books 2024

* = book club book

	audio books harry potter and the philosopher's stone - jk rowling copper river - william kent krueger the museum of ordinary people - mike gayle mercy falls - william kent krueger blood hollow - william kent krueger purgatory ridge - william kent krueger boundary waters - william kent krueger iron lake - william kent krueger this tender land - william kent krueger harry potter and the sorcerer's stone - jk rowling the fireground - dervla mctiernan weavers' way - david blake long gore hall - david blake storm force - david blake the wherryman - david blake horsey mere - david blake three rivers - david blake moorings - david blake st benet's - david blake broadland - david blake one-way tickets - peter grainger lane - peter grainger another girl - peter grainger missing pieces - peter grainger roxanne - peter grainger on eden street - peter grainger songbird - peter grainger the camera man - peter grainger the truth - peter grainger a private investigation - peter grainger the secret book of flora lee - patti callahan henry * time and tide - peter grainger the rags of time - peter grainger in this bright future - peter grainger persons of interest - peter grainger luck and judgement - peter grainger but for the grace - peter grainger an accidental death - peter grainger the running grave - robert gailbraith remarkably bright creatures - shelby van pelt * ink black heart - robert galbraith troubled blood - robert galbraith surrender, new york - caleb carr
	paper books the thursday murder club - richard osman
	ebooks an echo in the bone - diana gabaldon

am i tho

sitting at starbucks like a grown-up, trying not to watch the clock and think about constraints, but instead to enjoy the feeling of coffeeshopness. 

wondering why blogger indents the first line of any post by one spaceband. not the beginning of every paragraph... merely the first line of the entire post. by one single spaceband. automatically. every time.

listening to laurie r king's "lantern's dance", the 18th in the mary russell & sherlock holmes series. the first in the series, "the beekeeper's apprentice", was published in 1994. that's at once pretty recent and unbelievably far in the past. 30 years. crazy, actually.

trying to ignore the woman next to me... pull out the chair, pull it in. fidget with belongings, be still. get up, sit down. 

wondering if wearing kurta pajama would be cultural appropriation, and if that matters. can't we all just share the best of our cultures with each other? people all over the world wear NYY ball caps. isn't that appropriating american culture? maybe that doesn't count because america is a melting pot or maybe sharing isn't such a bad thing. 

maybe i am just old.

 

turn the lights back on

ICYMI the inimitable billy joel has produced a new song. 

back in the day, i got my albums via the columbia record & tape club. cr&tc was truly a racket based on the human inability to remember to say "no" via postcard once per month, and simultaneously, it was a cost-effective way to get recordings delivered right to the door. each month when my new billy joel or jackson brown or james taylor or dan fogelberg or supertramp or david bowie or reo speedwagon or eagles or cat stevens or barry manilow album would arrive, i'd put it on the stereo record player i'd saved money to buy from zayre's and i'd play it over and over and over again, with the lyrics (inevitably printed on the liner notes) in my lap, singing along and memorizing the lyrics, melody, and pocket.

some singers stay firmly in the pocket. the eagles, for example, due to the requirements of both tight harmony and the simple act of singing at the same time, stay in the pocket. barry manilow stays in the pocket...i don't have music theory training, so i can't say why he does this exactly, but it's got to do with the sound he's trying to produce. james taylor stays pretty much in the pocket as well. jackson browne tends to drag slightly behind the pocket, which i am guessing is due to his being sort of bluesy.

nearly always, billy joel gets ahead of the pocket. this makes it a real challenge to sing along, because you have to anticipate. eventually, i got pretty good at memorizing his timing, which can be like memorizing lyrics. it does make it difficult to just pick up one of his songs, but it's a fun kind of puzzle to get it right. 

i haven't taken the time with the new song to really get it down. i want to do so, but you know, life is so different when you're a grown up...not different bad or anything, just that time gets allocated in ways that seem to stymie hours-long sessions pounding one song in the ol' cranium.

i did notice that during the piano solo, there is a touch of "italian restaurant". did he do that on purpose? a tie-in from that song seems to fit thematically. 

in conclusion, i'm convinced all this singing along with men in the vocally formative years of my youth resulted in my being an alto. i mean, right?

i covet your thoughts on this matter.

1 = i have dry hair and dry skin. partially age-related (get off my lawn!) and partially just the luck of the genetic draw. 

2 = this winter, we went hiking a couple times. very cold and very fun. upon returning to the domicile from these frigiventures, i partook of steaming hot showers. i mean, steaming. steaming hot. so hot it felt cold. (have you ever experienced water so hot it feels cold? just me? mmkay.)

1 + 2 = my skin literally falling off like flakes of snow. body dandruff. 

wups.

to repair the skin damage, my aesthetician (yes, i have one of those [not actually personally owned, but you know... mine]) recommended nivea - the nivea that's like paste in a pot. i am very familiar with this product, having slathered it liberally upon my visage since college (a couple years ago) (lol).

but i figured, if i had done this kind of damage to my skin, probably something similar had been done to my hair. simultaneouswise, target had one of those offers like "spend X dollars on beauty shizzle in the app and get a $5 target gift card!!!!!!!" so, i shopped up some cucumber + mint vegan volumizing shampoo and conditioner which is "thoughtfully made" and promises weightless clean volume and declares itself paraben-free in no less than two of the eight descriptive bullet points on the product page.

impressive.

received product. placed in shower. used. obtained benefits. (also, it smells great!)

now...i already have a 2-in-1 shampooditioner leftover from summertime when the living is easy, which had been pushed aside for the separate shampoo & conditioner procured in autumn when the living becomes more complex. with short hair, these products can last for months, so i already have three bottles (jars? containers?) of hair product in the shower, and here come two more. 

