Thoughts on being a Mom and everything else
We’re in the midst of Chanukah, the Winter Solstice has passed, and Christmas is right around the corner. Whatever you choose to celebrate – or not, as the case may be – have a safe and enjoyable time.
Here in the Chicago area, we’re experiencing our first winter storm, topping off the bare sprinkles of snow with the potential for several inches, followed by a temperature drop that will make clearing the snow unpleasant. It’s the price we pay for wanting a white Christmas, I suppose.
Advent calendars, Christmas crackers, chocolate coins for Chanukah, that delicious pork skin at the Noche Buena celebration after the whole pig has been cooking all day… there’s are so many delightful (and delicious!) traditions around the winter holidays. Last year, we learned about an Icelandic tradition of giving books on Christmas Eve, and pairing that with hot chocolate to curl up and read. In a house of bookworms, that was an easy tradition to adopt. In fact, we’ve expanded on the idea by exchanging book recommendations throughout the year, though Christmas Eve is the only one that’s expected to be acquired specifically for each person. (Book recommendations so far have either been already owned or available through the library.)
What favorite – or new – tradition are you looking forward to this year?
This year has certainly had its ups and downs. I had my first short story published in an anthology (and my second one, which I’ll tell you about soon), we returned to attending Capricon in person (though I apparently didn’t blog about it), we’ve continued attending live shows, and we even went to Florida where we stayed in neat places, did some touristy stuff, ate amazing food, and most importantly, saw friends.
We went to our first WorldCon! But caught Covid. And to DorkStock and WindyCon (sorry, didn’t blog about those either… suffice to say, they were fun). But WindyCon coincided with finding out the old fridge was dying, and the day the new fridge was delivered coincided with discovering that the slow decline of my tires was accelerated by a nail in one of them. (Oddly, this is the second nail in a tire I’ve had this year, since our rental car in Florida picked one up.) Not, fortunately, the type that causes a bang and sudden accident… the “bang” in this title is metaphorical.
With other stuff going on, we’ve been a bit busy, so I apologize… my holiday cards are going to be late.
Occasionally, we venture into Chicago to see a live performance somewhere other than the Paramount Theatre, and The Twenty-Sided Tavern has a level of geek appeal that most stage performances don’t: it’s essentially a role-playing adventure on stage. In fact, it includes some of the randomness of your average tabletop game… specifically, dice. Oh, and audience participation. There are no real spoilers, it’s improv with reactions to the dice and audience decisions, so each show will be different.
As you enter the theatre, after scanning your tickets, you are told to scan a QR code to access an important feature of the performance: the audience interaction. Your playbill includes a sticker which links you to one of the three character classes: fighter, mage, or rogue. Keep your phone out – you’re going to need it, and please do take photos, they said.
One of the first audience actions is to pick the character for their class between three offered characters. The results are displayed as the votes are still coming in, and you’ll see this functionality at various points throughout the show. You’ll also see the dice as they’re rolled, zoomed in on each character’s dice tray.
The cast clearly enjoys what they’re doing, though the photo above may be when two of them lost the rest of their hit points due to some overzealous audience participation. To be fair, the natural 20 rolled in the fiery skeletal giraffe’s favor a couple minutes earlier set the stage for that crisis.
Twenty-Sided Tavern is playing in Chicago through January 15th, so you still have a chance to see it!
My first clue something was wrong was the milk that started smelling sour on its purchase by date. I noted it, but sometimes that’s a fluke, a single bottle that progresses faster than normal.
My second clue was less subtle: a sticky spot by a cat food bowl and a gooey puddle nearby, on the freezer side of our old (still current) fridge/freezer. I opened the freezer and tracked the slimy substance upwards to a middle shelf, where a Ziploc bag of overripe bananas lay careless flung at an angle – apparently not properly sealed – and clearly defrosted. I bemoaned the loss of the future banana bread and composted them, then scurried to move whatever was salvageable to the garage’s full-size freezer that came with the house, wiping off banana goo as I found it.
We had plans, so I postponed shopping for a replacement to the following day, exploring several well-known companies that could potentially provide a replacement. I measured the space, multiple times. Then I measured the doors – the front door is slightly wider than the door to the garage, so we’ll plan on the fridge going in and out that way. We discussed styles and narrowed our options down before placing an order.
And now we wait, fortunately with a semi-functional fridge that looks surprisingly bare, stripped of all its magnets and decorations on the outside, and down to the bare minimum foodstuff that we haven’t finished on the inside. The new fridge/freezer (top/bottom this time), originally estimated to arrive the day before Thanksgiving, was delayed and shipped that day instead.
