Remember November
As usual, it's a new month on the calendar and I am surprised that time is moving so swiftly. I'm really feeling ready for the seasonal slowing down of the end of autumn and approach of winter. We're still having gorgeous weather here - met a pal for a warm beverage today and had a lovely chat while sitting on the adirondacks at town center. And ran into another pal while procuring the beverage! Small town life is 100% my speed and I am lucky to live where I do. Despite the world being a shit show in many ways, at least there are friends and fall leaves and warm beverages and making art and, and, and. I remind myself that having gratitude for the good things in life gives me energy to fight the wrong and bad things in the ways available to me. I hope you are able to find some of that energy!
One of my books in October was Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. I knew I would love it, because I have yet to read a book by this author that I didn't enthusiastically enjoy. And it features not only a meta-novel but also robots in a future world - right up my alley! It turned out to be even better than I expected, with a pleasing twist that delighted me. Highly recommended, check it out!
Recent weeks also brought the return of Richard Osman's House of Games (entire episodes are viewable on youtube for those of us not in the UK). This half-hour general knowledge trivia show is perfect for watching on lunch hour and while there are some questions I have zero hope of knowing the answers to (snooker and football trivia in particular), it's really fun to play along at home. Recommended!
Did you see the news that an update is coming for Animal Crossing: New Horizons?! I was quite surprised and am looking forward to getting back into this game. Animal Crossing has been my favorite videogame ever since my pal Moses was visiting and brought his GameCube to my place back in the early 2000s (when he and the console left, I immediately found a gently used one - now that Animal Crossing had entered my life, I could not live without it!). It's been ages since I visited my ACNH island and I'm sure the villagers are going to be cross when I return, but there's no way around that. I'm looking forward to seeing how the update changes things - hopefully it will be a refresh that pulls me back in.
And it wouldn't be me if I didn't talk about They Might Be Giants again, eh? My favorite band since the early 90s and still making such good music today. Their backlist is incredible - so many albums, so many songs! I was thinking about one song in particular recently: A track from 2004, I'm All You Can Think About, is essentially a curse or a hex. I have trouble believing in things like that, but I do believe in putting out into the world what you want to see. And this is a good song. John Linnell has a number of songs to his credit that fit into this mini-genre. The ear-worminess of the tracks makes them even more effective as hexes!
