegetation would basically just burst into flame. So things have been worse than they are now. I have a friend with an anxiety problem who is all, “we’ve destroyed the planet; everything’s going to hell in a hand basket” and while I agree that things are going to hell in a handbasket from late-stage capitalism, we aren’t irretrievably bad in terms of climate yet.

The current theory is that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was sequestered by a fern called azolla. The mechanism by which it worked, from what I’ve read, was that the Arctic Ocean was closed off like the Black Sea is today. Azolla got established there and covered the surface. The azolla would die and sink to the bottom and new azolla would form at the top. This tiny fern gobbles up carbon dioxide and also is in a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that makes it fix nitrogen in addition to sequestering the carbon dioxide. Anyway as the plants died they sink to the bottom of this isolated stagnant basically pond and more would form on the top and it would die and sink more before eventually it ended up with all this like built-up azolla, which then compressed and eventually turned into oil. This, by the way, is why I have problems with people saying that oil is dinosaurs. Oil is not dinosaurs. Oil is ferns.

At some point, either the azolla must have spread, because we have oil here in Texas (which used to be covered by ocean) and there is oil in Venezuela, and of course, there’s the Persian Gulf. It must have done the same thing there — died and sank and died and sank.

During what is now called the Azolla Event, it cut the levels of carbon dioxide way down. And now we’re burning the azolla that sequestered that carbon dioxide and putting it back in the atmosphere, where it came from originally. This will return the Earth to the state it was originally. Unfortunately, current forms of life evolved during an ice age, so we’re headed to a place that’s natural, but incompatible with many current lifeforms. I guess there may be some people out there who are, like, it’s natural, so let’s just let it go back to the way it was originally. But most of us like our ice age. We like a world with caribou and penguins, and people not dying from heat-related illness.

So for those of us who like glaciers and polar bears and not reviving microorganisms that have been frozen in ice for millions of years, resequestering that carbon dioxide is a priority.

I’ve traditionally donated to a Nature Conservancy project called Plant a Billion Trees. The original plan was to plant a billion trees, just like it says on the tin. Their original deadline was 2015, but they didn’t make it. I usually give to planting trees in Brazil, where the Nature Conservancy is trying to restore the Atlantic Rainforest. In fact, since I dictated this, I gave another $25. Each dollar plants a tree (and, of course, helps buy land and things).

Each tree will sequester about a ton of carbon dioxide, which is no slouch, but for a long time, I’ve been wondering about trying to intentionally replicate the Azolla Event. With its nitrogen-fixing qualities, azolla makes a good fertilizer. Some people are also cooking with it, though I’m not so sure about that. One big warning, though. Azolla spreads. Quickly. So if I (or someone else) were to try to grow azolla for this purpose, it needs to be kept in something enclosed. I have a one-cubic-foot fish tank hanging around, which I’m thinking about using for this purpose. My father will be horrified because it will be unsightly. But no one but us will see it. I figure that once the tank is full, I can pull the azolla out, dry it off, and compost it. Then, once I’m sure it’s really dead, I can spread it around in my yard as a fertilizer. By my calculations, it should fill up every month or two. I mean, sequestering carbon dioxide one cubic foot at a time won’t help much, but it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

I don’t think I’ve read any books on global warming, so next up on my list of Gratuitous Amazon Links is The Battle of the Labyrinth, by Rick Riordan. We’re heading in to the home stretch of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Of course, the Riordanverse is just getting started.

Covid, Part . . . I Don’t Even Know Anymore

It’s back again and better than ever. Well, okay. It’s back again.

I have a coworker who texted us on Sunday saying, “Guess what guys? I’m Covid-positive.” So, since we’re all close together in our pharmacy, I decided to test.

Also, on Sunday, my dad said that he felt lousy and he thought it might be heat exhaustion. Well, the heat has been inhumane and heat exhaustion is cumulative, so I was willing to buy that. When I left for work on Monday, I reminded him that if the electricity goes out, the local library is a cooling center, since he thought it was the heat.

On Monday, I tested for Covid, since it’s loose at work. I asked my dad how he was doing. He said, “well I took nourishment today I didn’t eat all yesterday” and I, like…

So. I suggested the possibility that he could have Covid. He pooh-poohed it, because I was testing negative and where would he have gotten it from? He said it had to be something else. I left him the second test in that box, just in case he wanted to test. When I got up Tuesday, my dad asked how long it takes between exposure to Covid and the start of symptoms. I didn’t know off the top of my head, so he looked at his calendar and said that when he was at the doctor on Thursday, there was a woman in the waiting room who was coughing. He decided that testing might be a good idea.

