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Tag: reading

If I followed the stats…

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Then yesterday was a dog shit day for viewership/readership numbers. Interesting. I still have no clear idea what “brings all the boys to the yard” as it were, but I certainly didn’t have whatever “It” is in yesterday’s post. Though I will say this, on the whole a post with at least one photo usually does ok, for me, that is. But that photo is usually placed within the post, and not a cover image (unless it’s a short story). Yeah – so I have no idea what turns people’s heads or makes them sit up and take notice. I don’t intend to try and formulate a metric of things to tick off in order to garner more readers though. That sounds like it would suck all of the fun out of the process. Chasing stats has never, ever been fun. Talk about turning something fun into an Excel Spreadsheet time vampire of dreariness. Shoot from the hip, keep it loose, and aim at the broad side of whatever barn you like.

We took a brief family car ride to the Richmond Hill Go station last evening for their Halloween light show. It was pretty good. Tuned in to a radio station for spooky music. Had a photo op station with candy for the kids. And one ticket let’s you drive through twice. Which we did. It was about 30 minutes of lights, music & fun. A great time. Also if you search Facebook you can find codes for 50% off the ticket price. So a bargain! Here’s a few images from the event.

I have the kids at an indoor play park (masked obvs) and we’ll be here for at least an hour, possibly two if I can help it. Tire the kids out, and get our money’s worth from the entrance fee. Laugh out loud to the rescue on a cool, rain soaked Saturday morning. I even have some time to myself to both read and do some writing. Also answer the kids questions when they run on by to check in. Life is good, even if the quality of my writing isn’t.

I also broke down and ordered myself some air brush paints for my baked bust sculpts. I am currently working through a bust of Hellboy. Trying to take my time with this one. I have two very svelte looking Walnut bases I am looking to display with a quality hand made item on top. Once the clear coat went on the other day the Walnut absolutely just POPPED! Bam! So, I want to display them front & centre. Also I shaped them on the lathe, so I’d like to highlight that feature as well, once they are completely finished. I was going to do a copy of this Don Lemon bronze Viking bust I love, but then the red sculpey was shouting for Hellboy instead. I can’t fault it, red is red. Do someone red with the red stuff, not rocket science.

If you are wondering what I am reading, it is “Shards of Earth” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m little more than 100 pages in, and it seems pretty good. Aliens, war, destruction, abject fear. It’s all there. I bought the second book too. That’ll be four of his books I’ve read this year. Next year the last book of the Portiid series comes out, so I’ll nab that one too once released.

I think that keeps us all up to date. The rains have started up again, so I’m going to go back to reading & watching my kids get dizzy on a mini tea cup ride inside the park. Ciao Bella!

Here, on Route 66, we talk about Bruno-no-no-no.

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Have you ever done the route 66 drive from Nevada through Arizona to get to the Grand Canyon, talk about a whole lot of nothing. I get where Radiator Springs got its art direction from, because in mid August it was all a ghost town. Oh and the asphalt melts and ruins your tires in the heat, so there’s that to look forward to. What a waste of time that was. I think we stopped for gas at one point and it felt like The Hills Have Eyes out there. One Yike! Awarded. Zero stars do not reccomend. Grand Canyon on the other hand, giant hole in the ground. Absolutely lovely. Managed to capture some incredible photos. Which isn’t hard because of the scale and the depth of field in your photos. No fog banks to ruin your visit. My wife went to Machu Pichu in Peru many, many years ago, and did that hill climb and the fog was so thick she couldn’t see anything. Had to go back the next day, climb it all over again to get a photo that had any depth to it.

So Encanto is making the rounds at our house these days, out performing Moana, Frozen and Frozen Two by an order of magnitude. I must just be getting old as I find the sound mixing on the dialogue to be dog shit. I have to turn on the closed captioning, because it’s all just a thick mumble to me. I am, to be honest, hard of hearing from childhood, so that plays a role, I’m sure. But come on! Why have the music blaring, if people talk in a growled mumble even in childrens movies. The people are animated, shouldn’t they talk animatedly (not cartoonish but excitedly and with Em-pha-sis) enunciate more for those of us in the back. Probably why theater folks don’t do movies, they talk to reach the back of the room, which was how I was taught. So the moody, growler gets lost in my ear.

I’m a big fan of Luisa and her song, it’s a real banger. They all have lovely songs. Didn’t realize Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99! Was Mirabel. It’s rather lovely, if hard to follow because I can’t hear Abuela talk at the beginning, and through other parts of the film. A good time had by all otherwise.

We just had another 9 or 10 inches of snow after yesterday’s rains. We lost power at 2:00am on Thursday morning and didn’t get it back until just before 5:00pm, so that was fun. School cancelled due to inclement weather, and a portion of our town, us included with no power for nearly 15 hrs. It was a day. Kids took it well considering. But the fireplace came to our rescue yet again, so glad we put that in when we renovated nearly a decade ago. Well worth the footprint it takes up in the room. So I have spent another seventy five minutes shoveling snow again today. Next year, my Christmas/birthday present to myself will be a new to me, used snowblower. I broke my favourite shovel this morning, so I’m without proper tools if we get even more this month or next. Gah! Sick of the snow by now. It was eight degrees above zero yesterday, and kinda nice (even if rainy) and now we are twenty degrees or more colder today, plus the bitter wind chill.

