Wednesday Dispatches

1) NPR had an article about eye fatigue for people who use screens a lot. I spent the morning trying to follow the advice in the article and realized it was a losing battle for me. I am not going to stop every 20 minutes to do 2 minute breaks for my eyes. I honestly would never get anything done. Also, my boss just walked by when I was doing this circle thing with my thumb and just raised her eyebrows and walked by with no comment. I don't know why I'm sharing this with you, but here we are.

2) A while back I asked all of you for some advice on what to buy my BIL for his investiture because he's being promoted to a judgeship.  He's getting an Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. book, a candle with a sticker on it that says "Only Badass Motherfuckers Are Judges" (his wife said it would be okay), and I bought a really cool card from an Etsy seller. Unfortunately I won't be able to go to the investiture, but my spirit will be there.

3) Last week I asked if anyone had any questions for my husband for a fun post later on this spring. I'm still collecting questions! Feel free to fill out this form or you can email me any questions you might have. There's a form on the righthand sidebar of this very blog if you prefer to email me! 

4) I am exhausted right now. Yesterday I was making granola, which is pretty straightforward.  You dump things in a big bowl, mix them up, then put it all in the oven on a baking sheet for 45 minutes, stirring it every 15 minutes. I literally was falling asleep in those fifteen minute increments and waking up, very confused about what was going on, to the oven timer going off. I need multiple nights of a full eight hours of sleep, some time on the beach, and the ability to erase the mental load about household chores and when we need to buy more cat food.

Alas, that is not going to happen. So here I am telling you right now that I am going to be taking a break from a couple of things. One, I am going to stop doing Duolingo daily. My streak is almost 1500 days and I'm starting to get really resentful. I'm going to stop doing it and start consuming more media in Spanish. 

5) I'm also going to be going blog lite for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to be in Michigan and I don't know what my schedule will be like. My mother is not responding to chemo well and she's having terrible complications even though she's on the lowest effective dose. I have been given the task of having the conversation about whether or not she wants to continue treatment*. Meanwhile, THREE of my aunt and uncles will also be there and that's a lot of people and I'm super stressed about this trip for so many reasons. I will be still be posting regular update posts, like my monthly reviews, a CBWC update, book reviews as I write them, and my 20th anniversary posts, but my daily writing and reading of other's blogs will likely be sporadic. I am allowing myself this as one fewer thing on my plate right now. 

*No, my sister still isn't talking to me. My mother barely returns texts and I think it's because she's sleeping like 22 hours of the day. My sister and her husband are going on a vacation (and I want them to because caretakers need respite) and I will be in charge of my terminally ill mother, my sister's zillion pets, and my aunt and two uncles (the youngest of whom is 61) will be there, too. It's going to really be a worst case scenario for me. 

So, if I'm pretty quiet over the next couple of weeks, please know that I will be back more fully after the first week or so of May. 

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Do you do eye exercises? Do you have burning questions for my husband to answer? Would you like a candle calling you a badass motherfucker?

Burning Brightly (Valdemar) by Mercedes Lackey

 Valdemar saga (in chronological order of the world, not order of publication):

The Mage Wars
The Last Herald-Mage
Collegium Chronicles

The Herald Spy

Family of Spies 

Back to Valdemar!! Burning Brightly is one of only two standalone novels that aren't part of a trilogy or more in this saga.

(I found a new source about the reading order for Valdemar. Some dude named Mike has an amazing timeline that shows where all the books are in the reading order. I am obsessed with it and also quite pleased that I'm mostly doing things in the chronological order of the world. Lackey is currently writing the Founding of Valdemar trilogy, so I haven't read it because it's in progress still.)

In this book, Lavan (Lan) is the son of successful tradespeople. They have to move from his rural home to the city of Haven and Lan is bored and lonely. His parents send him to a school where he is bullied. As he is being tortured by his classmates, his anger and fright combine to have him start a fire that injures him and kills his classmates. 

Lan's Gift is that of a Firestarter. He is soon Chosen by a Companion (the white horse-like creatures that are not actually horses) and begins his life as a Herald Trainee. But Lan is wracked with guilt over the death of his bullies. While it was not done on purpose and there's even a hilarious scene in which one of his friends walks Lan through the degrees of murder, manslaughter, and then lands on self-defense, Lan knows he's being trained to kill people in a warfare situation and he does not want to be the cause of any other person's death, even if they are his enemy.

