Friends

Having a week's break from the spring crunch (and a couple of those days as actual days off, not just regular workdays) meant I was able to get some reading and a bit of watching done!

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Reading: On the novel(la)s front, two by Seanan McGuire and one by Rachel Reid. Butterfly Effects (the newest InCryptid) was good and also one of the major "wow, the reality (or maybe the scope, rather) of this series bears almost no resemblance to the impression given by the first handful of books" installments; the existence of multiple dimensions comes up very promptly in the early books (I think in the very first), but it was still a big shift to have that become part of the hands-on reality that the characters are dealing with.

Next I read Game Changer, the first book in Rachel Reid's Game Changers series, AKA the Heated Rivalry source material. I expected this to have far more detail on the Scott/Kip relationship than the show did, what with it being a novel that basically got turned into a single episode, but was a bit surprised by how many (most) of the detail in the show was completely different than the book, while the broad strokes are the same. (Also, I feel like I saw more than one reference to show!Kip being very physically different from book!Kip--I'm very sure I saw the word "twink" in play for the book iteration--and am baffled by where that came from, because...no? Anyway.) It was fine. I didn't love it, although I did appreciate many moments that were particularly fun in the context of the show.

And then I read Through Gates of Garnet and Gold, this year's Wayward Children novella. The sheer cost of these novellas made me decide within the last few years to just go for the digital versions rather than hard copies, and this year I opted to simply get the ebook from the library, which is why I read it a couple of months after it came out. I'm just not invested in this particular series. Ah, well.

For manga, I read the fifth omnibus of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which includes the three volumes available in English that I hadn't previously read at all. (Did I buy vol. 13 and 14 in their original single-volume release and then have to buy this omnibus volume to get vol. 15? Yes. >.<) A sixth omnibus English volume has been scheduled and delayed repeatedly, so I knew there was still at least a fair bit to go--the three volumes to be bundled in that one--but after this catch-up was the first time I actually checked for info online, and I was not braced to see that it's up to 31 volumes in Japan and ongoing. o_o I have no clue what's going on with the English release, but I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say it's probably a mess.

Non-fiction: still reading a chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass here and there, and I've also started (but not gotten far into) Crystal Wilkinson's Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks.

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Watching: We're caught up on The Pitt and have a couple episodes of Frieren yet to watch. (Am I right that this season of Frieren is over now?)

We also finished our watch of Heated Rivalry--my second time, and basically scruloose's first, except for the part where they saw most of the finale with minimal context back when I watched it. They also had some random bits of info in advance for their watch, because when I was initially watching it I wasn't at all thinking in terms of "this is a thing they may wind up watching" (they have much less interest in watching things in general than I do), so I'd been blithely telling them random stuff here and there before we got to the point of "perhaps scruloose will watch Canada's new national export after all". La? But they really enjoyed the show, which is the important thing. ^_^

I have worked. Uh. A lot. Over the past three weeks. o_o But now it's the weekend, and I don't currently have a rewrite to work on, and March Break lies ahead; the spring crunch isn't finished, but it's on hiatus for the week, and a normal workweek is a breath of fresh air at this point. (Also I'm taking a couple of days off during it.)

Yesterday work wrapped up early enough that I had an actual evening, so I was finally able to start Butterfly Effects, the fifteenth (!) InCryptid book. ("Finally" is a bit of a stretch, I guess, since it's still the release week, but this is a Sarah-narrated book. Mostly. SARAH.)

So my hopes for the weekend are pretty much: avoid napping (I don't find naps restorative and feel groggier after than before I started); finish reading Butterfly Effects; watch this week's The Pitt and hopefully the temporarily-streaming production of The Importance of Being Earnest with scruloose; get scruloose to redo my undercut; and (also with scruloose) do a second round of advance-prepping ten or so bags of the dry ingredients for my breakfast banana bread while also baking up a new batch of loaves. I think that last will also require decanting cinnamons from bags into jars, so maybe we'll manage a bit of other spice decanting/sorting while we're at it.