kiwiria: (Books: Warm Books)
[personal profile] kiwiria
Due to my summer vacation, I never got around to posting my books for August, so instead you get two months for the price of one!!

Plus an additional read from July, as I couldn't post the review back then ;-) I had the pleasure of being offered the chance to do an alpha read of a book written by a friend of mine, and absolutely LOVED it! It was published last month, so I can finally write about it!!!


A Home in Percival - Paula K. Berman, 4/5, 285 pages
A really sweet and charming story about finding friends and getting settled in a new place :) I love love love descriptions of setting a house to rights and making it your own, so this was right up my aisle.

This is cozy fantasy at its best. No real conflicts, no real crises - just people being people. It is definitely character-driven rather than plot-driven, but as long as I like the characters, that's never bothered me :-D

And at the end of the day I picked up the book at every opportunity I got, and feel almost book hungover now that I've finished. I will definitely need a physical copy of it at some point.


6 Books for August )

4 Books for September )

Books Read: 64
Pages Read: 11,859
Hours Listened To: 290
Book of the Month: The Enchanted Greenhouse - such a delightful read!
Biggest Disappointment: Probably A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. It wasn't bad - I had just expected better.

The Government Shutdown and Me

Sep. 30th, 2025 08:26 pm
rebelsheart: (Waltz)
[personal profile] rebelsheart
There will almost certainly be a shutdown of the US government tonight. In about 90 minutes.

I work for them.

At the start of the day, I did not know if I would be declared critical/exempt (work and get paid), excepted (work, get paid when the shutdown ends), or furloughed (don’t work, get paid when the shutdown ends.) I had a guess as to which.

And I was right... with a caveat.

I am excepted, but weird excepted because of the specific nature of my work.

I support group X, but I am employed by group Y. Group X has a special situation for funding and they are not immediately impacted by a potential shutdown. If the shutdown lasts longer than X's funding, my status gets reevaluated.

Yay.

hold queue madness

Sep. 30th, 2025 09:09 pm
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
I have two library cards, for the metro library and the local library. Lately I've been using the metro library more often, but the local library has a nice feature where you can request holds for a later date. So I had been letting my queue there grow and pushing the activation date further and further back...

... until I forgot to log in and defer the holds again this week. Oops!

Since having 50-plus books checked out at once is a bit much even for me, I am having to do triage as the holds arrive. And I feel really embarrassed to have created so much extra work for the lovely people who work there.

But at least I'll have a mostly clean slate after this?

checking in

Sep. 25th, 2025 11:05 pm
kareila: (sketchy)
[personal profile] kareila
September is almost over and I don't know that I have all that much to show for it, although I have stayed busy.

Progress on the old house continues, but not as quickly as one would hope. We had to switch from homeowners' insurance to renters' insurance since the building is unoccupied, and the property tax exemption is about to expire. But the trim replacement on all of the first floor windows that we decided was necessary (and long overdue) is just about done, and I finally finished removing all the trimmed branches from the back yard. (That was rate-limited to the two trash bags per week that would fit in with the rest of our garbage, because the city discontinued their yard waste pickup service.)

Symphony chorus rehearsals started back up a couple of weeks ago. I did get permission from the chorus manager to sing with the altos for the Beethoven Ninth, which I requested for two reasons: one, to save my voice from all the high A's, and two, to give me something to LEARN in a season that consists mostly of the Ninth, the Messiah, and Carmina Burana, all of which I have sung multiple times - as a soprano.

But actually, we do also get to perform a new thing, or so I found out this week. It's called "A Time for Jubilee" and the composer is Nkeiru Okoye, a black woman only a few years older than I am. That's scheduled for the end of February.

Connor is still feeling positive about school. He had his first CS exam on Tuesday and his first big English assignment was due today. The only class he doesn't seem to be thrilled with is his "introduction to student life" seminar, which is understandable. So far I haven't had to sit around campus waiting on him for more than a couple of hours at a time.

I have one more book to go before I'm caught up on the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I've also finally started the Earthsea books, and I'm rereading the sixth Old Man's War book to refresh my memory before getting the newest one, which I'm hoping will arrive at the library next week.

The baseball season ends on Sunday and the Red Sox still haven't locked up a wild card spot for the playoffs. It's going to be a chaotic weekend in the American League for every contender except Seattle. As for the Dodgers, they clinched the NL West today and their pitching rotation is finally in good shape, although their bullpen is still looking shaky. But I'd love to see them manage to pull off the World Series repeat, if only to give people one less reason to talk about the Yankees.

Question thread #144

Sep. 21st, 2025 03:34 pm
pauamma: Cartooney crab wearing hot pink and acid green facemask holding drink with straw (Default)
[personal profile] pauamma posting in [site community profile] dw_dev
It's past time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

April 2024

S M T W T F S
 123456
78 910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags