fred_mouse

I've been doing a lot of staring at bookshelves (bookshops, libraries), online library catalogues, publishers websites, book recommendation sites, online book retail sites and a range of other places that seemed like a good idea at the time. I have not completed the full systematic search I want to have done, but I'm allowing that some of that is going to happen during the writing phase, because I do not actually expect to find the kinds of books I'm after in most of those places.

My spreadsheet of books now has over 150 entries. Quite a lot fail one or more of the inclusion criteria, and some of those are duplicates because I'm attempting to capture the sources as well (will I analyse that? no, probably not. Am I capturing it anyway because I think it will have the potential for me to talk about? yes). Several I've already started reading. I'm most excited about Attack of the Smart Speakers, which I'm halfway through, and as I'm writing my reading notes I keep writing enthusiastic commentary. This one is a bit frustrating because it is a library copy, and so I'm writing more than I would if I could just mark up my copy -- I've now ordered a me copy to annotate.

I'm also really happy with Orion Lost, although I'm not sure how much that one is going to fall in a heap in terms of getting done, because the next set of plot beats have the potential to go places I'm not comfortable following. Yes, it is middle grade fiction, and it will be resolved, but some of where it has already gone has required a few breaks. (I'm aware that these are me specific emotional land mines and that they aren't affecting my interpretation, just how fast I can cope with it). Plus, I put it aside to deal with library books that are due next week (I found three possibles of which two are yeses).

Which brings me to my evening -- I have spent some hours on The Nile and Fishpond websites looking for books that might suit my parameters. On The Nile, I found searching for 'AI' and then filtering to books / fiction / children and young adult did a reasonable job; on Fishpond I found no search that was useful. And then at the end of that I looked through my spreadsheet, picked what was reasonably priced and high in my priority rankings and was a variety of options, and ordered Slightly Too Many Books. Including one co-authored by Farah Mendelsohn, which was has been in my wishlist for multiple years and was about half the price I remember it being (Farah is going to be the GUFF delegate to the local con this year, so I'm extra motivated. Will I take everything I own of theirs to be signed? probably not. But I'm not ruling out the possibility).

And now I have to wait. The original delivery date range when I looked was mid May, and when I checked out it was early to mid June, so who knows when I'll get any of them. I have no shortage of things to be getting on with, but I'm presenting my initial findings at the end of May!

last update was 25th March and I'm not going to attempt to remember everything done.

Healing: nipple is still very sore, still using the rubber (teething) rings inside my bra to keep the fabric off it (it is still noticeably swollen compared to the other). The rest of the skin has healed, and I think I've finally finished peeling. Most of my armpit is bald, which as a texture experience feels different from having shaved. I continue to have reasonable and exhausted days and have not correctly balanced how much I can get away with doing.

study: I've got lots of good books that meet my criteria, and I've been poking through them. Other parts of the project are going slower. I am frustrated by my inability to buckle down on one, but I am also aware that I'm working through the tasks that I said I was going to need to do to do it properly. I got an email from the ethics board about corrections, so that will be Monday's task.

weather: there has been a startling amount of rain. There was a cyclone that didn't get this far south, but did push a front through. Jandakot recorded 77.4mm on one day, which is a 51 year maximum for March*, and a total of 87.6mm in the five days of rain. Plus we got 16.2mm to 9amm Wednesday, and 6.8 mm to 9am this morning.

music: I missed the last rehearsals of term for the Monday night group, and that goes back this coming week. I have not practiced anything, not least because bowing was painful for a while. I have made it to two of the Wednesday night rehearsals - one to discover it was the end of term open practice / concert, and one where it was a greatest hits and I didn't get access to the music before the rehearsal, and so sight read everything (I did try a practice on the night before). I failed to go to the sunday recorder group last weekend because apparently when I updated my calendar to the new alternating fortnight I didn't do it right, and I'd been successfully doing it from memory up until now.

con: we are at not enough week's before the con. I have been dropping the ball more than I like and I have to find a solution. I have one I would like, but I don't know whether anyone will take it on. We have some fabulous guests. Plus we have both GUFF and DUFF winners attending. I know Farah Mendelsohn is one, but I can't pull the name of the other out of my head. I'm presenting in the academic stream, and at this point I don't have enough to say. argh.

