2023 Reading Challenge

I'm in a couple of virtual book clubs. One is Austen-related. The other is a local(ish) group managed by a shirt-tail relative of one of my friends. Here is this year's challenge:

1. Nonfiction book you know nothing about.

2. Book on New York Times bestseller list.

3. Book with a day of the week or month title.

4. Book with a person's name in the title.

5. Another read from an author you discovered.

6. Book that includes a map.

7. Book set in the 1990's.

8. Recommendation from a family member or BFF.

9. Book with Fate, Dream, Wish, Silver, or Dance in title.

10. Book set during summer.

11. Book with a number in the title.

12. Cozy mystery.

In other news, I'm keeping up with my January challenge for Zentangle and also with my Tangle A Day calendar. Knitting has been minimal but not non-existent this month. Thanks to all of the mountain cedar pollen, I'm using my inhaler every four hours and going through a little over one box of Puffs with lotion per week. I'm still dealing with intermittent food aversion, wherein I fix something that I know I like, take a few bites of it, and am suddenly done. I'm generally able to go back and polish off the leftovers within a day or two, but it's still more than a little unnerving.

That's all I've got for you today.

Books read in 2022

I've taken all of the books from the sidebar and copied them here to archive them.

1. 101 Things You Didn't Know about Jane Austen 3.5 stars

2. Magpie Murders 4.0 stars

3. Manga Classics: Sense and Sensibility 4.0 stars

4. The Mysteries of Udolpho (incredibly long audiobook) 2.5 - 3 stars

5. Atlas of the Heart (audiobook) 5.0 stars

6. When the Body Says NO: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection 4.5 stars

7. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (audiobook) 5.0 stars

8. I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust: A Memoir of Autism and Hope (audiobook) 5.0 stars

9. French Braid (audiobook) 5.0 stars

10. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books 4.0 stars

11. From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (audiobook) 5.0 stars

12. Vivid (Kindle) 5.0 stars

13. The Library of the Unwritten (vol. 1 in the Hell's Library series) - a re-read in preparation for vol. 2 - 5.0 stars

14. The Archive of the Forgotten (vol 2 in the Hell's Library series) 5.0 stars

15. The God of Lost Words (vol. 3 in the Hell's Library series) 5.0 stars

16. The Believer (Kindle) 4.75 stars

17. Jane Eyre (audiobook + print copy, for the French dialogue) 5.0 stars

18. Bookends: A memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature (library) 5.0 stars

19. The Lioness (audiobook) 4.0 stars 20.

Tuesdays with Morrie (audiobook) 5.0 stars

21. Bloomsbury Girls (library) 4.5 stars

22. The Jane Austen Society (library)4.5 stars

23. Come, Gentle Night (Kindle) 5.0 stars

24. Fool Me Twice (re-read; Kindle) 5.0 stars

25. Played for a Fool (Kindle) 5.0 stars

26. Rearview Mirror (Kindle) 5.0 stars

27. The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story (Kindle) 5.0 stars

28. Peace Like A River (Kindle) 5.0 stars

29. Watching Amy (re-read; Kindle) 3.0 stars

30. Steal Like An Artist (re-read; Kindle) 4.0 stars

31. The Year We Stole Christmas (Kindle) 4.5 stars

32. On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety (re-read; Kindle) 4.0 stars

I haven't completed any books for 2023 as yet. There's a Madeleine L'Engle classic that I'm not sure I've read before, which I'd begun reading here on my computer, and an audiobook on my phone. My goal is to read (or re-read) everything in both my Kindle stash and my Audible stash from oldest to newest and somehow wrangle both lists down to only show items which I've yet to read, without inadvertently deleting them. I'm reasonably sure there's a way to do that. I just don't know what it is at present, and I'd rather spend my spoons elsewhere.

I'm still croupy. The usual fall allergies have segued into a possible case of whatever virus is going around. I'm using my inhaler every four to six hours, drinking hot concoctions, eating spicy foods, etc., all to encourage the not-yet-infected contents of my sinuses to make like Elvis and leave the building. And, of course, the mountain cedar is now blooming.

