⋆⁺₊ fishing on the moon ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

It was not a productive weekend for me--awkward, because I had great intentions of getting an initial dent into my next rewrite. I did at least make it as far as reading through the translation and making some notes, but that was very much it.

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The one thing I managed was a fair bit of reading:

I finished Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice (a fun read, and I'll probably move along with the series at some point--I think I may even already have the second book--but I don't feel any urgency about it) and followed it up in rapid succession with Copper Script (KJ Charles) and Titan of the Stars (E.K. Johnston), both of which only came out last week. (Two books within a week of their shared release date probably isn't actually a record, but it's certainly not my norm.) Both were great, in very different ways. I knew Johnston had two books coming out in pretty quick succession this season (Sky on Fire releases next month) and that one of them has a planned sequel, but somehow I assumed right up to the end of this one that it was the July book. But no! It's this one! (Unless they both do.) I expect it'll be a fairly different book, and will be very interested to see how things play out.

I'm also still picking my way through The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. (Kobo thinks I'm 78% done.)

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Watching: scruloose and I saw the S2 TLOU finale last weekend, and at some point I'll probably ask around for broad and specific spoilers for the game, and that may impact how I feel about it. (Bella Ramsey knocked it out of the park, though. What a fantastic cast all around.)

We're also up to date on Murderbot. My inability to remember any plot specifics at all from All Systems Red (given that it's the only book in the series I've read more than once) is both a bit funny and annoying.

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Eating: The Zuni method of dry-brining and roasting a chicken was a success again. Unrelatedly, I got scruloose to pick up an extra-dark maple syrup from a local producer, and we tried and enjoyed it last weekend. (This jug doesn't explicitly say "extra-dark" or anything like that, so it's possible it's not actually the one I heard mentioned, but it is very dark and they acquired it at the store that had been named, so I'm kinda assuming.)

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Growing/Weathering: The lilacs have bloomed! It was windy enough yesterday, and rainy before that, that I was a little scared all the blossoms would blow right off, but that doesn't seem to have happened. I hope I remember to actually go outside and get some to bring inside.

The Sensation lilac [see icon, although that's not a pic of ours] is in pretty dire need of pruning, poor thing. The thought of actually making a(n approximately-)dated list of when to do specific garden things has passed through my mind, and if I'm lucky I'll actually try to assemble it. I think at least the last couple of years running we've looked up when to prune lilacs and then I've been thrown by the fact that our other one is a Bloomerang and presumably follows different rules.

I'm surprisingly annoyed that Mozilla is killing Pocket, given that my personal use case for it is "that's where I throw unread links that I realistically know I'll almost certainly never actually dig up again, thus satisfying the itch of 'but I need to know where it is in case I suddenly have a desperate need to read it'". I've backed up my Pocket data and will presumably never look at it again, but what will I use as bottomless pit now?

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Reading: I finished The Incandescent, which was a great read and also a wildly different book from Some Desperate Glory, so hats off to Emily Tesh's range! Now I'm a couple of chapters into Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice.

I'm also still working my way through Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

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Watching: scruloose and I are caught up on Murderbot and (until tonight) The Last of Us, and have finished The Pitt, which was, as advertised, fantastic. (Medical shows are so very not my genre that I don't have anything to compare it to; I think the only other one I've seen is Scrubs, manymany years ago.)

I duly read through the trivia section and whatnot on IMDb and saw when season 2 is apparently going to be set, and I think that's more months into the future that the newbie!doctors' ER rotation will last? (Have I successfully absorbed the terms for the various levels of doctors in an ER? No. >.<) That's a bit of an upsetting prospect, since Mel is my favorite (and scruloose's, and probably unsurprising for either of us). But I haven't read much else about the show at this point.

EXCEPT! I did remember that Sarah Kurchak [standard disclaimer: friend] wrote an article about Mel for Time last month, so I've read and can recommend that: "The Pitt’s Dr. Mel King Is a Small but Meaningful Step Forward for Neurodivergence Onscreen".

So now we have one episode left of TLoU, and odds are good we'll shift back to Kingdom for season 2, but Kingdom's seasons are very short, so we'll be back on the "what to watch now?" train relatively soon.

(Wheel of Time fans, I'm so sorry about the show's cancellation. :( On a personal level, I guess it pretty much guarantees that we're not going to go back and resume season 3 from where we drifted off after the first couple of episodes.)