*I use an aggregator site for my rain information, rather than the BOM, so they are going off their data set; they claim this as 'probably a record maximum'. They report 17.0mm as the March average (1973-2026), the previous monthly maximum as 83.6mm in 1992, and the previous daily maximum as 37.8mm, also in 1992. At the opposite end, 2011 had no rain in March -- that would be the year of the big hail storm, if I remember correctly.

October

I've had some of these hanging around for a startlingly long period of time. I'm in a bit of a grump, which makes this the perfect time to look at a book list. I don't have a lot of energy to deal with interfaces, and I'm less likely to be interested in All! The! Books!

75 Notable Translations 2023 from World Literature Today (limited free pages) - the introductory section was interesting reading, but the list was text, with title, author, translator, publisher, and no info, and I didn't care to click through. I scanned through to see if anything caught my attention namewise, but wasn't really expecting much. I spotted Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera and Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami to click through, and both sound sufficiently interesting I've added them to the list.

Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2023 hypothetically this should be a list I'll find a lot on. But! I was at least somewhat on top of my reading last year, so before looking at the list, I'm taking a guess that some of the interesting ones I'll already have read. I do like the format, where each reviewer talks about their picks, and writes some number of paragraphs with the books discussed collectively. I was right that there are some books I very much enjoyed on that list. There were some that I don't remember ever hearing of (although at least one that looked interesting was already on the wishlist; I didn't check them all). And a surprising number that I started and bounced out of to 'finish after Hugo reading season' because I knew they weren't going to be my number one Hugo vote. Most of which I still haven't gone back to.

November

Locus Magazine 2023 Recommended Reading List - this page managed to annoy me before I'd read anything by popping an ad up over the 'reject tracking' button, so that I ended up clicking on the ad instead of the reject. This provides a long list of who provides the recommendations, and many of those I recognised are people whose suggestions I have previously bounced off, so I wasn't actually all that optimistic. And then I started skimming, and realised that I just don't care enough to click through, and title plus author doesn't give me enough to latch on to. I was interested to note that the most recent Greg Egan is self-published, and I'd be interested in knowing what the story is there -- although not interested enough that I allowed myself to be distracted from task Close! All! Tabs! I spotted an Octavia Cade collection that I didn't know about, so that went on the list. I was very bemused to see a collection by Tom Reamy, but again, did not go down the rabbit hole of finding out what was going on there (assumption: reprint?).

I could have gone looking at the short stories, and decided against it. Similarly the next tab I had open was a long list of short story links that I decided to just close. I do like short stories, I just don't need these lists sitting there being Tasks.

Nebula reading list - I'm assuming that this is a generic link, and what is on the page changes each year. Which means I was probably meant to be looking at 2024's list, but I'm looking at works published in 2025. After a bit of a look at the novels (which was a much shorter list than I was expecting) I decided to skip. At this point in time my focus is kids books, and there aren't any.

Esquire: The 30 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 - this one gives lovely potted summaries of why they are recommended, and it was so nice to engage with. I did end up adding books to the wishlist that i would otherwise have missed. Long, but interesting.

From the New York Public Library Best Books for Teens 2024 - this has an itty bitty drop down that would allow for selection of other years. As I'm in 'close all the tabs' mode I have chosen to not go down the rabbit hole. This shows me covers, with title and author as text; there are an assortment of filters available. Oh! and a potted summary for each. I didn't find anything very inspiring, but I did realise that I can use this as a list for my uni book search, because there is a kids books section.

