alicebentley

Yesterday I meant to start out the new year (yay solstice!) with posting about the book I was reading. OK, listening to, which I nowadays count as reading.

It's Mark of the Fool Vol 5, and I'm enjoying it and the rest of the series, but like so much of what I read these days I can't unconditionally recommend it. Written by J. M. Clark, narrated by Travis Baldree, this is firmly in the sub-genre of LitRPG, a category I didn't even know existed until last year. Good characters, reasonable world building, but it very much completely on purpose feels like watching your friend's Dungeons and Dragons game.

AND I was going to drop in a pic of the cover art, only to find that I'm unclear on how to grab that image off of my Pictures folder and drop it in here. And that it's much later than I thought it was, which explains why this minor task is challenging me. So instead of doubling down I'm going to launch with what's here and go to sleep. My 4:00am alarms and another 10 hours of running the ink jet printer await me!

My love affair with reading books started early, helped along no small bit by enthusiastic parents with a hodgepodge but large collection of books. The actual -amount- of books I read has varied wildly, impacted by work, activities, inclinations and supply.

I was reading very few books during the last handful of years of my bookstore, for instance. Just too busy/tired. And for a span of time after that, as if I'd lost the knack.

In previous decades acquiring a book always meant a paper copy to me. I'd nab the occasional ebook when that was extra convenient, but I really love the whole experience of holding a book, turning the pages, enjoying all the design choices the publisher makes to bring them into being. But as we all know, that leads to having thousands of books to provide habitat for, or potentially (shudder) move. So over the last half-dozen years I've been making a concerted effort to buy ebook variants, and gift or sell a bunch of the paper ones.

It's not the same experience, but it's easier on my aging eyes (thank you backlights and adjustable text sizes) and storage issues are much reduced.

A couple years ago my process at work changed. My day was filled with assembling models, sometimes ones I'd already done many times. The perfect environment to have an audiobook on headphones - especially if it's an audio version of a book I'd already read and didn't need to be completely immersed.

The books that really swayed me to this was Murderbot. I had already bought and read each of Martha Well's books as they came out, usually with a re-read of all the previous ones once a new one arrived. Kevin R. Free's audiobook was an unexpected delight, bringing me a way to revisit this favorite story while giving me a new view of the characters and events. And while still getting good work done!

After that I started binging audiobooks quite as badly as I've ever tucked into paper - and it's past time I wrote up more of these experiences. That's my big plan for more DreamWidth posting and I hope I will hold to it.

I'm often drawn to reading here, but rarely comment or (even more rarely) post. And I'd like to change that.

But I stutter to a stop trying to craft posts about work (surely only interesting to myself) or home dynamics (very stable, pleasant) or projects (haven't been doing gardening for more than a year).

This morning I realized that one activity I could easily spout out about is reading, which went from not very active, hardly more than a book a month or so, to three or four a week. The biggest instigator of that change is audiobooks, which I never really got into until last spring and The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I had read them all as hardcovers as they came out, but found that the audio adaptation read by Kevin R. Free bought a new level of enjoyment.

Changes at work also led to a better environment for listening to books - I might now spend as much as a third of my work day assembling models that I've become very familiar with, and can build swiftly and well without constant referral to Standard Operating Procedures.

Another audiobook series that prompted my listening change from "never" to "commonly" is Dungeon Crawler Carl, which had the perfect mix of entertaining, imaginative and, well, flighty - not something I have to pay close attention to - which lead to my binge-listening at every good opportunity.

It helps my budget that I make good use of the Libby app from the King County Library system - their selection is limited compared to the big audio suppliers, but there's enough to keep me busy and FREE is a very attractive price point. Better than free even, because I know the borrowing activity helps the library and the authors.

Today's audiobook, via Libby, is Babel by R. F. Kuang.

Twenty years ago, when we moved from Chicago to Vashon, we had too little time, and enough money, that instead of weeding our collection of books (and the remnants of the bookstore) we shipped everything here.
I estimate it was about 15,000 volumes.
In 2012 we were going through a rough patch, and just the thought of having to move with So Much Stuff was panic-inducing. So I started making runs to used book stores, getting tables at conventions where I priced everything to move move move ($1 each was common), and had probably dropped to about 4,000 or so books before I ran out of energy (and panic).
Nowadays we are much more likely to buy our new books as ebooks - and while there's a core of several hundred books I will likely always keep, I am ready to find new homes for much of what's here.

So I applied for a dealer table at Norwescon. It would be my first local outing since the pandemic started, but one gets fairly good distancing by staying behind a table, and I love the bookseller experience of connecting people with books.

But they turned me down.

Faced with listing them one by one on some For Sale site (bleh) I whined about this on FB, where some folks said they would be interested in seeing a list, and one local bookseller said he'd come take a look.

