That’s about where I am today. It’s a great improvement over last Sunday but that’s all I will say about that. First world problems.

It’s the end of January and I actually kind of pulled myself out of whatever wee winter mini-funk I’ve been in and did some relatively serious chores. Cleaned one of Gertrude’s ovens (I cleaned the other one a few weeks ago or so). Mopped floors. I do this stuff fairly frequently anyway except for the ovens which are MOSTLY used on low to heat up leftovers. Not a whole lotta messy cooking going on around here.

The Guru pointed me to Affinity Photo as a Photoshop replacement and although I have barely scratched the surface of what it can do, I can tell it will waaaaaay more than cover my meager needs. For $25 or something (I got it on a half-off sale). When I bought Adobe Creative Suite a gazillion years ago, the full price was something like $3000. Because I was a student, I got it for $300. Now it’s a subscription. Anyway, thanks to the Guru for steering me to Affinity!

Shoveling? Just barely. We got MAYBE an inch overnight. It was supposed to continue throughout the day but didn’t. But I did my civic duty by pushing a shovel around for a few minutes and throwing a little salt down. I think the salt would’ve done the job without the shovel. I used to do almost all the shoveling here but after the GG retaaaarred, he pretty much took it over and upgraded our equipment with the addition of a snow-thrower, a yooper-sized one at that. I have [conveniently] not bothered to learn how to use it. I’ve never learned to use a lawnmower either. Long boring story there.

After all that and some other chores, I settled down to re-read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Except it’s only sort of a trilogy. There are seven books now with the addition of two sequels and two prequels. Given that he started expanding the series in the early 1980s, I may have been semi-aware that there were more but I was toiling away at my Childhood Career and creating new human beings around then and more likely to be reading things like Mouse’s Train Ride or The Dreaded Cat Family Book [not its real title]. It’s interesting revisiting this old sci-fi stuff in many ways. I’ll save most of those for some other day but I was about half-way through the first book (302 pages on my phone) when I started wondering why there weren’t any female characters. One finally makes a fleeting appearance on page 233 and a second possibly more substantial one comes in a page or so later. I’m not kvetching about this. It was a different era and it was what it was. I am curious about whether the later additions to the series will include more female characters.

P.S. I remember very little about the Foundation trilogy 🐽🐽🐽

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2021 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.