December

Unusually, a video: The Top 10 Science Fiction Books Published in 2023 - I hadn't heard of most of these; there were two that I have on the wishlist, but I didn't have the motivation to add any of the rest to said wishlist, not least because several were subsequent books in a series. I skipped through much of this because I wasn't that interested in the commentary, at least on the series ones.

Reactor: Readers Pick Their Favorite SFF of 2025 - this is the first one of these I'm reading today, but I'm tired and grumpy, so I suspect I won't be putting things on the wishlist. ... and this is image plus link; I don't have the oomph to go clicking through, so looking at the pretty and then closing the tab.

They needed someone else to bare witness to this.

Not enough to watch, but they have to be naked when doing so. Which, actually fit quite well into the scene I've stolen the quote from, but ah, not enough for me to think it was a deliberate play on words.

I'm a week post radiation; I'm still very red, and I have some raw patches in my armpit / outer edge of the breast. I assume this is mostly because I did not do the same prevention there, because I did not realise I needed to.

This means I am doing a lot of going topless; it is fortunately still warm enough to be doing that (although it is down to 22°C at the moment, and even with the door shut I'm a tad cold). I ran out of the ointment the hospital gave me, then the healing gel i was using, and the replacement artisanat found isn't as good.

I have found a couple more books to fit the reading for the fiction part of my project, so I'm going gung ho on that. Am a little frustrated that I keep finding books from the USA, rather than anywhere else.

I have not been keeping up with DW. I've just opened about 20 posts and I think I'm going to end up closing them having skimmed. I have, instead, fallen face first into Heated Rivalry fandom, and very much appreciate chaosmanor sharing their sources for fic. (I have not seen the show, nor read the books. This is unlikely to change. Youngest has been reporting back on the show).

I have not been reading all that much* lately. Since the last post I have finished three books, all of which are from the old murder mystery list -- mostly because I have them on my phone, and I've been reading them in waiting rooms. In decreasing order of how much I liked them:

1. The Middle Temple Murder by J.S. Fletcher. 4 stars. I didn't entirely follow the plot, and I'm not sure if I was supposed to. But it was well written and the characters were great. review
2. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. 3 stars. It's a classic, I understand why it is a classic, but I also don't think it is worth reading unless you are already a Christie fan. review
3. The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen. 2 stars. Unlike the Fletcher book, where me not following felt like a me problem, here I felt that the author was going out of their way to make it hard to follow. Also, all the characters are dickheads. review

* not counting a bit of short fiction, a lot of Heated Rivalry fic, and chapters out of a lot of books that I haven't actually made it to the end of because it requires focus I haven't had.

Over the last two months, I've been opening all the dreamwidth posts I intend to read (at length) or reply to, and then not having the oomph to do so. At the beginning of the weekend, I have over 450 tabs open in this window. I ... am not going to read all of those. I'm slowly closing them. I'm reading bits of them, but I'm not commenting.

so, one generic post: To all those who have been through surgery / medical bullshit, I hope you are recovering well. To those who have lost loved ones, I'm sorry for your loss, my condolences. To those posting about weather: I'm very much appreciating it. Also those posting small details of lives, reading, gaming, music, etc. To those sharing your creative endeavours, congrats! (and I'm sorry: if it is writing I have no spoons to go read).

If there is something you want me to know about, comment here or DM me please

(This post comes with the soundtrack of Youngest asking "If You were the tax act, what word would you use for tips?" and then complaining that 'gratuities' isn't in section ten, but there is something about grape vines).

Today was my second radiation treatment, and it was better than the first. ... I guess I should talk about the sensory hell that the first treatment was, and the way that it completely derailed my day (the second didn't completely derail the day, but some of my choices made it less than optimal)

( this got long, and I do not have the oomph to trim/edit )

2 down, 13 to go.

not much in the way of medical TMI this time, but still, content note for cancer treatment details.

