The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I was totally gonna write, like, the best post any of you have ever seen, except my son came in and talked to me for a couple of minutes and now every word of it is gone.
Sigh. I don’t know what the hell happened to my short-term memory but I blame getting old and the Internet and I don’t like it at all.
I am probably going to read at least seven new-to-me Seanan McGuire books in 2019(*); she is, I think, probably the most prolific author I am aware of, and gets mentioned fairly frequently around here. The last book of hers that I talked about a lot was Into the Drowning Deep, written as Mira Grant, a book that at the time I called her best book and which made it into #4 on my end-of-2018 Best Of list.
SO, yeah. ‘Bout that.
Drowning Deep is still my favorite of her books, I think, as personal preferences go, but it’s no longer her best book. Middlegame now takes that honor, as it’s a nearly-as-entertaining story with a frankly much more complicated theme and structure than any of her previous work; McGuire is, and this is not a criticism, a fairly straightforward author, which is one of the things that makes me so partial to her work, and Middlegame is anything but a completely straightforward book. It is, frankly, the second book I’ve read this year that I would describe as a level-up by the author, and in fact she talks about how it took her forever to decide she was good enough to write this book in the afterword.
So why am I calling this a “reviewlet” and not a review, since we’ve made it perfectly clear over the years that I don’t really feel compelled to adhere to any particular sort of template when reviewing books? Because I feel like going into this book as blind as possible is a good idea, which makes me not want to talk about the story all that much. Now, you will have to be patient for a bit at the beginning, as you sort of start off at the end of the story– well, one end, anyway– before rolling around to a prequel and then the beginning, but like I said, the book’s structure is kinda complicated. It’ll pay off, I promise, but there will probably be some confusion at first. It’s worth it.
What’s the book about, though? Alchemy. And twins. And math. And quantum entanglement. And language. And Frankenstein. And The Wizard of Oz, and a neat little fictional book-within-a-book that I kind of hope to find out that McGuire wrote in its entirety and released somewhere, and another actual book called The Midwich Cuckoos that I might actually have to check out. And graduate school. And horror. And murder. And … well, other stuff that I’m not going to spoil.
Y’all know if you can trust me by now on these things. Be it known that I’m highly recommending this, and my end-of-year list for 2019 is going to be bananas, and go check it out.
(*) Which would be more impressive were it not for the at least nine Sarah J. Maas books that I’m going to have read by the end of the year. But more on that in a couple of weeks.
… halfway through, or depending on how you choose to look at it the break part of fall break is over and I’m into the weekend. One way or another I’ve been reasonably successful at doing that thing I do where vacations are useless unless I get a lot of stuff done with them, as opposed to, say, relaxing, which I don’t really know how to do except in the context of basically monetizing it.
(I’m not being clear here. “Spend an hour reading” can be a perfectly cromulent way to “get stuff done,” provided that I intended to do a bunch of reading over the break. If “read a lot” isn’t on the list, it’s wasting time, not getting stuff done. There is no “relaxing.” If I can’t describe it, it doesn’t exist.)
Anyway. Point is, I finished the second-to-last, 660-page Throne of Glass book yesterday, leaving only the thousand-page monster that ends the series, and I’m taking a break to read something else in between Sarah Maas rodent-killers. I’ve been to both the dentist and the doctor. I beat my latest run of Dark Souls 2 and went back to Salt and Sanctuary, which didn’t catch on with me the first time I tried to play it and holy shit has it caught on on the second try. I have reclaimed the garage for my car, if not my wife’s; we’ve been parking in the driveway for far too long and we need to sell or toss a riding mower if we’re going to find a place for both cars in there again. I got one room in the house reasonably cleaned up and decluttered and I’m working on the office right now. Or at least I would be, if I wasn’t blogging, which still counts, because “blog every day” is definitely on the Shit to Do list.
