reading – Page 4 – Philoquialisms

Weekly status update [0039/????]

Oh, hey, it’s November. Gulp.

I kept reading aggressively through November 1st. I wrote about The Orphan Master’s Son here; it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. I also knocked out another Christopher Priest novel, The Separation. I still like him, but I feel that he really basically writes the same novel over and over again. Each one has begun to feel a little too same-y compared to the rest. Timothy Zahn’s Spinneret was the last book I read; I finished it on the morning of the 1st. Some of you may recognize his name from the Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars novels that really kicked off the Extended Universe back in the ’90s. Spinneret was fine, if slight. I’m taking at least a brief hiatus, even though I still have way too many books sitting on my sofa to read.
November started, which means NaNoWriMo started as well. I began writing Sharp on the evening of November 1st, and after getting ~300 words into it I stopped. The literary style I was affecting simply wasn’t working. I should have known better, honestly; the last time I copped a style that wasn’t my own, it was for a Banksian pastiche, and I had similar troubles putting words to page at any reasonable rate. This time, though, the words weren’t just slow. They were awful, as I discovered when I reread it. So: I tossed it and started over today. I’m a little over 1500 words in now, and those words came at roughly 6-10x the rate of the original 300, so that’s good at least. I’m not sure yet if the story is any good, though. I’ll keep you posted.
The first of November was also the first day of open enrollment for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (AKA “Obamacare”). I had to finish on the phone, because COBRA is complicated, but the end result is that I should have insurance next year… and it should be free. That was a surprising discovery, but it’s because I make a lot less money now that I’m retired. On the one hand, it feels kinda weird and wrong that there isn’t means testing to go along with raw income. On the other hand, government stuff like this never, ever breaks in my favor… so I’ll take it. I’ve still got to contact my COBRA coverage company and get it to terminate on December 31st, but that can wait until I get at least the beginning paperwork for the ACA stuff.
Let’s just say the diet didn’t hold and leave it at that. I’ll try harder this coming week.
I’ve been trying to actually stay on top of TV for once. Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine continue; I’m in the last season of LMoE. I just finished season 2 of Luke Cage tonight (it was fine but not great) and am close to finishing season 6 of Orange is the New Black. I started watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Hallowe’en, for obvious reasons, and that’ll take the place of Luke Cage for the time being. It’s cheesy but fun.
Boy, this was a down month for the stock market. And there’s likely more on the way. Those numbers used to be a lot more hypothetical in terms of affecting my continued financial health than they are now. Gulp.

I’m gonna keep cracking on this novel for the next few days, at least, to see if it’s got legs. If so, I’ll try to assess whether the writing is worth sharing or not. If it is, well, I’ll be linking it here, which should provide something a bit different to read, horse story notwithstanding.

Here’s a book thing: “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson

I had never heard of Adam Johnson before. The local library had a display of short story collections, as part of their year-long reading challenge that I somehow missed signing up for; I had already grabbed Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman, but something about the cover of Fortune Smiles appealed to me. It seemed pop-art-y, for some reason evoking my memory of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay even though they don’t look very similar at all.

I liked Fortune Smiles

From that, I learned that the book that put Adam Johnson on the map was all about North Korea. I put it on hold and added it to the enormous pile of library books that are currently sitting on my couch; I’m tearing through them as quickly as possible in anticipation of NaNo, knocking out all the novels before I dive into the dauntingly-huge short story collections that remain.

Come Sunday evening, it was The Orphan Master’s Son‘

The book is dark, depressing, haunting. It paints a vision of the DPRK that is unrelentingly awful. My understanding is that it was painstakingly researched, that life there is really just as terrible as the book shows, and even if it’s only a tenth as bad as the book makes it out to be, the North Korean regime’s iron grip on its populace is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. This is something I knew in the abstract, of course, but reading about it–even in fictional form–makes it much more visceral, much more real despite the irreality of a story.

And, more than anything else, this is a book about stories. The DPRK is a place where everyone lies as a matter of course, from morning until night when the power goes out, because to tell the truth is to implicate yourself in doings which officially never happen, even though they absolutely do. The ability to lie on demand, to concoct a tale that cloaks events in such a way as to satisfy your interrogators, is just as critical a survival tactic as knowing which flowers are edible, or how to set a snare to capture a swallow and eat it. (Both of these acts are illegal, of course. Everything is, other than worship of the Dear Leader.)