I pulled out my handy dandy BinaxNow(tm) testing kit and set it up. I timed my dad while he swizzled the swab in his nose, and then we waited. Sure enough. He was positive.

There’s a combination urgent care and emergency room that we use for a lot of our Covid needs at work (Alex also went there for his diagnosis when he got Covid). I set up a profile for him (attaching the pictures of his ID and insurance card took **forever**) and gave him the address of the clinic in case he felt up to going on Tuesday. Needless to say, he did *not* feel like going in.

So I drove him up there on Wednesday and, due to his age, and him being short of breath, they put him in the emergency room half of the building. I’d never been over there, and if I hadn’t been terrified for my dad, I probably would’ve been fascinated. My dad’s hearing isn’t all it used to be, so I helped translate. The workers couldn’t take their masks off so he can read their lips, so I repeated the questions with my mask off just long enough to ask the question. They got symptoms and lists of medications. My dad doesn’t take anything systemic, just eye drops.

Public Service Announcement Time: if you ever deal with bungee cords, **Please** wear eye protection. That’s why my dad uses eye drops. He smacked himself in the eye with a bungee cord back in . . . 2010? 2011? His ophthalmologist says that she gets more patients that way.

The doctor came in soon after that and my dad could understand what the doctor was saying. So when the doctor said that my dad would be there for a couple of hours while they did bloodwork and took xrays, since my dad could hear him, I came home. I swear I stopped somewhere on my way home, but I cannot remember where it was. I read for a while, and two hours after I left the ER, I headed back, and got there just as they were getting his paperwork together to release him.

We stopped for Popeye’s Chicken and his prescriptions on the way home and he’s been taking Paxlovid(tm) and an inhaler.

Now the thing is I spent basically 45 minutes in a midsize sedan with a person who has Covid. I put the air conditioner on vent rather than recirculate so that we were getting fresh air in there, but still, the close quarters greatly increases the chance that I’m going to get it, too. I’m basically planning for it.

This is particularly important considering that another coworker called today and said that she has it. There were four of us scheduled, but we ended up with only three. Ick.

I tested again today and it was negative, so I can go to work tomorrow. Saturday will be 72 hours after I was in the car with my dad, so I will test again on Saturday. I’m stocking up on food I can eat in my bedroom, because when I’m not doing something that requires this computer, I hide in my bedroom now.

I have nuts, and pudding, and vegetables. . . . Cranberries! I bet dried cranberries would be good. Since I’m likely to get this *from* my dad, I can also emerge to cook. I’ve ordered some chicken and things that I can cook and then take to my bedroom to eat.

The thing is, that two more of my coworkers had Covid at the same time I did, so I suspect that they will get caught in this current round of Covid, as well. This looks like it’s going to be fun.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for the final book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series: The Last Olympian. I was worried about this book, largely because as far as I’m concerned, the Harry Potter series sort of fell apart at the end, and so I was worried that Riordan would also bobble on the dismount. I needn’t’ve worried. He nailed it.

Warning: Whining and Navel Gazing Ahead

I missed a few days. I mean, if you follow my blog you’ll notice that there’s a few days missing.

I don’t know what happened. I just . . . I’m getting the hang of doing this writing will walking, and I just . . . . It’s been too hot to walk? I worked the early shift on Wednesday and had an appointment with my oral surgeon on Thursday morning. But, with time I’m hoping that this will get easier to do.

I have a theme song for my writing. I’ve sort of ritualized the Daft Punk song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. I play it when I’m walking just before I start writing. Then I open my copy of Dragon Anywhere software and begin to dictate.

I feel a little short of breath today. I don’t know why. My breathing has mostly been good but today and yesterday I’ve been coughing more than usual, and right now I’m walking uphill. Most of my walks have been pretty level — in my store, at the Riverwalk, so I’m out of practice in walking uphill.

I watched a video about codependent relationships yesterday new channel I discovered called Mended Light which is a therapy channel. I mean, this channel is not a therapeutic relationship, but it’s information on therapy and what kinds of things you might need therapy for. It ends with an invitation to have a consultation with one of their therapists and, of course, if you need therapy they encourage to get it, even if it’s not with one of their therapists. Most of the videos end with Jonathan, the lead therapist saying, “We need your light,” and that’s really uplifting.

I’ve wondered if Thomas and my relationship was codependent, but based on what they say, I think it probably wasn’t, at least on my end. I actually came into this relationship from a very strong place in my life. At the time, my theme song was “The Future’s So Bright,” by Timbuk3. I’ve recently discovered that apparently the song is about nuclear annihilation, but, one in three songs in the 80s was about nuclear annihilation. For me, though, it represented my future as a foreign language translator, living in the city, maybe with a small dog and some adopted kids.

