Another Oxford Story

This one is a whole series by an American author, Lynn Morrison, who has settled down in the City of Oxford, and is clearly ensorcelled by that magical city!  In addition to the usual over the top adoration of Oxford University, this author has incorporated magic into the stories.  It's nicely done, but ends up giving the story a slightly Harry Potteresque feel.  Not terrible, but if a reader is familiar with Oxford—which I'm not, at all—they might feel like, come on, it's just a university.  It's weird, but not that weird!

There's a baby dragon- like critter—a wyvern, to be exact—that attaches himself to the main character, and very cleverly pretends to be a cat, so as not to blow this main characters cover to the muggles.  The name of the wyvern is Humphrey, but he hates his name, and wants to be called H.

The main character is Natalie Payne (rather an American-sounding name for a British heroine) but she's nice, and gets along well with the wyvern.

June 14

Apparently it's trump's birthday!  Nobody is celebrating it around here; Trump prolly doesn't care what happens in our town, and there's likely going to be a lot of fussing near Washington D.C., or Maralago.  Well, as long as everything is on Trump's own dime, can't complain!

How about Chuck E.  CHeese?

I'm reading a story, where, again, one girl in a couple wears a dress, and the other wears ǰeans, for a party.  This is getting to be just too much of a cliche in books on Amazon.  In going to have start looking elsewhere for more satisfactory stories. 

Kay

Lindsey Pennington: Soft Lips ...

I've just finished reading another book by Lindsey Pennington.  The previous books by this author I had read were exceptionally good; very literary, would have been my verdict.  Since I'm so picky about careful language, and grammar, I guess that those aspects of the writing must have been really good. 

This latest story, though, started out very promisingly, but sort of became a little scattered as it went along; actually the entropy in the writing got very bad indeed.  But I had made a connection with the characters, so I just had to finish the story. 

There are two women, the older one of whose marriage has broken up, but who is a very determined, very giving, very lovely person; and the younger a psychologist and counselor, patient and understanding, but just discovering that she is getting multiple sclerosis—still only minor symptoms, but eventually going to be serious. 

They love each other very much.  But the older woman is diagnosed with cancer, which eventually kills her, and the younger, the caretaker, is left devastated, with the only child of the deceased woman, a boy, to look after.  She is eventually persuaded to seek companionship in a lesbian bar. 

Also at the bar, with her crazy friends and her sister, is a young lawyer.  She's straight, but these girls are her friends, so she tags along with them, always to this same bar.  For a bet, she's asked to kiss a girl, a one-time exercise.  Of course, she ends up kissing our other protagonist.  It's a good kiss; neither of them can stop thinking about it.  The young lawyer runs home from the bar. 

The story revolves around the lawyer's clumsy attempts to deal with her unexpected new attraction to a woman, after a decade or more of being only interested in men.  She finds out the home address of the psychologist, Kerry, and bursts into her home, uninvited. 

There are some interesting circumstances; the lawyer—an attractive girl—is half Scottish, half Korean; and her mother is a typical, interfering Korean mother.  There are four children, all girls, all different, and all real characters. 

The biggest character of them all is the lawyer herself, who was extremely picky about the men she wants to date; she has a checklist, and she scores them all on a 100-point scale.   (She's even got a scale for women, to help her lesbian friends out.)

It's sort of fun, though nothing really unexpected happens.  The comic attitudes of the young women, and their zany conversation kept me hooked, though I thought the long-suffering psychologist was just a little too patient with her rude lawyer client. 

But there are just so many mechanical errors that I strongly suspect that there was a very capable editor for the previous stories, but not for this one. 

Kay

Terpsichore

The last few days I have had a strange experience—actually, a whole series of strange experiences—similar to some that I've had in earlier years.  Having so little to do, I spend a lot of time on Facebook.  And I get sucked into these so-called reels, which are simply videoclips.  And some of them are just girls dancing. 

They have a happy smile on their faces, and they've got pretty dresses on—I guess they know my taste in clothing, by now, so they can select videoclips keeping that in mind, or ... anyway—they're dancing away; and in my mind I'm so depressed, because I never learned this sort of dance!

I can certainly dance ballet; I took many years of it; I can dance the Waltz, but was seldom called upon to waltz with anyone.  But these hip-swinging Latin dances are completely out of my reach, and they're the best for dancing by one's self.  Then, there are these Tik-tok type dances that are so cute; and I'm so consumed with envy.  If I had to do it all over again, from my early teens, I'd dance up a storm!

Dancing is natural for girls in these times. 

Irene Idänvalo

OMFG.

A Facebook 'content creator' from Finland has made herself at home on my Fb page.  Her name is Irene, and she's the heading of today's post. 

Irene

It seems very much as though she's posting from Finland, though she's completely at home with English idioms, her slight accent notwithstanding.  She has a side buddy, her sister, who is often featured in Irene's video posts (they're always video clips; in fact their main content home is Instagram, I believe), and the sister's name is something like Snuikki.  [Added later: it's Snuikku.  If think Snuikki sounds a little more convincing.  But I don't know Finnish, unfortunately.]

Many of Irene's (which is pronounced 'I-re-neh')'s videos start with

"LISsen!!" screeched out at the top of her voice, after which she will go into the main subject, which is often The Finnish Word of the Day, which is quite often something multi-syllabic and intimidating, such as (yelled out) "Kurkku kipu!"

"Say it with me: kurkku kipu!  But what does kurkku kipu MEAN?"  So she would break it down, and say: kurkku means cucumber, and kipu means pain, so naturally kurkku kipu means a sore throat!  (Finnish etymology often takes an unexpected turn.)  She has a sidekick, namely her sister, a redhead, who seems marginally more sane than Irene herself, and an all-round softer person.  But this Snooky girl has her own posts—some of which also involve Irene—in which Snooky comes across as a lot more assertive and confident than she does in her sister's videos, when she's playing second fiddle.  They are fascinating people, and their choice of subjects are exactly calculated to suck me in!!

These videos—probably qualify as podcasts—are generally hilarious.  People all over the world tune into them, apparently, and they have a huge following.  I've only watched them for two days (Fb algorithm is sending me their video clips multiple times the last two days), so I'll have to report in more detail once I see more of them. 

Kay

P.S. She puts on a really convincing Southern / Texas accent!  They're (the two sisters) are very serious about their posts—I guess Instagram posts—but sometimes they're a little casual about the actual content.

One time, Irene badmouthed tortillas.  I was quite disconcerted.  This has to stop. 

Kay