The Orphan Master’s Son questions the meaning of identity, both personal and national, when survival requires that identity to be made of lies. It does not look away from horror, from the everyday evils of a brutal despotic regime that starves an entire nation to death while convincing them that their demise is righteous and just. It had passages that actually forced me to look away from the book for a bit, utterly defeated by the hopelessness and depravity. And it also finds hope buried deep within that unblinking despair.

Like the stories that the characters have to tell in order to survive another day, the story of The Orphan Master’s Son has holes, problems, issues. And like those stories, it is not about being true, it is about being convincing.

I am not sure I have ever been so convinced.

Weekly status update [0038/????]

As promised (and expected), a comparatively peaceful week.

I read eight or nine more novels in the pre-NaNo rush. Five of them were The Long Earth and its sequels, a collaborative effort by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. They were… fine, I guess? The setting was neat, but none of the books really had a plot, per se, other than the fourth. Mostly they were picaresques. Easy reads, though. Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net was much more interesting, a pretty obvious reaction to the typical cyberpunk stories that the man had popularized with his Mirrorshades compilation. I’m currently in the third (of four) “Okie” novels by James Blish. The compilation sorts them chronologically rather than in publication order, and it shows; this third one was the first written, and feels a lot rougher than the others, in the weird sort of way ’50s sf often does: absolutely crazy stuff happens (like sending a planet out of the galactic plane as if it’s no big deal), and the book treats it as a fait accompli. It’s weird, but a nice change from the headier modern stuff I’ve been reading otherwise, so I’ll finish it up in the next day or two.
That said, I’m still going to have a ton of books left on my sofa at the start of NaNoWriMo, only four days away now, which means I’ll have to keep reading throughout the month. It’ll be less of a problem than usual, I guess, since I don’t also have a job sucking up the oxygen (and time), but it’s going to be something of a first for me.
Speaking of NaNo, I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about my upcoming novel, including thoughts about how it’s likely to end. I think I have a pretty workable (if very rough) outline of the main body in my head. That sort of thing often changes with the writing, and I’ll definitely let it if it needs to, but it’s a good start.
As part of the prep work for said upcoming novel, I had to look into the modern state-of-the-art for Google Web Fonts. (You’ll see why… hopefully.) I think I’ll be able to do what I need to do with a minimum of pain, although I’ll have to write a custom text-to-HTML translator for this novel so it’ll look right. I’m… actually kinda looking forward to that?
Still watching a bit of TV. I manage an episode of Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine most days, and Luke Cage and Orange is the New Black every other day or so. I’m looking forward to finishing both of the latter shows, mainly because I want to bump The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina up on the queue for timeliness/thematic reasons.
Other than my usual free-to-play gaming, I’ve put quite a bit of time into video pinball in the last week or two. Pinball FX3 has the Williams licenses now, and those tables have been fun to mess around on, but I’ve mainly been grinding Sorcerer’s Lair, which I still think is the best table Zen’s ever made. I find it really strange that it’s their free-to-play table, particularly given how many hundreds of dollars I’ve sunk into all the other ones… but that’s fine. It was interesting watching a Twitch streamer play the table for the first time, having the same dawning sense that I did many years ago of “oh, there is actually something to this whole pinball thing!” Yes. Yes, there is.
The diet’s been pretty much derailed for the last couple of weeks, at first due to the visit and then later because it’s always easier to say “tomorrow” than it is to actually buckle down and do the right thing. I’m typing this up as a bit of public self-shaming to, you know, buckle down and do the right thing.
On a meta note, the new Gutenberg editor for WordPress is horribly buggy; it tends to eat anything after italics in a bullet point unless you do some stupid shenanigans, as one example that I had to deal with several times while writing this update. I may go back to the classic editor for a while until they fix more of the bugs.

In the middle of next week begins the month-long adventure of NaNoWriMo, which will be… interesting, for sure. I look forward to it with no small amount of trepidation every year (and wrote about it earlier this week), but I do look forward to it. I don’t know how it’ll mess with my posting schedule here, though. We’ll find out together, I guess!