I’d dated a lot, and nearly all the guys I dated were bad news. Liars, cheats, abusers. One was really sweet and looked like a young John Travolta, but he . . . how do I put this? I had to explain a lot to him. He would be, “I’ve heard of this guy who . . .” and then describe someone legit famous like the existence of this guy was news to him. Another guy, every time I said I liked something, he’d tell me how it was bad or wrong. Eventually I gave up and broke up with him. He is apparently now a registered sex offender.

So I’d basically given up on dating. I figured that my best bet was to make my life the best it can be as a single person and if I find someone someday, then I find someone someday, but not to count on it.

So I was in this really strong place. I ended up in a long-distance relationship with Thomas, so I didn’t want to go out of the country for a semester because I barely saw him during the school year as it was. Nearly all of the people in my family who got degrees became teachers, so I figured that would be a good fit. It wasn’t, but I still got fantastic grades, got into the honor society, and would’ve graduated with honors if I’d stayed in school another semester.

I graduated, started on a career track that would’ve led me to becoming a paralegal with a large law firm in Chicago, and married Thomas. Everything was fantastic. Then we moved to Texas.

When we got to Texas, I went into the deepest depression I’d had since middle school. I’d always had a bit of acne, but the climate here made my skin just blossom with cystic acne, which led to massive acne scars.

Thomas had worked with people who’d lived here and they’d led us to believe that San Antonio was a party city. That there were street festivals and things all year. We got down here and there were, like, two festivals — Fiesta and the “Mud Festival,” when they drain and clean out the San Antonio River. I mean, there were more, but no one we had contact with ever told us about them. This was 1993, when you couldn’t just boot up your computer, connect to the Web, hit Google and type in “San Antonio Festivals.”

So my mental image of me getting a job as a paralegal and attending festivals in bodycon dresses was *poof* gone. I did get the paralegal job eventually, though it was in corporate rather than litigation practice, but the festivals didn’t really materialize. And the ones that did, it seemed that it was just “get liquored up.” Woo.

Remember that my experience of drinking is that we don’t do it to have a good time, we do it to mask our misery. Yay.

I’m having trouble remembering what we did on the weekends back then. There weren’t even any parks to speak of. Men’s Fitness magazine, I think, actually ranked San Antonio really low for existence of parks. We visited Friedrich Wilderness Park a lot, but not much else. Well, we joined the zoo and the botanical garden, but didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time there, that I recall.

Even the environment I lived in was depressing. I went from our apartment to a parking lot, to a street, to a different parking lot, to a street, to a parking lot and back to our apartment. What’s not depressing about that?

Where am I? Geographically speaking?

As I’m talking, I’m walking up and down the streets of my neighborhood. I need more steps than usual today, so I’m literally walking up and down the same street, rather than up one and down the other. This is including around the cul-de-sacs and things, so I’ll get more steps that way. I can’t remember if I’m going down or coming back up this street right now. I guess when I get to the end of the street, I’ll know.*

Back to my subject. I was feeling really good about myself and my future and things when I got into the relationship with Thomas. I was in a strong place, feeling pretty self-sufficient, and it wasn’t until the downward slide in Texas, that well, things went downhill.

Well this is a long way of saying that if I had that confidence and feeling that I could be self-sufficient from 1987 to 1992, then that ability is in there somewhere. It’s time to try to get it back. I’m planning to stay in San Antonio another 10 years. Once I’m 65, I can research which schools in which states have which discounts for students over 65 and make decisions then about where I’m going to move to for school.

Again, my plan is to work on my language skills to the point where I don’t actually need the schooling, I just need to get the grades and the piece of paper. Maybe the translation skills training, too, unless I can find it somewhere else by then.

For example, on the beginning of my walk tonight I spent 22 minutes listening to El Ladón del Rayo, the Spanish translation of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief (Germane Amazon Link!). I had to slow it down a bit because the translation is in Castilian, and I speak Mexican Spanish. But that’s a good thing. Getting that degree, if I choose Spanish as my specialization, will probably require me to know Castilian, at least to have a passing familiarity with it, and that’s what I’m getting here.

*I was going back up the street.

Little Women

As I said yesterday, I’m going to try for writing about books in the order they were written. Let’s see how how this works out. I’m reading one of Victoria Holt’s old novels (from 1968) and a book from 2015 and it’s been a long time since I’ve read any of the older novels from my younger days . No Hawthorne or Dickens or Twain or anything like that. So I’m going to do Little Women today and then, you know, in a couple of months or years or whenever, I’ll reread a 19^th century novel and I’ll have to go backwards to catch that one.

