psocoptera

Honeyeater, Kathleen Jennings, 2025 Australian Gothic novel. (I might have thought novella but I found an interview where she said it was a novel.) I was not super into this - at first I was like "what even is happening" and then as it became a little clearer I was like "but *why* is any of this happening". The most interesting bit was a minor character whose story I wished we were in instead. I would like to see all those birds, though.

Starstrike, Yoon Ha Lee, 2025 ya sf, second in a trilogy that started with Moonstorm. I liked Moonstorm a lot but unfortunately this one didn't work for me. Interesting things are still going on but the writing felt scattered and muddled and I rarely had any sense of anticipation or direction. I may still check out the eventual third book - I would still like to see how things turn out for the characters, and it seems quite possible that Lee will re-find his groove or the structure of the third book will flow better or whatever the problem was - but as of this one I can't really recommend the series. :(

A nice big finish for Disepiphany: yesterday I tested every pen in our annoying corner cabinet and pen and pencil rack and found a whole bag's worth of dried-up pens and broken-in-half pencils and such to get rid of (does Staples still have pen and marker recycling? we'll see) and then reorganized everything. We still have a ridiculous amount of everything - every year the kids have new marker and pen and pencil sets on their school supply lists, and then they come home in June with half of it barely touched - but fingers crossed that I can now get the things I actually use in and out of the cabinet without a bunch of other things diving out with them.

And then also, awhile ago J (big J) gave me a very exciting gift of exotic sausages (like some from game meat), not knowing that I have a pretty serious phobia of prion disease and don't eat game meat any more. I wrestled with it for awhile but finally acknowledged that even if I could make myself eat the sausages I couldn't make myself enjoy them, and while I felt bad Rejecting A Gift and Wasting Food, those are exactly the kind of rules you get to break in the Disadvent season. (I don't even believe the first one is a good rule but it was in my family growing up - like, oh, you hate that new clothing item? you'll be wearing it anyways - which I suppose was only supposed to apply when I was a kid, but my guilt did not get the message.) J, who is awesome, and kind about my anxiety, did not give me shit about it and is pleased to get the freezer space back.

And tomorrow I get the rest of the ornaments off the tree and the tree goes out to the yard to hang out until townwide tree collection. Happy Disepiphany!

Digital disepiphany: I got my inbox down to a new low (for the past ~7 years).

Surprising nobody I did not read Alecto the Ninth from last year's anticipated list, nor All Hail Chaos, nor Queen Demon yet, although that one did come out. Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, The Incandescent, and The River Has Roots were all good though.

This year I'm looking forward to Vernon's Daggerbound, a sequel to Swordheart; Moniquill Blackgoose's To Ride a Rising Storm, the sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath; Platform Decay, Martha Wells' new Murderbot novel, and Radiant Star, Ann Leckie's new Radch novel. (And then from my tier 2 books I will also mention 2025 books Caskey Russell's The Door on the Sea, Rebecca Campbell's The Other Shore collection, and 2026 books Suzanne Palmer's Ode to the Half-Broken, Isabel J. Kim's novel-expansion Sublimation, and Shannon Chakraborty's second Amina El-Sirafi book The Tapestry of Fate.)

As generally happens the disadvent season petered out or was overtaken by the holiday season, the arrival of my parents, etc. I did finally get J to try on some old clothes of mine, many of which she thought she would keep, which doesn't get them out of my house but did get them out of my closet. Maybe we'll even manage another batch for disepiphany!

Last year's divvying up of the family ornaments took an unexpected turn when the entire tree fell down, raising the temperature three steps and removing eight plants. No, sorry, that's Deimos Down. My mom has always loved big Christmas trees and if this was maybe going to be the last time she was hosting the whole family she wanted a really big tree, so it was like eight feet tall and unbelievably packed with what was still only a mere fraction of the ornament hoard. Most of which were (naturally) on the front facing the room and not on the back facing the wall. I think the stand just couldn't handle it. My sister and I were sitting across the room and had just enough time to make horrified faces at each other as it suddenly swayed forward and fell. Happy Christmas Eve!

We cleaned up the water and broken glass and took all the ornaments off and stood it up again and wired it to the wall and redecorated with only non-breakable ornaments, Christmas was saved, yay. (I thought maybe we should get rid of it before it could strike again but this was unpopular.)

And at the same time, we conducted a confusing and occasionally fraught process of "ornament shopping" in which first my sister and I and then my kids were to pick out all the ornaments we might possibly want, even from among those back on the tree already, even favorites of my moms, and set them aside, and then my mom would pick *back* out the ones she didn't want to give up yet but note down which we wanted, and then we would pack up what we were taking.

I don't think this would have worked at all if my sister and I were inclined to drama - we would have had to do pick one at a time, or do something like the bit in Cryptonomicon with the furniture in the parking lot. But she's the chill one, and I'll fight about plenty of things but not ornaments. There were definitely some I wanted to see *one* of us keep, but might as well be her as me. Maybe five I really, truly cared about: the cloth star that hung between my parents' stockings the Christmas my mom was pregnant with me, the cloth pegasus that hung over my bassinet, the cornhusk doll my mom made when I was a baby of a woman holding a baby, the goofy mylar ball from the drugstore that in my memories is the first ornament I ever picked out for myself when I was like five, although my mom says that's not true, and - I don't know, something else. None of those were at all in contention because they've always been understood to be mine. We had maybe one real moment of conflict where my sister was like "and I'm taking this" and I was like "I think J likes that" and my sister was like "I've liked it for FORTY YEARS" and I was like yup right carry on.

Between me and the kids, we ended up with like five or six shoeboxes of ornaments to bring home. More stuff for me, but less for my mom. She was also supposed to then get rid of the ornaments nobody particularly wanted but as of a year later she has not, and apparently ended up packing a lot of them back away with the good ones she wanted to keep. Two steps forward one step back, I guess.

I have so much to say about ornaments that I made two false starts back in January and then gave up. (They were the third long story of the three long stories, which nobody but me remembers but is still an open to-do list item.) I still want to try to say things, but maybe broken into enough small pieces to not be a tl;dr-sized wall of text.

Packed and mailed the holiday baking.

Turned in ink cartridges for recycling at Staples, another one of those semi-routine tasks I tend to put off.