(Also, Gutenberg ate the last couple of sentences of this post three times because of that stupid italics bug. Ugh. Back to the classic editor I go.)

Weekly status update [0037/????]

After several quiet weeks, this one ended up pretty much jam-packed from start to finish.

But first: the deluge of words doth continue. I read my first Christopher Priest (of The Prestige fame) and enjoyed it enough to make an exception to my “no more holds before December” rule so that I could get… well… The Prestige. John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, about the Theranos debacle, was a sobering (and fascinating) read.
Most of the week, however, was spent with my cousin from Louisiana, who was visiting the area. She stayed in Asheville through Tuesday, then headed my way Wednesday until Friday. It was a pleasure hanging out with her, driving around to the various sights, eating a bunch of food I probably shouldn’t have had but, y’know, guest!
Monday I rode a horse for the first time in my life. I wrote about it here. We also visited downtown Asheville–yes, I made the obligatory stop at The Chocolate Fetish, although I forced myself to only get one thing there, a single dark chocolate and sea salt caramel–and I spent time going over a bunch of puzzle types with her, as she’s new to the whole paper-puzzles thing.
Tuesday was game night back home, but I took the opportunity to write up the horseback outing. I decided to do something different stylistically, treating it as a story rather than the looser form of a blog entry, and inasmuch as that sort of thing “works,” well, it seemed to work; a couple of people were surprised to learn that “Along for the ride” wasn’t just a short story of my own devising. Which, I mean, I guess it is? Just not a fictional one.
Said game night was spent playing Spirit Island, which was fun and frustrating and fascinating in roughly equal measure. We lost, although I feel we hung on considerably longer than I felt we would after a terrible start. I’ve already decided that it’ll be making the trip back home for the holidays; I want to get more plays in.
Wednesday was mostly spent in and around town, starting with lunch in Hickory (Vietnamese, yum) and including a stop at a local antiques store so that my cousin could pick up some knick-knacks to bring home. We went up into the mountains for a bit, hiking a scrap of the Green Knob Trail before the sun got too low.
An early start Thursday had us back up in the mountains. We hiked Linville Falls and Mount Mitchell, which was… perhaps a bit more than we should have done, given that neither of us are at peak levels of stamina. But it felt good exerting myself in a way that I basically hadn’t done since I retired, and my cousin was duly proud of her own efforts. The day closed out all the way down in Charlotte at The Glow, which was fine if a bit underwhelming. The carvings were amazing, but they had to all be at a distance behind ropes to keep kids from messing with them, which made the experience feel rather detached. Still, it was the sort of thing I never would have done on my own, and I’m glad my cousin dragged me to it.

I slept like a rock most evenings this week thanks to high levels of physical exertion, and although I had a great time, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to next week being a quiet one.

Weekly status update [0036/????]

This morning was the first time this fall that the temperature dropped in my house overnight below my AC settings. I have never been so prepared for autumn.

The mad reads continue. I did a rare re-read of a library book this week, The Rook by Daniel O’Malley, because I had also checked out the sequel. To be fair, I didn’t know for sure it was a reread until the first page, when I went “this seems strangely familiar,” sending me digging through my library history. It was worth re-reading, though; it’s basically a more comic (and less cosmic) take on the premise of The Laundry Files, which is one of my favorite series of all time. The sequel was good, too. That said, the real star of this week is the book I finished about twenty minutes ago, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. It was very, very good. I cried a lot.
Quite a few puzzles, too, although the pace slowed down during the week as I realized that I have a lot of reading to do if I want to be done with the stacks before November starts. That’s almost certainly not gonna happen, but I have to try the best I can.
The same goes for television; I’ve managed to watch an episode of Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine most days, but it’s been a while since I watched one of Luke Cage, and I haven’t picked up another dramatic show either. That’s fine, though; I’m never going to feel bad about minimizing my time spent watching TV.
The only real event this week: there was a Hallowe’en shindig at my old workplace this Friday evening, and I finagled a +1 from someone. It was nice to see folks–particularly the kitchen staff, who I miss like hell–even if I kept getting asked when I was coming back. I’m glad I went, though. It gave me an opportunity to taste a cherry-flavored Hint water as well. They’re great.

