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Oops! Is March Madness going on?
Complaints: 1. Weather is very chaotic. The last couple weeks have been traditional spring--need some heat at night & AC in afternoons. (Older mobile home) Tonight there is a freeze warning with wind chills down to 13°F & possibly a bit of snow.
2. I mentioned above to my Discord RPG group last night & NY Friend retorted, "You keep it! Don't send it to me! Got enough." No sympathy from MN Friend or Canadian Friend in chat, either. Only from New Orleans friend.
3. I missed Pi Day?!
4. I decided to finally read Mists of Avalon this weekend. (The first of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Aurthurian novels.) I got through < 40 out of 876 pages before deciding it's the Most Boring Book I've ever read--and my college work-study job was recording textbooks! I'm not being paid to read it, so I am done. I like her Darkover SF novels, so didn't expect Mists to be so...tiresome, or to not care about any characters. Next time I want to read about King Arthur & Co., I will reread Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy.
Non-complaints: 1. Husband got these tasty little mini desserts at Harps the other day. 2. I have solutions for Complaint #3. I can count yesterday's yummy cornbread as as a pie, &/or bake a cobbler pie and tell every one, "I'm not rounding the value of pi!"
Non-complaint
Nope, it's all on automatic. They just suck the money as needed.
Very good, I see what you did there.
My Pi Day plans went partially in the trash can. The pizzas, no problem. The actual desert pies were MIA from the desert area. Not in the bakery section, nor frozen. I decided the lone Cheesecake Factory offering would work, it was round and a calorie rich. And very distructive to my diet. As I walked out of that aisle I found two Marie Callendar Dutch Apple pies someone decided to put next to Bryers Vanilla Ice Cream. Debated. Cheesecake won.
Yesterday our official Denver temperature high was 72, Glendale was 74. This morning I woke to 27, feels like 17 and snow blowing from the winds. Later as I browsed DAZ's store, Xcel alerted me to power outages in my area from 'unknown' causes. Take your pick: high winds or trees downed by high winds. So far we are good. Update says those earlier outages will have a 12-hour 'maybe' fix time. In three days, expecting temps in the mid-80s. Fun times.
I think I had a Pizza Pi on Pi day.
On Complaint 4: I, also, had trouble with Mists of Avalon, but I managed to complete it in the hopes it would get better. It did not. Might I suggest Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex, which played a supporting role in me telling an Admiral, "Your navy sucks," in '78 (I think it was '78...slept since then and brain reset), having the same Admiral award me the Navy Achievement Medal a few months later whereupon I reaffirmed my previous statement ("Yes, sir, your navy still sucks."), and in '81 explaining to a Commander why I said it in the first place which (apparently) had resulted in him having to listen to the story every time he saw the Admiral. Alternatively, you might try Nicholas Seare's Rude Tales and Glorious. It might cause you to question your life choices, but it does explain how the whole sword-in-the-stone trick was accomplished.
Complaints Continued: 5. The microwave died last night after a long life. I don't know how long because I cannot remember when we got it, beyond before we moved here 5 years ago. We have another that came with this place, but we don't know if it works and will have to dig it out.
6. Bear the Lab is barking at all kinds of real & imaginary things today, & I already had a headache from the weather change. (We're in the warmer part of that nasty storm that is bringing lots of snow to many of you.) Finally, he has blessedly decided he's scared off all the threats to his pet humans & is quietly napping.
7. It's clearly Whine Day for me--and you can't buy wine on Sundays in Arkansas :(
Non-complaints Continued: 4. I backed a Kickstarter for an RPG line I love as my birthday gift to myself. 5. March 26 is the 10th anniversary of us adopting Bear the Noisy & Very Furry Lab/Belgian mix, aka Bear the Supreme Doggo.
