Syllabus #209

I'm not in the summertime habit of proclaiming, "What a week!" because time is largely irrelevant and I try to avoid stressful situations from late May to the beginning of August.  But, OOF, what a friggin' week.  Our house was like a sad Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial up until Friday afternoon.  Turns out that Frank's sweet little face and diminutive stature concealed a killer instinct.  He was a little too intent on trying to eat the cats, so we had to take him back to the animal shelter.  

The only animal that was blissfully unaffected by the tumult was Charlie, who enjoyed having a new butt to sniff for a few minutes before he proceeded with his usual routine of napping in a sunbeam all day.  The cats were terrified, stress-shedding, hiding, and even vomiting a little.  We never allowed Frank and the cats to actually make contact or injure one another, but it was a lot.  I felt horrible about all of it, and may have cried several times, but multiple old ladies tried to basically steal him from me at the shelter.  I should have started a bidding war.  I'm sure he didn't spend more than an hour or two back at the shelter, and he's already being spoiled by some nice retiree who snuggles with him while they watch General Hospital or whatever the hell is on daytime network television in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty three.

Summertime achievement unlocked

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A department of sidewalks?  Wouldn't that be grand!  

Shouting "I'M FARTING" to punctuate your statement is a varsity level debate technique.  

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Analog Reading:

I threw in the towel, for now, on The Best Minds.  There were a lot of passages that felt like uninteresting tangents to me, and my kindle checkout had expired and I couldn't download new library books without letting that one disappear.  I put it on hold again, and may finish reading the book the next time it's available, but I just wasn't enjoying it enough to justify slogging through it right now.

I devoured Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts.  I'm a sucker for plausible dystopias.

Now I'm reading Emma Straub's Modern Lovers.  It's like finally getting to eat a cool, crunchy salad on a sunny patio after a month of eating meat at potatoes in a dank basement.  It's nice to have some lighter fare for a change.  It's not a romance novel, as the title might imply, but rather a story about how our friendships evolve as we age, and what our friendships and romantic relationships mean to us at different stages of our lives.