Here’s something disgusting that I never needed to know but now do: too much gum will wreck your GI system. To be perfectly frank, I wish I still didn’t know that, but it’s been a month for finding out. I almost never buy gum and I also almost never have it lying around the house, but on the rare occasions that I do, I have a bad habit of chewing through it like a beaver until it’s gone because, I don’t know, nature abhors a full gum package and so do I? Anyway, I picked up a couple of packs on a whim and did my usual beaver thing but started getting severe unacceptable tummy problems that very evening after not even half a pack and I thought I was coming down with norovirus again and long story short I’m blaming it on the gum. I didn’t used to have problems with excessive gum-chewing. I hate everything.
Anyway, I still don’t have a job, but I’ve still managed to treat myself a bit. From left to right:
- Mocha art at DUA DC Coffee
- Indonesian beef rissole and empanadas from DUA
- DUA cheese and onion empanada, my new favorite snack
- Two chocolate croissants and a bacon gruyère pastry picked up on my first trip to my local Roggenart which I had no idea existed until recently even though I’ve lived here for three years, and my Taco Bell DoorDash because I was finishing 1984 that night and I needed something to cheer me up
- The bacon gruyère pastry by itself; it was divine
- Shopping haul from Target (yes I am ashamed but I needed cleaning supplies and we’re back on the Target embargo now) and Wegmans (not ashamed of this one)
- My old spice rack
- The new spice rack I just bought at Target even though I only went in for tub cleaners because I’m trash and I somehow ended up in the kitchen aisle
Despite the treats, I’m moderately proud of myself. I’ve been using my time more productively since the beginning of the year – not to the extent that I would like, but baby steps. My greatest accomplishment this month was buckling down on my bag collection because this is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody should have this many bags. This isn’t even the full collection.
Not all of the bags made it into the sale pile, but I managed to cut the collection down by at least 3/4, and that is a tremendous achievement. I’ve been fairly diligent about listing them on Poshmark, and have even managed to sell a few of them as of this writing. I also went through my collection of never-worn earrings, which I amassed during a very confused period in my early twenties, and sold about half of them to Plato’s Closet for a surprising amount. The rest unfortunately were unsaleable, at least to Plato’s, but I did manage to read enough of 1984 while I was waiting that I felt pretty good about finishing it that same day.
My other greatest accomplishment: creating comprehensive inventories of my bag and book collections, because if we’re honest they’re probably the most expensive things in my apartment and the greatest contributors to whatever net worth I have. Also I just really love making spreadsheets and lists, so this was time well spent.
I actually did have a book inventory database on Notion, but I got seized by a fit of data-related paranoid insanity, which told me I’d better move that inventory to Excel because Notion does tend to have a lot of stability issues, at least if the neverending bug/fix emails can be believed, and I don’t want to wake up one morning to find that my entire database has been wiped. It’s fun being me. :’)
February Reading Stats
Books Finished:
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling
- Foul Lady Fortune – Chloe Gong
- 1984 – George Orwell
- Twilight Falls – Juneau Black
- Cat + Gamer 7 – Wataru Nadatani
- The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne Collins
Total Pages Read: 1,882
I had originally thought to make 1984 one of my resistance reads for the Pocket Books Shop Five by Five in 2025 challenge, but that challenge died a hard death when I realized I don’t have as many hours in the day as I always think I do. I’d still encourage others to try it, but I had to withdraw because I just don’t have the time.
Highlight of the reading month: forgetting that Cat + Gamer was due for a new volume, because it was a real surprise when it turned up in the mail, lol.
This series just keeps getting cuter and cuter. I wish there could be more than eight volumes, but alas. It’s a real pity the next volume will be the final installment.
As far as the other books go, Foul Lady Fortune made a LOT more sense upon reread, and I am pleased to have finally knocked her off my review list. Prisoner of Azkaban was mostly delightful; Twilight Falls was superb; 1984 was exactly as depressing as advertised; and Ballad, as always, was a solid three-star read that made me want a meatloaf sandwich so badly that I am attempting my first meatloaf tonight. Results will be out in next month’s reading summary. Wish me luck, I’ve never made a meatloaf before. ._.
I’m excited for this coming month, at least in terms of this blog, because – aside from Foul Lady – all of the reviews I’ve been posting this year were written for books I read last year. But after I publish Chamber of Secrets next week, I’ll finally get to start posting the books I’ve actually read this year, starting with The Wild Robot (Peter Brown). I’m also looking forward to the mid-March release of Sunrise on the Reaping (Suzanne Collins), for whose sake I reread Ballad in the first place even though I’d already reread it at the end of last year. (Look, that was different: last year I read it on my Kindle and this year I want to reread the entire series in hard copy, starting with Ballad and ending with Mockingjay. It’s on my series TBR and everything.)
In other reading news, here’s six words I never thought I’d say: I left my Kindle Facebook group. This is partly because the group is far more smut-heavy than I originally realized and that gets irritating fast if you’re not a smutty person, which I am not. I got tired of seeing smutty recs and especially tired of seeing smutty excerpts that were so poorly censored that I wonder why they even bothered, and overall I would say my personal tastes do not align with about 99% of the group. The other problem was one very specific person who appears to be perennially short of reading material and unwilling to open Google for themselves. They were amusing for a couple of posts, but their regular demands for recommendations got tiresome fast, especially as they’re not actually part of the group. I don’t even know them and I already find them exhausting, and I got sick of seeing their posts in my feed, because after a while it felt like that was all I was seeing. We might as well have been tossing our recommendations into a pit for all the good they seem to have done. (lol, I say that like I actually offered any recommendations. I would have the first time, but I didn’t know any books of the kind they were looking for.) But since this is obviously my problem and not a problem with the group or with anyone in it, this was an extremely easy fix. I wish all problems were so easily resolved.