Next week will be quite eventful; I have a cousin coming into the area for vacation, and we’ll be doing touristy stuff while she’s around. Should be fun! And then NaNoWriMo’s right around the corner…

Weekly status update [0035/????]

This’ll be a short one; it was a very quiet week.

Reading continues apace, although I got “stuck” for a bit on The Two Georges, an alt-history novel by Richard Dreyfuss (yes, the actor) and Harry Turtledove, who I assume did all the actual writing. It was a just-fine book, honestly; the real problem was that it was a 1000+ page book in a 450-page binding, which meant the font was tiny and single spaced. It took a lot of energy to read.
Continued watching The Last Man on Earth, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Luke Cage. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch another episode of OITNB.
More puzzles, including a ridiculously hard Slitherlink that, I think, has permanently turned me off of the ones in the Gakken publications. There’s “interestingly hard” and then there’s “requires flat-out guessing or psychic powers,” and a few too many of their puzzles are of the latter type. It’s a shame, because I find even the hardest ones by Nikoli pretty trivial at this point, but I’m not willing to beat my head against those crazy-hard ones, so…
Nothing meaningful on the videogame front. I did learn that Zen got the license for Bally/Williams tables after The Pinball Arcade lost it, which has me very excited; I much prefer the polish of the Zen tables, so seeing them do real pinball rather than the fantasy tables they usually do will be very interesting.

Like I said, a very quiet week indeed, perhaps the most “just the usual” week I’ve had since I retired. No complaints here, though! Other than that there’s no way I’m gonna get through my stack of books before NaNoWriMo starts in a few weeks…

Weekly status update [0034/????]

This is another hell of a week, but at least (mostly) not for me? Thin comfort.

The trilogy that started with Ninefox Gambit stayed mostly excellent, although I wasn’t completely enamored with the conclusion. Still, worth a read. I also read a bunch of other books too.
Other book notes the first: I actually quite liked Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is apparently Not The In Thing, but whatever. (I’ll freely admit that its core “schtick” is one I’ve thought a lot about, which alters my judgment.)
Other book notes the second: Fortune Smiles is a fantastic short story collection by Adam Johnson. One of the stories is very dark, but it warns you pretty close to the start, and if you read the book in chronological order you’ll be warned earlier anyhow. This was another one of those “pick it up at random in the library” books that I almost certainly wouldn’t have ever picked on my own, so: yay library displays!
Other book notes the third: I’m in the middle of reading Harlan Ellison’s seminal sf collection Dangerous Visions; I can see how it would have been pretty damn transgressive in the late Sixties, although with the benefit of hindsight it occasionally has a whiff of Trying Too Hard. Most of the stories are excellent, though, and as a whole it holds up impressively well. My favorite bit so far isn’t one of the stories at all, but Ellison’s introduction where he tears into the whiny Old Guard and their complaints about how the new sf just isn’t the same as the old. The fact that it could be taken almost verbatim as a tear-down of the modern “crisis” in sf that, for a while, centered around the whole Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy/etc. thing is delightful. Everything old is new again, kids.
Despite continuing to read at a rapid pace, I also continue to check out library books at an even more rapid rate. Half of my couch is covered in them. I have thirty-five checked out right now, many of them huge tomes full of short stories that will take me forever to finish. what am I doing
We had an extended game night Tuesday. We played Concordia, one of my favorite games, and I did very poorly, coming in last. Part of that was an idiotic play on my part in one of the final turns that cost me something like fifteen points. I acted like a complete jerk at the end, though, so… I’m afraid I’m not a lot better about that whole situation than I was when I wrote about it last. Ugh. I’m not happy with myself about that.
Finished up Bojack Horseman season 5, which was amazing, and Jessica Jones season 2, which was… fine… I guess. Started on Luke Cage season 2 and Orange is the New Black season 5. I may actually drop that last one, which is veering dangerously close to the sort of “everything is miserable and you get to watch” modern take on TV that I just can’t handle.
I weighed myself on Thursday for the first time in, uh, almost a year, I guess? I’m at 271 pounds; my best guess for how much I weighed when I started on this diet in late April is somewhere between 330 and 360 pounds, so I’ve lost something in the 60-90 pound range over a bit more than five months. (In case you’re wondering, my goal weight is 180, which is technically overweight from a BMI standpoint but is actually on the line where I go from looking healthy to looking less so.) That’s pretty damn good progress, even though I’ve got a long way to go. I was also reminded that I should never, ever own a scale. They ruin my will with the irregular ups-and-downs.
Lots of puzzles, too; I’m finally getting to a point where I’m relatively confident in my Kakuro solving, and I continue to work on several other books and magazines on a one-off basis.
No prose, although I did finish up my Guide to the Cardpocalypse series.
I also came up with the core idea for my NaNoWriMo novel. My current plan is to share that here as I write it (although probably not as body text, which would be overwhelming). We’ll see if I still feel that way come November.
Mostly just the usual on the videogame front, although the launch of Hollow Knight on the PS4 made me buy it (again) and play it, since I find that sort of game way more suited to a big TV and recliner than my computer. If you like Metroidvanias, I strongly recommend it.

