#23 of 24

I am, by the way, on Bluesky. I got on it back when it was invitation-only in 2024, I think (hence the simple handle, just like I had on Twitter). I hadn't used it hardly at all, though. I'd like to, though, as I deleted X (Twitter) last year and Bluesky is better than Threads in some respects. So I read this book. I'm just starting out, though. If you're interested in following me, or if you'd like me to follow you, I'm at: https://bsky.app/profile/eilir.bsky.social.

2026 Reading Challenge Update

I'm pretty happy with how things are going. My aim was to read 24 books this year. I've read 19; I'm seven ahead of schedule, and I'm working on another three or so. I've read each month, so Goodreads has given me an 'achievement' bookmark for each one. There are 174 days left. Here is what I've read so far, in reverse order:

1. Supervisor, Manager, Leader: The Basics of Being a Boss by Mike Kraus
2. Knock 'Em Dead 2016: The Ultimate Job Search Guide by Martin Yate
3. 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions by Ron Fry
4. Can I Recycle That? A Guide to Better Recycling and How to Reduce Single-Use Plastics by Jennie Romer
5. The Inspired Houseplant: Transform Your Home with Indoor Plants from Kokedama to Terrariums and Water Gardens to Edibles by Jen Sterarns
6. House Plants for Every Space: A Concise Guide to Selecting, Designing and Maintaining Plants in Any Indoor Space by Green Interior
7. The Lifelong Gardener: Garden with Ease and Joy at Any Age by Toni Gattone
8. The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook by Melani Sanders
9. Painting in Watercolour: Practical Techniques and Projects for Beginners by Wendy Jelbert
10. All These Ghosts by Silas House
11. I Need a Job!: Be Noticed. Land the Interview. Get Hired. by Gary Burnison
12. CV Handbook: A Curriculum Vitae Owners Manual by Will Coghill Behrends and Rebecca Antony
13. The Everything Guide to GLP-1s: Lose Weight, Build Healthy Eating Habits, and Achieve Lifelong Weight Management by Kayley George
14. What Color is Your Parachute Guide to Rethinking Interviews: Ace the Interview and Land Your Dream Job by Richard Nelseon Bolles
15. A Good Apology: Four Steps to Make Things Right by Molly Howes
16. On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
17. Why Your Resume Isn't Working: And How You Can Fix It Now by Wendy D. Steele
18. Unmasking Adult Autism: Embrace Your Autistic Identity, Overcome Executive Dysfunction, and Empower Your Neurodivergent Self by Neuro Nurture
19. Camouflage: The Hidden Lives of Autistic Women by Sarah Bargiela

Five more to go. Let's see if I can go beyond that. Hopefully! I've got two works of fiction I'm working my way through (these are almost all non-fiction). One is The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown. The other is Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory by Iddo Gefen. I'll be happy to add those to the list, as I do non-fiction much more easily than fiction these days, alas. I don't know why.

So we don't have HBO, and we wanted to watch 'The Gilded Age',

 and Lexington Public Library only has Season Three, inexplicably. Two copies.

In case you didn't know, anyone in a contiguous county (including Fayette) can get a library card at the Jessamine County Public Library and have full borrowing rights if they're an adult. Unlike the Lexington Public Library, they still have physical CDs, older books in series, Hoopla, and Freegal music, which I miss. It fills in some of the gaps. They're at 600 South Main Street in Nicholasville, so not far away, and they also have a studio and a Library of Things, where you can check out practical things like birding backpacks and telescopes. All you need is an ID with your address on it. Their website with full details is: https://jesspublib.org/

The library, as you exit

I also found the first book in the Amelia Peabody mystery series, which I dearly love. So, unlike LPL, they keep older books in series. We've had to request books from interlibrary loan because LPL no longer has the earlier books for the series we want to get into.

Also, JCPL has access to Freegal Music, which LPL used to have. You can download a limited number of songs a week to keep.  For as long as you want. Period. I managed to get several albums that way when I used it before. So that is nice.

                                                  I'm also really excited because they have Hoopla, which allows you to check out five items per month--books, audiobooks, movies, or TV series. I plan on checking out Life is Beautiful, a 1997 movie that is very highly acclaimed that will apparently make me cry, and the dramatised audio version of Crocodile on the Sandbank once I am finished re-reading the book.