Meanwhile, Lan's Herald-mentor is Pol, a Herald whose Gift is that he can do every known Gift to some extent. He's not a great Mindreader, but he can do it. He's doesn't have the most Empathy, but he can certainly change the tone in a room if he wants to. So Pol is the one who has to teach Lan how to control the anger that fuels his Gift. 

The first part of this book was very much like Foundation and I started to get a tiny bit worried that this was just going to be Mags 2.0. But it wasn't. Lackey was going to finish Lan's story in one book and the story did not go in the direction I thought it was going to go. 

Lovely addition to Valdemar. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

:It is not a better world, and we must deal with things as they are.: (page 174)

Lan's Companion is full of these pearls of wisdom.

Pol was dancing on the edge of his energy, though; he was forced to juggle teaching, tutoring Lavan, and meetings with the Select Council, along with whatever incidental tasks came up. He wasn't young anymore, and his body reminded him of that sad fact rather frequently these days. (page 261)

I thought it was interesting that in this YA book one of the main characters was older. I sort of liked it. 

Lan always thought that this was the saddest part of the year, the time when it seemed that winter would never end. The excitement of Midwinter was over; hard-packed snow blanketed the sky. The cold was relentless, leaking in around door- and window-frames, sending unexpected chills down the back. You couldn't escape it, except in bed, and you knew that when you woke up again, you'd be battling it from the time you turned back the covers. (page 265-266)

Preach it, Lan. It IS the worst time of the year.

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

From the street, except for a gown or a hat prominently on display in a window, it wouldn't be possible to tell these places from an ordinary house. (page 20-21)

The previous manifestation of the feud had been hats; tall, pointy ones, dripping veils and gold chains, which imperiled everyone around them and forced them to walk with a peculiar, backward-bent posture with the stomach thrust out. (Page 77) 

Cool Bloggers Walking Club Week 3: April 14 - 20

It is week three of Cool Bloggers Walking Club, hosted by Elisabeth where the goal is we all walk at least ten minutes a day.  Let's see how this week went for me us.

Sunday, April 14
40 minute morning walk with Hannah - last we left, Hannah was not feeling well; she's acting much more energetically this morning
15 minute to and from the coffee shop to meet up with some friends
27 minute walk with Hannah this afternoon after she had a bath - because Hannah had not been well the last couple of days, she was pretty stinky; it was well into the 70s today, so I bathed her in the driveway and took her for a walk to dry off

14 minute walk with Hannah before bed

Morning shadow: I look tall and Hannah looks like a wolf

Monday, April 16

31 minute morning walk with Hannah

33 minute walk with Hannah after work - It's too hot for poor Hannah. Luckily, it's going to cool down dramatically soon.

31 minute walk with Hannah before bed - She's still not doing really well. She's acting normally otherwise, but poor baby is struggling on walks.

Tuesday, April 16

30 minute walk with Hannah this morning

24 minute walk with Hannah in the rain - the weather has been lovely here, but spring has reared its ugly head again and now the rain has restarted

24 minute walk with Hannah before bed

Hannah is SO MAD that someone made her stop running around to pose for the camera. SO MAD.

Wednesday, April 17

15 minute walk with Hannah this morning - This was shorter than our normal walk because of thunder and lightning. I really didn't want to get caught out in a storm with H. Within five minutes of us getting home, there was quite a lot of rain and wind for about five minutes and then the skies cleared. 

20 minute walking around campus today

33 minute walk with Hannah after work - Okay, I think we've turned a corner and H is feeling better. Finally. We dodged the rain and it started raining as soon as we got inside our house.

25 minute walk with Hannah before bed

Hannah says "Just Say No to Drugs."

Thursday, April 18

30 minute morning walk with Hannah

26 minute walk with Hannah after work in the rain *sigh*

18 minute walk with Hannah before bed in the rain

I sometimes get bitter at my early mornings, but sometimes I see things like this and I'm grateful for the 5:30 alarm.