And we’re grateful to the helpers… the family member who offered to loan us a mini-fridge, and the neighbor who asked if we needed space in his. If the fridge had died completely, we certainly would have availed ourselves of the offered assistance.
I’ll keep it short this week. You may be shopping for holiday gifts already, and contemplating a charity gift drive or two as well. Please consider Transanta as a possible destination for some of those gifts; they send gifts to trans youth in need, safely and anonymously. Many of the stories are tragic, children rejected by their families simply for being themselves. You can peruse the bios at this link and click on the image to reach each person’s Amazon wishlist.
In true Midwest fashion, the weather has been all over the place this past month. We’re past our first and second frost, and my maple tree stands bare, yet I was able to pick a fresh strawberry yesterday afternoon. I haven’t drained my rain barrels yet, and there are a few branches still to trim before the final brush pickup of the season.
Today’s high was 76 (around 24 if you think in Celsius), and I took probably the last opportunity to walk out to the mailbox barefoot for this season… tomorrow’s forecast is promising a high of 40 (4.4 Celsius), followed by comparably cold weather into the foreseeable future. We have not, however, had snow yet, and I recall that my first Thanksgiving weekend in Illinois was sweatshirt weather, so it really could go either way at this point.
Either way, we are seeing beautiful sunrises and sunsets this time of year (OK, only one of us usually sees the sunrise), and look forward to those cold days in winter when we look out at the pawprints in the snow.
As United States citizens, we have few obligations, particularly since military service is optional. While voting is also optional, I would suggest that it, jury duty, and paying taxes (whether income, property, or sales) are part of our obligation as citizens in this democracy.
Midterm elections – scheduled for November 8, 2022 this year – are overlooked by some voters because they don’t usually include the hype that presidential elections do. This is a flaw in our process, every election matters. Our U.S. representatives are elected every two years, our senators every six (on a rotating schedule, so one-third of the Senate is running for office in any given election), and state and local officials are almost always on the ballot.
If you’re not sure what’s on the ballot for your location, you can look up a sample ballot on Ballotpedia, and your county website may also have one available. Once you have the names of candidates or issues on the ballot, you can research them using Ballotpedia’s information, Google, and other sources to ensure you have the necessary information when voting.
Go vote!
Anybody who has lived in a multilingual household knows that sometimes your brain decides to finish a sentence in a language that’s different from the one it started in. Sometimes it switches a single word, pero you never know until it comes out, and even then you may not notice because it happens so often. The world premiere of BULL: a love story, the last show in this inaugural season of the Paramount’s Bold series, captures this perfectly with a fully bilingual cast bouncing between English and Spanish. Opening weekend was perfectly timed for inclusion in the 5th Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival.
The story is set in Lakeview, a community within Chicago, back in 2005-2006, when our cell phones were still dumb. The main character, Bull, is just returning to Lakeview after a decade in prison and trying to reestablish his life, including building a relationship with his daughter who barely remembers him. As expected in live theatre, the story has its ups and downs, making you hope things turn out alright yet unsure until you reach the end which type of alright that will be.
It’s playing through November 20th, and the page that I linked to above has a promo code for discounted tickets. If you see it, let me know what you think.
No, I haven’t blogged about this book before, that was The Raven Spell, the first book in this series. In that post, I mentioned that the next book in the Conspiracy of Magic series by Luanne G. Smith was coming soon; it was as delightful as the first book, with a publication date of October 2022. This review was originally published in the August 2, 2022 issue of Booklist Online.
Stunned by her sister Mary’s sudden death at the end of The Raven Spell, Edwina Blackwood is forced to retreat from London when a stalker magically destroys her shop at the beginning of Luanne Smith’s The Raven Song. Even her departure from London is threatened when their train tickets are pickpocketed from her love interest, Ian Cameron, and they resort to the witches’ safe house and a magical train to reach Sir Henry’s Elvanfoot’s home in the north. Thinking themselves safe, Edwina and Ian relax as the witches and fair folk prepare for the Gathering, a celebration of Midsummer, and Edwina explores her increasing abilities with fewer restrictions than in London. As Ian investigates something sneaking through the veil between the mortal and fairy worlds, he finds increasingly disturbing connections between his work and Edwina’s stalker, and runs afoul of his employer who mistakenly thinks he’s hindering the fair folk. The surprises about both characters and the setting throughout this story will delight readers as Smith continues to skillfully play with folklore.