Also, some time ago, LPS got rid of all their CDs, and they had some Shinedown ones I got to listen to. I know, I can stream them. It's not quite the same. 😊 So between the two libraries, a lot of service gaps get filled.

The library card is kind of spiffy

'The Gilded Age' Season 1
 (written by the same person who
 wrote for 'Downton Abbey'

My favourite mystery series, first book

#15

Take Control of Your IBS: The Step-by-Step Guide That Acutally Works by Kirsten Jackson. Green Tree, 2024. 9781399410922.

Which means...

I remember this sort of thing

We once had a donation at college of those overruns in the student centre, where they can't sell the books, so they cut the covers. They were mostly Penguin classics. I gathered up so many that I couldn't really carry them well, and I filled up a couple of bags plus more (they're small, but still). I was late for my next class. My professor actually helped me carry them to my car. Afterwards, I went back and picked through what was left and found quite a few more. I was a history and classics major, so these were right up my alley, things like Scipio and Herodotus, Descartes, etc., but also some esoteric subjects like understanding tarot as well. I wound up with about 100 of them. I still have them. It was so worth it, even with damaged covers.

Now I will say, when I got home, a friend looked through them and asked to pick one or two for himself and my greedy pigginess got threatened (hey, I didn't share well back then; I'm an only child and I'd worked hard at getting them home). He'd missed out on the whole thing. He got mad and decided I should be buried with the 'imperative books' or, in my case, cremated with them. Since he's in charge of my funeral, he may just do it, despite my advance planning, and the thought of him burning books in a crematorium does bother me. He'll know which ones are which due to the covers, too.

Sigh.

I am so behind

but here goes...

Number five...

A Total Knee Replacement Handbook: How to Self-Advocate for Your Own Health Care and Well-Being, Before and After Surgery by Carolyn Fortuna

This is from a patient's perspective, as opposed to the previous text, which was written by an orthopaedic surgeon and was well-prepared. I'm glad I got one from each viewpoint.  Incidentally, both had very similar recommendations, which I found interesting.

It's sad that I've only read five books in six months. My goal this year is 36. Maybe I can catch up while I'm laid up. I don't know. In the past, I've generally been unable to read in recovery from surgeries, and mostly it's been listening to music in terms of entertainment for me. We'll see. I'm going to try to make a concerted effort to read this year, I think. Stay tuned to see if that ever comes to fruition. I have several books out from the library that sound very interesting, and the librarian said they wouldn't come after me even if I couldn't return them. (I'll have Brenda do it sometime when she comes over to play the game or maybe if she takes me to the doctor). But I feel like a dragon sitting on a hoard of treasure, anyway. :) Oh, and I have an app on my phone counting down to the big event...I'm now 41 days out from surgery. When it's within 30 I can file for FMLA/short-term disability. It's close. It's starting to get real.

I just have to share what my psychiatrist, who is Brazilian, so his first language is Portuguese, not English, said. I told him I was nervous about the procedure and he said, and I quote:

Oh, there's nothing to worry about. We just cut off your knees and put in the prosthesis!

To which I replied:

Dr. X, that does not make me feel better!

At this point he realised, after 40 years of practice, that perhaps he'd said the wrong thing, and went into a personal story meant to soothe where his wife had each knee done and the surgeries had gone very well. I was just glad he had gone from medical school into psychiatry rather than orthopaedics. I do not think that sort of bedside manner would fly. Don't get me wrong, I love my psychiatrist. He manages my meds well and I've gone to him for a long time. But, still...

I told my therapist (who had been very good about telling me, 'oh, there are so many of these done, I'd much rather have a surgery where so many were done a year rather than one every once in awhile') what he said and she was flummoxed. Mind you, they're in the same practice. I'm not sure if she's allowed to share that so long as no personal information of mine gets shared, but I suspect it will get around the office, as these things do. :) 

What a blessing from sadness

Nazis stole this Holocaust victim’s books. How his grandson unexpectedly got them back: Project in Germany aims to return books to their rightful owners

#3: Re-reading a book I adored as a child

 And it didn't disappoint.

3. The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key. Scholastic Books, 1965, 140 pp. ISBN: 978-0590085342.

Twenty-seven

H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers by RJ Ivankovic
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I spent two years in real time playing weekly sessions of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, Chaosium's campaign based on HP Lovecraft's story 'At the Mountains of Madness'. I got this for myself and each remaining player who made it through that grueling adventure as a holiday present/badge of honour.