I'll get around to doing it, but that table would have been nice.

I still really love my job, but I can tell that the current batch of new-to-me responsibilities are taking a toll as last night, for the first time in memory, I had a series of nightmares. While they weren't straight out of examples from my day, I can see how they are related to the things that make me anxious at work.

Nothing to do for it but forge on forward and get the work done regardless.

I've said so many times that I'm going to try posting here more often, and then months pass.

But there's nothing like trying again!

In home-body news, At end of January I took a new position at work, moving from the manufacturing side to a Planners position, specifically for the Assembly group. This will mean a lot more computer time (my beloved spreadsheets!) and a lot more interacting with people. All upsides for me.
As of this week, I feel I've gotten on top of about 2/3 of the job, leaving a complex, critical meaty-center still to achieve. But I'm on the right road and think it will work out very well.

I am tempted and teased by the lure of social media, spending much enjoyable time cruising FaceBook, Twitter and Tumblr which give me a brief subset of what my friends and my people are doing. But I'm rarely driven to post, almost as rare to comment.

And I think I should be doing better than that. It's not that I have nothing at all going on - it's that I have trouble reducing my scattered thoughts to concise presentations. And I most especially have trouble producing well-spoken arguments to posts where I want to discuss or refute the OP.

I know the feeling well from in-person conversations. There are topics I have opinions and information about, but whether I want to chance engaging depends so very much on who else is part of the discussion. Some people I'm shy about revealing my ignorance to. (And yet it's such a good way to learn more.) Some people have set-in-stone opinions that I'm no longer interested in flailing against. (But shouldn't they experience at least an occasional flailing?) Posting on social media is the worst of both worlds, as you only somewhat know who your audience is, and have very limited ways to turn posts into conversations.

Much of what I start writing about becomes too inconsequential to share. (That outbuilding I am never going to construct as there are better, cheaper ways to get similar results. The bird-house business I invented for my MBA assignment that had all sorts of clever aspects, but no, I'm not planning on launching a new career to get it to exist.)

And then there are the topics that I *do* think there's some interest in, but I haven't found the right place to stage them, or cut the time into my life to produce them.

This post is me trying to get my head around the problem, and encourage myself to Find the right space, Make the time, and Do the thing. I recently dropped in hours at work (so that others with more need could have them) and I'm thinking now should be the perfect storm of influences to drive me to do this.

Now, is DreamWidth a place for this? I dunno.

After a week or so of being back at the house full time, I find I will need to push myself a bit more to use DreamWidth for posting, and that I still cruise through FaceBook and Tumblr perhaps more than is wise.

I still have towering stacks of boxes to sort through, now taking much more time than it did because all the low-hanging-fruit easy boxes have already been dealt with. Now it's down to stacks of magazines that I really still kind of like, but am unlikely to read through, and drawers and boxes full of office supplies that I am somewhat flummoxed on how to deal with. I mean, I know to gather all the binder clips together, and pile the various pens, pencils, markers and other writing elements to one side, but then what? And what about this sweet clear bendy ruler? Or these three slide rules? What to do with things that I still like that I don't really need is a question I expect to continue to grapple with - until I either find spots for everything or find peace with tossing it out.

I've done the LJ -> DW import, and will see if I do any better at posting here than I have at LJ or FB. History indicates Not Likely, but hey it's free to try.

One thing that reviewing my different accounts has underscored is that I don't remember all of my online friends anywhere near as well as I thought I would. I can understand that - it's been years, and with some of you we haven't had much engagement. Or I know a lot about your current lives, but can't remember how we met or what our relationship is between the two of us.

I'm not sure there a good way for me to reinforce those old, clearly insufficient memory tracks.

I safely arrived back on this damp green island on Monday night. And while I did post about it to FaceBook, updating DreamWidth seems to have passed me by.

It is both weird and wonderful to be back here. Yes, by far the highlight of the experience is living with my marvelous Mike again. But it's also been interesting how the house now gets compared in the back of my mind with the potential new places I checked out in Minneapolis. This house has larger rooms, larger windows, extensive woods for a backyard and (except for being a little colder than I prefer) is just objectively nicer than what I would have landed up choosing there.

I'm staying a little too busy unpacking boxes and rearranging rooms. Besides the very full car of things I moved from Minneapolis, much of which came from my mother-in-law's place in Chicago, the house itself had a lot of things either packed up in expectation of moving, or just shoved out of the way when we emptied the North half of the house in order to rent it out. So there is a ton of sorting, and deciding, and probable selling of stuff in addition to the effort of washing and painting the SouthEast room before moving things back into it. I haven't painted a room in decades, but I know the basic process hasn't changed at all.

And I suppose I better stop putting it off by cruising social media...