7T: aches and pains and baby geese

1. I went on a road trip last week to visit both kids. First stop was Bozeman to get the annual tour of interesting places from MadMax who is at school there. Then the next day we drove to Salt Lake City for PellMel's birthday and Mother's Day weekend. I love a good road trip and this one was really fun. Dean was able to fly down for the Salt Lake part. 

2. But nothing shows your age like having to sit still for a couple of hours. I used to be a road warrior, but not anymore. Between the bathroom breaks and the now-mandatory stretching stops, we rarely went more than a couple of hours without a break. At one point we went three hours and I could barely walk when I got out of the car.

3. For some reason I couldn't get interested in the audiobook I had downloaded, so I listened to a bunch of podcasts. Highly recommend the Broken Record podcast interview with Pentatonix, the Without Fail podcast interview with Paul Holes (about the search for the Golden State killer), and the 10% Happier podcast interview with Brene Brown.

4. When I got back, we had babies! We've had a Canada goose hanging around for a couple of weeks, but there didn't seem to be a partner. So we were surprised when one day there were two geese and six or seven goslings in tow. They are the cutest things. I will try putting a picture in here and we'll see if it posts. (If it doesn't, you're not missing much- I don't want to scare them so I took it from pretty far away.) 

5. In honor of the appearance of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue this week (doesn't it usually come out in February or March? not sure why it was so late this year), here is the link to the rant I wrote back in 2013. I don't usually care all that much about it, but that year they published a special insert about how to "get the look" of a swimsuit model, and it pissed me off. To put it mildly. They've never done it again, so I must not have been the only one who didn't like it.

6. Remember when I was on an eco-guilt trip about using disposable face wipes every night? Well, I found a great solution and I am a happy convert. They're called micro-fiber face cloths and you just get them wet and wipe your face, then throw them in the laundry. No soap required. I have about a dozen and my favorites are here. 

7. One of the things we tried in Salt Lake City was Top Golf. It's sort of like if you made a golf course into a bowling alley. It was fun for all of us, but especially for Dean and MadMax who are big golfers. The scoring system favors accuracy, so Dean cleaned up. MadMax is more about the huge drive that doesn't really go where you want it to but soars one hell of a long way. It's expensive but fun if you're a golf fan.

And since we are, and it looks to be a rainy weekend, we'll probably spend the better part of ours watching the PGA Championship, which starts today (it's Thursday as I'm typing this). Have a good one.

p.s. I forgot that I get an email version when people comment, so Hi Laurel and Julie! But I can't respond to them directly at the moment.

7T: Game of Thrones edition, plus a couple of extra things

Spring is here!

(I'm not a fan of GoT, but I live with and know a bunch of fans so this is my --what do you call it? hot take? spicy take? bored take?)

1. PellMel read the first four Game of Thrones (GoT) books before the fifth one came out and gushed, You have to read these!! They are amazing!! It was probably around 2010 because I remember I got her the fifth one for Christmas and it was published in 2011.

2. So Dean read them. But I refused. No freaking way, I said, I am not getting sucked into another epic fantasy series before all the books are out. I will read them when they are all published. If you know anything about the GoT books, you are laughing now, because no more have appeared (the author George R. R. Martin is/was projecting that there would be seven, with an option for eight if he needed it).

(2a. Same goes for Patrick Rothfuss. Dean loved the first two of his Kingkiller Chronicles even more than he loves GoT, but the first one was published in 2007, the second one in 2011, and nothing since. I haven't read them because I was waiting until all of them had been published. But I might cave in on these ones because Dean loves them so much.)

3. So then the TV series started in 2011. (2011 was a big year for epic fantasy, wasn't it?!) We didn't watch it because a) we don't have HBO, and b) we were going to (hahahahaha) wait until all the books were out, because everybody knows you should read the book first, right?

4. But this winter, with nothing we wanted to watch on TV, we decided to try them. I picked up the first season on DVD awhile ago when I saw it on sale, so we had it. I made it through the first episode, which was considerably too dark for my taste, but by ten minutes into the second episode, I was done. Dean is completely absorbed, but every time I try another epsisode, I give up again. What is wrong with you people??? Why do you love this show? It is horrible. There are horrible, cruel people doing horrible, cruel things to each other and the camera lingers lovingly on all of it.

(4a. We went to see Avengers: Endgame last weekend, and a character was stabbed and then the camera cut away. I leaned over to Dean and said, if this was Game of Thrones, we would have spent another minute and a half watching blood gush out of that guy while he died.)

5. Seriously. The last time I tried to watch an episode, in the first five minutes, one of the dozen or so horribly cruel people asked someone who was being tortured in front of him, "would you rather lose your fingers or your tongue" and since I immediately got up and left the room, I don't know which one he picked but I could still hear him screaming from the kitchen. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND our culture's current obsession with torture as entertainment.

Don't get it. Don't want to. Never will. But Dean is apparently not bothered because he finished out the season and to be honest I'm pretty sure he wants to watch the rest. So I will probably get him the boxed set of all the seasons that are out for Father's Day, but I am not watching them. The good thing about knowing I will never watch GoT is that I can read all the funny opinion pieces and memes and I don't have to worry about spoilers, because I don't care. Go ahead and spoil me.

6. I have found a balance of social media involvement that is working for me, so I'm going to stick with it, which means after this one, I'm going to post by email. When you post by email, you can't schedule the posts, or post pictures (I don't very often anyway), and I won't be able to read or reply to comments. Just so you know. Y'all don't comment much anyway. Email me if you need me, link is in my profile. Apologies for not posting on a schedule.

7. I don't think we've ever talked about tarot here because I was trying not to offend my more conservative readers, but as I told you a couple of months ago, I've lost my conservative readers anyway, so why not. Maybe sometime I will post more background info (short version: tarot isn't magic, it's just a way of accessing intuitive knowledge). I have a new deck called the Rebel Deck, which I love with a great love. Usually I pull three cards from it, and this was my most recent reading. It made me laugh. I think the message is clear.

Three cards from the Rebel Deck

Have a great day. I missed this.