• Healing (external) looking good. The scar is as long as my little finger, and quite dark (almost like a lightly faded black permanent marker). It is no longer raised or itchy. Little bit red either side, possibly because it is difficult to get the breast in a position to see the scar, and it means I was pulling on the skin. I continue treating with the scar therapy gel, in hopes that that decreases my chance of it going stiff (I have a history of cheloid scarring on my knee, which the doctor that did the surgical tidy up of the scar attributed to issues with the original stitching / treatment)
• Internally I'm assuming there is still a bit of healing to go because there is infrequent discomfort, mostly if I end up in an odd position and the breast is not supported. Also noticeable last night while chopping veggies, so I may need to look at what is wrong with my posture there.
• I'm still wearing the surgical recovery bras; I've now moved to not using them at night because my skin was getting quite irritated under the band. Of the four I started with, I have misplaced the good one, and one is a size too large. Fortunately, I have found an old sports bra which is appropriately soft and has no underwire to wear while the two are in the wash. A couple of times I have tried wearing one of my usual, which I think of as soft, but have underwire; in each case the surgical area has become noticeably sore. I'll keep doing that every few weeks until it isn't an issue, then transition back to my usual bras. I have decided against going to the specialist bra shop to get more, mostly because I don't have the necessary time + energy.
• radiation: appointment one with the radiologist, who was all 'this is your choice, ...' and then gave info that summed up approximately to 'given your age/situation, I'd do it anyway'. Also implied, I think, was the fact that there were cancerous cells further from the cancer site ('the margins'), necessitating the second surgery; my take from that is that it was moving quickly. Thus I am skipping over the expensive test and going straight to radiation. I think if the cancer site had been elsewhere in the body, it might be different, although I did not get a feel for which way the likelihood went. But being in the breast duct, there is a lot of potential for cancer cells to have moved a long way and be starting up again. Thus, radiation of the whole breast.
• Appointment two with the radiologist is Monday. They can treat me at the local public hospital (literally next door to the private one I had the first surgery at). It will be three weeks, multiple sessions. Likely noticeable side-effects are sun-burn like sensation and some other minor discomfort. Slight change in the breast tissue (ongoing) may occur, so it might feel different to the other, but as it already does, eh. And there is a slight chance that a small bit of the lungs behind will be damaged, but in a way that I am not likely to perceive.

For reasons I don't remember, Youngest bought sago, and then we discovered that there was some still in the cupboard. In discussion about what to do with this surplus, Youngest commented that they didn't know how to make sago pudding*, so we set out to do so. This is a bit variant on what I learned as a kid, so I'm capturing it now, because this was much closer to what I want it to be than it usually is. It is to be remembered that this is a dessert that is more about texture than flavour, and I make it with more flavour than the family friends I learned it from. Next time, I'll try soaking the sago in the soy milk, and then add water after, because the taste was a little thin.

1/2 cup sago plus 2 cups of water, in bowl, put in fridge for ~30 hours (it was going to be less, but I forgot last night; the fridge is because I am not leaving wet starch out in nearly 40°C heat).

Cooking: I used a heavy bottom pot, which I vaguely remember is important, but I don't remember why. Started on the too high burner, which was good for getting it to the boil, but I had to move it to the medium heat once it came to temperature.

Soaked sago plus somewhere between 1/2 and 1 cup of soy milk, a tsp (estimate; it was what was left in the tub) pandan extract, and 2 somewhat heaped tbsp white sugar went in the pan (for slightly more flavour, use brown sugar; it will be a weird colour but it tastes fantastic). Bring to boil, turn heat down to gentle simmer, stir constantly, making sure to scrape down the sides of the pan regularly (do not be tempted by the idea of taking a break. This will burn in what feels like a moment if the heat is just a tad too high). I use a silicone spatula for this, so as to be sure to get into the corner of the pan. Check regularly for translucence - when all but one sago ball is completely translucent, and that one at least half done, I call it done, and pour into bowls to set. I have a lovely set of thin metal dessert bowls that are perfect for this, because they don't cool down too fast.

* not to be confused with sago pudding, which is a steamed pudding I vaguely recall, and have a recipe for that I've never used