Friday, April 19

27 minute morning walk with Hannah

20 minute walk to a petting zoo on campus! a petting zoo! - then I went to the library

32 minute walk with Hannah after work

10 minute walk with Hannah before bed

Saturday, April 20

32 morning walk with Hannah

38 minute walk with Hannah after lunch

27 minute walk with Hannah before bed

H: I refuse to look at you. You are terrible. 

What's the most interesting thing you saw on a walk this week?

20th Anniversary Countdown: Guest Post #1

My 20th Blogiversary is in September and I thought that the best way to celebrate it would be to have a guest post every week counting down to the big day (when, truth be told, I don't really have a big plan). This is the first of those guest posts written by Bestest Friend herself.

I met Bestest Friend when I was a freshman in college. She didn’t like me, but I liked her, so I kept pestering her until she realized I was here to stay. She lives in a different state from me, but that doesn’t stop us from regularly calling and texting and having inside jokes no one will understand. She works in the education field, has a giant teenage son, two dogs, a cat, and will tell you a lie so confidently that you will believe whatever she says, no matter how preposterous. Here’s what she has to say.

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Hi! I’m NGS’s best friend. If, at any point in this blog, she has referred to someone else as her best friend, she was kidding. I’ve known her since forever, and she lets me call her a name that she doesn’t let anyone else call her, AND one time I accidentally killed our shared gecko named Nipple and threw it in a ditch outside of Washington, D.C., so I win the Best Friend title.

Years ago, she did her first 45 words post, and she went in order of the most important people in her life, and I was one of the very last ones which meant I was one of the MOST important in her life, and I’ve carried that knowledge with me, in the back of my head, for over a dozen years. So yesterday, she texted me and asked me if I would be the FIRST guest blogger in a series of guest bloggers revolving around “20 something or other”, and I couldn’t even answer for like four hours because I’ve been DEMOTED and now I’m the LEAST important because I am first so I’ve gotta make this guest post AMAZING so I can creep my way up to the top again. [Note from NGS: For a year, I wrote a brief 45 word blurb describing people in my life. You can find them here if you're interested. Also, I asked her first because I waited too long to line anyone else up with less than a week's notice and I knew she'd get it to me in time!]

So, here we go: The TOP 20 Ideas for a TOP 20 Post that I Considered Making about NGS. So meta.

20. Top 20 Ridiculous Opinions from High School That are Still Stuck in her Brain. 

First of all, she has this ridiculous idea that you can’t use contractions in a formal paper, and that’s not true, that’s just what you learn when you either (a) go to high school pre-1957 or (b) go to high school in a town the size of a postage stamp. She has more opinions from high school, too, but I’ll save those for later Top 20 lists. 

19. Top 20 Songs that Make Me Immediately Think about NGS
For a while in college, we went on a lot of road trips. She would drive the big truck named Truck and I would… actually, I guess I was like the comic relief. We would make these epic mix CD’s – her song (usually country) and then my song (something cool, obviously). These made certain songs immediately associate with NGS in my brain. Piano Man. Independence Day. American Pie.

18. Top 20 Random Categories of Tchotchkes that I often send to NGS
I know these have to annoy her. Bunnies after Easter. Pigs. Chickens! [Note from NGS: They go into my office and amuse me at work.]

17. Top 20 Breeds of Dogs that NGS Will Squeal at and Pet at any given time
This category is a trick. The answer is ALL OF THEM.

Billie and Sherlock are Bestest Friend's dogs. They are obviously my best friends, too.

16. Top 20 Things with Gluten that NGS Will Scarf Down when Visiting Me
There was a time when she craved gluten. I have a picture of her, standing on a street corner in my city, munching on some huge baked good from the North Market. She’s been with Doctor BB for like 63 years now, so she’s used to the lack of gluten, but it was so very cute at the beginning of their relationship.

15. Top 20 Grudges I Still Hold Against NGS
NGS graduated undergrad one year before I did, and she got a job at a town an hour north of our college. She had lived in the state above ours for most of her life, so it’s safe to assume that she knew all of the traffic laws. I drove up to see her, carefully following my MapQuest directions, and I went to turn left at a light. It was red, so I stopped, waiting for the green light so I could turn. Instead of turning green, it started blinking red. I waited. The cars behind me honked. I think I sat there through four or five cycles of the light, people zooming out of line behind me and going around, flipping me off and shouting. Finally, I also went up to the next light and turned left. Later, she told me that this was a law in her state. SHE SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME. I’m still mad, NGS. Still mad. [Note from NGS: A blinking red light means stop at an intersection and yield to oncoming traffic. You must stop completely before entering traffic. This is a UNIVERSAL rule of driving in these United States. But it was a crappy intersection and I tried to avoiding turning left there. I should have warned her.]

