Soo… This week didn’t go quite as planned.

We had three super busy days at work thanks to a long-planned event. The lead-up to it had been stressing me out for the past couple of weeks, and I am so glad to be done with it. That was planned. I’d been dreading it, but I got through it.

The thing that caused my week to not go as planned? It’s a major change in my life, but definitely for the cuter. I’m adopting a kitten!

 

I was on my way out to an appointment on Wednesday morning. I usually take a short cut through my apartment building’s laundry room, and when I turned the corner I found a tiny stray kitten staring up at me. There was no hint that she belonged to anyone and no sign that anyone was coming back for her, so I picked her up, took her up to my apartment, set some wet food and water out for her and headed out to my appointment. When I got home, I took the kitten to the veterinarian, where the vet determined that she was about five weeks old and weighed just over a pound. They treated her for ear mites, fleas, and intestinal worms, gave me some feeding recommendations, and sent her home. I have always wanted a black cat and had been thinking off and on again for the past several months about getting a kitten. My older cat is aging (he’ll be fifteen in September), and he is notoriously grouchy around anyone but me. I’d hoped he would be more accepting of a kitten, given that he is a big cat, and I thought that a tiny kitten would be less threatening. So far, this has been the case. I’ve been keeping the two of them separated so the older one can get accustomed to kitten’s scent (and because kitten hasn’t been vaccinated yet. She’s too little), but the older cat has been more laid back about the change than I thought he would be.

It’s been challenging to get the kitten to eat and drink enough and then clean up after her. She knows what the litter box is for, but she doesn’t always use it. *sighs* But she is very young and will learn, so I will just have to keep spot cleaning the floor until she gets it figured out.

She is a tiny ball of fluff, and she has won me over completely. I am still thinking about what to name her.

What I Finished Last Week:

• Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno Garcia, ARC provided by NetGalley
• Bring up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell #2) by Hilary Mantel
• Storm Rising (Mage Storms #2) by Mercedes Lackey

Gods of Jade and Shadow is a fairytale-like story set in Mexico during the Jazz Age. It tells the story of Casiopea, who finds a chest full of bones in her grandfather’s bedroom and ends up reanimating the Mayan god of the dead. She must follow him on a quest to regain the lost parts of himself in order to regain his throne in the Mayan underworld of Xibalba, as well as maintaining the balance of the world. The more I look back on this world, the more I like it. Silvia Moreno-Garcia keeps rising in my estimation. She writes deceptively simple books with engaging heroines and stories that linger in the mind.

Bring up the Bodies was excellent, as expected. I don’t know how Mantel manages to accurately combine historical figures and events, beautiful writing, and deep introspection this well, but she does and the effect is incredible. Book three of this series, The Mirror and the Light, will easily be my most anticipated release of 2020.

Storm Rising. I read this as part of the #ReadingValdemar project, and even though it’s scheduled for August, I couldn’t resist picking this up and reading ahead. This is not an action-oriented trilogy. Mage Storms reads more like a political and domestic drama, where people are in conflict with each other for various reasons while they try to figure out how to stop the storms of magic that threaten every known country.

What I’m Currently Reading:

• Lyric Poems by John Keats (63%)
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (297/858)
• Dune by Frank Herbert (91/883)

I keep forgetting that I’m reading Lyric Poems in part because it’s on my phone, and partly because I haven’t enjoyed the first few poems. I have never really liked poems that tell long stories, and that’s what those first poems do. Fortunately, the later pieces are ones like ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, which are beautiful and don’t tell melodramatic stories.

I’m not as far into Lonesome Dove as I’d hoped to be, though I am going to make a major effort to get through the next section today, while it’s hot outside and I don’t want to go anywhere or deal with real people.

Dune. I’m not as far into this as I had hoped I’d be, either, but that’s okay. It’s only about the twelfth time I’ve read it. I’ve been thinking about this book and its heroes, the Atreides, in a new way and it’s subtly changing how I look at the book.

What I Plan to Start Reading This Week:

• Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasure of Solitude by Stephanie Rosenbloom
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, audiobook read by Kyle McCarley

Alone Time arrived at the library for me via inter-library loan, so I need to get through it before it’s due back. I had forgotten about my hold request for the audiobook version of The Goblin Emperor, so it was a complete surprise when it arrived via Overdrive. I’ve only listened to a few minutes’ worth of it, but I like what I’ve heard so far. Otherwise, I intend to catch up with Lonesome Dove and Dune.

What I’ve Been Watching:

I finally got caught up on Stranger Things! I’m not just talking about season three, either. I hadn’t yet watched the second season, and because I’d been hearing so much about the ending of the third season, I decided to get caught up. I’d forgotten, in the time since I’d watched the first season, that even though I have zero nostalgia for the 1980s, I really enjoyed the show. So this week, while getting the kitten settled in, I had Stranger Things playing and now I am completely caught up. I really appreciate how the Duffer Brothers age the stories along with the kids. Instead of trying to write stories for the twelve-year-olds (or so) they started out with, they age the stories along with the kids and include themes of first love, crushes, and the challenges associated with growing up, getting jobs, and figuring out who you are as a person. And also dealing with terrifying creatures from another dimension.