This may take more editing than usual. I’m dictating this while I’m on the Riverwalk, so this is kind of fun. When I dictate a post at home, I’m walking around my neighborhood at night and there’s usually no one around, so I’m more comfortable speaking out loud. I’ve already passed two groups of people now and as a result, I’m speaking really quietly. I’m talking into my phone, so I’m pretty sure they won’t think I’m carrying on a monologue like the street preacher I passed about 15 minutes ago, but still.

Okay now if you live in United States you probably have some familiarity with Little Women. I mean, you might as well if you’re in a different country, but I have to admit that when I was in Italy, I never asked anyone “Hai mai letto Picolle Donne?”

So a little overview of the book may well be in order here. Little Women is the semi-fictionalized autobiographical story of Louisa May Alcott’s family. Alcott had three sisters, Anna Bronson Alcott Pratt (Meg), Elizabeth Sewall Alcott (Beth), and Abigail May Alcott Neiriker (Amy). The girls of the book have similarities with the sisters in real life such as the second sister (Jo/Louisa) being a writer and the youngest (May/Amy) being an artiest.

In Little Women, we start out Christmas of 1863, which is during the United States’s Civil War. The Marches live in Connecticut so they’re on the side of the North, the Union, the Yankees, whichever you prefer. And their father was off being a chaplain during the war. The family had had money at one point but Mr. March had lost their money in a bad business deal and so now they’re living in genteel poverty. They only have one servant left! The horror!

Anyway, the girls have no fashionable clothing and they have to make repairs on the clothing they do have. This doesn’t set well with Meg, who is very envious of the members of her peer group who can buy nice things. The girls become friends with Theodore Laurence, the grandson of the older man next door and we watch their families, one with love but no money, and one with money but no knowledge of how to express their love for one another, interact. We watch Jo attempting to make money from writing, and Amy become the favorite of their rich Aunt March, who helps her get training in her art. Meanwhile, Beth becomes friends with Mr. Laurence, and Mr. Laurence supports her love of music.

The book that we know of as Little Women is actually two books – Little Women and its sequel Good Wives. Little Women ends with the wedding of Meg and John Brook. Good Wives follows the young Brook couple and we also watch Jo and Amy find love. As for Beth? I don’t know if I need a spoiler alert for a book 150 years old, but Beth is too good for this world and dies young.

My mom was in English education major and she had Opinions about this book.

She hated the pairing of Jo and Friedrich Bhaer. She was totally a Jo/Laurie shipper. I can see that, but I can also see the Jo/Friedrich pairing. I ended up buying Jo & Laurie in part of the Germane Amazon Link and also so that I can see the ending my mom wanted.

On the downside, as much as I love my mother, I’m not blind to her misandry. Men scared her and confused her. So anytime something went bad in the life of one of the wives of a writer or a female writer or whatever, it was always a man’s fault. Like with Zelda Fitzgerald. My mom always said that F. Scott Fitzgerald drove her crazy.

She was very angry with Bronson Alcott for failing to support his family and leaving it to one of his children. She may have been onto something.

Bronson Alcott was a dreamer. He wanted abolition and to reform American education and convert people to vegetarianism and a pure way of living in harmony with the land. I mean, these were all good things, but the way he went about them was. . . suboptimal. For example, he tried to found a school without corporal punishment (hitting the students), which is a good thing. However, current sentiment hadn’t yet turned against corporal punishment, and that, combined with an unorthodox teaching style, based more on the Socratic method, where students and teacher converse in hopes of finding truth, which was also not the preferred method. Oh, and before I forget, he didn’t hit his students, but he encouraged his students to hit him, telling them that their failure was because he had failed them. He openly admitted that he was playing on their guilt and shame in doing this. Wow. I’m 110% against corporal punishment, but at least corporal punishment is honest.

Well, Bronson attempted to keep this school going for 10 years and ended up penniless. Then a friend gave Bronson the money to start Fruitlands, a farm dedicated to clean living and rejecting the use of farm animals. You know, like to run plows and things. So the people living there had to push the plow themselves,which is hard work. They also started this farm too late in the year to get a full harvest in by winter, so they almost starved. Fruitlands lasted seven months.

As a result of this lack of practicality on the part of her father, Alcott ended up writing children’s books for the rest of her life because they sold well and she could use the money to support her entire family.