Its rhymes are sometimes a bit contrived, but they hit all the highlights of Lovecraft's story while referencing the later expedition of their campaign.

It is a delightful book, with lovely Seussian illustrations, and it still conveys the horror of Lovecraft's story although it is simplified in verse. I would highly recommend it, especially after reading Lovecraft's story or playing the Chaosium campaign. I will say as a group we were scarred by that adventure, and this brought back memories of what happened and beyond, particularly the musical tones heard in the distance...but I should not speak of such horrors.

View all my reviews

Full citation: H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers by RJ Ivankovic, 2024, Chaosium, 142 pp. ISBN: 978-1568824956

I love this. And despite the fact that it's set up as a children's picture book, it was 142 pages, so not just a tiny book.

Twenty-six

Citation:

26. The Autism and Neurodiversity Self Advocacy Handbook: Developing the Skills to Determine Your Own Future by Barb Cook and Yenn Purkis, 2022, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 167 pp. ISBN: 978-1787755765.

I didn't care for this one. It was too general and really didn't give me what a sought, which was ideas for advocacy and requesting accommodations if needed.

Oh, well...I gave it 2 stars on Goodreads.

Twenty-one and twenty-two

Citations: 

21. Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine, & a Miracle by Major Brian Dennis, Mary Netherly, and Kirby Larson. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009, 70 pp. ISBN:  978-0316053181.

22. Watercolour Lessons: How to Paint and Unwind with Tutorials by Emma Lefebvre. Coral Gables, FL: Pear Tree Press, 2022, 256 pp. ISBN: 978-1684810079.

My goal for this year is 36 books. I got behind over the summer, so I'm only at 61%. I need to step up my game. I've got one I'm about a third of the way through but I don't know if I'll finish it; it's rather slowly-paced, plus three I'd like to go ahead and read or re-read that are fiction, and one non-fiction guide.

So, here those are:

1. What the River Knows by Isabel Ibañez (this is the slow one)

2. Flying Too High by Kerry Greenwood

3. Re-reading Storm Front by Jim Butcher

4. Re-reading The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

and also a non-fiction one:

5. Knee Replacement Surgery: A Patient's Guide Before, During, & After by  Chris Easton

Beautiful and informative and # 17

Of the 50 species this new book from the University of Kentucky Press, I have only seen two: whooping cranes and red-headed woodpeckers. At the rate things are going, I may never see any of the others that are in Kentucky at least part of the year. Since 1970, 3 billion birds have been lost in the US and Canada. The author writes that that means nearly 30% of the birds that used to live in the two countries have disappeared. 😥 Many of these are very colourful. The bill was very intesting. I just hope it doesn't become a historical catalogue. The bird on the cover is a painted bunting. I've heard of them, at least, but many of the others were new to me, so I learned a lot from it.

Citation: Williams, Matt. Endangered and Disappearing Birds of Appalachia and the Southeast. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2024. 248 pp.

Oh, and that's book 17 for 2024!

Sixteen

I'm going to count this even though it's very short.

16. Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper.

It's delightful.

Numbers eight and nine

8. Looking After Your Autistic Self  by Niamh Garvey

9. Autism and Asperger Syndrome in Adults by Luke Beardon

Yay!

So, I have had a long dearth of reading for several years now. I've skimmed books, even maybe finished a few, but nothing impressive. I find my attention has been very short--probably a consequence of my ADHD and scrolling through the internet. So this year, I've decided I want to get into it again, as I have been a librarian who no longer reads. On Goodreads, I've joined the 2024 Reading Challenge in an attempt to read more. I set a reasonable goal, of 36 books, to try for.

I am happy to report I'm ahead of schedule, having read seven books so far this year. They're all non-fiction (I'm going to shoot for both fiction and non-fiction, print/e-books, and audiobooks. We'll see how it goes.)

