Summer comes early, but there’s no rain in sight.

Wow, things are just crazy right now. While Winter was quite chilly, there was little rain - which we desperately need - and by the time August rolled around, well, the temperatures shot up. It was almost as if the last week or so of July was Spring, and then… BOOM! Summer, baby! I’m completely over it.

Which leads me to the next item in my “things be crazy” list. Water. Yes, that life giving liquid that everyone needs to live. It seems like I’m out. That’s correct. My tank runneth dry. It has been my biggest stressor over the last few days since I discovered that I had but mere inches left in the water tank. That facilitated a phone call to a recommended water carrier who was happy to schedule a delivery for 2000 gallons - for the Friday, 13th October! Honestly, the demand for water at the moment is unreal. We haven’t had any decent rain for nearly 7+weeks, and even then it only filled the one tank to about 2/3 full. Then yesterday I went out to the tank to check, and thanks to a blocked toilet over the weekend, my tank is down about an inch or two of water. So today, Monday, I called the water carriers early to see if I could get any leftover water from a delivery that didn’t use the full water tank’s worth, and nope. But I could go on the wait list for a cancelled order - with 40 other customers. It just isn’t my week for this shit.

So that leaves me with a few bottles of bought water until I can go into town next (where I can hopefully but a few 10L bottles) and eeking out what little water I can scrape together from other sources. There is a small tank on a stand at the back of the house, but I only used that for the plants so I’m not game to drink that, but it will be fine for flushing the toilet. So if anyone does read this, keep your fingers crossed for me as it’s going to be a bumpy 11 days until delivery. On the plus side, I’m shuffling along pretty well. I still get very fatigued and the brain fog is no joke at times, but my achilles tendon has settled down to the best it’s been in years, so I’ll take this as a small victory in the face of having limited bathing opportunities for the next week. 

Now, onto the reading front. I’ve been fairly restrained over the last couple of weeks on the book buying front. There has not been a huge amount of books that have caught my eye, but some of the ones that did are well and truly out of my price range. I just can’t get over the economy at the moment. Prices are ridiculous on all consumption fronts. A mass market paperback should not cost $20+, and I’m completely pissed off at the meteoric rise in food prices and petrol. I bought petrol last Friday and it was $2/L (or over $7.55 per gallon). Anyway, rant tangent aside, although I haven’t been buying up big on the book front, I have been reading some interesting books. I’ve gone off the fantasy books at the moment, and have had a real desire to dive into some Urban Fantasy, as well as some Paranormal Cosy Mysteries. So I’ve been rereading some old favourites as well as trying some new recommendations. Once I get through my current KU reads I might go back through my finished books and put together a recommendations list… yes?

So that brings me to right now as I come to the end of this post. I’m rather sporadic in my uploading, and I’m still on the hunt for an affordable replacement laptop, or desktop, so that I can get back into filming some videos for BookTube. Until then, I’ll leave you here. I need to start closing off some of the windows and curtains on the back of the house so that I don’t get roasted as the sun starts to scorch the back of the house in an hour or so.  So, it’s goodbye from me, and until I see you next time,

Getting Back Into The Saddle

Okay then.  Let’s see long I remember to do this ;D

It’s been a rather weird week.  I cleaned as much as my creaky body could stand last week because on Friday my mum and her sister came for a visit for the first time in months. That was fine, it wasn’t too bad - until Friday when I sat on a hard chair while we had a rather scrummy lunch at our local pub. That set off my lower back, but unfortunately I had forgotten that I still had to start my mum’s mower (mine was having a time out at the local repair place) so they could show me how to get it going. Big mistake. The awkward pulling position, plus the low handles really chucked a spanner in the works. I spent Saturday with back spasms around the waist area, and it has only slightly improved since then. I’m using my Nurofen frequently, and if I didn’t have to do other things I might have considered cracking open the Panadine Forte for this.

But physical health aside, I was able to enjoy quite a few rereads - as well as discovering that one of my favourite shows has finally made it’s streaming debut on a platform I use! On the book front, I’m rereading the Kitty Underhay Mystery series by Helena Dixon. It’s an engrossing cosy mystery series set back in the 1930s. The characters are fun, and I just adore the setting of the Dolphin Hotel. A great series to curl up with on a chilly winters day. Then I made the mistake of starting to watch the remakes of Blithe Spirit and Rebecca yesterday and OMG, what a train wreck those are. I love the originals of both movies, plus the book/play, and I can’t believe how they screwed them up! So, I ordered the 80th anniversary edition of Rebecca (it was on special, and I couldn’t find my paperback) which should arrive by the end of the week *fingers crossed* for a reread. Thankfully I didn’t have to shell out anything for Blithe Spirit because when I moved my massive bookcase last week I remember tucking the small blue paperback of Blithe Spirit onto the shelf so I must dig that out (and my old dvd of the Rex Harrison adaptation) as a palate cleanser. The remake characters were not only totally over the top and cliched. It was truly a shock to watch these actors striving to recapture the magic of Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, Kay Hammond and Constance Cummings and completely missing the mark! If you can’t improve on the original, then don’t touch it! Which then led me back down the rabbit hole that is YT as I searched for old videos I’d watched years ago as members of the booktube community ripped these to shreds - and rightly so. I honestly miss the days when Hollywood actually had original content and wasn’t full of shitty remakes, reboots or crappy sequels that nobody asked for *sigh*.

