My son has been patiently working away at the Path of Pain since I got home from work, four hours ago. The person who put the video above together is some sort of divine creature; I never even attempted this feat when I was playing Hollow Knight, and if I had I would have invented twelve new swear words and killed one of the cats by about the halfway mark.
This kid hasn’t let a single swear word or even really a single sound of frustration pass his lips the whole time. No controller tossing. No muttering under his breath. Just persistence and patience.
I don’t know where the hell he got it from. Sure as hell not me.
Three or four Saturdays in a row now have involved a lengthy afternoon nap; my body has been doing this thing to me where I’m waking up at 6:30 on Saturday mornings whether I want to or not (spoiler alert: I don’t want to) and have been completely unable to get back to sleep. This has led to hours-long naps on each of those Saturdays, eating my entire afternoon.
Well, tonight the boy had a birthday party to go to that was a good 45 minutes from our house, so after driving him out there my wife and I had dinner at Das Dutchman Essenhaus and spent some time attempting to shop in Amish country; it turns out Amish country shuts down entirely at 6:00 PM on Saturdays other than that one restaurant so we didn’t really get to do any actual shopping, instead driving around and alternately dodging horses that were supposed to be in the road and chickens and deer that weren’t. We just got home; it’s 9:00 and I still feel like we dragged the boy away from his party too early.
(The family of this friend of his is richer than God; the building we originally thought was their house, because it was house-shaped and considerably bigger than our own house, was actually their gym, an entirely separate building from their actual house. When he got in the car at the end of the night he said that they had spent a fair amount of time at the party digging a tunnel in their foam pit, which means they have a foam pit. We do not have foam pit money in the Siler household.)
Anyway, I’ve spent all day writing a review of Keith Ammann’s new book in my head; I got an early copy of it and it releases this week, so absent any world-shaking events that absolutely must be written about, expect a book review tomorrow.
I feel like there needs to be a post here about the general hysteria around all the corners of the internet I frequent about That Man last weekend, and whether he had died or not, but there was a two-hour Thing at Hogwarts this evening, and I just got home from that, and I have lesson planning and some other business to attend to so I can sleep, so … yeah. Instead, have a picture of Jonesy in his new sky bed I installed last weekend.
Why four days? Because both the boy and I have Friday off(*), so either of us can be sick that day. I was a mess yesterday and last night, and lazed around all day, and am going to attempt to have a useful and productive Saturday leading in to four days of productive teaching and learning. We will see if I can pull that off.
Spent most of the non-lazing parts of the day assisting the boy with a D&D campaign he’s planning that is loosely based on Elden Ring, only to discover afterward that there are a ton of people out there who have already done a lot of the legwork necessary for that project. Unsurprisingly, when I mentioned it to him he said he wanted to do things his way, which scans with my role in the “assisting” project, which was to propose ideas for him to shoot down. I’ve told him that he can actually have people over next weekend to put characters together if he– you guessed it– attends school all four days this week, after attending school for a total of five days in January and February thus far.
2025 has sucked, y’all, even by the insanely low standards I had for it going in. We will see if this low bar for next week can be climbed over or not. Cross your fingers for me.
(*) Thank the Lord Jesu for this, because Valentine’s Day is reliably the worst day of the year to be a middle school teacher.
I have to say that I kind of needed this book. I absolutely adored The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune’s first book in what we’re apparently calling the Cerulean Chronicles, and I’m really hoping that the fact that the series has a title now means we’re going to see more of it. My review of that first book has become one of my most inexplicably popular posts– my seventh most popular post in the history of the blog, in fact– and traffic for it tends to come in waves. It’ll have 40 hits over the course of a day and then trail off, and then a couple of weeks later it’ll have a hundred, and then it happens again. I don’t know why! I don’t get enough information about referrers from WordPress and if there’s something else I can use to look up where views are coming from, I don’t know how to use it. Feel free to enlighten me in comments, if you have a suggestion.
Anyway, Somewhere Beyond the Sea returns to the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and the magical children and their two caretakers, who continue to have one of the most adorable relationships in all of literature. This book lives in Arthur Parnassus’ head, though, instead of Linus Baker, the main character and POV of the first book. While the switch makes perfect sense in the context of the series, Arthur is a darker, angrier character than Linus, and some of the gentleness and charm of the first book is lost in the switch. This book also introduces a couple of actual villains, as DICOMY, the Department In Charge of Magical Youth, Linus’ employer from the first book, turns on the orphanage and in particular on one of the children who live there. There is another DICOMY inspector, this one very much cut from the “I pretend to be here to help the children and am absolutely not here to help the children” cloth that I was so pleased to see Linus was not in the first book.
