Month: March 2022

Quibbling with an irritating mystery novel

Posted on by Liz

Of all the books I’ve been reading it is silly to write about one of the most irritating, but that’s where I’m at this morning. I realize people love this series but everything about the first book grated on me! It is “Murder with Peacocks”, set in a small town. Our heroine is a blacksmith but took the entire summer off to go live with her mom and sister and do a professional job for free (planning three very large, complicated weddings and all the parties leading up to them).

Everyone is supposed to be quirky and funny, which is kind of cool, except they are all horrible with horrible boundaries and the gender politics are from like, the bad part of 1980 that voted against the ERA. Multiple (witnessed!) sexual assaults are treated as mildly humorous! The heroine just doing a shit ton of work for free for her horrible, entitled family is supposed to make them all extra charming. She’s so independent, strong, and liberated, but for fun she cleans the houses of strangers and her own (rich, I guess) family’s SEVEN BATHROOMS. I am over her, and everyone around her!

It’s also written in the weird twilight zone where everyone should have a cell phone, but they don’t, because the writer hasn’t figured out how to do a mystery with cell phones yet – let’s not forget that era of books and TV that were so strange!

Let’s also not forget the weird racist sweatshop (owned by the male romantic lead) in this tiny town with Mrs. Tranh (the heroine THINKS she MAY be Vietnamese – hello – perhaps the name and them speaking Vietnamese could be a clue) and the unnamed, unnumbered Ladies who don’t speak any English and sew wedding outfits 24/7 apparently and also no one in town knows them or invites them to anything despite the town all going to the weddings and knowing all of each others’ business.

But that is not even my most persistent quibble. There is a guy whose wife died and her sister, his sister-in-law, comes to stay, and (bad boundaries alert) Meg our heroine keeps ending up searching the sister-in-law’s room and suitcases and comenting on how she finds more and more “expensive knick-knacks” in the suitcases, so the sister in law was stealing, which is treated (like every crime, including murder) as mildly humorous. (Maybe they were her sister’s or family heirlooms, anyway!)

But THAT is not even my quibble.

WHAT are these expensive knicknacks? I can’t imagine what they ARE! Are they bookends made of GOLD?! What? What are they? Are they snuffboxes previously owned by Louis XIV?! Are they, like, a gem encrusted robot nightingale that sings, like some Caliph gets for a present in the 1001 Nights?

So, I am not like, filthy rich but I am comfortably well off and buy myself nice things sometimes. Here are some of the knick-knacks I can see from bed.

(They are there on purpose since I am in bed a lot and enjoy looking at them!) These non-valuable objects include:

* A lava lamp. Would fit in a suitcase.
* A small china triceratops
* A fist-sized chunk of green glass I got in an estate sale
* A copper bud vase with gold and enamel inlay
* Another bud vase, art deco, painted
* A decoupaged tray my grandma made
* A glass cube with laser etched diagram of the known universe

bookshelf with knick-knacks

They are valuable only to me, though maybe you could resell the bud vase for thirty bucks or so on ebay. (I looked, for reference!) The rest of it? Not valuable.

So much for the madcap mystery. All the characters need to go read Captain Awkward for at least 2 years and think hard about their life choices.

Please send help and tell me what these small town valuable small objects might be!

Got the Rona

Posted on by Liz

After 2 years of being pretty careful we finally got covid. It hit me kind of hard because of having asthma I guess. I’ve been off work for a month, hoping to improve this next week and be back at work but that will depend on whether I can talk without coughing.

It has sucked but I am reasonably good at being sick in bed. One aspect of being disabled that actually helps sometimes! The down sides of having covid while disabled – the logistics of getting to doctors’ office was kind of hairy since I could not handle a) the bus b) driving c) breaking down and putting together either the manual or the powerchair for transport in a car. My sister drove me to to get a monoclonal antibody infusion (TOTAL INFUSION was the hilarious 80s name of the clinic) and then isolated in her basement for days in case I had exposed her. I didn’t want to take a cab. Then at some point I thought about going to urgent care (because my blood pressure was out of control probably from the high doses of prednisone) but could not figure out how to get there without once again asking someone to potentially be exposed and then have to isolate.

I am fine now, just still coughing/ asthmatic when I move around a lot, talk, or laugh. NO LAUGHING ALLOWED. Goal is to quiet this reaction via more inhalers, nerve drugs like gabapentin which apparently help with dry cough, and more tea with honey than seems humanly possible.

I also gained 10 pounds almost instantly from the prednisone and eating whatever I felt like eating, which was: everything.

I missed a bunch of events, concerts, and so on that I had wanted to go to and will probably keep missing them as I will likely go back to work before I am 100% better and the ramp up to Actually Better enough to go out in the evening will be long and slow. So that also sucked.

Luckily the weather was amazing so I spent a lot of time, after the first two weeks where I barely got out of bed, lying on a sort of pallet on the lawn in the garden. I feel very lucky to have a sunny little garden with its astroturf lawn, hummingbirds, finches, and flowers. At first I was getting help from Danny to set up the little bed and drag it back to the Underhouse every day but now I can do it. There is also the hammock and my amazing outdoor claw foot soaking tub. Variety in where you park yourself is really good when you are sick, to keep up morale!

Milo turned 22 and A. is 19. They will likely be going off to grad school (library science) and university (probably in the UK). I’m so proud of them both!

Milo got covid, rather lightly, but was better within a day or two. Danny was pretty sick and slept through nearly a week (some of that isolating in the basement, but we didn’t isolate well enough) and then has been still a little bit sick for maybe 3 weeks or so. He is better now!

SDI & the EDD have been a non ideal experience, as they seem to have screwed up somehow. I think my doc sent in the paperwork but EDD attached it to a claim from 2014 (??!!!!) So my claim is in limbo, it doesn’t have a case number yet, so when I call on the phone I can’t get to the right menu to get a person, and I also can’t send a message since there is no claim to do it from, only a “pending” claim. ARRRRGH.

We are just starting to have people over to hang out in the garden. It’s nice but I find people to be exhausting. I holed up in the room with the door shut kind of a lot just because everything seems irritating and overwhelming and I get a headache quickly if things are overstimulating.

Somewhat inspired by the sudden heavy hitting covid, I started filling out a little workbook called “I’m Dead, Now What?!” that is supposed to gather all the information that would be useful to your survivors or executor of your will. It is interesting to contemplate. Mostly I worry about the giant mess of books, papers, and magazines that I have been lugging around for my whole life and which has NOT gotten any more orderly. What would anyone even do with it? The least I can do is put it in order and sort out anything “important” (LOL? is any of it?). Some of the zines, at least, should go to a good zine archive and/or maybe get scanned. So that will be a goal for this year. Maybe I can hire someone to scan them once I have a pile ready.

I would not call this “Long covid” by the way – Just a long recovery since my lungs got hosed and the exhaustion kind of lingers. I expect in another month I’ll be frisky as ever.