I am so very thankful for my inhaler, which thanks to my Medicare Advantage plan is the only baseline prescription for which I am out of pocket, and for my reimbursement plan, which works differently than the one I had when I was working. This plan rolls over at the end of each year, so there is no "use it or lose it" penalty. I may very well end up with enough in that fund to cover cataract surgery in a few years or maybe even a liver transplant should I take up drinking again.

Which, of course, I am not going to do. Just in case you were worried.

Leftovers for breakfast

I awoke at dark-thirty with a stuffy head and a crabby cough. First step, after grabbing my glasses: out to the kitchen to nuke a mug of chicken broth, as it was too early to use my inhaler. Reheat the remaining square of cornbread in the microwave, add butter, and zap it for a few seconds to melt said butter. Nuke and polish off yesterday's oatmeal. Grab yesterday's leftover chipotle chicken flatbread pizza to finish the job of wrestling my sinuses into submission.

So now I am more than vaguely full and less than perfectly de-congested, but I am breathing somewhat freely and no longer wobbly from insufficient sleep or low blood sugar.

Yesterday I did a huge restocking of the pantry via Costco, and today I will finish the job via Kroger. I would far rather curl up in bed and aim for another three to five hours of sleep

Just got hit with another wave of the groggies. I'm going to fix some warm milk and go after that nap.

"Foyle's War" and other good distractions

I finished the ninth season last night. Anthony Horowitz is a genius. My sister sent me two of his books several months ago, one of which ("Magpie Murders") finished its TV adaptation on PBS Masterpiece last night. The man is a prolific writer, and I've been so impressed with everything he's touched, that I'm aware of. Michael Kitchen plays Christopher Foyle, a local detective in a small English town beginning in the early years of World War II. Honeysuckle Weeks plays his driver, Sam(antha) Wainwright, nee Stewart. The series gave me a real sense of how ordinary people fared during the war years and immediately thereafter. Answer: not well. Food, petrol, and clothing were rationed. Many people had been bombed out of their houses, and new homes couldn't be built fast enough. Profiteering and the black market were rampant, causing civil and political unrest and a general mistrust of the police and the government.

I spent an hour or two yesterday, unsubscribing to various vendors or newsletters and deleting nearly 300 emails. It's amazing how something so small can boost my mood and lessen my general anxiety.

We've received our updated boosters. The bipolar bears were having some side effects over the weekend. As for myself, I was a bit more tired and a bit more crabby than usual. I spent a lot of yesterday napping.

I also watched a couple of middling movies over the weekend. "Just Like Heaven," with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, two eminently likeable actors, was maybe 3.5 out of 5. "Win A Date with Tad Hamilton" had competent main actors, but three of the sidekicks (one hers, two Tad's) had potty mouths and a generally sleazy attitude. Blergh.

I just put half a dozen small potatoes into the oven to bake. We have just enough sour cream left to grace them nicely. And the dishwasher will be somewhere near the end of its cycle when the timer goes off, so we'll have clean dishes.

So, I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed.

I knew, going into it, that this month would be hard. It's the first month in which there is no final paycheck to soften the finances. Just my first pension check and Beloved's SS check, which is significantly larger than my own would be, because he worked longer and earned more in his lifetime than I did.

I think I'm feeling mild depression on top of my chronic anxiety. It might be time to ask my doctor to up my dosage. Or maybe I should just grab my Ray Charles CD and boogie until my crabby hip says WHOA!

The bad news is that they took October's and November's Medicare Part B premiums out of my SS check. The good news is that I can set up an automatic reimbursement from the HRA account which is part of my retirement, and that anything leftover in that account rolls over into next year. (This is separate from, and different from, the reimbursement account I had when I was working, in which a set amount was taken from my paychecks to fund future reimbursements, and anything left at the end of the year was lost to me. I never had that problem, between my medical expenses and those of the bipolar bears. I usually exhausted the fund between April and June.)

It's not all doom and gloom. I have a carefully constructed, updated spreadsheet in which the regular expenses are all accounted for. There's very little margin for error, error being groceries and unexpected medical bills. There's also light at the end of the tunnel, in that next year I'll get the generous COLA increase and a decrease in the Part B premium, which will effectively give me a raise of nearly $200 a month.

I'm cooking a lot more, both in frequency and in volume, and I'm grateful for the strength to stand and stir. I'm portioning our servings and saving half in the freezer for a meal the following week, with a reminder on my phone to prevent freezer burn. I'm learning to use the Instant Pot, and I'm doing a lot more cooking from scratch, now that I have the time.