Things I’ve been reading since I started my reread of Little Women indicate that Alcott may have been a transman. Now, I’m reluctant to decorate this post with pink-white-and-blue flags because, well, there was no real term such as transgender back during her lifetime and I really hesitate to sit here in the 21^st century and label people based on what they might have defined themselves as today. One of the quotes that supposedly prove their status as a transman was one where they say “I am more than half-persuaded, that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body. . . . because I have been in love in my life with ever so many pretty girls, and never once the least little bit with any man.”

Generations of lesbians have seen themselves in this quotation. So was Alcott a straight transman? Were they a lesbian? Were they nonbinary?

I can hear some of you now, ‘does it matter’? And as a straight-passing ciswoman, I say it does. Representation matters. Being able to see yourself in fictional characters and historical figures matters. And seeing yourself in somebody who may very well have been one of the heroes of your childhood really matters.

Book Blogging

I am starting a second blog post for today. It’s July 1 and if I finish this today this should post on July 3, 2022 at 12:30 AM.

I know I go back and forth on whether to make this a book blog. Right now, I’m forth, I think. Like, I’m planning to do some book blogging. I mean I do still want to travel blog here but my hopes to make money from this to pay for travel haven’t materialized and I need topics, so . . .

Now, since I’m going through my Goodreads account, listing books in the order that I’ve read them for my Gratuitous Amazon Links. Maybe if I’m going to book blog I should talk about the books in the order they were written which will be a completely different order from the one were major where my gratuitous Amazon links work. Now at some point I may well end up blogging about the book which would have been my Gratuitous Amazon Link.

Here I took a brief break to go play Pokemon Go. The gym in my neighborhood was empty and I had a chance to leave a Pokemon there.

Anyway I think the oldest books I’ve read at this point are my Nancy Drew books. Sort of. The Nancy Drew series was written in the 1930s and then in the 1950s, they were edited/rewritten. I’ve been reading the 1950s version, but Goodreads has them listed as the books from the 1930s. So maybe I’ll blog about the Nancy Drew series. Or have I already done that? I think I’ve already done that.

I’ll have to go looking for that post and maybe update it with a picture of Riverside, Illinois, the town I picture as River Heights or something. I don’t have any pictures of downtown Riverside that I took myself, because when I went there I was too young to have a camera, but still, I probably have I maybe will find one Wikimedia Commons or a government site the would have it. Something where I wouldn’t have to pay to post it.

As for the next oldest, I don’t know. I’m working on some old Victoria Holt books so maybe those? When was the first Discworld book written? (N.B. 1983, so not even close) I went through a Discworld book reading phase for a while, until I started to burn out and stopped.

I know I’ve read a lot of older books, but I don’t think any of those are listed in my Goodreads account yet. Like, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Three Musketeers, among other old books, for fun, and I’ve read a bunch of, like, Hawthorne and things for school and I think I’ve lost my mind. The oldest book I’ve read since I started keeping track in my Goodreads account was Little Women, which I just finished recently. It’s been a long week.

So I guess my first chronological-order book post will be Little Women and I can even fold in some travel, since we went to Orchard House in Concord, which is where the Alcotts lived when Louisa May was writing Little Women. W00t!

I hesitate to try to sell y’all a copy of something you can download from Project Gutenberg, so I may need a Gratuitous Amazon Link. I just bought the Kindle book of Jo and Laurie, the fanfiction which ends with Jo and Laurie ending up together. I haven’t read it yet, but the reviews are pretty good. Also that’ll make a good Germane Amazon Link for my Little Women post.

So back to Percy Jackson for a Gratuitous Amazon Link, I guess. The Titan’s Curse, by Rick Riordan, the third book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. We go to the Smithsonian Institution, and to Hoover Dam (the exhaustion-fueled dam pun scene is one of my favorites!) , and to San Francisco. I’ve been to one of those!

July Goals

So today is July 1. This will post on July 2, of course, because I’m posting stuff at 12:30. I don’t actually know why I decided on 12:30. It might be because I didn’t want to take the risk of accidentally launching at noon. I wanted to post overnight in my time zone, so I guess I decided, “okay let’s make it half past midnight.” But that was you know six years ago? Seven years ago? Dear God, have I been working on this blog that long?

Sigh so it’s July 1 and I decided what kind of figure out a way to get all of my goals in during this month. My goals, such as they are, are let’s see: writing, reading, exercise, learning, and savings I think. I think that’s it the maybe more. But I’m going to just… Chug forward on those five.

My reading goals are easy. I read before bed every night, if not more often. I have a t-shirt that has Belle on it saying, “My Weekend is All Booked” and yes, yes it is.

My writing goals kind, kind of obvious, I’m going to write. I have, of course, this blog, and I have a couple of novels in mind. I also need to get back to Pep Talks for Writers (Germane Amazon Link!). (A) They’re pep talks. For writers. and (B) my reactions and things about them gives me something to write about.

