It has been A Month, but there’s a faint light on the horizon: I’m on vacation!!! (I have done nothing to deserve a vacation, but if we all waited around for the vacation we deserved we’d never get a break.) By “vacation,” of course, I mean a staycation, because I’m going to be spending this week cleaning and organizing my apartment like I should’ve been doing for the last two months. I’m also hoping I’ll start putting my money where my mouth is and actually cooking for myself instead of relying on frozen foods and take-out. It’ll be wild. And now, having said that, I feel obligated to admit that I did pick up sushi on Friday to celebrate the start of my vacation, but that was a one-time fluke.
I love Wegman’s, but their gyoza is one thing I don’t really recommend.
June Reading Stats
Books Finished:
- The Testaments – Margaret Atwood
- A Storm of Swords – George R.R. Martin
- The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
- The Water Dancer – Ta-Nehisi Coates
- All Who Go Do Not Return – Shulem Deen
- The Heart Goes Last – Margaret Atwood
Total Pages Read: 2,907
Most beloved June read: All Who Go Do Not Return. Most disappointing June read: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which will be dissected in great detail at some point in the near future, so I won’t go into it here.
Most notable June read, which is only notable because it was literally the one Margaret Atwood novel I had never read: The Heart Goes Last. I didn’t love it, so I suppose we could also label it the Most Saddest June Read. I will always love Margaret Atwood, but this book really didn’t do it for me. The characters were annoying, the story was shockingly predictable, and I didn’t like the ending. I particularly disliked Stan, who was and is a total ass. Not that I especially liked Charmaine, but she can do so much better. This one got three stars out of me, and I will likely not be reading it again.
Currently Reading
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
I wasn’t planning to read this one because I read The Buried Giant back in 2019 and was not wildly impressed, but my mom loved Klara, so I decided to give Ishiguro another try. I’m only on page 15 so it’s too soon to decide how I feel about it, but it’s interesting and I’m hopeful. (As a side note, I got this book out of the library and found that the library will straight up tell you exactly how much money you’re saving by borrowing instead of buying. It’s great. I’ve borrowed from this library before, but this is the first time I’ve read the receipt, and it’s got me wondering if all my other receipts are similarly informative.)
Death Note
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
I randomly started thinking about Death Note the other day, which is why I now have the complete series on DVD. This was a college favorite, so the nostalgia factor is high, and I’ve started rereading the manga alongside rewatching the anime. And I cannot tell a lie: if I resented the way the female characters were treated as a college student, I absolutely hate it as an extremely bitter adult. I like the series overall, but this is one hurdle I’ve never been able to clear, because the female characters suck. Naomi Misora is the only truly intelligent female character but she’s killed off almost immediately and also I hate her relationship with Raye, but I suppose that’s an issue for another post. I do remember Wedy being cool, but she’s not in the story yet, so I’m not counting her. You don’t go into Death Note expecting feminism, though, so I’m trying to overlook this.
Miscellaneous Apartment News
I have a table!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned during this whole moving process, it’s that I have very little furniture of my own because in all my other apartments I’ve lived with a roommate and all of the common area furniture came from her. Then I moved back to my parents’ house, and, since I had no reason to buy furniture, I didn’t. Moving out on my own was a bit of a shock because you don’t really realize how much you rely on furniture until you don’t have it. I had a bed, a desk, a TV cart, and a few small tables, and that was it. Luckily I was able to get my hands on an affordable couch and dining set, and now I don’t have to eat standing up at the counter anymore. Also apparently I have more downstairs neighbors than I thought, whose existence I only learned of when one of them came out to yell at the table delivery team because it was too early for furniture delivery. I’ll admit it was barely 7:30, but the team was in and out in under 15 minutes and I didn’t set the delivery time, so I can’t say I’m sorry.
In other furniture-related news, I also now have a rolling coffee table! It cost less than $18 and took about 20 minutes to put together, and would probably have taken less if my fine-motor skills were just a little bit better.
And here’s what I’ll most likely be using it for.
I wasn’t originally looking for a table with wheels, but I’m glad I got one because this thing is seriously adorable. I especially appreciate its two shelves. The other tables I was looking at were single-level.
In full transparency, my little cart is actually $39, but I got it for under $18 because of the bookcase delivery debacle I had back in May. The bookcase arrived in one piece, but the delivery person was supposed to carry it into the apartment for me, and they instead left it on the porch after knocking on the wrong door. They later claimed they had tried to call me, but I had my phone on me during the entire delivery window, and I call bullshit. They’d texted me to let me know they were en route, so it didn’t occur to me that I might need to tell them to text me when they got here. In the end I called Ikea to ask for a partial refund of the delivery fee, and Ikea, instead of putting the money back on my credit card like I thought they would, sent me a gift card, which arrived a little over a month after it was supposed to. I was mildly annoyed but then I realized I needed a little coffee table and then I realized I could get one with wheels, and I have now forgiven Ikea for absolutely everything. (As for the bookcase, one of the apartment management team happened to be showing the apartment across the hall while I was tearing out my hair down on the porch, and I was able to nab him when he came downstairs. He is literally the only reason I was not found crushed between the steps and the bookcase box. Not everyone is so lucky.)
Lessons learned: Don’t rely on Ikea delivery, or something. I guess. At least make sure you have someone with you in case they goof up.
