Day 127: Early Night Tonight

Posted on 07/18/2020 by chick

I got up a little earlier than I usually do. Otherwise I followed my usual routine, then did some cleaning and called my mom. I don’t feel like I did a lot, but I’m exhausted. So, first a snack and a shower, and then I’m going to settle into bed with a Barbara Michaels novel.

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Hot!

Posted on 07/18/2020 by chick

I haven’t checked the thermometer for the exact temperature outside, but by my estimation it is approximately one billion degrees out there.

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Day 126: Missed Opportunities

Posted on 07/17/2020 by chick

I saw an interesting webpage today that compared postcards from old resort sites with pictures from their modern day ruins. It made me think wistfully of “Beautiful” Mount Airy Lodge, which was once a big resort in the Poconos. It was heavily advertised in the NY/CT area when I was a kid. My grandparents owned a vacation home, so there was no way my parents were going to shell out big bucks for a hotel vacation, especially since they didn’t have big bucks. So I never got to visit the fabled resort. It closed in 2001 and has since been demolished. There is now a Mount Airy Casino Resort built on the same site, but I’m not inclined to bring my family to a place with “casino” in the name. It’s seedy-sounding, not warm and welcoming like the “lodge” always promised to be. I guess I missed my window of opportunity on that one.

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Day 125: More Books

Posted on 07/16/2020 by chick

Today this stack of books arrived.

The Dark on the Other Side, Someone in the House, The Crying Child, The Grey Beginning, The Wizard’s Daughter, Into the Darkness, Houses of Stone, and Prince of Darkness by Barbara Michaels.

I’ve been in just the right mood to continue with my goal of reading all of Barbara Michaels’s books. Sadly, inter-library loans are suspended due to the pandemic, so the library wasn’t going to be able to help me. Better World Books was willing to sell these novels to me for a better than reasonable price. I cannot be certain that the company is as good as it claims to be in terms of its charitable work, but I’ve been happy with the quality of the books they’ve sent me. These all appear to be decent reading copies for their age.

I have two more book deliveries coming soon. One is another batch from BWB, but it’s for Livia. There’s also a pair of books en route from a random small bookstore (in Wisconsin, I think it was). I liked the story of how the owners bought the store, and I felt sad for them that the pandemic hit soon after, so I ordered a couple of books from them. I’m crazy like that. I do believe I am finally done ordering books, though. For now. But who knows how I’ll feel next week? 😉

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Day 124: Hooray for Salad!

Posted on 07/15/2020 by chick

My husband went to grocery store and now we have salad. I love salad! Hooray for salad!

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Day 123: Weather, Dinner, and Bad Numbers

Posted on 07/14/2020 by chick
  • It was almost as if the Lords of the Sky didn’t want me to walk today. Every time I started to think maybe I should go out, the sky rumbled. Eventually I took a chance and went outside. It had just stopped raining and the sun was out, though there was thunder in the distance. Marshall came outside and walked for a while with me. He asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I had nothing. My life is so repetitive now that I have nothing to talk about. But we had a nice walk anyway, and we finished just before the rain started up again.
  • I made pancakes for dinner. It wasn’t the healthiest of dinners, but it’s what I thought I could manage given the ingredients I had and the mood I was in.
  • The coronavirus numbers were not good today. The U.S. had over 65,000 new cases and 900 deaths, and our country’s total death count will top 140,000 later this week. When I first started blogging about the virus and subsequent lockdown, I never could have imagined how poorly we’d do as a nation. I mean, Italy had shown us how easy it was to do poorly, but we’re the U.S., and we’re great, right? Well, not so much now, if ever we were. I am mentally bracing myself for worse numbers to come.
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Day 122: Pandemic Reading

Posted on 07/13/2020 by chick

I am currently reading Daniel Silva’s The Rembrandt Affair. I had seen it on a list of recommended reading, and I was able to purchase a used copy at a reasonable price. I had hoped for something heist-y, but it’s more spy-y. It’s a very serious sort of book, with plot lines involving Nazis and Holocaust victims, and it’s written in a style that is, basically, reportage. I don’t typically read thrillers, so I don’t know if this book is a typical example of the genre, but I suspect that it is. I’m not loving it, but I’m also not hating it. It’s making me feel that I’ve broken out of my reading bubble a bit and that that’s a good thing. I’m about 3/4 of the way through, and I hope to finish it by the end of the week.

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Day 121: Going a Little Mad

Posted on 07/12/2020 by chick

I finally broke down and bought a digital subscription to The Washington Post. I just got so sick of hitting their paywall. I doubt it will last past the $1 trial period, but if it does, I’ll have to dump my NYT subscription. But if I dump the NYT, I’ll get sick of hitting their paywall, too. There’s no winning in this world, unless you’re willing to pay $$$.

In any event, it shows that I’ve gotten mighty free with the credit card. That’s one of the side-effects of being home all the time. Shopping is a big part of how I do the mom thing. I buy the stuff that the family needs. It’s part of my identity. Cut me off from my regular shopping outlets, and I guess I start to go a little mad.

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Day 119: Whew!

Posted on 07/10/2020 by chick

One of my work projects will be going to print soon, and it’s time for me to make corrections. Thanks to the pandemic, the procedure for making corrections has changed, but for the better. Previously, I would go to the office to do the corrections or, if necessary, my boss would e-mail scans of the pages that needed corrections. Now the entire thing gets scanned, and I can look at all of the pages from the comfort of my own home. I had worried that this particular project (the one I handed in just before lockdown) would turn out to be a mess, but I looked through it today, and it’s really clean. Whew! At least that’s one thing that the pandemic didn’t ruin.

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Day 118: We Love Books

Posted on 07/09/2020 by chick

My husband, who is concerned about my book-buying habit, attempted a sort of intervention. He told Livia to tell me to stop buying books. And it worked to the extent that she did pass along the message. But then she also told me that she wants a bigger library of her own and asked me to buy more books for her.

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