My first novel is my flipped Beauty and the Beast. Beauty goes looking for the Beast, rather than being kidnapped by him. I’m afraid it’ll read like a teen romance, and I don’t know if I want them to end up together.

I also have another couple novels that I’ve been kind of toying with. One actually started as an alternate history version of what might’ve happened if Zheng He had, actually, traversed the Pacific Ocean and landed in North America and set up a colony. This was my female dominated culture story, because in this version, the European colonists just don’t know that they’re outclassed by the Chinese people who were already here and they end up in a multigenerational war. Eventually, the girls have to be raised to have careers and the boys are trained for the army. However, this would end up working so that I, a white girl so pale I disappear when I stand against a blank wall, would be telling brown people’s stories.

I think I’m going to maybe make it a fantasy novel, but I don’t really have room for magic in it. I may have to put some kind of subconscious magic thing in there to make it fantasy. I may be onto something here. I wonder if healing magic would work. The boys coming home from the war will definitely have different levels of PTSD and I could invent psychotherapy using magic. Not “and your PTSD is gone. Poof!” But more “next week we’ll work on healing the trauma of killing a person for the first time.” I don’t think that’d interfere with the plot I have in mind.

Let’s see, next is learning goals. This is mostly foreign language learning, I need to work on my Spanish this month because June and July were Spanish, my Italian for my book, and my Chinese because I’m getting somewhere with it, actually. I spoke Chinese to one of my patients. She was having trouble understanding the problems she was having with her bank card and so I ended up telling her to call her bank. I don’t know if I was perfect, but she understood. And now when she comes in, I say hello to her in Chinese. I also have The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan in in Spanish both as an audiobook and a hard copy book, so I may do something with that during the course of July.

Exercise goals. I play Pikmin Bloom and the game has a weekly challenge. I go back and forth between the too-easy goal of 20,000 steps in a week, and the too-hard goal of 100,000 steps in a week. I’m also doing the Samsung Health Global Challenge which is 200,000 steps in a month. My record for finishing early is on the 14th of the month, which is around 14,000 steps per day (brief interlude where I count up by basically counting to 200 by 14s using birth control pill packs to double-check my math (most packs are 28 pills, so two is 56, 3 is 84, etc.)). I also would like to go start going back to the gym. I hesitate to go back there when the manager’s there because I don’t want to attract any attention by coming back. So I guess I’ll time it to be there when he isn’t for awhile.

Savings goals. I’ve lost a bit of money in the last year. My house had a major repair, and I chipped in half of it plus I had to take the whole mortgage onto myself for the rest of 2022 to pay my dad back for his half which of course means that I should’ve just cashed out and paid the whole repair off and we should just kept going with the mortgage payments. We were both stressed out and not thinking clearly. So now I need to recover from this. I have an account with Acorns, which I’m saving up around $100 per month by rounding up my purchases. I’m also putting aside $10 per week, so once I can buy a share of stock with that, I will do so. I’m going to get a bit of a raise soon. According to my boss’s boss, the raises will be every six months “until a certain point,” and then every year “until a certain point,” but what that raise will be or what that point is? Who knows. I think that maybe I’ll bump up my stock purchase plan a bit and increase my savings that way. Depending on what the raise is, I maybe will increase it by a couple of hours per week (so if it’s $0.50, I’ll increase it by a dollar or two) and I won’t even notice the change. Also, I’m still paying myself to study my foreign languages, so that works out to a couple of bucks a day. Unfortunately that’s not going into the deficit from the house repair, that’s just the tuition and stuff for getting the modern languages degree I should’ve gotten in the first place. But at least as long as I have those, I’ll never run completely out of money.

In future months, I might add cleaning goals, photography goals, or music goals, or other goals. I need to get back to practicing the piano. For July, though, I’m just going to hope that doing a bit a day will chip away at these four. And once I do a bit, it’ll follow to do a bit more. One blog post will lead to two. One page in a book will lead to another. One Duolingo lesson will lead to more. And so on.

Missing Pictures

You know, I really wish Thomas had given me more warning that we were going to split up. I mean, I know I this is the stupidest reason in the world for something like this, but I’m very disappointed that so many of my photographic memories and things are gone.

Ages ago when digital cameras first became a thing, Thomas bought a digital camera that used floppy disks and he filed floppy disk after floppy disk when we traveled and then he copied them onto his computer and I figured we were going to be together forever and that they were safe on his computer. I figured I’d be able to access them whenever I needed to. In fact, getting my own computer was something of a bone of contention. He figured that I could do my writing and things on his computer when he wasn’t using it. Finally he gave in.