The first book was about a family forming. This one is about threats to tear that family apart, although the addition of a new child to the orphanage adds another new perspective that isn’t as negative as the two representatives of DICOMY.
Ironically, while the book isn’t quite the cozy “big gay blanket” of the first book, I found that I related to Arthur more than I ever did to Linus, which wasn’t something I was expecting on the way in. Arthur has a traumatic past– that’s not the bit I relate to, mind you, as I can’t really make that claim– but he spends much of the book struggling with his temper, as he has the ability to simply make the threats to his family go away in the most violent and retributive manner possible and repeatedly chooses not to, as that’s not the person he wishes to be.
Let me just say that it is not difficult for me to relate to a character who is a father and an educator who occasionally struggles with preventing his rage at the injustice and unfairness of the world from affecting the way he lives in it. Not difficult at all. I lack the ability to set things on fire with my mind, however, so his struggle has a touch more immediate salience than mine might.
Most interestingly, I think with Arthur and particularly Arthur’s past, and the fact that this book does dwell on trauma in a way that Cerulean Sea did not, Klune is in some ways addressing the criticisms of his first book, which I won’t go into here, but you’re welcome to click on that link up there. It turns out that Arthur Parnassus ending up the Master at Marsyas Island was not an accident. I’ll leave it at that.
I can’t issue quite as strong a recommendation for this book as I did Cerulean Sea, but that was one of my favorite books of the year it came out and remains my favorite of Klune’s books, so that’s not saying a lot. This is still a comfortable #2 in his body of work, and you should give it a read.
Parent-teacher conferences at my kid’s school today, which ate up most of my evening, and then I had two tests and an assignment to write for tomorrow, and I’m contemplating how long I’m going to wait until I take this big bastard out of its box:
… so, I have spent money unwisely, but fuck it, I get to give the original PS5 to my son and get some good dad points, and fuck it, the world’s ending so I may as well buy useless shit, right?
I am, for only the second time since he has started going there, irritated with my son’s school. And, like, really irritated this time, not mildly irritated like the time he got in trouble over some bullshit that felt like the teacher’s fault in preschool. Sending-strongly-worded-emails irritated. How dare you make me disappoint my kid irritated.
And I don’t really want to get into details, especially since it’s 8:26 already and I’m showing signs of doomscrolling on top of everything else and I would really like to get away from my computer and go sit in a room with my kid with a book in my hand. I’m not gonna bitch about my kid’s school online, even in the mostly-anonymous format the blog affords me. But I really don’t need any external stressors right now because I know how my brain works and I’m likely to lash out at some poor fool who doesn’t deserve it because of unrelated stress, and I’m also irritated with my school for entirely unrelated reasons, and just … fuck.
Any of y’all have any pull with Medcline? I wanna try out their shoulder pillow. The CPAP means I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore (well, okay, the sleep apnea means I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore) and I’m tired of shoulder pain and waking up with my hands asleep. I’m sleeping a thousand times better than before I had the CPAP but I feel like there’s still room for improvement. That said, I’m not willing to drop the kind of money they want for their system on something I can’t see or touch before I buy it. Therefore they have to respect my status as an Internet Influencer and send me one for free. I have prior experience with reviewing pillows! How many Important Influencers can say that? Not many, I tell you.
So, yeah, get on that, y’all. I’m 5’10”, by the way, since that appears to matter.
There will be no ranting about postcards tonight, because I’m taking the night off, and no ranting about school either, because the boy is still sick and I ended up having to stay home with him today since my wife had unavoidable commitments at her job. He went to urgent care on Monday and was greeted with a shrug and a “Man, viruses are a bitch sometimes, aren’t they? Bring him to his regular doctor if he’s not better in a few days.” Today we took him to his regular doctor and were greeted with a shrug and a “Man, viruses are a bitch sometimes, aren’t they? Bring him back if he’s not better in a few days.” All I know is the kid’s been sleeping 20 hours a day for a week and a half but that doesn’t seem to be helping anyone find anything actually wrong with him.
Anyway. Another part of the reason I’m not doing postcards tonight is that it’s somehow 7:00 already and despite being home all day I don’t have anything ready for tomorrow yet. The fact that I spent the whole day screwing around on BlueSky might have something to do with that, I suppose. (Follow me on BlueSky, while I’m begging for stuff!) So I probably ought to go do some lesson planning now, I suppose.
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