But I got some decluttering done before I started blogging, so that counts. You can see the surface of a table in here that you haven’t been able to see for a while. Now if I can just get the floor cleaned up; it’s gross.
“Buy a feather duster” is on my list for this weekend, believe it or not. I don’t plan on feather dusting the floor, of course, but holy hell are the corners in the house getting troublesome. EDIT: Turns out we have a feather duster! I completely forgot about it, and found it just now while looking for the mop thingies for the “ReadyMop Mopping System” we have, which is basically just an oversized menstrual pad that can be rubbed on the floor. So I can dust tomorrow! Woo!
Yes, I just “Woo”‘ed dusting. I never said I was interesting. EDIT ENDS.
On the list for this weekend: my wife’s job has a family day/fun fair thing going on tomorrow, so we’re doing that; I have nothing at all to do for work, having quite sensibly prepared for next week before leaving on Wednesday. So the rest of the agenda is to get some shit going on Patreon, which has been languishing in October and is awfully close to becoming another free month. (I don’t charge my Patrons in months where I don’t feel like I’ve earned it. I don’t know that anyone would actually begrudge me the dollar or whatever they’re pledging, but it rubs me wrong.)
Oh: and the bathrooms. Gotta take care of the bathrooms, or at least the main one in the hallway. That’s Sunday sorted, right?
Sure.
… so am I making chili in the slow cooker?
Yes. Yes I am.
My mother’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and she made it known that she wanted a sheet cake for her birthday. Sheet cake is something that, in my head, she used to make all the time and we’ve had a few times in the last couple of years but not as often as we used to, and then I mentioned it to my wife and it quickly became clear that she had no idea what I was talking about, meaning we had somehow not had sheet cake once in the nearly twelve years that we’ve been married.
So I got the recipe from my mom and … uh, well, my wife made the cake, actually, because every time I try to bake it goes very poorly, but as you’ll see this is a really simple recipe and I totally could make sheet cake on my own and it’s completely Goddamned delicious and go make a sheet cake right now.
This will fill an 11 x 17 cookie sheet. Yes, a cookie sheet. Sheet cakes, as you might guess from the name, are flat.
Obtain two sticks of margarine, a quarter cup of cocoa, and a cup of water. Melt the margarine and bring everything to a boil. Mix two cups of sugar and two cups of flour in a mixing bowl (ideally, glass, as it’ll heat up less readily than metal) and pour the boiling mix over the dry ingredients. Then mix in two eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla, a teaspoon of baking soda and a third of a cup of either buttermilk or “sour milk,” meaning milk mixed with some quantity of vinegar that Mom wasn’t certain about, so we used buttermilk.
Bake at 375 for 15-20 minutes.
In the meantime, take another stick of margarine (yes, we’re up to three sticks, dammit, and don’t you complain about it,) another quarter cup of cocoa, an entire fucking box of powdered sugar (that’s what the recipe says; I assume the boxes are standardized, but who the hell knows) and a quarter-cup of hot water, melt the whole mess over a low flame, and beat the hell out of it with a wire whisk until it’s melted and no longer lumpy.
Give the cake five minutes after it comes out of the oven to cool off a little bit, then pour the icing over it. Optionally, sprinkle crushed walnuts over the top; we used to always do it this way when I was a kid but the boy has allergies so no longer.
Let it cool to room temperature and then eat the hell out of it. Eat the corners first; they’re the best parts. Ideally sheet cake is accompanied by a tall, cold glass of milk.
Mmmmmmmm.
I hate Facebook.
I feel like I have to have started a dozen posts with that sentence by now. I hate Facebook, I’ve always hated Facebook, I resisted having a Facebook page for years after most of my friends were already on the service, and my tenure there was characterized by frequently shutting my account down for a while and occasionally deleting every single thing I’d ever posted to the site. I finally permanently shut my Clark Kent account down … a year ago? Two? Longer? I dunno, it’s gone, and my only presence there now is as Luther. Luther rarely posts anything other than the automatic notifications of new posts, although I do comment occasionally on other people’s stuff.
