Month: September 2020

It’s Wednesday & I have an ashy eye

Okay, I’m going to get into the ashy eye story in a minute, but also I just want you to know that I got a COVID test after flying across the country, and it is negative. So…whew.

But, yes, I have an ashy eye.

So I discovered this ashy eye issue the day I was packing/prepping to fly across the country. My eye had been bothering me since Thursday. It kept watering for no reason, which honestly happens to me quite a bit, but I thought it was just allergies. You know, a fire was raging, and debris was flying through the air, so it seemed logical. But that night I couldn’t sleep with my eye mask on because it felt like something was stabbing me in the eye.

Then, on Friday, my eye was still bothering me. It was still with the leaking and all, but I could smell smoke in my house, so, again, I just banked on allergies. Also, my daughter told me I looked like I had gotten punched in the eye because my eye was swollen. “Yes,” I told her. “It’s the allergies.”

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F is for Flight #PandemicAlphabet

I decided to leave California.

If you’ve been following the news, you know the wildfires are very intense there, and the air quality is terrible. The one closest to me–the Bobcat Fire–caused smoke bad enough that several friends of mine in a neighboring city were put under an evacuation warning last Wednesday night, and my job closed the campus last Thursday. Because I am an idiot (no, really this time), even after getting the alert that my job (which is down the street from my house) was closed because of extremely poor air quality, I still attempted to go to the pool. I wound up lasting all of ten minutes before I started coughing because, you know, the smoke was so bad. Oh, and Thursday night, my city was also put under an evacuation warning, though it was for the northern part of the city closer to the mountains.

On Thursday night, I finally packed my evacuation bag.

On Friday morning, I could smell the smoke in my apartment, so immediately ordered an air purifier on Amazon to be delivered the next day (they were sold out locally).

By Friday afternoon, I had booked a plane ticket for Sunday to Tennessee with plans to stay there for two weeks and then to drive to Florida and stay for two to three more weeks. My return flight is currently booked for five weeks from now.

Here’s what got me to decide to leave:

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5 Books I Wanted to Nominate for My Book Club’s Middle Grade Mystery Theme & the One I Did

So my book club is doing middle grade mysteries for October, and unfortunately, I can only nominate one book. One! This is sad for me because I have a lot of books that I could recommend because I want the people in my book club to read and/or talk about them. Just for context (do I need more context?), after I taught the detective literature course at my school last fall, I said my dream would be to teach the class again and focus solely on middle grade capers or puzzle books. (I was sick of all the murdering and violence in the adult literature.) The point is that this topic lives close to my heart. 

So, anyway, here are all the books I wanted to nominate for my book club to read and the one I did wind up nominating in the end.

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It’s Tuesday & I watched some movies

Also, I guess I should confess that the new block editor for WordPress isn’t that terrible. I think last time I either got sent to some incomplete version of the editor OR I just was not in the headspace to deal with the change. Or a combo platter. Either one. The point is that it’s not that bad now. Is that because I am very enamored of the star rating block? Maybe. But also I have written/drafted my last few posts with the new blocks and haven’t wanted to throw my computer across the room, so.

But you’re here for the movies! So let’s get into them.

The Old Guard (Netflix), Work It (Netflix), and Mulan (Disney+)
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Book Review: The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Look, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a well-written book with beautiful language, but my rating/review is probably (mostly?) more about WHEN I am reading it than the book itself.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates



The truth is this is a book club pick and if it were up to me, it is not what I would be reading. I have also read a lot (A LOT) of slave narratives and books about slavery. If I were new to the books about the slave experience game, I might feel differently about it.

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