Draginon

I finally got around to finishing House of Leaves. Interesting book but a very hard and infuriating read at times, enough that I would go a couple months inbetween chapters. The portions pertaining to The Navidson Record were fun to read, Zampano’s ramblings got way too academical at times that I would space out and skip sentences, Truant’s footnotes were a chore since they tended to be nonsensical ramblings and were way too run-on in the beginning to be fun. The letters by Truant’s mother were fun as well. TBH I’m not sure how an accurate movie of this would work since the different stories are very different style wise, tone and even font so maybe having multiple directors would help but the Zampanò ramblings would be cut since it would be so forced if included while Truant’s story would need to be a framing device while the letters… I don’t have a clue. I’m glad to be done so that I can finally get onto something else since I wanted to finish this book before starting something else. Not quite sure what’s next but I think I’ll head into my Brandon backlog.

Lord of Chaos is good, my only negative is that it’s the start of that dumb long summer plot that I hated reading during summer and needed a break from. Good luck finishing Monte Cristo in a reasonable time.

I did like the relationship between the lead and her eventual husband but the overall mystery is a dud for me. I like how her early stuff is random like this, since in her first decade she was still figuring out what worked for her, and I wanted more stuff with Anne after this but we do get Colonel Race again as an old friend of Poirot so this is connected to her main canon of work, unlike Tommy & Tuppence which are fun offshoots not connected at all. I’m not sure what to think of Race himself since he takes a weird role of being a good guy but also a suspect and red herring antagonist so I’m hoping his role is better defined when he’s next seen. I’ll also be glad to get back to a Poirot since I’m reading her stuff in publication order and I have another one off next before returning to ‘that pompous man’ that I enjoyed in that first book. Also interested to see what Marple is like when I get to her books, though I have heard she’s different in her first book so I’ll have to read and hope I like the real Marple when I get to her.

Got around to finishing The man in the Brown Suit. Didn’t really have much time to read thanks to plenty of late shifts and moving. This book was more espionage based compared to Christie’s other books but did start with a death. It eventually turns from ‘Who is the mysterious Man in the Brown Suit’ to ‘Who is the Evil Mastermind known as The Colonel’ and frankly I can’t tell you why the evil mastermind needed to be taken down. The people responsible for the earlier thread were dead and he was just an associate of theirs for the crime. It would be like Gaston dying halfway through Beauty and the Beast and focusing on bringing Lefou down. Going to take a brief break from Dame Christie to read something a little seasonal, House of Leaves. And yes I’m reading the full color edition.

Not bad, just a ‘why??!!’ moment. I had ordered something off Amazon and it arrived but it was the wrong item. The only option given to me was a refund, not even a replacement or sending me the correct item. Then I went to the store to get some iced tea and they were all out. I then went to grab something to eat and get tea there and they were out too.

Earlier I watched Six. It’s a great musical concert with a wonderful cast of women. Everyone in it was fantastic and did their own renditions on the songs. I was in a mezzanine box, so I was off to the side a little, but it was based off the discounted tickets available through work and these were the few good options I could get without going back of balcony seating.

Thank you! They’re Billy’s from IKEA. I wanted a contrast between the regular sized ones with the thin ones and having my Sanderson shelf be in the middle opposite the door made sense. I have another small bookshelf not showing in the picture that I’m going to put my comics/manga on. I’m hoping to be done with all this before Halloween since I got delayed thanks to my dad being a nuisance around the house. All the placements are in flux as well since I’ll find more of certain stuff that might need a different shelf to be on. I actually might get another shelf later but I’ll have to do delivery since my car is too small to pick it up and too heavy for me to lift without help. I can assemble it myself, it’s just hauling it is the problem.

Currently in the middle of rebuilding my library, and more importantly getting a better setup for a Sandershelf, and just from sorting I think I’m going to need a couple more shelves to be safe since I want to leave some empty space for growth purposes. In the picture the short shelf I’m planning on having be my Sandershelf with the wall space to hang my Bridge 4 poster and my Kickstarter goodies on top of the shelf. This is all work in progress since I’m mixing movies and books with this setup. So far I’m going to keep all Doctor Who stuff on one bookcase, all comics/manga together, all Marvel films together, etc. so it’s going to take me some time to finish this.

Not a bad day but just a ‘this coworker is being frustrating’ thing. This particular coworker acts like everyone, and I mean everyone, is giving too much ice cream away. I was trained that you fill up the cup and for cones have 3 swirls on top but she thinks that’s too much ice cream. She even gave a ‘demonstration’ on how much and she even said it was still too much. I could understand if it was just our area but every single venue that has ice cream? Heck the Harry Potter area has 4/5 swirls as their standard for cones and she was livid at that one. What made it worse is she thinks her standard applies to places not even owned by Universal itself like McDonald’s and Disney World. Theres another coworker and she always acts like a jerk. One venue it had been a few months since I was there for closing so I needed a moment to remember all the steps of what was needed and that was unreasonable for her. Heck I was squeegeeing the excess water towards a drain and she had a problem with that. When emptying the shake machine for cleaning she got on me for not getting big enough containers for the shakes even after telling her I got the biggest ones available.