Interesting. I really enjoyed Mists when I read it, but I was also 16 and just getting into fantasy and had no basis for comparison. I think it might've been the first woman-centric fantasy I'd found, too, so I probably would've forgiven a lot of shortcomings just for that. I wonder if I'd have a different opinion if I read it now (not that I have the time).
on #3 - My hobbit self says that every day is pie day, so there.
on #1 - sympathy from THIS MN friend. There's enough sucky weather to go around; it's not a competition. And everything around here is built to deal for what Nature throws at us. Not everyone has that going for them.
I am hungry. I hope we get seated at Applebees soon.
@SiverGirl, I wasn't much older when I started reading Darkover. And yes, it was harder in the late 20th century to find strong female leads, especially in fantasy & similar genres. The Darkover books were mostly either written well before the Avalon series or much later with a collaborator. Maybe I should give Mists another try in a few months. The book isn't going anywhere, I picked it up at the library's last sale. Of course in our place, it could get buried under other books LOL
I think for most hobbits, it's multiple pies per day, a meal plan I could go with. But I'm not sure I could afford that much flour, Graham crackers, &/or premade crusts & pies. Fortunately, I have everything needed to make a cobbler tonight.
As for my other northern friends, it was really teasing. NY Friend remembers when my family lived in Florida and me & the kids jokingly asked him to ship us snow all the time.
Re: Mists... I do remember being a little impatient in the beginning with all the lead-up, and skipping it on subsequent rereads... I realize it's part of the Arthurian mythos, but not the part I cared about. And it was definitely a slower paced book in general, though that doesn't bother me if it's what I'm in the mood for. Sort of like the older set of Disney movies took quite a lot longer to get to the point where interesting stuff starts happening, and nowadays you pretty much launch right into it. Definitely give any of the prequels/sequels a miss, though. I tried a few of them and wound up deciding she really should've quit while she was ahead. (So apparently my patience was finite lol). I remember liking Firebrand well enough to get my own copy, though... which isn't in the same series but it's along the same theme (feminist Trojan War rewrite, basically). And it's much shorter.
All or this was '90's though, so take with a grain of salt. Honestly I was still riding high from the recent discovery that there were fantasy books for grownups. I'd thought you were just supposed to outgrow all that when you got older and was tenaciously clinging to my battered copies of the Chronicles of Prydain. Then I looked up from browsing the CDs at one point at the library and saw the FANTASY/SCI-FI sign over the shelves right across from me, and it was like the sky opened up and the choir of angels sang.
(...and then I fell in with a new group of friends who were utter nerds, and I never lacked for suggestions after that. One of them handed me War for the Oaks and then proceeded to take me on a tour of all the places in it, and I was in love. It may not be the greatest book ever written, but it's still one of my favorites.)
I read Mist of Avalon farly close to its release and, I think, found it OK - not great, but not bad certainly. It's probably in one of the boxes of books that had to be moved to make way for others now. I've not read any darkover, but i did read some of her contemporary paarnormal romanceish stuff (and still have the Sword and Sorceress books on my shelf).
I read it in the 90s, but that was pretty much my experience, too. It was OK. Not going to ever read it again. Probably threw it in a box somewhere.
Non-complaint: One of the side effects of leveling up into Mom of a Teenager status is the teenager occasionally decides to make cookies.
Today we learned:
.....PI day at a loal bakery here in Portland that is renowened for its tasty pies.
Ah, 3/14. Sadly we don't have a pi day as there is no 31/4.
I got a new microphone and I can't get it to work. Not sure why,
This talk about cookies has reminded me that I need to bake this canister of Pillsbury orange rolls before their expiration date, six days from now. There's nothing worse than letting a can of orange rolls go to waste.
Only some people think I apologize too much, those are usually the idiotic stupid people on my life. I apologize probably because I can't help them and my inability to deal with their crazy stupid ways.
Nor do we have a 3rd day of the 14th month (eg 3.14.1592). Grossly unfair.