Need to rest my shoulder, and I hope to start a new chapter in my ongoing series today. Still dealing with the loss of my Expanse series.

I keep thinking I want to read the grapes of wrath, which I opted not to read in high school, because I read of mice and men, and the odyssey and the iliad instead. I think I might have missed out on something there. It’s not what I usually read (science fiction or fantasy) but I think it has something to say that I want to hear. One thing I did do when I was out of Artschool and went to university, was I went to the campus book store and found all the sci-fi that was part of a Lit course, bought and read those when I found my Business admin or Sociology texts too dry. Although the abnormal behaviour Sociology stuff was entertaining and enriching. I found De Bono’s six hats to be kind of a pseudo science take on common sense. But whatever. There was considerable overlap between the two subjects. Time studies on manufacturing factors heavily in both streams. So I could use texts for one stream as sources for papers in the other. Less reading for info, more sci-fi reading for fun! Go me!

Reading a whole novel series aloud.

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Was both one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It took me just shy of a year and a half. I read the entire seven book Harry Potter series to my eldest daughter once she showed me she could pay attention long enough to make the exercise worthwhile. We started book one by reading half a chapter at a time, doing voices and dramatic pauses, sounding less like Alan Rickman as Snape and more like Will I am Shat tner. We read the first book three times in a row before she was comfortable enough to move on to book two, which we read twice. My throat took a real hit reading out loud every single day. Once the shit downs hit, and school went on line, we would read chapters throughout the day as well. We did that right up until this summer when we finally completed the whole series, and moved on to Percy Jackson, which was ok, but nowhere near as entertaining. We have yet to finish the fifth and final book of the series. Not sure if the payoff will be worth it. The whole point was to spend time together doing something fun, and imparting a life long love of reading and storytelling. I know that I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I hope to some day read The Lord of the Rings to both kids. Then we can watch and enjoy the films together as well. Or I’ll enjoy it and they’ll tolerate it and move on which is fine to. I show them the thing of interest, and they can choose to enjoy it or find something else that interests them instead. I want them to like this stuff, but I don’t expect them to love it or become obsessed with it. I just want to be the one to offer it up to them, I don’t care if they don’t want to wrap themselves around it like I did as a preteen/child. I just want to introduce them to stuff I like so we can share it for a bit, as a fun experience and then let it go. If they adopt it – great, if not, at least we shared it for that brief moment in time.

The books I was able to read in 2021*

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Some of these titles came out well before 2021, and I also ended up reading all seven of the Harry Potter® books out loud to my eldest daughter this year, but I’d read those myself when they came out back in the early 2000’s, so I won’t count them here, but that took up much of my mental capacity to read this year.

The selection of books that I read for pleasure this year (2021).

The two Fart Quest books were meant to be read to my daughter so that we could think about starting up some short D&D sessions now that I had built a bunch of terrain panels (pictured inset). But I enjoyed them immensely and didn’t feel like sharing yet. Plus the text is still a little above her reading comprehension level so perhaps next year! I have the third book on order, which was initially scheduled for September, but has been bumped to February of 2022. Chasing New Horizons was an amazing retelling of the Pluto missions, and I was riveted throughout the whole book. The pictures are incredible as well. Black Star Renegades was a fun romp in a Star Wars adjacent sand box. Project Hail Mary was a clever and entertaining entry from The Martian’s Andy Weir, which still proves to be one of my all time favourite books, alongside Jurassic Park, and the Death of Superman novelization. Martha Wells has a fantastic short story series in the Murder Bot Diaries, with the newest installment called Fugitive Telemetry. I had heard a number of people talk about The Forever War, and I can see why, it was pretty good, although a whole lot of current science fiction has leaned heavily on this book, so if I’d have read it much earlier in my formative years, I think it would pack a heck of a wallop. Mars Rover Curiosity was pretty much a text book, which means it was dry, but also informative. A trade off for certain, but, worthy of a read if you love space exploration and drones. The Goblin Emperor was a slow burn, but still exciting and very interesting. It is probably the most off the beaten path for me from this years selection of reading, but I really did enjoy the palace/royal intrigue elements. Out of nowhere comes the last on the list Troll Fell, which was a quickly paced story of rural viking woes, and trolls, and gold & treasure.

As I mentioned earlier I have the third Fart Quest book on order for early 2022, and I also have the last installment of The Expanse, book #9 to read after Christmas. There is a Shiflett brothers sculpting book that was supposed to arrive in November, but hasn’t shipped yet, due to supply/shipping issues with paper coming out of the USA.

I hope you’ve all managed to find the time to read great books of any length. I used to be such a length of novel snob, but since I wrote a book of short stories myself in 2020, which I published in March of this year, I am far more attentive to the story itself rather than the page count.

Available now!

The Company – A series of interconnected space short stories: Varied works of short fiction
by Amazon.com.ca, Inc.
Learn more: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B091JB3MG7/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_QDBT1TWRPV4H7DVBX3JZ