Here's what I have read so far:

1. Shoulder Treatment: Guide To Recover From Shoulder Surgery: Typical Shoulder Surgery Recovery Timeline by Jaime Knecht
2. An Adult with an Autism Diagnosis: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed by Gillan Drew
3. Very Late Diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome by Philip Wylie
4. The Shoulder Patients' Handbook: The Rotator Cuff Tear Guide by Paul B. Roache
5. How to Recover from Shoulder Surgery: Safe, Effective Recovery: A Physiotherapist Shares 40 Years Experience Rehabilitating Shoulders by Bruce Paulik
6. The Ultimate Guide for Shoulder Surgery Recovery: Your Complete Guide to Recovery, Tips, Strategies, Diet and Essential Must-haves to Speed Up Shoulder Surgery Recovery Time by Morgan Gray
7. Shoulder Surgery Recovery: Over 100 Tips and Strategies to Make it Much Easier by Anne Talmage Cooksey

Currently reading:

1. Looking After Your Autistic Self  by Niamh Garvey
2. Autism and Asperger Syndrome in Adults by Luke Beardon
3. Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes
4. Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (audiobook) by Edith Sheffer
5. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

My behavioural coach, plus a milestone

recommended this book, which is not actually a diet book, but rather a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approach to helping people with their relationships with food. I'm five chapters in and I'm finding it very helpful. It makes sense. It's all about changing your thoughts and justifications into healthier ones. The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person by Judith S Beck, PhD, whose father was the one who first developed CBT. If you want the Kindle edition and you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, it is included for free.  By the way...this is my 12,000th post.  Yipee!  It took a little over 21 years, but it's a great milestone. I'm enjoying writing again.

Going through this book

With my in-person therapist, and I have discovered from taking the self-assessment questionnaire between chapters one and two, that I apparently have every anxiety disorder known to man. Sigh. This is going to take a while. 

My therapist and I are concentrating on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy treatment for anxiety and frustration tolerance. The AbleTo counsellor and coach are working with the depression module, using CBT and  DBT for things like my emotional relationship with food and identifying activities to help with the depression.  That, along with the increase of my meds and the light therapy, will, I hope, have a profound effect on both depression and anxiety.  The latter ones are already doing a lot for my depression.  But my anxiety feeds my depression and has a greater impact on my life in general, or at least an equal one, so I need to deal with it as well.  Time to move on to the second chapter.

My day started rather rough

 My neck has been hurting quite a bit, and it's making pain and parasthesia going down through my arms, which has been quite annoying. So last night I took my dose of muscle relaxants I keep just for such an occasion. Tizanidine is really mild, and they're only 4 mg pills, but I take three at a time as directed.  Usually when I take them, the next morning I wake up early and refreshed, ready to go.  Not this morning.  I was sluggish, kept falling asleep and hitting snooze. I start my alarms (there are several) at 6 am so I can get up by 7 am at the latest.  It takes 15 minutes for me to shower and 15 minutes to get ready, then a 10 minute drive and 20 minutes between walking to the bus stop, taking the shuttle, and walking from the bus stop at the University of Kentucky emergency department.  So I realised that I was, indeed, going to be late when I finally crawled out of bed just before 7:30 am.

I took a shower, got dressed, grabbed my lunch, got in the car, took my COVID screening on my phone, and texted my supervisor and my manager.  Then I drove carefully to UK's Orange Lot. Right as I was getting ready to go through the second roundabout, I thought about combing my hair (I drive with both windows down), and I realised that I didn't have my comb, or my crossbody purse, just my backpack (and yes, there's a brush in the backpack, but that's beside the point.)  So I told me, that's fine, just don't get pulled over or get into an accident, as you don't have your licence with you.  I'm pretty poor right now, as it's right before payday, so I wasn't planning on spending money at least, and I did bring my lunch.  All good, right?  I had my phone and my receiver for my continuous glucose monitor.

So I parked and was getting my jacket on (it was raining a bit) and then it hit me. My badge was in my purse.

Yesterday I'd put my badge holder on a new lanyard one of my co-workers brought back from the beach. Because, unlike the one I usually use, it has a reel and snap joint for clipping in onto the lanyard, I'd decided to keep it in my purse rather than put in on for the trip, because I didn't want to take a chance of losing it at UK. It's $15 to replace the suckers.  The reason for that is they double as a proximity card, so in addition to clocking in and out, they get us through various locked doors (and my office happens to be one you have to badge into) AND you can't get into the computer and get to all your files unless you have yours.  And of course, then I left the whole purse, which is only big enough for my wallet, keys, lip balm, hand sanitiser, and glucose tabs, really.  I'd left it on a stool near my bed at home.  But if I'd gone to work, I wouldn't have actually been able to work, and I'd have to fork over money I didn't have to get a new one.