Had a permanent address all lined up and the inspection came back showing there was at least $6000 of mold repair, a new AC needed & a water heater as well. My sister was the one keeping in contact with the realtor since my hours are unpredictable, I might have a 8-5 shift one day but a 1-9 the next, and she decided to cancel the contract so now I’m meeting with the realtor on my day off to look at a couple more places. I loved how that place looked and I’m just tired of being in flux like this and just want to have a home to call my own. I’m hoping the new ones lined up look nice otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Wasn’t sure where to post this. Last month my mother had found out she had stage 4 cancer. She was put into the hospital a couple weeks ago after fluid got into her lungs and they discovered that the cancer wasn’t on the lungs like they thought but inside them and eating it away. They put her on morphine last night to ease her out of the pain and she passed away at 3AM. My sister and dad are both there taking care of the arrangements to get her cremated and get rid of some of her stuff we won’t need now. I’m not there because I’m halfway across the country and work at a theme park so I can’t just drop by and be there without letting my supervisors know. One thing my sister wants us to do is go on a Disney Cruise and scatter the ashes at Disney’s private island but I did the research to see how legal it is and, unless you contact the cruise beforehand to make an arrangement, you could get into big legal trouble, as in banned for life if caught. I really don’t want to do something that could get us into trouble at that level. People caught scattering ashes at the theme parks get lifetime bans and I don’t want to get banned from something I love. I even told them over the phone when they told me she passed and my sister didn’t care about doing it properly and legally. It’s going to raise some red flags if they see ashes coming aboard but none leaving since they screen the bags before and after and it would be morbid to be carrying ashes in a carry on bag. I didn’t love my mother at all by the end, she was a toxic person who mentally and emotionally abused me, but even I don’t think breaking the rules is worth doing that just to give her a final resting place. I’m also trying to figure out when we could even go to do something like this. Do it at Christmas? Around her birthday? Just a random Tuesday? I’m just torn over what to do in this situation at the moment.

Finished Murder on the Links yesterday. Not as golf centric as the title implies since the body was only found on the golf course. Its actually kind of amusing how much of a romantic Poirot is since he can look at two people and instantly tell they like each other and tells Hastings to ‘back off’ from the girl, not that it helps since Hastings is a Casanova falling in love with every ‘goddess’ he sees. Even this book has Poirot help Hastings get together with his future wife by the end. It’s just amusing since Poirot is such a rational person and doesn’t like getting into sentimentality at all. So in essence Poirot is all ‘get your mind out of that gutter and focus’ but when he sees it’s true, innocent love he’s a wingman! Next up is The Man in the Brown Suit which is a stand alone since the characters don’t become regulars like Poirot, Marple or Tommy & Tuppence.

Finally got around to watching Encanto and for all the praise I heard about it it was pretty average. I know, pretty controversial but I just want to be honest here. I liked the message it was going for, that family isn’t perfect and the generational toxicity aspect of it, but overall it’s not something I would place in my top 20 favorite Disney Animated Canon films (only the official ones from the animation studio so forget about the Pixar films here). Moana felt like a much more relatable film and character compared to Mirabel. I don’t hate Mirabel, she’s just unremarkable for a Disney heroine. In terms of songs they feel very forgettable unfortunately. I can remember the melodies of all the songs from Disney’s previous films, even if it’s just the instrumental version, but I barely remember what any of the songs sound like besides some of We Don’t Talk About Bruno. People praised Surface Pressure and I can’t even remember how it sounds barely half an hour later. I guess my point in the end is the film feels like lip service and an attempt to be diverse on a surface level only. Another way to put it is that when I see any new Disney film for the first time it’s all I can think about all day long, Moana and both Frozen films did that, but Encanto is one of the few that didn’t do that for me. Others that didn’t do it for me were Winnie the Pooh (the newer one not the 70’s classic) and Wreck-It Ralph 2. Heck if I only think about only the current era of Disney that started with Princess and the Frog (film 49) through Encanto (film 60) and compare it to the previous renaissance era of The Little Mermaid (film 28) through Lilo & Stitch (film 42) Encanto feels on the same level as Dinosaur (film 39) and during that era Dinosaur was the oddball film of the group and Encanto definitely feels like the oddball for me in this new group of films, especially if I don’t count the canon sequel films as their own film and just the second part of their initial film, which means we might be seeing the beginning of the end of the Neo-Renaissance era for Disney and might be heading into another Dark/Dork Age era soon.

Finally got around to finishing Dame Christie’s The Secret Adversary. I’ve mostly been reading on the shuttle ride at work, usually one chapter each ride, but I got terribly sick during the middle so I needed to take care of myself first so I only just finished it. It was a pretty good mystery, though it’s categorized more as a spy thriller. I had kept going back and forth on who the perp was and I was down to two heading towards the climax and one of the two was correct. Supposedly the perp is one of those ‘you’ll never even guess’ suspects but I had him on my list halfway through after one key person ended up dead and he was one of only three people there so it had to be one of them. Onto the next Christie book, Murder on the Links