14. Top 20 Movies that Made NGS and I Burst into Tears at the Same Time
It’s just The Notebook, you guys. Sitting in her little apartment in the big city. With no warning. Tears everywhere.

13. Top 20 Vegetables That NGS Told Me About for the First Time
This human is the vegetable queen. Who eats kohlrabi on a regular basis? This woman.

12. Top 20 Slight UnTruths that I Told NGS and She Believed Me
So, this worked better before Google, but it’s still hilarious today. When anyone asks a question, I am good at confidently answering. People believe me. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it just matters that it SOUNDS right. NGS believed me for years. She may still, honestly. “Hey, how many countries are there in the world?” Me: “Around 187.” “Oh, okay, thanks.” And sometimes, just for fun, I’m randomly right.

11. Top 20 Guys I Pictured when She Started Dating “Biker Boy”
I thought she was dating a guy on a motorcycle wearing leather. I was so proud of her for going outside of the box. It turns out, she was not.

10. Top 20 Family Rifts I Accidentally Made on NGS’s Behalf
Once, when the Vatican was looking for a new pope, I spliced a picture of her husband’s head onto the old pope and shared it to her on Facebook and suggested her husband for the new pope, and it turns out that her husband’s family was on Facebook and they were very, very angry for a long time. Oops. [Note from NGS: My SIL brought this up the last time I saw her. It's been more than a decade.]

Note from NGS: This is the exact meme that caused the rift. Come at me, SIL.

9. Top 20 Vacations that NGS and I Took Together
SO MANY! We had this streak of years where we would pick a city, arrange for flights there, meet up, and just wander. Sometimes I would plan and sometimes she would. My favorite was NYC, but hers was probably Nashville. We had amazing cucumber cream cheese in Chicago. Once, we line danced with Navy men in Jacksonville. We also took other vacations together, like the time we took my dog up to visit NGS’s parents in their little tiny town, and we watched The Bachelor and went to see “the bars” (the bears) at the zoo.

8. Top 20 Holidays that NGS sends me cards for
Trick category. ALL OF THEM. With bad jokes. [Note from NGS: Hilarious jokes.]

7. Top 20 Times NGS Almost Fell off of a Bridge
I was super-duper pregnant in the summer of 2007, and NGS was living in Minneapolis, and a bridge collapsed right where she drove every day. The cell phones went down. I couldn’t get through to her. I was convinced that she had fallen into the water while crossing. I was inconsolable. Anyway, she lived.

6. Top 20 Weird Reasons We Became Friends
I knew NGS but I didn’t think she liked me, and then the year between freshman and sophomore year in college, she started sending me mail, and I was so touched. Of course, now that I know her better, I realize that she probably got the home address of all 50 people on our floor and was sending them mail, too. But we didn’t get close until this girl we both knew invited us both to stay with her in an off-campus apartment one summer. NGS and I immediately split one of the two bedrooms (why we chose to do this, I’m not sure). After one grocery shopping trip during which the girl made us buy grape jelly, the other girl took off to live elsewhere and NGS and I stayed there, sharing a room and living our lives. We adopted random pets, went to drive-in movies, made up dance routines to songs, and just lived our lives. And we never ate the grape jelly. 

5. Top 20 Times NGS Impressed my Parents
The first time we all went out to dinner, we went to a Chinese restaurant. At the end of dinner, NGS commented to me that she didn’t like Chinese food, but she had eaten her entire meal. I mentioned this to my parents later, and they were SO IMPRESSED that she had been too polite to say anything. From then on, any time I wanted to go anywhere with NGS, do anything with NGS, they were on board. They loved her so, so much. My dad even had his own nickname for her and would pass on messages to her from me. It was adorable.