Currently Reading
Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No progress this month. It kinda comes and goes.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
J.K. Rowling
Current rating: 4.25 stars, ish. The Harry Potter reread continues, and I wish I didn’t know that the writing goes sharply downhill in this book. As with PoA, the Kindle page numbers are infuriating, with the result that the Kindle book purports to have a mere 301 pages even though we all know that’s a bald-faced lie. There is something tremendously disappointing about picking up a book that huge and being told it only has 301 pages.
On the bright side, I am at least disappointed in style, because it finally occurred to me that I could conserve my stickers by putting them into Soboro’s clear case.
Birthday Festivities
All By Myself
I actually love being all by myself. Since my birthday fell on a Wednesday this year, I went nowhere and did basically nothing, though I somehow still felt the pre-holiday pressure to do as much as I possibly could (i.e., applying to jobs or something similar, I honestly have no idea what I did on the Monday and Tuesday beforehand because I wipe my to-do lists at the end of every week which is starting to seem like an oversight). This year I had the first white birthday I can ever remember having and it was magical even if the snow didn’t last.
I’m not sure what I normally do on my birthdays, come to think of it, but this year I decided birthdays were meant for playing the dumbest PS3 game ever made and listening to PoA on audio. I also indulged in Chef Boyardee (guilty pleasure lemme alone) for lunch, ordered my favorite Indian takeout for dinner, and baked myself an oatmeal cake because I happened to have a partial container of oats that needed to get used up. This is what happens when you don’t check your pantry before you go to the store. You end up with extra tubes of oatmeal. HOWEVER, that embarrassing extra tube turned out to have exactly the amount that I needed, so all in all it was a pretty good birthday.
With Family
I have been driving past this restaurant for years and have never once set foot inside and it seemed high time, so we paid it a visit and had a great time. Everything was delicious and I’m sad that my leftover short rib and risotto are gone, but the standouts were probably the fried green tomatoes topped with giant chunks of crab meat, and the fried oysters. Also pictured: the butter balls I stole from the restaurant because I have always been the kind of person who steals butter balls from a restaurant, even when I had a job. Three of those butter balls got tossed into the mac ‘n cheese I made on Thursday night. I have zero regrets.
After dinner we watched Men in Tights and had cake at my apartment with an extremely disgruntled cat, and I ended up spilling the entire plot of Mirror Mirror, from which my brother not unreasonably concluded that Bianca had both gaslit and Stockholm Syndrome’d the rock dwarves. Which, now that he’s said it, I can’t unsee it.
With Friends
Heather and Michaella came over the day after the family dinner for our traditional joint bday potluck and damn was the cat unhappy. She is by nature solitary and mostly independent, though she does appear to enjoy and even seek out my company, and two rounds of guests in as many days was just too much for her. She is normally quite friendly with Heather and Michaella, but this party was the straw that broke the kitty’s temper, and she made her displeasure plain. (To which I say buck up buttercup, we don’t entertain that often.)
Anyway, we played some games but as usual broke all the rules, and we had a good potluck. Those strawberry yogurt pretzels brought by Michaella are my new favorite snack, and I am going to have to see if I can buy them somewhere other than Costco. As well as the stir-fried chicken and bok choy, I made a spinach and tofu soup which normally is supposed to use Shepherd’s Purse which I could’ve sworn I had but all I could find in the freezer was a bag of spinach. Welp, needs must and spinach is a perfectly fine substitute for Shepherd’s Purse, so at the very least I was able to clear the spinach out of the freezer. I also had a tub of my family’s strengthening soup (supercharged chicken stock that has surprising healing properties), so that went into the soup because we must keep our friends healthy, and, since I had spare egg yolks left over from the egg white drizzle, I added omelet shreds as a garnish. The soup was fine, but next time I need to add more salt.
The best game of the party was the Animal Crossing Monopoly Michaella gave me, and I am shocked that I do not have pictures of it. Must’ve been too busy breaking the rules to allow us to play until the bank went broke. Fortunately, I did manage to get a picture of the book sponges Heather gave me, which I will never use for any purpose other than display because they’re too precious to waste I mean LOOK AT THEM ;_;
February Noms
In order from left to right: stir-fried chicken with bok choy and lap cheong, made as a test run before the bday potluck; yaki udon, served with a little visitor, who probably smelled the bonito flakes on top; random late-night ramen with chili oil because I’m only human; and ginisang pechay, a Filipino bok choy dish of which I am extremely fond. Currently kicking myself for only making a half recipe because I finished the leftovers yesterday. I’m doing fairly well with my freezer contents, but I still have a handful of frozen pork baggies that need to get used up. I might have to toss the pork belly into another udon.
Circe’s Corner
I appear to have adopted a vampire.
A vampire who likes desk chairs.
A vampire who puts her paws in the air like she just doesn’t care and ACTIVELY PULLS APART MY BOOKMARKS, AAAAAAARGH. THIS BITCH GOT ANOTHER ONE OF MY BOOKMARK TASSELS AND SHE LEFT IT ON TOP OF THE BOOK LIKE A SERIAL KILLER SHE IS GOING TO THE KITTY ORPHANAGEEEEEEEEE >:(
I even noted last month that she was working on this specific bookmark, literally why didn’t I listen to myself. I will be addressing her from henceforth exclusively as Circe Destroyer of Bookmarks.
