NyQuil seems to be doing this weird thing where I’m waking up every hour or so. I fall back asleep almost immediately, so it’s not terrible, but odd. I haven’t had this reaction to NyQuil before, but I haven’t taken it in years, and I’m wondering if it’s some kind of interaction with the ADHD meds I’m on these days. Hm.
Anyway. Reading this morning — I’m in the midst of two books, Karen Fowler’s _Booth_ and Charlie Jane Anders‘s _Victories Greater than Death_.
I have no intrinsic interest in John Wilkes Booth, but I’ve loved every single book Karen’s written, so I figured I’d probably love this, and it’s beautifully done of course, but also bleak (with cruelly-treated children and slaves), and sometimes I don’t feel up to coping with bleak.
So I started the Anders too, which is YA, and it’s fast-paced and somewhat stressful in its emotional intensity, but it isn’t bleak, and there’s a lot of charm, as you’d expect from Anders, so I think it’s working pretty well as reading balance.
It’s week 5 of the semester, and I still am not really adjusted to the schedule I have this fall, where I don’t teach anything until 3 p.m. I mean, it’s great, my mornings are much more relaxed (time to read!), even when I have morning Zoom meetings, since I don’t have to be anywhere. But it’s also just odd; I’ve never had workdays like this before. I’ll probably adapt to it just before the semester ends, and then I’ll be back to a more typical schedule. Ah well!
Plans for today include more reading, exercise, e-mail, writing, cleaning, cooking a beef and potato curry for dinner tonight, maybe cooking some seeni sambol too, prep for class, teaching, and then watching TV with Kevin in the evening. We’re finally caught up on both HotD and RoP and Lower Decks, so we’re probably going to go back to either Moon Knight or Abbott Elementary, depending on our moods.
Photo: wild snakeroot, I think, in one of the little vases Anand made in pottery class this summer, with velvet pumpkin. It’s been too hot for me to want to garden, but that should end on Wednesday, and then I expect to have a lot more gardening in my life again.
I probably should hire someone to come in and do work in late summer, because I just don’t enjoy gardening in the heat, and so I don’t do it mostly, and the garden gets even more junglee than I want it to be. It’s going to be some work to hack it back.
Also, our house is being eaten by vines, and I need to figure out how I’m supposed to deal with that. Or we can just surrender to the vines. That’s an option. At least the raccoons seem to have moved on. We think.
(I don’t mind raccoons as neighbors in theory, but when they dig giant holes in our roof hastening the need for a new roof, they become less desirable neighbors, I’m afraid.)