Oct-Dec 2022

 October

1: joining my parents to watch some House
2: Ren's excitement over me having gone to the prison museum
3: asking a patron, upon seeing her stack of Marie Benedict books to check out, how she liked the novel about Rosalind Franklin - and sharing in our outrage over what happened
4: hot air balloons disappearing into the mist
5: dive-bombing toward the cart upon seeing the book I requested, & nearly tripping a coworker
6: Asphalt Meadows on repeat
7: actually fucking vibing to Taylor Swift, ngl // getting my mom hooked on the Junior Baking Show // getting new napkins & dish towels for the house
8: a wild (fictional) ride through Utah's Canyonlands
9: rodeo cowboy photoshoot
10: finding Horseshoe Hill again by following my old map + directions
11: responses to a writing prompt about singlehandedly smuggling illegal coffee
12: ordering more LJ Maas books (including, to Ren's delight, the "lesbian Brokeback Mountain")
13: new gems amidst Minecraft's comforting familiarity
14: an attempt to fix the (ultimately unfixable) tire mishap
15: friendly canine greetings from our therapy-dog volunteers
16: a rain check on a cafe hangout
17: adding to my book list spreadsheet
18: seeing the license plate "KIWI" on a green Kia Soul
19: group effort on the Worldle bonus rounds
20: hitting 90k miles
21: stumbling upon new, unnamed trails (and satisfyingly swoopy mountain-bike dips)
22: joking that my book could be a new genre: food romance/literary mukbang 
23: a cafe hangout after work 
24: sweater weather
25: revision inspo (& writing on the job)
26: a mug of chai at work
27: a Halloween-themed Minecraft build
28: investigating an abandoned structure off Jenkins & Worchester
29: another system crash, six months after the last major one
30: family watching Mare of Easttown
31: all the little children's costumes

November

1: introducing an angel flashback
2: a discussion sparked by seeing a book called "The 12-Hour Walk"
3: catching up with Sarah K
4: a chilly morning crouching on the wet asphalt to get the tires topped up
5: a truly wholesome romance about a soon-to-be divorcée who meets a lovely lesbian lady (& her dog) out in the woods
6: Matt randomly putting on a CD called "Wolf Rune," & being transfixed by the kantele and haunting vocals
7: trying to counteract the force that is a patron insatiable for CDs (& clogging up our racks) by shipping his returns off to other libraries
8: showing some kiddos (& their granny) how to use the self checkout machines 
9: DIAMANTES!
10: wheezing at Booktube reviews
11: a lunch outing at a vegan restaurant (that I shockingly hadn't tried yet)
12: furious outlining/backstory drafting at the NaNoWriMo write-in
13: blazing through a new scene (the improved ending, in fact)
14: some fun on a kid's borrowed scooter
15: pasting up a (found) poem on my cubby wall
16: coloring gnomes for our work's holiday cards
17: the most outlandishly absurd song lyric I've heard to date (hint: it's Nick Cave)
18: cactus fruits & gourds out at the old Jenkins place
19: when the shy, sweet Papillon of the teddy-bear face and soulful eyes chooses me
20: dragging my ass through the end of a terrible book
21: assisting the sweet elderly gentleman from writing group (over the phone & later in person)
22: cholla reverence
23: the adorable ending of Queerly Beloved (& adding to my own WLW tidbit)
24: a minimal Thanksgiving mishap, quickly remedied
25: sneaking a peek at some homes under construction
26: browsing the Vegan Without Borders cookbook with Jeremy
27: learning about toaster oven romances
28: discussing Pitchfork reviews and critic credibility
29: old hippie couple (decked out in their matching "Ugg boots & jeans" 'fit) performing music at the open mic night 
30: finding out that there are Gerri Hill audiobooks available on hoopla

December

1: a cacophony of crows 
2: the halo-glow of horizon ringed under the overcast sky
3: some sketches from Man Stroke Woman series 2
4: catching up with one of the OG writing group attendees (who's been in absentia the past several meetings)
5: Matt's insistence that I should start a "Google Maps vacation" Twitch stream
6: thwarting the man who tried to sneak in with the visiting school kids (not me personally doing said thwarting)
7: when the CD patron's complaint to the city councilor is rewarded with new CD shelving
8: bringing jobs to the villagers
9: photographic tribute to the dead snake
10: a 90+-year-old patron making a dark joke about her mortality
11: outlining the revisions I need to do in a spreadsheet
12: discussing AITA posts
13: Anna turning the meeting into a small-group lesson
14: Jeremy suggesting - and leading me to - the jewelry screwdriver and voilà, clumsily dropped watch fixed
15: delving into The Dodos' discography
16: a plot twist I should have seen coming that's not even really a twist
17: when they pull some of the withdrawn CDs to play in the back & I think that if they'd just waited on one of them, I would have checked it out before it got axed (& it being by Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton, and not only is that band name epic, she is the lead singer of Metric, which I've also enjoyed listening to without knowing she was part of it)
18: going to the brick-and-mortar restaurant of a vegan place that previously only existed as a food truck
19: taking home tower-garden peppers
20: when two separate couples come in for library cards, and each of them was born on the same day of two different months in the same year (the 10th of __ in 1948, the 21st of __ in 1990)
21: work holiday party (and dipping in & out of the room for snacks)
22: hanging out with my bro & his animals
23: trying some online mattress brands in the flesh
24: collaborative and competitive work on the online jigsaw puzzle
25: everyone excitedly taking a turn on Mom's new typewriter, an early present for her birthday
26: Kwanzaa hype (after a hiatus)
27: making use of a little notepad I collected ages ago to write a bit of the chapter I was working on (the novel journal accidentally left behind at home)
28: getting my clothes back, at least
29: learning that Joan Armatrading is a quiet lesbian icon
30: The Deep (the book & the song it was inspired by)
31: plugging prompts into an AI text generator and cackling at the stories it comes up with