4. Top 20 Things NGS Does Much, MUCH Better than Me
Look at her blog. Such organization! Such planning! Such working out! She’s a role model. I am more… loosey-goosey. She got married and made it work. I got married and then I left him and then I had serious relationships with a number of people and it’s just this tumultuous existence, but not NGS. She’s the bestest.

3. Top 20 Times We Got Lost
We wanted to go to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and we did, and then we wanted to go to Parma so I could adopt a hatchling leopard gecko, and we used this map that my brother had given me, and it must have been from the 70’s because all the streets were different in downtown Cleveland and there were one-way streets everywhere and we just kept driving in circles. Every guy I’ve ever known would have been freaking out, but we just laughed and laughed. Years later, we were in downtown Manhattan and we were lost and I just used the street grids to guide our way and it kind of worked. We get lost a lot. It’s okay. 

2. Top 20 Times She Made My Toddler Cry
One time NGS said that she was making polenta for us and we were really excited and it looked just like yellow cake. My toddler sat at the table and got a plate of it and dug in. I’m certain he was expecting cake, and he took a huge bite, and burst into tears. I’m talking, huge, elephant-tears, squirting everywhere.

1. Top 20 Ridiculous Promises We’ve Made Each Other
After 9/11, we heard recordings of people who knew that they were going to die who called their loved ones and said goodbye. I made NGS promise that she would NOT call me if that happened. I didn’t want that mental burden. And she’s made me promise that I won’t let anyone put a bad picture of her in her obituary if she dies. [Note from NGS: This promise about the bad obit photo came YESTERDAY before I read this list. There are more than twenty ridiculous promises, I assure you.]

NGS is the most constant person in my life. She’s kind but honest and I love her so very much!

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Thanks for reading, friends. If you made it this far, you know more about our friendship than I do. Who is your Best Person?

Five For Friday Edition #4

 1) After years of being the only municipality in the county that didn't allow it, our city council finally caved and allowed ATVs to be on our city streets. This is crushing for me. These vehicles are loud, numerous, and almost always driven aggressively. Now that the weather has turned, my afternoon walks with Hannah are occasionally very loud affairs and poor Hannah, never a fan of small engine noises, tucks her tail and runs for home. 

I feel very "get off my lawn" about this, in the same way that I do about fireworks. 

2) I have done some soul-searching recently, based on a comment Jenny wrote on this post. I have joked in this blog space and in the comments sections of a lot of your blogs, that I am a lazy person. My true desire at any given time is to be on the couch with my cat reading a book. But the truth is that I am NOT the kind of person who actually IS on the couch with my cat reading a book most of the time. I am a busy person and I'm busy because I've set myself priorities that don't lend well to hanging out with Zelda the Cat and reading a trashy romance novel most days of the week. Just to give you a quick idea of how a generic weekday in my life might look:

5:30-6am - Read under my SAD lamp
6-6:30am - Walk the dog
6:30am - 8am - Feed pets, feed me, get ready for work, including getting lunch ready, drive to work
8am - 4:30pm - Paid work
4:45-5:30pm - Walk the dog
5:30-6pm - Exercise
6-7:30pm - Make and eat dinner
7:30-8pm - Update blog stuff
8 - 8:30pm - Walk the dog
8:30-9:30pm - Get ready for bed/clean up the mess that is the house
9:30-10 - Read in bed

There's no time for being lazy! I have to stop calling myself lazy. This is honestly quite a personal revelation. 

3) I just got a reminder that I need my yearly mammogram. Does it seem crazy to anyone else that I need to do a yearly mammogram? The screening guidelines are so inconsistent. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (UWPSTF) doesn't recommend yearly mammograms until women are 50 (unless they have increased risks) and for women older that 50, they recommend every two years. The American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends women 45 to 54 get a mammogram every year and every other year for women 55 and older. Such variation! I have been getting mammograms every year since I was 40 based on the recommendation of my doctors, but my risk factors aren't crazy. Anyway. Just a complaint. I scheduled it for next week. 

4) Just what is Duolingo trying to tell me with this?

    The candidate does not accept his/her defeat.

    But democracy doesn't work like that.