Here’s the thing: Facebook does allow me to at least nominally keep an eye on some people who I’d have fallen out of touch with otherwise. But the site in the last couple of years has transitioned from Something What I Don’t Like to, like, actually genuinely becoming evil, and it’s getting harder and harder to justify having a presence there. The problem is (and I’ve said this before) that I do get a decent amount of traffic driven my way from there (I am not unaware that many of you are seeing the first couple of paragraphs of my I-still-don’t-like-Facebook post on Facebook), and while it’s not like I make any money from the blog I do like the idea that people look at it every now and again. The other problem, and this is a bit more serious, is that many of the shows that I go to to sell books basically only have a presence on Facebook. They have websites, but the websites are static, and the number of important updates from conventions that I’ve only seen because I was following them on Facebook is quite a bit larger than it should be.
I’m able to justify remaining on the site because I block nearly all of their ads (I saw an unaltered Facebook page not too long ago and was shocked at how much clutter and advertising I’ve been avoiding with my adblocker) and, well, nearly everything the site thinks it knows about me isn’t true. Facebook isn’t making any money off of mining my data. My name, birthday, home city and a bunch of other stuff are all either at best sorta-true (Luther, as a pseudonym, exists, I suppose) or utter lies. I have tagging turned off in photos and most of my privacy settings turned up to 12 so even if someone were to put my picture up somewhere they can’t tag me in it, and if they did, it would be under the wrong name.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish other people would stop using Facebook, and I wish these cons would have more robust websites so that I didn’t have to have a Facebook account to interact with them. If the site shriveled up and died I wouldn’t miss it at all. But I still have one because right now I feel like to a certain extent at least I have to, and the second I no longer think that’s true will be a happy day around here.
Last day of the quarter today, and my seventh grade classes were working on story problems, because, well, they’re bad at them. I was talking to my second hour class and going over some of the more common errors first hour was making in an attempt to not explain the same exact things five thousand more times for the second class in a row. Unfortunately, some of the errors they were making were errors of volition and not of comprehension: to wit, the student who put dollar signs in front of every single answer when only two or three of the questions were involving money may have not been doing his very best on that assignment, and if you turn in a sheet of paper with 10 answers and not a single other pencil mark on it it is fairly likely that I’m going to suspect you may not have actually done the assignment.
So, yeah, I’m talking about all that. And in the process of having this conversation with the students, I point something out that is especially true today, when it’s the last day of the quarter and the assignment must be turned in on the day it is assigned: I would much rather have something turned in half-finished by someone who has clearly been working than a completed assignment from someone who, and I quote, “wrote down a bunch of random-ass nonsense for ten answers and turned it in.”
Wait.
What did I just say?
The class is blinking at me. Did I just–
Yeah, I did.
Uh.
Obviously the appropriate thing to do was to apologize and then watch as both I, my co-teacher, and the entire class collapse into laughter, because fuck it, it’s early in the morning on the last day of the quarter before a five-day break and, well, y’all, apparently Mr. Siler ain’t completely on his game today. So, yeah, I don’t usually swear, at least not accidentally, in front of my students, but apparently today my filter isn’t set quite as high as usual?
I shoulda had more caffeine during first hour, is the take-away here.
I’m in my typical Monday semi-coma, reclining in my recliner (that’s what it’s for) and trying to motivate myself to, like, eat dinner or clean something or read something or do anything but stare at my computer, but the following is still true, and I’d like to take a moment to celebrate it: tomorrow is the last day of the first quarter, meaning I have survived the first quarter of my return to teaching.
If I can make it through the first quarter, I can make it through the first semester. And if I can do that, I can finish the year.
I’m still not sure if I want to do this next year again. I don’t know if this is a “permanent” return or just a single-year thing; we’ll see. But the first quarter didn’t kill me. And right now, I’ll take that.
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