Part of me wants to go back to all the places we went during that era, but now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not sure where we all went. I mean we have pictures from when we first moved to San Antonio. We took trips to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. We went to Austin and to wherever-we-were in Louisiana. But I think those were all before the digital camera. We may have been using one of those el cheapo cameras. Not the disposable kind, but one of those little plastic point-and-shoot cameras. Did we have a Kodak disk camera at some point? We may have.

I have some old undeveloped rolls of film. I wonder what’s on them. I should take those and get those developed. I also should put on a pair of gloves and a mask and go into the dusty garage and see if there’s pictures in there.*

During our marriage, we took, let’s see, the trip our first honeymoon which was right after our wedding was Indianapolis. We went to Union Station and there’s, like, a Civil War monument there, and we went to Eagle Creek Park, and we discovered that the art museum is closed on Mondays. I think I may have gotten a picture of Love, by Robert Indiana, though I don’t know. God. Our second honeymoon I know there’s a bunch of pictures from that. We left Chicago and went down through Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee we stopped at Rock City on the border between Tennessee and Georgia and then we drove to Florida we stayed at my mom’s best friend’s house. We went to Corkscrew Swamp and Disney World and did Epcot and some of the Magic Kingdom. On our way out of Corkscrew Swamp, we decided to take Alligator Alley to the end, so we ended up in Naples at the beach. We dabbled in the Gulf for a bit and headed back to the East Coast. We met my cousins who were living in Florida at the time. We got there really late because I couldn’t find the turn and this was in the days before Google Maps. We finally had to stop at the Circle K which is literally around the corner from the house for a map.

On the way home, we went to Stone Mountain Park has a very problematic history but it’s beautiful. We went to Shakertown in Kentucky and should have pictures from both of those. We also stopped at Berea College because I was very interested in a college without tuition (students work to earn their education). I don’t know if I have pictures from there, though. Then we went to Wyandotte Caves in Indiana and I should have pictures of that. These were all before the first digital camera. Oh! We stopped at St. Augustine on our way down, too. There was a pigeon bothering the employees of a bakery that we went into. I think we took a picture of the pigeon.

That’s 1991 and 1992. In 1993 we moved down here and went to Chicago for the Visions science fiction convention. I think we went every year until they stopped. We probably have pictures of a bunch of Doctor Who actors somewhere, but not much in the way of sightseeing pictures. Oh! One year we hung out with my parents and cousins (different cousins from the Florida ones) and went lighthouse spotting. That might’ve been after Alex was born, now that I think of it, so it probably was during the reign of the second digital camera.

I know that in 2006 we went to Fort Lauderdale and saw the smaller King Tut exhibit at the art museum. This one had a Akhenaten, speaking of problematic, but the statue was amazing. One of of my trips, we went to Miami but the friend are going to meet got sick and didn’t make it.

I’m very fortunate that I grabbed all of the pictures of Alex and all of the pictures that Alex took that I could find. In fact, that covers a lot of territory. Alex got his first camera in 2003, so it covers the 2003 trips to Disney and Key West. I also copied all of the pictures from our UK trip that I could find to my computer.

Now there was a long pause while I tried to remember if Thomas and I really went anywhere else. Mentally, I was going over a map of the US.

We went to Toronto, but I have a lot of those pictures. We went to a wedding in Eau Claire Wisconsin and decided to go to the Minnesota State Fair and then stopped off in Madison on the way home. That was just before our wedding, so no digital pictures there.

I always thought that Thomas and I did a lot of traveling, but I don’t think we did. We basically just traveled around Texas and went back and forth between San Antonio and Chicago, and San Antonio and Florida. We did go to California several times and I retook a lot of those pictures in 2017.

We took a weekend trip to Seattle once. I’ll have to go back there and take pictures.

I’ll also have to try to remember where all in Texas we went. We went to the Dallas Museum of Art and to the Galleria in Houston. The Texas State Aquarium. Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, but Alex and I were back there just . . . 2018?

I’ve been thinking that I missing a lot of memories and I don’t think I am I think most of what he have is in the garage covered in dust. That’ll be fun.

Speaking of travel, our Gratuitous Amazon Link for today is a Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, The Sea of Monsters, by Rick Riordan. And the Percyverse books are all about the travel, even when the travel is just among the realms of Norse mythology. Which isn’t the case here. That’d be odd. In The Sea of Monsters, they spend a lot of time at sea and also visit Chesapeake Bay.

Long Day June 29, 2022

So today’s been kind of adventure from a phone perspective. Well, in general, really.

