Just tired

I haven't at all kept up with this. Or my diary. Every day is just a never ending to-do list, and trying to record anything is just one more thing.

Hurricane Ida trashed the lower level of the house. We're fine, we didn't lose anything we couldn't afford to lose. There's a whole dramatic story there, but I'm too tired to write it.

We're in the middle of contractor hell now. We're moving forward, but it's an endless one-step-forward, two-steps-back game.

The contractor who has spent the entire summer trying to jump through the hoops to replace our dying air conditioner (unrelated to Ida) fired us today. Gave us most of our money back and quit. The combo of Jersey City regulations and the weird custom set-up broke him. Now we have to find a new contractor and switch the permits.

ARR's back to school went fine. There's just a bunch of PTA stuff to deal with.

I have concerns about gaps between the product team and the C-suite at my current employer.

I'm trying to self-publish a novella, with a goal date of Nov 6. It's effectively an exercise in setting up a small business. If it were not a holiday themed novella, I'd push the whole thing out two months, but it's now or wait a year. You know what I really want to do after a day of media planning and setting up marketing automation? Come home to do media planning and set up marketing automation, only with a much smaller budget and crappier tools and it's my own money to lose. Whee.

Tired. It'll be fine, it'll all be fine, progress is being made on all fronts. But tired.

Books

74. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, trans. by Paulette Moller. 2. So this is a YA intro to the history of philosophy, with a super-meta framing story. Which makes this sound so much better than it is. Its pretentious, faux-naïve writing style features deeply unlikeable characters and is incredibly condescending to anyone who's mature enough to actually follow the arguments.

75. Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot by Vera Tobin. 3. Apparently I read this last year and completely forgot, which is extremely uncharacteristic of me. While 2020 was fairly traumatizing, I'm not sure it says great things about this poor book. Tobin delves into both literary and psychological theory as to why we like surprise in our fiction, and how these surprises can be accomplished, which is interesting. But it just doesn't seem to quite stick for me.

76. The Grift by Debra Ginsberg. 4.5. Tangled and engrossing story of a charlatan fortune teller who actually develops psychic powers, accidentally ensnaring several of her clients in a California town. Right on the border of literary fiction and speculative, in the best way.

77. The Campaign for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton. 4. Man, being a Victorian would have sucked. I still like flipping through this classic household management guide with its bonkers recipes, though.

78. Intrigues by Mercedes Lackey. 3.5. Look, I'm not going to say that the later books in the long-running Valdemar series are ground-breaking. But they have a certain kind of angst that I find deeply nostalgic and makes for great comfort reads.

79. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. 4.5. A woman on the edge of death gets to keep returning to key points of her life and seeing how making a different choice would play out. It kind of goes where you think it will, but not exactly, and that's perfect.

80. Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History—Without the Fairy-Tale Endings by Linda Rodríguez McRobbie. 3.5. Bathroom-reader style book—lots of 2-3 page stories about various princesses through history. You wouldn't want to sit down and read straight through, but they're great for picking up, reading a couple pages, and then putting down to pick up again days or weeks later. A number of cool stories, many of which I hadn't already heard.

81. Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. 4.5. Hogwarts noir. Private detective without magic investigates a murder at the magic school her sister teaches at. Plenty twisty. Note that the protagonist admits right off the bat to having made some shitty decisions, and then proceeds to make some shitty decisions for emotional reasons. If you're going to throw the book at the wall when the protagonist is stupid and self-destructive, this ain't the book for you, but she's at least self-aware about blowing up chunks of her own life.

82. The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker by Leanna Renee Hieber. 2. Overwritten in a faux-Victorian way, this features a colorless (in every possible sense of the word) protagonist and a too-stubbornly-stupid-to-live swoony problematically older love interest. Melodramatic with a useless heroine, who can't even remember her one moment of glory.

83. Stick Dog Slurps Spaghetti by Tom Watson. 4. This is a kid's book you won't mind reading to your kid. Stick Dog's companions are hilarious stupid, and Stick Dog is subversively smart.