Using spelling and pronunciation not entirely inappropriate for 1592, as it happened we had 'ciccen (pronounced 'Chicken) and asparagus (pronounced 'sperage')' pie on the 14th of March.
Regards,
Richard.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was a large part of my paperback library either in the 60's or 70's. But I have never got into any books where modern authors retell myths, fables, fairytales, ... with a modern slant on them. It just doesn't work well. And I generally love their original fiction/sci-fi/fantasy but vere into retelling, I am so out of there.
Pi Day or pie days - may I point out that the British cookbooks are full of pies for all year round and don't need a specific day to eat them? And pubs provide them with drinks on the side. Good stuff for empty tummies after a long day of shopping, work, or touring.
Weather whiplash - Snow from 3am to 11pm yesterday. I was up for all of it. Temps never made it up past 25F, feels like stayed in the single digit to teens. And after all that, I think I have about an inch of snow on my van.
I read it in early 2000s with a lot of other MZB books I borrowed from the local library (including most of the darkover books), and I would say the same: it was an OK read, but not something I'd feel like reading again.
Non-complaint: Rain today, snow tonight, but weather will be cold but clear in the early morning. It's time for another grocery mini-adventure. I've made my bus pickup appointment. Breakfast at the hole-in-the-wall beanery in the decrepit mini-mall. Then grocery shopping and then an Uber home, hopefully before the 11:00AM price increase. More snow threatens in the afternoon.
Complaint: I still have semi-clogged faucet in the bathroom sink. Maintenance guy apparently has a one element push-down stack for a memory. Also, a couple of weeks ago the newel post cap on my porch railing broke off. It was a decorative square wooden cap with a wooden ball on top. I tried to protect it from the weather but the coating always wore off, the ball cracked, the square wooden base warped, the glue gave up, the whole thing eventually came off in my hand as I was yanking on it to steady myself onto the steps from the depths of the ruts in the unmaintained driveway (Sounds like another landlord problem to me.
)
Non-complaint: Yeah, yeah, I could just grab onto the naked top of the 4x4 post still slathered with chunky, broken glue and broken staples and bird poop, but decided not to. So, I ordered a new newel cap. This time it's solid copper and screws onto the top of the post. Being solid 20 gauge copper, it won't flake or peel. It completely covers the end of the post, and provides a solidly attached, smooth copper ball finial to grab onto. Ooh, classy.
I chipped off the glue, and installed the cap with a screwdriver, and it looks bright and shiny for now. Yeah, it's going to get a green patina eventually, but it's better than glue, splinters, broken staples, or poop.
Well, the predictions were right... we did fall in the 4-31" snowfall range, landing somewhere around 10 inches (though about 2 1/2 hours southeast of us got double that). Low base temp tonight is -2, high on Friday around 60.
Our weather has commitment issues.
complaint: Very tired of the onboarding process eith the new service provider for payrolling one of Little Dude's disability programs. They send all these forms that don't have options built in for the situation where the parent is the caregiver (so, exempt from worker's comp, paid time off, and some stuff that's intrinsic to what would happen if I was a stranger). They say to fontact them with questions, but their answers are vague and unhelpful. So I make a best guess, and when it's wrong they send it back telling me I needed to check the other box (and my favorite: "this form doesn't really apply to you at all but you need to check the other box"). Okay, fine, but vlearly you knew the right answer, so why didn't you just give it to me in the first place?
Worse, the program changed so that now the worker can no longer be the patient representative because you shouldn't be signing your own paychecks. So I had to ask my mom to be the representative, which means that now instead of just handling everything, I have to walk my confused, frazzled mom through the whole process. So I'm still doing everything, but now with collateral damage.
But at least apparently they could run the background check with the fingerprints I already had on file with Dpt of Human Services for the state, so at least I don't have to figure out the logistics of going in to get that done again.
Why does pouring cat food into a the bowl an individual is completely complaining about being devastating empty by loud meows calm that individual down?