Well, that was excessively long, so, uh… until next time!

Weekly status update [0033/????]

What a week.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday: the storm that didn’t really hit us. I had thoughts.
Most of my weekend time–and, actually, most of my time during the week as well–was spent reading. I think I read something like twelve novels in the last seven days; I know for a fact that I read three just yesterday. It was nice. I particularly want to note the three Seanan McGuire novellas that start with Every Heart a Doorway and the three Ben H. Winters novels that start with The Last Policeman. They were all particularly pleasant reads. I’m currently in the middle of Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, the first in another trilogy. It had a bit of an impenetrable start, but I’m over halfway through it and enjoying it thoroughly now.
I also got back (at least temporarily) into watching television. It’s Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in the morning, then the just-released season of Bojack Horseman and season two of Jessica Jones in the afternoon. Both of those are almost done, though; I’ll move onto Luke Cage for sure, and probably finally start the second season of Fargo as well.
Several of my old coworkers (and some that would be new, were I still working) were in town this week, and I was invited to a pair of group events. Those were nice, but honestly the best evening was Tuesday, which involved just three of us having a long conversation about science fiction over dinner at the best local Tex-Mex place. It’s always nice to catch up with folks, but I do much better in small groups than I do in large ones, and I’m delighted that someone reached out to plan that dinner. (Thanks, Mike!)
The downside of said dinner: despite getting through a dozen novels this week, my library stack actually grew (in word count, if not volumes) thanks to suggestions-slash-recommendations from that extended conversation. Sigh.
Puzzles provided a nice series of interrupts over the course of the week. Not just for me, too; I had Amazon ship a fat stack of puzzle books to one of my cousins back home, who had expressed interest in them back when I visited in April, and spent a couple of hours on the phone over the course of the week helping her work through some of them. She seems pretty hooked, which gives me a good feeling. Puzzles are awesome.
Nothing exciting on the video game front, though; I’m mostly taking a break after the heavy Creeper World action from the past few weeks, just maintaining my dailies in the handful of free-to-play games I still muck around with. I really, really need to put Let It Die to bed.

I’ll finish up my Cardpocalypse series this coming week. I know my tiny readership isn’t big on commenting, but: this is your final chance to get me to cover anything you think I’ve missed. So, uh, get on that, I guess?

Weekly status update [0032/????]

I’m writing this one early, since it’s entirely possible that by the end of today I’ll be without power for a week or so. That’s what I get for thinking that western North Carolina is all that different from Louisiana…

