December 1, 2019 – Simple Tricks & Nonsense

Sunday Salon
Whew, November. The past two week have felt like some alternate universe of rain and no ultimate frisbee playing. I generally love the rain, especially here in overly sunny Arizona, but not when it floods the fields I rely on for exercise. So, things have been a bit disjointed around here. And then a four day weekend which has pretty much contained three Saturdays! I’m looking forward to Monday…

Reading

I had Nonfiction November plans which seemed to evaporate as soon as I made them. I ended up splitting the month between fiction and nonfiction. In November, I finished:

Ghostbuster’s Daughter by Violet Ramis Stiel
Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle – a reread
Columbine by Dave Cullen – I plan on posting about it later in the week.

One of the more interesting short stories I read in November was Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” As I’m going through my books of his complete works, I’m finding a lot of Poe stories that I’m not familiar with. “Ragged Mountain” combines one of his travelogue-style stories with a themes of mesmerism. I hadn’t realized Poe had written more on mesmerism than “Mesmeric Revelation” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” “Ragged Mountain” preceded both into publication.

Of course, I have a TBR for December!

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Well Met by Jen DeLuca – I don’t remember whose review I saw of this, but it sounds fun. Since some other true crime books will come off hold later in the month, this should be a nice palate cleanser.
War for the Oaks by Emma Bull – I enjoyed rereading The Last Unicorn chapter-a-day style in the morning, so I decided to continue the trend with this reread.
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg – And another reread from my college days that is also part of my morning routine.
Continuing my reading of Moby-Dick and Edgar Allan Poe

Movies/Television

We don’t go to the movies much, but I’m looking forward to seeing Knives Out in the near future. I’ve pretty much been a fan of director Rian Johnson since Brick (2005). I’m glad to see him back from Star Wars land.

Did I watch the three (four?) movies I ear-marked for November? I did not. But that won’t stop me from having a list for December:

Creed (2015)
Birdman (2014)
American Heist (2014)
The Beguiled (2017)

I also have The Alienist and season two of American Gods in the queue.

Music

R. E. M.’s Monster was a pretty big deal for me in college. The band just released a 25th anniversary edition remix. That kind of makes me feel old, but it’s definitely feeding into my college days nostalgia.

Other Stuff

I’d say I had fun with my project “fling” during NaNoWriMo, but honestly reading and writing about a 100 year old murder was rough going. I’ll come back to the project, I’m sure, but for now I’m going back to pure fiction. I’ll be working on Wicked Witch Retired for the foreseeable future.

Fall ultimate league finished a couple of weeks back. My team lost our first game. The second meant very little so we played mostly fun, beer-soaked points. Below it a picture from that game of me catching a hammer throw (an up-side down throw). It was a good throw and an easy catch.