This week’s five things will hopefully be a little shorter and more like its original intention of a list of things that were on my radar over the past week. We’ll see how that goes.
1) Books
I have really slacked on reading this week, but I only say that because so many of the books I had in progress when I started last week’s update are what I’ve since finished. I did start listening to a YA audiobook on my walk yesterday –it’s too hot for running – and listened to about another third of it while cleaning this morning. I got the recommendation from the Books and Bowties channel over on YouTube. I find I’m intrigued by a lot of their recommendations. This particular book is Burn Down, Rise Up by Vincent Tirado. YA that revolves heavily around school and teenage drama rarely interests me, but those that involve elements of horror or fantasy can be great, fast reads. Burn Down, Rise Up uses an urban legend setting as a means of telling some of the history of the Bronx and its residents. With both queer elements and BIPOC characters, it’s also not a bad add to your Pride Month reading if you are looking for that kind of thing.
2) Summer is here.
In my “normal life,” away from writing, I do teaching and tutoring, so I wrote up a blog post with a few ideas for families to try on the cheap. Obviously, your mileage may vary on those, depending how the weather is in your part of the world.
The weather in much of the US has been positively brutal of late. Seems we might be into that trend for a long time to come since not enough leaders and companies are interested in doing anything useful.
Be safe out there, dear readers.
3) Schedule
I’m not sure if it’s the ADHD or just not feeling the pressure of “responsibility” for it, but I got lax in this newsletter thing. Again. I’ve also been struggling to get up at 5am to write, and I keep saying I’ll do it later in the day, but it’s a lot harder to tell myself “Yes, you’ve done enough ‘important’ things and you can now make up stuff’” at other times of the day.
So, I set a goal for myself to get one of these out each week. I know most of you probably barely have time to read your own stuff, but if you happen to notice it’s missing, hit me up on Twitter and ask where it is.
I also told myself I was going to get something up on Medium once a month. In the past, the pressure of a deadline helped focus my energy and make me churn out something, but lately it feels like deadlines make my mind blank and I can’t think of a damn thing to say.
Gotta work on that.
4) ADHD & Planning
Speaking of ADHD, I still use my Hobonichi Cousin and it still works better than any other planner system I’ve tried. Mostly because it’s all in one place. I can journal and do memory keeping in the same place as my weekly schedule and my to-do lists and reminders and appointments. Having it all in one place is great for me. (Others may need to keep separate books for different tasks, but I find that just leads to procrastination and losing things.)
I did a video about it a long time ago. I need to update it since I do now use stickers and things in it. (They’re great as a visual reminder of when I gave the cats a flea pill, when I colored my hair, etc.)
5) Videos
It seems like the whole world is converting to videos for everything. The same people who used to learn all their crazy conspiracies from Facebook are getting them on TikTok now and I just can’t keep up. Honestly, TikTok sounds exhausting. Putting that much time and energy into editing short video clips and constantly thinking of content? I need a nap just thinking about it. (Clearly, I’m an OLD.)
I keep wondering if I should start doing planning videos or talk about books or something on YouTube again, but that platform doesn’t seem as popular as it used to and I do not have time in my week for fancy video editing.
What are your thoughts?
Bonus Thing
The full moon was last Tuesday, and we decided to go over to the beach to watch it rise. We’d actually been at the beach the night before, and also Saturday night, which is what gave us the idea. We were not alone as the beach was full of people burning sage and incense, smoking weed, showing off their LED nunchuck skills, and taking videos of the moon. Seriously, for a while I wondered if I was the only one not watching it through my phone screen.
One person who wasn’t there was the person I joked was “raptured” the night before.
See, we were hanging out Monday night for almost two hours. The wind was a little chilly and the water a little rough (for South Florida), but the moon was beautiful, and the bugs weren’t biting like they had been Saturday. We ate our dinner and went for a twilight swim and enjoyed ourselves. Off to our right was a beach chair and float that no one seemed to be coming back to. When we left, I made the comment because there wasn’t really anyone else around on that part of the beach.
The following night, the same chair and float were in the same place.
What do you think became of the owner?
(Husband figures the person wandered off to the nearby bar/restaurant, got drunk, and either forgot to come back for their things or decided it was too long a walk and went home without the stuff.)
Shark got them