I had tithing settlement yesterday, and I promised the bishop that if it became necessary, I wouldn't be too proud to ask for help.

I don't think it will come to that. Meanwhile I'm going to make a pan of cornbread. Because cornbread plus a mug of milk or buttermilk is a delicious, joy-enhancing meal.

I know that we're in God's hands, and I know that He hasn't dropped me yet.

A month and a bit in.

I'm adjusting. My first pension check arrived last week. I paid as many bills as I sensibly could and will pay the rest when my Social Security check arrives later this week. I'm signed up for Medicare Part B and have received my updated Medicare card. I'm also signed up for a Medicare Advantage plan and am waiting for that card to arrive. I need my card in order to set up a profile with my provider and properly compare Rx prices with those from a couple of GoodRx providers and Mark Cuban's online pharmacy. Every penny I can save there can be applied to the bipolar bears' dental bill payment plans.

If my budgeting is realistic and proceeds forward on schedule, Diana will be paid off by my next birthday and Fourthborn's dental plan by midsummer. Middlest's dental plan should be paid off by the end of next year. And, depending upon how large and how often any additional principal payments are, the mortgage might be paid off in a little over two years from now. All of which are good things, indeed.

Right now I am teetering on the edge of sleep. For a moment, I was standing in the hall of my parents' last house, with one eye looking into their bedroom and the other into the bathroom. This is ordinarily the time I would be lying down for a nap, having stayed up until nearly dawn watching British TV. I'm sure that I'll return to a normal(ish) sleep schedule at some point. And I did go to bed significantly earlier than I have been.

Time to get off the computer and start getting ready for church. Thank goodness for dry shampoo!

Staycation's over

I am sitting here, waiting for the oven to finish warming up so that I may bake a cauliflower pizza. I haven't wanted one for months and months and months.

To bring y'all up to speed, last week I took Middlest to get a couple of fillings and the initial work on replacing two crowns. I also had a checkup with my herpetologist hematologist and another iron infusion two days after that.

I went to see the wound care specialist, who declared that the rogue eczema was technically not a wound and got me a quick referral to a dermatologist. I quite like her, and I now have two steroid creams: one for my forehead and jawline, and another for my legs. All of which are recovering steadily.

I had my appointment for a replacement driver's license, as the one which the state mailed out in March never arrived. The new license came in today's mail, so that's that for several more years.

This week we had Fourthborn's disability hearing and will get the judge's ruling in six to eight weeks, about the time we're gearing up for Middlest's. I had a follow-up appointment with my PCP that afternoon re: the rebound Covid. While there I got my flu shot, brought him up to speed on my eczema and new meds, and left with a prescription plus his signature on the paperwork for a handicap hang-tag. Renewal is in four years, and I will not need another prescription for that. He also X-ray'd my lungs to make sure that there were no clots lurking after the rebound Covid last month, and they're fine.

Yesterday I had a lengthy phone conference with the folks who will be my liaison with the corporation, now that I'm retired. I've spent a handful of hours over the past couple of weeks updating my spreadsheets to reflect the impending financial reality. I've also made double payments on Diana and the two payment plans for the bipolar bears' dental work. If I can keep up the over-payments, Diana will be paid off shortly after my next birthday and I can split that money between savings and the dental payment plans.

Tomorrow I am officially retired, and early next week I should get the form from HR proving that I have been insured up to and including today, which means that I can apply for Medicare Part B. Once that's established, I will then get to choose between a Medicare Advantage plan or a bushel of supplement plans.

In between all of the appointments, I have watched a whale of a lot of British TV. There has been minimal reading, but my overall priority has been to establish a reasonable sleep schedule built around the timing of various medications. I'm sleeping a bit better. I'm sleeping longer at a time. My overall level of anxiety continues to drop. Current plan is to get our boosters in late November.

Tomorrow and Sunday are General Conference. All bets are off as to whether I fall asleep during the sessions. I'd prefer to be awake and hear all of the addresses. My physical health is stabilizing, and it's time to work on my spiritual health.

Later, gators. I have a date with DCI Banks, Annie, Helen, and the rest of the team. I'm fixin' to begin season 4.