how do you live so happily while i am sad and broken down?

1. We saw My Chemical Romance tonight! It was a great show, though I am really not that big a fan of the Hollywood Bowl as a venue.

2. I went to the farmers market this morning and was already planning to get some tamales from the Filipino tamale stand but then I saw they had a sign saying this would be their last weekend for the rest of the year, so I'm really glad I was able to go today. Now we'll just have to look forward to getting them again in January.

I also got a delicious vegan pumpkin custard danish from the vegan deli stand.



I don't know what the custard was made of but you'd never be able to tell it wasn't eggs and milk. I love that they used kabocha on top instead of regular pumpkin. I'm definitely going to check the next time I go and see if they have it again.

3. Gemma!

Recently Finished
The Clock House Murders
Most recently translated of the House Murders series. I didn't like this one as much as some of the others, but it was enjoyable. How many crazy houses did this one architect build anyway?

Welcome to Murder Week
Well, that will teach me to skim the summary of a book. I saw that this was about a woman who finds that her recently dead and semi-estranged mother had booked and fully paid for a trip to England to participate in a murder mystery game in a small village and when they won't refund her, decides to go alone. I assumed that during the mystery game there would be real murders! But there were not. Instead it was about finding out about her mother and also falling in love with a local guy. It was all right, but the mystery/romance balance was definitely heavy on the romance side.

At the Bottom of the Garden
Two sisters are taken in by their estranged aunt after their parents die, only to find her house haunted by ghosts of people she's killed. I liked this a lot, but it felt very unmoored from both place and time. The setting was...somewhere in an anglophone country that didn't feel like anywhere. The era was...sometime in the semi-recent past. I see the author is Norweigian. I wish she'd set it in Norway! But instead it's somewhere they say things like "bottom of the garden" and drink tea all the time, but is otherwise mostly vaguely American seeming. The technology seems maybe 1980s in some regards, but attitudes and clothing seem much earlier (everyone wears dresses and suits for the most part) but also sometimes more modern. I think with a little more leaning into the vagueness, it could have made it feel more like a fairytale or something, but instead it just felt, well, vague, in a distracting manner. The story was really good, though! And the audiobook was great, with separate narrators for the three main POV characters.

Masks
Cute middle grade graphic novel about three monster kids living in hiding in a town that has nearly eradicated monsters. When the abandoned building they're living in is set to be torn down, they decide to venture out into the human world on Halloween to hopefully find Haven, a safe place for monsters that an older monster kid had once told them about and then left to find, never to return.

Star Trek: Lower Decks vol. 3

Yuri Espoir vol. 1
A high school girl is told by her father that on her 18th birthday she'll have to marry a man who helped bail out his company. A closeted lesbian who has yet to ever date a girl, she feels this will be the equivalent of death, and decides that while she doesn't want to date anyone during her last years of freedom, knowing the relationship would be doomed, she'll console herself by creating a sketchbook of yuri relationships, and ropes her friend into helping her, totally unaware that her friend has a huge crush on her. This is cute. There's the framing story but also mini stories about each couple that she sketches (which are just her fantasies, since they're all total strangers).

Kindaichi Papa no Jikenbo vol. 5

1. When I wore my new glasses last night I was feeling a little funny like they might take some getting used to, even though the prescription is not that different, but I wore them all day today with no issue, so idk what that was.

2. There was some rain overnight, but it never really materialized today, so I was able to take all my walks and bike rides and not get wet. There was a tiny bit a little while ago, but it's stopped again, and while we might get some more overnight, that should be the end of it.

3. I finished up a puzzle this morning.



This was a 500 piece one, which is a little too easy for me now, but I had actually bought it last year after Halloween and saved it for this year. It was fun, though, and now I'll put it out in the little library for someone else to enjoy (there's still time before Halloween!).

4. Jasper was wilding out on my bag yesterday lol.

1. I preordered the Ocarina of Time remake today. It comes out on 11/5, so not that long from now. I never played the previous remake (though we did buy it) so it's been a while, plus it's really been totally redone, so I'm looking forward to checking it out.

2. We're supposed to get rain tomorrow and Thursday. Hopefully not in a way that interferes with my routine too much. It's nice and cool this evening (and has been pretty nice all day, though I was cooped up in a meeting all day and didn't go out during the day).

3. Molly loves my chair so much. And no one else seems to care about it, so it's nice that she can enjoy it without anyone else fighting over it. (Though sometimes I have to kick her out, alas.)

1. I saw some fun Halloween decorations this morning on my bike ride. I took a long ride up into the ritzy part of town as I often do on the weekends, so the houses are huge!

( Pics! )

2. ( Weight loss )

3. I went to the other farmers market this morning and got some empanadas. I got the same cheese and corn ones as I got last time, but also got a roasted veggie one, which was delicious but I could see chunks of garlic as I was eating it and it immediately gave me stomach issues, so I won't be getting that again. I also got a guava cheese dessert empanada. :D

4. Gemma loves being on Carla's desk chair when it's tucked under the desk. So secret!

1. It was hot today but not as hot as yesterday, and more importantly, it was overcast all day, which really helped the heat to not feel as bad. It's also dry and windy, though that has its own issues such as aggravating allergies (and fires, but thankfully that hasn't been an issue near us this year).

2. We had a nice morning at Disneyland, followed by lunch at Knott's Berry Farm.

3. Ollie is such a cutie.

1. I had been planning to push setting up the new phone back another day to today or possibly even the weekend but last night I felt like I had enough free time and ended up doing it then. Being able to transfer directly from phone to phone definitely makes it so much less of a headache than it used to be, but it still takes time and mental bandwidth. But I got it done and was able to use it today no problem. After a year or so of the wobbly USB jack it is so nice to actually have the cable click in place and know that I don't have to worry about it randomly losing connection while driving.

2. It's hot but at least it's dry? And it's just a couple day heatwave (today is the peak) and then rain next week (hopefully not in any way that interferes with my routine).

3. I'm very glad it's the weekend. Even if it's a hot weekend.

4. We have recently gotten into Jet Lag: the Game. Over the last few years we've seen these guys a lot on Tom Scott's Lateral podcast and I think they were on an episode of Dirty Laundry as well, so I was vaguely aware of them and we had Tom Scott's previous Jet Lag appearance on our watch later list for ages, but recently he joined them in the most recent season which is set in Japan, so we ended up watching that as it was airing and really liked it. Then we watched his previous appearance, and are watching another season weekly with Alex when she's over, and we started another one on our own lol. Oh, and we watched the first season, too. There are a ton of seasons (I think almost twenty) and the episodes are long enough that we usually break each one into two or three sessions. But they're a lot of fun and we've been enjoying them. I think there's at least one more set in Japan, so we'll probably watch that one next after we finish the one we're on.

5. First pic with the new camera. Not sure I really see a quality improvement?