5) Some of you may already know this, but I'm planning a fun celebration for my blog's 20th anniversary in September. Some of you may also know that my dear husband does not read or participate in anything having to do with my blog. But as part of the anniversary schedule, I was hoping to do a 20 Questions with him. (Note that this is aspirational. I have thought about this for a long time, but have yet to ASK MY HUSBAND if he will agree to this. If he says no, well, maybe I'll answer the questions the way I would answer them. That would also be a fun exercise.)

If you have any questions you've been burning to ask him (what do you think of your wife's obsession with Garth Brooks anyway?), please fill out this form and let me know what you're interested in learning from him!

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Do you have any fun plans for the weekend?

Photo Every Hour 4/17/2024

I'm back with another exciting edition of me taking a photo every hour of the day. I feel like the last time I did this, it was sort of an exciting day, but  this is a very boring work day, so it's going to be a struggle. Let's see how the working hours between 8am and 4pm shake out.

5:32am - Stumble out of bed, turn off the alarm, turn on my SAD lamp and read for 20 minutes. I'm currently reading Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon and I am enjoying it so far.

6:22am - Had to cut my walk with Hannah short this morning because, while I will walk her in the rain, what was thunder and lightning in the distance when we started our walk started to worry me as we went further on. Hannah, who is a lazy dog and does not like to be on walks anyway, was very much okay with a shorter walk.

7:41am - I did Duolingo in the car on the way to work while Dr. BB drove.

8:04am - On the way to work I realized that my left pinky was bleeding. My eczema is in truly bad shape right now and my skin had just split open. I got to my office and went to the First Aid kit I keep in my desk (look, if you don't have lip balm, dental floss, nail file and clippers, Band-Aids, bacitracin, and spare ponytail holders in a box in your desk, I don't know what to tell you) and went into the bathroom to wash my finger and put a Band-Aid on it. All before I so much as changed my shoes.

9:52am - I'm going to a regional conference, but it's held on our campus, so I just had to troop up the hill to the student union. This log cabin "represents the pioneering experience." It's so weird that it's just plopped down in the middle of campus.

10:06am - At the conference. I sat with some nice folks from a different college and started chatting and then they made us all move to be at the same table with people from our own universities. I was sort of upset by this. I mean, I like my co-workers, but we never really got to meet people from other places. Grrr.

11:49am - We broke for lunch. One of the women that I had met before I was exiled to my university's table had mentioned she wanted to go to the bookstore, so I volunteered to take her over there. While we were over there, I had to take a photo of this gnome in honor of Nicole. 

12:16pm - I made it back to the student union. They gave us a lunch voucher, but I'm going to be honest with you, the idea of eating in a college cafeteria made me want to curl up in a ball. I took the lunch I packed this morning out to the balcony on the second floor. It was cold and threatening rain and five minutes after I took this photo, I had to go inside because it did start to rain. *sigh*

1:41pm - Friends, this was my entire afternoon.

2:11pm - Break. I just walked around for five minutes. 

3:49pm - We're almost out of here. 

4:58pm - Finally got home. Hannah was excited to see us. You can't tell from this photo, but she's wagging her tail like crazy. We're about to go on our walk. Also, I only took this one photo and the poor thing has her eyes closed in it. LOL. 

5:26pm - Walk with Hannah! Look at the tulips! And daffodils! She's like a dog model for a seed catalog. We took an extra long walk after our aborted walk this morning. It did not rain on us this time.

6:50pm - Dinner is done. I sat on the couch to start this post (you can sort of see my computer on the left) after dinner and Zelda decided I should really be spending time petting her. She was obviously right.

7:38pm - Started my yoga practice for the day. I normally like to get my workout in before dinner, but that wasn't in the cards for today.

8:47pm - Walk with Hannah before bed. It's windy, but otherwise the nicest it's been weatherwise all day.

9:35pm - I said goodnight to the girls, filled out my goal journal for the night, and headed up to bed. Hopefully I'll be asleep before the ten o'clock hour.

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Did you do anything unusual yesterday? Or what was the most mundane of mundane things you did?

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez came on my radar because of the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge and then Stephany reviewed it and said it was okay. 

Julia is the youngest daughter in a Mexican family living in Chicago. Her parents came over from Mexico under pretty bad circumstances and just as the book is beginning, her older sister dies in a tragic accident. Julia is struggling. She can't wait to move out, away from her stifling family and their expectations that she behave more like Olga, her "perfect" dead sister. She learns that maybe Olga wasn't so perfect, though, and soon Julia is questioning everything in her life.

