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  Four of the ten novels I read in April.

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  Right, "Oceanic," the way to get me to read your novelette is to begin with a discussion of religion. One where a teen who's just converted to a more fundamentalist form is trying to get his tween brother to do the same. So religion, proselytizing, pressure. Yeah, I no longer care what interesting scifi stuff you may have in the background, I'm out.

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  Epub-split a couple of collections. It's cruel to list a story in the Copyrights page, then not put it in the collection. Just caused me needless confusion for fifteen minutes trying to see what I'd missed.

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  Me: Alexa, tell #SomaFM to play The Dark Zone. Alexa: Opening "The Dark Zone: An Adventure Racing Podcast." It's early dementia, I tell you.

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  I found my grandmother's mint-green milk-glass bowl. It went missing some time ago, and I had no idea where. Turns out when I air-popped some popcorn, it was too much for the big white bowl, so I'd put the overflow in the green bowl to offer to my father. Fine. Except when he was done, he didn't put it on the deal-with-this corner of his kitchen island. He'd just put it on a bookshelf in the den, and later put a newspaper flyer on top of it, hiding it from me. Only found it when...

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  ◍◍◍◍◍ 1632 and Beyond #4 (4 ss) ⁓March 2024⁓ Three Ring of Fire Tales plus a Ship People one. ●●●○○ Fire on the Mountain ⁓ Bjorn Hasseler There's a fire in the student dorm blocks on Calvert Hill. Floods of refugees meant there were over 5000 students at Grantville High. That meant there was also young love, accidental pregnancy, and parents who wildly overreact. ●●○○○ A Knight’s Tale — Therapies ⁓ Edith Wild Teens Amalia and Maggie are having cookies after school when gunfire breaks out....

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  Another doctor's appointment — isn't getting old fun? — and this time there's a sign by the receptionist's window, saying that staff will be masked when interacting with patients. 3 nurses + 2 receptionists + 1 doctor = 0 masks. The sign also requested that patients mask. I saw four other patients, none of them masked. It is to sigh. #WearAMask #CovidIsNotOver

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  The yard remains covered in the tiny tulip-shaped things from the tree. I've looked online to see what they are, but I don't know the proper terms to find an answer. #trees

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  The annoyance of brushing your teeth and having the rechargeable battery in your slimline electric toothbrush die mid-task, forcing you to finish manually, like some caveman… 🪥

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  Forgive me, Mother Nature, for I have laughed at an AI music video where Harcourt Fenton Mudd — backed by a whole lotta Stellas — sings about how she's Completely Unavoidable. #StarTrek

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  The ebook I'm reading just got shorter. Halfway through there was a formatting error where the font size didn't reset to normal after a section of enlarged text. After adjusting the book settings to counteract that, it dropped from 1300 screens remaining to 700 pages left.

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  ●●○○○ Beyond a Swim - Stan Muir (ss) 2021 Joeline got up very early in order to drive to her nudist club, the better to be able to get in some laps in the swimming pool before anyone else showed up. Which is why she was annoyed when a man jumped in and also began swimming laps. Joeline wasn't thrilled when Jim and Tammy later tried to set her up Matthew, the man who interrupted her quiet swimming. Joeline was still recovering from her mastectomy and breast reconstruction, and while being a...

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  In the Ring of Fire novel Letters from Gronow, Philip Fröhlich was a legal clerk trying to become a horror writer (inspired by the translated works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and the like appearing in Der Schwarze Kater [The Black Cat]). He had to watch his budget, so he kept a journal of his expenses, with most days looking like:   28 March 1635 Wednesday   Breakfast — 1 cup morning broth 1 pfennig 1 wheat roll 3 pfennigs   Supper — 1 sausage 2 pfennigs 1 m...

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  Back to the same doctor as last week. But where last week's visit was in and out, this time there was a 35-minute wait until I got in to see the doctor. And it was a busier day, with a dozen patients in the waiting room, none masked. #CovidIsNotOver There's still the sign saying staff is required to be masked. I went into the bowels of the busy building for my test, encountering a lot of people. Compliance was bad: 2 receptionists + 10 nurses + 3 doctors = 1 mask Exactly one nurse ha...

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  Tony's traveling companion had promised — lamented, really — that he would be regaled with libidinous entertainment in the djinn palace. It might have been impressive to a native of this alternate dimension where the Arabian Nights were real. “To a citizen of the United States, accustomed to a nineteen dollar radio for music, TV girly shows and the Radio City Music Hall as seen from a dollar-forty seat, practically any bathing beach in summer, and an occasional burlesque s...

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  I put the space heater away last week. It had been a couple of weeks since the furnace's "fresh-air" system had sucked in smoke from the neighbor's fireplace. So what just happened when the furnace kicked on? Yes. So now my throat itches and I have a sudden headache, and I've had to turn the furnace way down, close my heating vent, put my air filter on high, and drag out the electric heater. Bleeping caveman neighbor and his polluting fire.

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  Blood test today. No other patients there, so nobody not wearing a mask. And the sole blood tech there was wearing a mask, which is practically unheard of these days. A red letter day. #WearAMask #CovidIsNotOver