Speaking of which, a non-trivial amount of time this week was spent on preparations for Florence. I bought a bunch of low-carb snacks, along with a lot of liquids (read: Coke Zero and, as an even bigger treat, Ginger Lime Diet Coke) to add thermal mass to my fridge, which is usually almost completely bare. Charged spare phones and, vitally, my Kindle Paperwhite; checked out a metric ton of books from the library, washed every scrap of clothing I have, et cetera. I’m as prepped as I’m likely to get. Now it’s just a matter of lasting through the storm.
My reading binge continued, albeit at a bit of a slower pace. Noir wasn’t as good as The Serpent of Venice (both by Christopher Moore); I actually really liked the latter, although I have no particular attachment to either The Merchant of Venice or Othello. I thought it was quite a bit better than Fool, even. Now I’m working on The Black Opera by Mary Gentle, which is good if dense… and glancing over at the 25 (!) other books I have checked out. Woof.
I also played quite a bit on the computer. Specifically, I finished off Creeper World 2 and its free Flash sequel CW2: Academy. I really liked it, although the time pressures in a couple of the levels were very non-traditional for the series. If you’re a fan of tower-defense-y RTS-y turtle-y indie-y games, the series will provide many hours of fun for not a lot of money. It’s available on Steam. Now to see if I can get Particle Fleet: Emergence working…
Still haven’t touched the code for Dudes. Life got a little more hectic slash stressful than I like for jumping into something with that level of complexity.
I did find time to watch a couple more episodes of Jessica Jones, which seems to finally be picking up steam halfway through the season. And the new episodes of BoJack Horseman dropped just this morning. I watched the first one and see no reason to believe it won’t continue to be, for my money, the best show currently “on television” (whatever that means in the streaming era).
My order of puzzle books from Turkey finally came in after spending over a week in Customs. I’m super-stoked about them; there seem to be lots of neat, interesting puzzles inside, even if some of them (like the traditional logic problems) will be forever cut off to me since I don’t read Turkish. It’s every issue of the magazine ever published, and they only cost me $2 apiece even with shipping halfway around the planet, which goes to show just how big a price disparity there is on these sorts of things.

Right now I’m sitting in my comfy recliner, watching the wind steadily pick up in speed outside while I prepare to curl up with a book for a while. I’ll post again here later this weekend, assuming I can. See you on the other side!

Weekly status update [0031/????]

After the (relatively) busy times of last week, we’re back to something rather more like my usual speed.

I read a lot. A lot. I still have a stack of a good dozen books I checked out at the library (which prompted me to write my paean to the institution earlier this week), but on the whole I made a bunch of forward progress. Most of it was fiction; Lamb by Christopher Moore stood out, although it suffers from the problem that those most likely to get the most out of it are also those most likely to never, ever read it. The sole non-fiction book was Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, which was impressively readable. I typically take two to four times longer to read non-fiction, but I tore through Peak in a single afternoon.
I also watched a whole bunch of TV for basically the first time in months. For whatever reason I was in the mood to give The Good Place a shot; cue spending much of three days tearing through both already-aired seasons. It’s extraordinarily good, probably the most clever show I’ve seen in years, with a bunch of genuine laugh-out-loud moments and a stellar cast. Most impressive (to me) is the showing that the main actors who aren’t Ted Danson and Kristen Bell make; I had never heard of Jameela Jamil, not being British, and she is absolutely fantastic in her role as a do-gooder aristo. The real find–I assume everyone in Britain already knew of her awesomeness–is William Jackson Harper, who plays against Bell’s “banality of mediocre not-quite-evil” with a combination of exasperation and existential dread that is absolutely pitch-perfect. Never has the word “what?” had such an impact. I don’t want to write an article on the show, because to really cover what I’d like to cover it’d be spoiler-y as heck, but if you haven’t watched it yet: what the fork are you doing?
After getting my second Burnout Paradise Platinum trophy (per my past article, the game thankfully only has one really stupid one), I went back to mostly just playing my daily free-to-play stuff on my PS4. The computer’s another matter, though; I’ve been on a huge “old strategy game” kick, playing the original Heroes of Might and Magic and Warlords and other games of that ilk. Most of the time has been with Creeper World 2, which is… wildly different from the first and third games, not just in raw design–the side-view thing is a big twist–but also in its heavy use of timed stages. Lots of fun, though.
Other than all of that, just the typical “spending too much on games I don’t need,” on both the digital and board-type front. You know, the usual.
I haven’t touched the code for Dosat yet. Soon.

To be fair, after the relative excitement of last week, it was nice to mostly just curl up with a stack of books and get my literature on. Which I will likely continue this coming week… to my distinct pleasure.