Look, I'm just the audience for YA anymore. I just kept wanting to shake Julia, tell her that she needed to get her head out of her ass and stop being an insufferable brat, and remind her that having two loving parents is infinitely better than the alternative. Julia does have a lot on her plate and her sister dying is really terrible, but Julia is also an entitled jerk. And she's mean. And maybe she's just a teenager being a teenager, but I did not enjoy the time I spent with her. 

I know I'm old because I honestly wanted the book to be told from her parents' points of view. 

I regret finishing this one. 2/5 stars

Lines of note:

I know I should clean, but whenever I look at the mess, I think, what’s the point? Nothing feels like it has a point anymore. (location 195)

I mean, doesn't everyone think this when they clean? It's a viscious cycle - the cleaning is never done and as soon as you stop, you have to do it all over again.

...skinny, little guy who looked like an aardvark...(location 323)

I like to note animal/human metaphors. To be honest, I don't know what an aardvark looks like, so this meant nothing to me at the time.  Okay, I looked it up. Aardvark below. It's pretty cute, but I can see how this is a mean thing to say about someone. 

Kelly Abram - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/175359469

I seriously don’t know what she saw in him, because not only was he ugly, he had the personality of a boiled potato. (location 323)
More meanness from our main character.

Everyone is desperately trying to hang on to the sunshine, enjoying the unexpected warmth before winter takes a cold gray crap on the city and makes us all miserable again. (location 552)
I feel this in my very soul. It was lovely for the last two days and today I left the house without a coat and now it's cold and rainy and I regret not having a coat with me. 

If I end up being an office lady who wears slacks and changes into white sneakers to walk home from the train, I’ll just jump off a skyscraper. (location 589)
Were we all this mean and judgmental as teens? (I may feel attacked because I have to switch out shoes to walk the dog.)

There are hundreds of spam emails from many different companies. I guess the spam bots don’t know when someone has died. It seems so disrespectful to advertise to the dead. 50% OFF STOREWIDE!! BUY ONE GET ONE FREE SHOE SALE!!! VITAMINS FOR THE PERFECT BIKINI BODY. (location 2705)
This is an interesting observation. One time Bestest Friend told me that she had put me in charge of her Facebook account in case of her death. Apparently that's a thing you can do. I remember laughing, but it's not really funny, is it? I suppose our electronic estates will need to be settled when we die, just as our physical assets will. (I've written about my angst about the state of my blog when I die. How will my readers find out? Will I just stop updating and no one will ever know what happened?)

“Julia, sometimes in life you don’t get to do what you want to do. Sometimes you have to deal with what’s given to you, shut up, and keep working. That’s it.” (location 3613)

This is from Julia's father. It's no wonder I wanted to read a book centered on him.

Things I looked up:
Cepillín, that scary Mexican clown who looks like a rapist but everyone loves for some reason. (location 125)

Ricardo González Gutiérrez was a Mexican clown as well as a singer, TV host, and actor. He died in 2021. 

Cepillín in 2018

The House of Bernarda Alba (location 355) - A play written by the Spanish dramatist Federico García, completed in 1936, two months before García was assassinated during the Civil War

chambelan (location 1606) - A male member of the court of honor at a quinceañera 

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

...usually walk around the apartment wrapped in a blanket and wearing a hat, looking like a fool. (location 2106)

He’s not even wearing a hat or scarf, so his face is bright red. (location 2129)

His face is flushed from the cold, and he looks cute in his big, puffy jacket and purple stocking hat. (location 2142)

Their husbands, tío Raul and tío Leonel, stand next to them, both wearing cowboy hats. (location 2818)

After Los Tigres score their first goal, a dark guy in a cowboy hat comes toward us with bottles of Coke and plastic bags of pork skins slathered in red salsa.  (location 3046)

“Buenos días,” he says, and tips his hat. (location 3119)

Today Esteban is wearing jeans, a faded Beatles T-shirt, and a straw cowboy hat. (location 3168)

Esteban takes off his cowboy hat and looks toward the mountains. (location 3220)

“Is he wearing a hat?” (location 3401)