First, I had a nightmare about Thomas and the end of our marriage and that was distressing. I mean come on now my 17 year marriage ended. That was by definition pretty stressful. And it has been on my mind a bit lately. That woke me up at 5:30 this morning, and I had trouble getting back to sleep. Mind you, I had to be up at seven to go to work. It took me a while to get back to sleep. I ended up getting up at 7:10, got myself together as fast as I safely could, and got to work 10 minutes early. Additionally, thanks to a clerical error that I didn’t catch until too late, I was actually scheduled for half an hour before the pharmacy opened. So I was there 40 minutes before the pharmacy opened. I got some steps in, so that was nice.

The day went okay, mostly, and, well, I have a Pokémon Go friend in Houston who always sends me raid invites during Raid Hour on Wednesday (from 6 PM till 7 PM in your local time). I always feel bad, because I’m in the suburbs and there’s not really anybody playing at that time. I mean, Walker Ranch Park usually has someone, but the parking lot is small and the overflow parking areas are now taken up by construction. So I almost never can send invites back.

So, after doing some research, I realized that I could be at the Pearl by 6:00 pretty handily, and there’s lots of parking there. So today I decided to go down to the Pearl after work. I could get some more steps in and hopefully get some Pikmin Bloom . . . I’m not sure what to call it. It seems that the game has new Pikmin spawn in places where you spend a lot of time. Like, there are always a bunch up by my work and a whole lot by my house. Since, as I said before, I live in a suburban area, that means I have a lot of Pikmin with stickers that say “S” for, near as I can figure, “Street.” So I’m always on the lookout for new locations. I figured that after I did my raid or raids, I could do some expeditions around the Pearl and maybe get some more expeditions out there in the future.

So after work, I headed off. I don’t like the Google maps navigation thing. The last time I used it, for example, it literally told me three times what street I should be on, then said, “turn right here” with no warning, so I ended up having to go around again, which was a waste of time and gas. So I just memorized the street names and the direction I needed to turn and headed out.

Okay, time for an interlude. When Thomas got his first cell phone it was on his work plan with Sprint. Once he left that job, they let him take the phone and number with him. His new job also gave him a phone, so I took over that original phone account. Basically, someone in Alex’s family has had this phone number for 25 years. Then after the divorce, I took over the account. Well, once T-Mobile bought Sprint, they said they’d shut down Sprint’s network and they sent out Sim cards. The deadline for the shutdown of the network was June 30, 2022. Which is tomorrow. Turns out, they shut it down right at midnight Greenwich time. I intentionally sat on the chip until the network went down because as fond as I am of my current phone, it’s starting to show its age (locking up, overheating, etc.). And in order to get a new Samsung phone at my store, I need to be fully on T-Mobile’s network. So I figured that once Sprint’s network shuts down, I should be fully on T-Mobile’s network and can get the Samsung phone I want.

I was not expecting it to go down just before I arrived at the Pearl. I was approaching McCullough, preparing to turn right, when my phone beeped. It was the notification that I no longer had service. So, rather than turning right and going to the Pearl, I had to make a left and head home. OMG.

So I headed home. Once I got connected to my Wifi, I discovered that I’d missed a raid invite. After doing another raid, courtesy of my friend, I installed the SIM card. I restarted the phone, which was apparently not restarty enough, so the phone restarted again and then it started to overheat. Eventually it settled down, and now when I boot the phone up, it has that nice violent pink color of T-Mobile instead of Sprint’s yellow. I am giving the thumbs up now, but you can’t see it.

I ate a little dinner and then decided that I wanted to do some more walking, partially for my health, partially for my Pikmin Bloom weekly event, and partially because it’s something I enjoy doing. Unfortunately, it was still way hot outside. So I went to take a one-hour nap, which ended up being a one-and-a-half-hour nap. Now I have to give my dad his eyedrop, eat a little something else, get rid of some more Easter candy (I still have a little more than one bag of jelly beans), maybe take a brief shower, since it’s really humid and I’m sweating like whoa, take my medicine (including my tretinoin for my acne scars), brush my teeth, and head to bed.

Now for a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Hm. Where was I? I think that The Witch’s Heart, by Genevieve Gornichec, is up next. The Witch’s Heart is the tale of Angrboða, Loki, and their three children, Hel, Fenrir*, and Jörmungandr.

*I have the worst time trying to remember Fenrir’s name. I keep wanting to call him “Fenris,” as in Fenris Ulf, from the Chronicles of Narnia, and Fenric, from the Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who episode The Curse of Fenric. I’ll figure it out someday. I hope.