I called my boss and basically asked, since I was already going to be late (although it would have been maybe by five, ten minutes tops) if I could go back home and get my badge, and she said that was fine. So I got back in the car, went home (obeying all traffic laws) got my purse, made sure my badge was in it, drove back (which was interesting, as a jogger crossed against our green turn light and some yahoo in a truck in the oncoming lane decided he was supposed to go, too, so he ran a red light, nearly hitting the car in front of me, who had yielded to the jogger, who looked to be in his 60s and was certainly old enough to know how to cross a street and obviously just didn't care).

I got to work 45 minutes late, but got started on my work, and actually got a bit ahead today, so it was a pretty decent day all told.  But it was a little sketchy there for a bit.

Tomorrow I need to really be on my game because I have a meeting at 11 am and I have to prepare a couple of spreadsheets.  The other person who reads the material won't be there tomorrow, so I'll read both weeks of summaries.  I've gotten very good at pronouncing the word 'hemiepiphysiodesis' due to this meeting.  Wednesdays morning are usually me preparing for it, as she does her part the afternoon before.  After the meeting, I plan to get as far as I can on authorisations (I have a couple to do for this week, and then it's on to next week). I'd like to get a minimum of two to three weeks out this week, and preferably a month out, and then fill in the new visits or added ones.  I also need to work on some denials and do some housekeeping in terms of putting data into other spreadsheets so I can file some paperwork.  That doesn't all have to be done tomorrow afternoon, but it would be great if I could get some of it done this week.  I've been working really steadily and my days are certainly full; there's never really boring downtime some people have in their jobs.  There's always a lot to do.  But since we shuffled our duties between a co-worker and myself so she both schedules and authorises offsite imaging and I authorise surgeries and office visits, my anxiety has gone way down.  Scheduling was a juggling job that kept me constantly worrying about details of whether something would work, and it took a whole lot of time.  I hope she's doing okay.  We back each other up, though, so the other day I did both jobs and it wasn't too bad becuase it was a little quieter on the offsite front, at least, and I only had to schedule the urgent ones.

I guess I should sign off here.  I will try to write more.  I've been listening to Pandora, but I have a book I'm reading (or, as my roommate puts it, a computer file, as it's a Kindle book out of the library) that is fiction (something I've been struggling to read of late), over 300 pages, and I'm over halfway now.  It's called The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick. It's about a widower who finds a charm bracelet of his late wife which turns out to lead him on an adventure learning more about the woman he loved and the life she had before they met.  I'm really enjoying it.  The writing is very pleasant and the story drew me in.  It's taken me a couple of weeks to get this far, as it's hard to make time, but I checked it out again so I have it for another two weeks. Yay! Hopefully I can finish  before it's due.

Oh, I got to do a librarian thing today, finding out some information for a co-worker that involved calling an oral history centre and finding out how to access their materials.  It was fun.  That part of my life seems like it's in the past now, but it's still nice to be able to do things like that occasionally, plus I learned about some resources I didn't know about.

Okay, I really am going to sing off her for now.  Good night.

What book from your childhood would you want back?

Mine would be my copy of a 1st edition paperback of 'The Sword of Shannara' by Terry Brooks. It was given to me by a high school teacher and has an inscription. It had a pull-out artwork by the brothers Hildebrand, which was quite lovely and not included in subsequent printings.

I wound up accidentally putting it in a group of books that I donated to the Stanford/Lincoln County library. It is still listed in their catalogue. I wrote them at one point to see if I could get a copy of the inscription at all, to no avail. I'm tempted to drive down there (about an hour away) just to see if it's still there. I love the idea that others have read it and perhaps developed a love of fantasy from it--I just wish I hadn't let it go due to the inscription and the artwork. I do have an omnibus of the first three books of the series, and I'd hoped the artwork would be duplicated, but no. But the inscription is really what I'd like to 'get back'.

'Only a quid': woman reunited with childhood book in museum shop

Interesting article on the acidification of books and paper

The Little-Known ‘Slow Fire’ That’s Destroying All Our Books: Chloe Vassot on the Relentless, Inevitable Process of Decay