I recommend books and music and video games all the damn time, but I don’t stray into other products all that often. Let me say that you could spend as much as you wanted on Govee Christmas lights and they would be worth every dime:
They have a feature where you point your phone at the tree after you put the lights on, and then the app maps where the lights are, which allows you to pull off effects like this, which come from the center of the tree:
Just fucking awesome. There’s literally hundreds of preset patterns even before you get to the user-customizable ones or, y’know, just colors, and it’s all kinds of fun to sit in front of the tree and just fiddle with the app.
Meanwhile, we’re expecting 4-7″ of snow tonight, so if y’all want to start doing the Dance of Two-Hour Delay, that’d be great. I don’t actually want a snow day tomorrow because that makes the rest of the week really fucking complicated but a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning would not be looked askance upon.
Also, yes, that’s a stuffed quetzalcoatlus as a tree topper. My son’s idea.
My sole accomplishment this weekend, if you want to grant it that status, was taking this spinning bookshelf out of its box (fresh from the TikTok shop!) and putting it together, which means that I now have this little spot for all of my YA books, or at least I have this little spot for all the YA books I have right now, because I’m going to outgrow it in about five more books. It’s pretty and colorful, though, and the fact that every book on there but one is exactly the same size grants it a really pleasing symmetry. I’ve said this before; there is a difference between being a reader and a book collector, and I am very much both of those things.
That’s about all I did. I’m about halfway through R.R. Virdi’s The Doors of Midnight, which is 800 pages long so it’s taking me a while, but I took one pill on Friday night because I was having trouble sleeping and it knocked me on my ass for a day and a half. So there’s not much else of note worth talking about at the moment.
This happened Friday at work, so I can’t count it as an achievement, but I’ve got all of my classes planned out through December 4th, an event so rare that, statistically speaking, it didn’t actually happen. Any number of things can upset my plan (which is why I’m never planned out this far ahead; it’s mostly pointless) but we’re in a sort of autopilot-type unit right now, where C has to follow B which has to follow A, and the only real changes that could happen is delays either due to school closings, further sickness, or my kids just not getting something, and then really all I have to do is back everything up a day, which is no big deal. There are seven instructional days until Thanksgiving; I have no plans for Thanksgiving and we likely won’t make any either, since Bek’s family is the weekend before Thanksgiving and my family is the weekend after Thanksgiving. So that weekend will probably be filled with Lego, reading and video games and not so much massive amounts of food. But I have to survive that long first. We’ll see.
Over the years we have really gotten into alternative tree toppers, and this year’s is some sort of Pokeymans, I don’t know which kind. But the tree is up. There have been years when we haven’t bothered; I don’t think we had one last year, and three cats in the house means that we’ve forgone ornaments for pretty much the entire time we’ve lived here. Also, yes, that’s an artificial tree, because people who bring real trees into their houses for Christmas are lunatics, and yes, I’ll die on that hill.
The lights are controlled by an app, and do all sorts of fun stuff, only some of which looks like it’ll trigger epileptic seizures if we leave it running for too long. They’re pretty though.
Anyway.
I had to give up on a John Irving book this weekend, which I find immensely frustrating. I’ve read nearly all of his work, excepting only his nonfiction and … maybe? a short story collection that I’m not sure actually exists? But I’ve read all of his novels, at least, or I had, up until The Last Chairlift came out. Irving has always been an author who really, really liked his repeating tropes over his body of work, but this book– his first in seven years– reads more like a parody of a John Irving book than it does an actual John Irving book– as if someone much less skilled than him read all his stuff and then tried to write a book in his voice. It took me a week to get through the first three hundred pages out of like 870 or something, I didn’t care at all about what was going on, and then I hit the part where the POV character (who is, of course, another writer) started including long segments of his screenplays in the text of the novel, and that was where I decided I had to be done. The worst thing is this may very well be Irving’s last novel; he’s 81 and if it took him seven years to write this one, I don’t see another coming out anytime soon.
On to a Kevin Hearne book, which isn’t much shorter and I’ll probably finish in three or four days. The Seven Kennings series has been great so far and I suspect he’ll stick the ending.
I expect my current feeling of general contentment to last until roughly fourth hour tomorrow, but for now I am in a pretty good place. We had Third Thanksgiving today with my wife’s side of the family, and that cousin of hers who makes the cheesy tater tot casserole was there, and we brought home like four pounds of cheesy tater tot casserole, so we are absolutely calling today a success. It’s not quite 8:00 and I have finished my lesson planning for tomorrow, I took care of a few minor projects around the house and I read like six books over the last five days, plus I finished Blasphemous II.
I’m going to call this a pretty well-spent break, I think. My wife and son both have tomorrow off as well, so I expect to get home and find half of the wallpaper in the house missing. How was your holiday?
Lots to do today: some recording, some putting-together of furniture, moving around other furniture, some minor bits of shopping, every item of clothing I own has been washed in the last couple of days and needs to be put away, four days of lesson planning (lucky for me, I got caught up on my grading before leaving work on Friday,) a loose plan for the weeks between now and ILEARN because I feel like as soon as I actually internalize when ILEARN is it’s going to start causing panic attacks and I need my numbers to look good so I probably ought to start getting ready, and whatever the hell else it occurs to me to do to procrastinate about starting all of that. Also eating, showering, and the various other tasks necessary to keep my shambling mass vertical and non-odoriferous.
Also I think I’ve decided it might be time to redo the look of the site. I like this one a lot but I’ve been using it for a couple of years at least and it’s time to freshen things up a bit.
What are you doing with your Presidents’ Day? (Probably nothing, I realize this. It’s a dumb holiday.)
I went out and braved the cold— the snow kind of fizzled in our neck of the woods; we got barely an inch– to buy eggnog this afternoon, which probably counts as the single most festive thing I’ve ever done. I also bought lemonade, generally considered more of a summer drink, but what the hell, I’m a rebel.
Have I recommended Andor yet? You should watch Andor. And if you’re celebrating today or tomorrow, I hope you have a lovely day, and if you don’t, I hope you have a lovely day anyway. I’ll likely post at some point but don’t expect anything too fancy.
