Well, lately, I sleep til 8-9am, out walking/biking by 10-11. Generally 2ish is the earliest that I am finished with the morning walk/bike ride, chores, showering, and lunching. I was up to practicing guitar & singing 3-4 hours a day. Some reading. I've started doing crossword puzzles again. If I'm cooking, I generally start 6-6:30. After supper, more reading, then lately 2-3 hours of TV/movies. starting 10ish. Finished bingeing "Lucifer" - surprisingly fun, although at times as trite as you would expect of a multi-year series. Then binged the end of "Vikings". Next up "The Expanse".
I've decided I'm only going to binge things. I still have 1/2 a season of "Peter Gunn" to watch and harvest jazz standards from. But Amazon has decided to start charging me $0.99/episode, which seems like too much for 1/2 hour episodes. Oh well, only like 15 to go, when I'm done working up the 60-70 songs currently in the queue and need more I'll cough up the dough.
I had an abfab couple of weeks Jan 16-29: my youngest daughter visited me here in Naples, FL with her husband and 3 sons aged 6, 3, and 1 YO. They were going to stay a week, I told them early on they could stay as long as they wanted, so they stayed an extra week. Her husband worked remote Mon-Fri, and the 6 YO did remote classwork Mon-Fri. They went to the beach 4x, the IslandWalk pool 3x, Vineyards Community Park splash park 2x, a nice walk in a rookery (alligators!), and on their last day the very nice little Naples zoo (more alligators! - and dozens of Lego animals?!?!?).
It was great getting to cook 9 days in a row. Normally I cook 2 nights in a row, 4 servings a night (or sometimes only 2 of protein), so I then eat (alternating) leftovers for the next 6 days. Their last night in Naples we ordered out for pizza; the 2 nights before that my son-in-law acquited himself most excellently in the kitchen, making fish tacos the 1st night and chicken kabobs with homemade tzatziki sauce the 2nd night.
My daughter (and her sons) worked a 300 piece jigsaw puzzle, and she started a 1000 piecer, and left it for me. So I've been spending some time on that too.
Well, not like it really matters. I am in my 9th year of being gloriously and happily retired, FTW!
1st book read: "Fleet Elements", by Walter Jon Williams, 2020, 454 pages, 123k words. The 2nd book in the 2nd trilogy in the Praxis meta-series, which also includes 2-3 short stories. Williams' writing is like an old friend to me. Good space battles, I guess. More plot regarding our star-crossed lovers. Slightly annoying cliff-hanger ending.
2nd book read: "Machine", by Elizabeth Bear, 2020, 495 pages. The 2nd book in her new "White Space" series. I was really psyched by the 1st book in this series, which seemed to have appointed itself the successor to Iain Banks' Culture series. So I was excited to get this 1. I don't think it is as good as the 1st, but still a page-turner. Characters include humans, aliens, and AIs, what's not to like?
3rd book read: "Perfidia", by James Ellroy, 2014, 705 pages, 204k words. This is the 1st book of "The Second L.A. Quartet" by Ellroy. I read several of his books decades ago, and have watched "L.A. Confidential" a few times. I think I got the 2nd book of the new quartet ("This Storm") on sale at Bookbub, and bought this 1 when I realized this fact. Ellroy considers himself the king of True Crime, there's plenty of that. The book starts the day before Pearl Harbor, after which things get pretty crazy in L.A. Most of the characters are cops or informants. Everyone stops sleeping, instead working all the time, doing drugs, and having sex with movie stars. I really wondered about that. Are Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the public domain? Don't they have descendants or estates who might take exception to their being protrayed as lascivious individuals? Somewhat off-putting to me. I think I'm kind of over this genre, I think it will be a while before I read the 2nd one.
4th book read: "Some of the Best of Tor.com: 2020 Edition", various authors, 2020, 789 pages, 214k words. Tor publishes new stories online, a few a month, and at the end of the year creates a compilation of the best 30 or so stories and publishes them as a free eBook - yay! Generally a pretty good collection, and this year is no exception. This year's collection seems to skew heavily towards fantasy and horror, with very little science fiction. The collection was not as totally dominated by LGBTQA stories as I expected.
I totally forgot to clear the magazine stack in January, so I need to get that and February next.
No comments:
Post a Comment