the ish is that i don't have room for all this. the conundrum is what to do with the unused portions of the previous solutions. do i put it back in the closet and pretend i am going to use it again sometime? leave it in the shower to continually shame myself for being wasteful? throw it out?

i would really like to take door number three, but can't make myself. it would be gloriously freeing and also naughtily wasteful - which combines to make it sound fantastically fun. but i just can't seem to bring myself to have that much fun.

i covet your thoughts on this matter.

perambulators perambulate

in an earlier season of my life, i hung out in an online space where runners chatted about running stuff and tossed around phrases like "runners run" - a wisdom disguised as an inanity, equal parts well durr and HELLS TO THE YES. in those days, it wouldn't be unusual for me to put in 9 miles in one lunch hour (or so) - 3 miles to the park, 3 miles speed work, 3 miles back...my job was very different then, and my running much quicker. 

my job changed. our offices moved and instead of in a secluded alcove, i was working in a glass box. that and the larger team signaled increased responsibility. i could not in good conscience take expansive lunch hours.

my ability changed. i was diagnosed with asthma, battled tendonitis, took the skin off my right knee thrice across so many years - tripped while running. the last time, there was legit doubt that i had enough knee skin (as opposed to scar tissue) to enable skin to grow back. it did grow back thank goodness because getting butt skin grafted onto my knee did not seem a promising route. 

then there was the pandemic. rather than my tediously detailing the derailing, i'll just say that job, office, running, and family were all significantly disrupted, maybe not in that order. 

during that time, though, i did discover real joy in walking. well, walking and audiobooks. this is my balm, my rejuvenation, my joy. give me 3 miles and a narrator with no goofy vocal habits. ahh.

here recently, however, 3 isn't enough. i want 4 or 5 or more. the other day i miscalculated my route and did 7.5 and loved it, no regrets. the books are still part of it - undeniably - but i can listen to books sitting on my ass. the mileage craving is a thing unto itself. 

we'll see where it takes me - literally and figuratively - but i don't care about the ends. i don't have goals at this point...right now, it's just me and the mileage. 

why? c'mon. you know why. 

perambulators perambulate. 

nose in the ayer like i just don't cayer

 yesterday whilst i was out perambulating, i noticed how fresh the air was. not "fresh like spring" but just fresh, clean, clear like a chalkboard waiting for the first day of school. 

then i noticed...

someone is doing their laundry. that hot-dryer-sheet aroma just wafting down their driveway and across the sidewalk...nice to be wrapping up a chore at day's end.

someone has coffee outside, mmm the smell of caffeine! did they make coffee outside?? maybe just did a starbucks run and carrying it inside from their car... maybe just having a cuppa on the deck, watching the evening sky.

someone is digging in the dirt, putting off a turned-earth bouquet gardening? preparing the ground for spring flowers? maybe kids digging random holes. maybe someone burying their dog*. (*dead dog)

someone had pizza last night. nice trash bin, jonses. who's keeping up with THAT?

someone needs to visit their mechanic. snuffly joe mczhausterton! tryna perambulate here, buddy! ugh, get that checked OUT.

what happened to my frosh ayer???

reset. 

reset.

ah.

someone is having italian food for supper. lasagna? baked ziti? cooking with the windows open on a cool evening - so maybe it's steamy spaghetti. smells goooood. enjoy your supper, neighbor!

someone is heating with wood, got a nice little fire going in their fireplace, burning a little hickory. mmm. yes, smells like hickory and not treated lumber. domesticated fire FTW.

and there's the freshly turn earth again.

and there's the laundry.

what happened to the coffee?

and i'm back to the car, in it, driving, home, and on with my own evening activities.

i can see why puppies always have such active noses - up in the air, down on the sidewalk, sniff, sniff, sniff - - you can learn a lot!

platform merge

many of my photos are stored on microsoft's onedrive platform -- samsung used to have a backup platform of its own, but sold out to microsoft some years back. 

wait. back up a bit.

before the Great Samsung Sellout, the place i work (i'd like to be more concise, but: my company? i don't own it. my work? it's not only mine. my office? we're virtual, so...) had shifted to a complete microsoft immersion experience called 365 which comes with storage called onedrive. kind of like dropbox or google drive - but integrated with outlook, word, excel, et alia. 

so, i had a work onedrive account when samsung migrated their backup to the platform as well.

one for work. one for personal. microsoft don't care. 

i think MS's brain is just too small to understand that one person could want two touchpoints because they merged me. the only thing i can figure is that their wormy software noticed the two accounts when i logged in from my phone, and decided to "help" me by merging them.

who has ever experienced "help" from a tech company as authentic help? if you, please provide your story in the comments.

the outcome of this mergation is that i receive "your memories from this day" emails to my work account. it's fi-i-i-i-ine. whatevs. but still annoys the hell outta me because come on, microsoft, do better!

also, i have to log in to my account constantly. follow a link from a coworker's email? login. open a cloud file in excel? login. view my memories from this day? login. 

i hear you - you think i have to log in so much because i am logging into a personal account and a work account. GREAT THINKIN BUT NO. it's the same account - same username (my work email) and same pw for both. 

okay, sure. something is twisted up somewhere. at some level, the two accounts are different - but not any level visible to the human eye.

i tie this invisibility to microsoft's (and all tech companies these days it seems) blind adherence to privacy rules. they are so darn determined to layer on privacy that they end up hiding me from myself.

this note is at the bottom of each "memories from this day" email.

Your privacy matters

No human saw your photos, and no additional storage was used when this collection was created.

firstly, why is there no "." at the end of the first sentence? or, perhaps a ":" as in - here is what we have to say about your privacy mattering. 

secondly, that's a weirdly phrased disclaimer. really can't quite figure out why, but it strikes me as both funny haha and funny odd.