So that has been my week in a nutshell. Nothing exciting, just day to day life. Hopefully when I can get my butt organised and get a new desktop/laptop so I can start venturing back into making my little bookish videos. I do miss that interaction. And on that note, it’s late (for me) and my eyelids are just about dragging on the floor. So it’s goodnight, and until I see you next time,

My, how the time flies!

Well, isn’t this a weird feeling.  It has been so long since I’ve posted anything on this blog that I really don’t know where to begin.  It’s been nearly three and a half years since I the spicy flu started, and while a lot of people took to YouTube, social media, blogs or other sites to make connections and feel like they were still a part of the world, I retreated into my own little sphere. I isolated with a vengeance (even thought Covid barely reached my neck of the woods for quite some time), and fell into my home library, Netflix/Stan/Amazon Prime, and the ever comforting BookTube. I just couldn’t deal with all the outside ‘noise’ that was just bombarding me in the form of the ever present Covid updates on the tv, the worldwide tracking of the pandemic, and watching idiots going to extremes to deny Covid was a thing, and paying for it with their lives, and the lives of the others that they infected.

So, my house became my fortress from the outside stresses. And while you would think that might mean that I joined to millions who decided to throw themselves into home renovations and other lifelong projects that they just hadn’t gotten around to starting, my happy little arse just noped out of all that and I retreated into my books and the normality I could still find there. No covid, no pandemic - avoided rereading The Stand by Stephen King for this very reason - and that is how I kept my sanity during these very trying and strange times. Thankfully neither my mother, my aunt, nor myself had to deal with the spicy flu, but I can tell you that the vaccine kicked my arse. My first shot was okay until it wasn’t. Thankfully I’d asked my mum to come up for a few days just in case. I ended up with a large red reaction at the injection site, plus I had a doozy of a fever for about 36-48 hours. Then I just felt like crap for the remainder of the week. Then about 4 months later (I think) I hauled my butt in for shot 2. Again, my mum came up to stay with me as my arm felt horrible, and I got a worse red reaction on my arm where the nurse jabbed me. The fever was worse. I felt miserable for longer, and took longer to feel better. However, it was  the 3rd shot that really drove home that I just wasn’t having the usual reaction to this vaccine nonsense.

As it happened, when I went to go in for that third vaccine (booster) and then waiting the required 30 minutes before leaving the drs surgery I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to like what was in store for me.  My arm felt a bit off during the 15 minute drive home, and by that afternoon the fever was already kicking in. I was a sweaty mess for the next three days, and not only that, I had a bigger reaction at the injection site. My arm was not only red where the nice lady had stuck me with the needle, but I had a secondary reaction on my inner bicep with a nice little lump under it, but my lymph gland under my arm had a lovely big lump, and to add insult to injury I also had a lymph reaction in my right armpit too! But it didn’t stop there, no, I also ended up with freaking chronic fatigue. Now I had chronic fatigue as a 12 year old and was told it might come back later in my life, but I certainly didn’t expect the freaking vaccine to resurrect it! So, after about three weeks of feeling miserable thanks to the fever and the lymph glands being all swollen and tender, it was now the chronic fatigue that was kicking my butt.

So, here we are. It’s now almost 16 months since my third shot, and I am staying away from the 4th shot for the moment as I really do not want to endure any more worsening symptoms. I still am wary of being in the wide world after three years of diligently avoiding crowds and only going to town when I needed to shop or keep an appointment. My outlook on life in general has changed, and while I was pretty introverted before, I can honestly say that if my local Woolworths would have delivered to my address during the pandemic, I would avoid going into town as much as possible.

But, alas, that is where I fell down the Amazon rabbit hole. With everything either being shut during the quarantines we had in Australia, or businesses being shut in general (or the shortages that resulted from the shutdowns worldwide), Amazon became a comfort resource. They were selling books for ridiculously cheap prices - especially during the first 12 months - that I honestly bought more books than I needed and could have filled a big bookcase or two with all the stuff I bought. My reasoning at the time was basically “they’re cheap, and I want to read them one day”. Ah, yes. The famous ‘one day’. This led me to acquiring more books, and it became a little addicting to rock up to the post office nearly every day and walk out with a parcel - or 5! - full of all the books that I could find cheap that took my fancy. I found so many great books for as little as $2.84 (I think that was one of my Modern Library editions). I filled shelves with all the classics I could get my hands on. Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Classics Deluxe, Vintage Red Spine classics, Modern Library editions, and all for less than $8 a book. Sadly, the days of Amazon almost giving them away has disappeared. Now books are becoming so expensive that I will wait for months, checking the prices periodically, until I find a sale and then I strike. However, even that is becoming a rare thing as the pricers continue to soar.

Anyway, that is a rant for another post. I have no idea if anyone will even read this, but I feel like it is slightly cathartic to finally start getting my thoughts out into a post. Perhaps this is a sign that I might feel like getting back to filming and posting some bookish content back on YouTube… 🤷🏻‍♀️  Oh well, if you read this, than thank you for making it through to the end of this weird little snapshot of my thoughts on the covid years. I wish I could say that the worst was behind us, but I heard a rumbling about a new variant that originated in the US that has apparently been in Australia since April… it seems to be never-ending at this point. But it doesn’t do me any good to dwell on all the negative things, so here’s hoping that this to shall pass. 

In the meantime, here’s a cute cat pic to soothe the soul ;-D