A while ago, minim_calibre asked me if I'd read any Kate Atkinson and I said I had, but it was very long ago--I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum and the first Jackson Brodie book after I fell in love with the Case Histories TV series with Jason Isaacs. She ended up buying me two books she'd read, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and I finally had the chance to start on the first one, which is like four inches thick so felt pretty daunting. I'd been so busy with work (some truly awful, awful books [mygodihateYAsomuch] and one really good one that I wasn't sure I could do it, but I really wanted to keep my reading streak going. It's been so wonderful to reclaim the reading part of my life, I can't even tell you. It's also hugely inspirational to my own writing when I'm reading really good fiction--or heck even nonfiction.

If you've never read Life After Life, I can highly, highly recommend it. It'd be easy to say it's essentially a time loop story/multiple timeline tale, where little decisions or events have history-altering effects both personal and global, but that barely touches on the story. I just loved it and I'm looking forward to the related book about one of the characters, I hope it's as un-put-downable as Life After Life.

I discovered there was a BBC four-part limited series of it a couple years ago, on Prime in the US, and it was...okay. It should have been at least six episodes, though, because a book that sprawling requires a lot more time--there were significant cuts to the story that I think any fan of the book would be a bit twitchy about, and a major change to the ending. Still, a lot of good actors and it was nice to see some of the characters come to life.

It's just so nice to feel like I can read again after all these years. Like when I have my nose in a screen, it's because it's something that adds a little value in my life, rather than the horrible garbage of everyday life.

Yesterday, a friend and I went to a pumpkin patch and U-pick farm, because she's very into the gourds and cucurbits for art, and I wanted to have a nice outing. We lucked out and got the most spectacularly perfect, sunny day in the 70s, and I found a couple of beautiful pastel pumpkins (one kind of a mottled salmon and blue-green and the other a pale blue) as well as a starfish-shaped gourd to buy, even though I've never been into Halloween at all. I'm not sure if I'll put them out on the back porch or the front, the front's pretty crowded and small, but I think that's the "obvious" place for a Hallloweeny decoration. I also bought some apples from the farm's produce side, and the best sweet corn on the cob I have ever tasted in my life. It was so good we were texting each other about it. If I didn't live over an hour away, I would have driven right back there for more corn.

Everyone always says fall is their favorite season, but I think if you live somewhere where it is relatively dry in October, and the leaves change early, sure, it'd be fine, but in the PNW it's just suddenly cold, super wet, and miserably gray. The leaves are just soggy masses, so you don't get to wander outside in piles of dry leaves, wearing your woolen sweaters and scarves, feeling the sun on your face while you drink your punkin spice bullshit drinks. Nope, instead you have to wear your Gore-Tex jackets and waterproof shoes and hope your street won't flood when the heavy rains have nowhere to go because everything's clogged with slimy leaves. Bleh. Give me spring any day.

My numbers have been holding steady at a place where it looks like remission, though no one wants to say it is. I could have a bone marrow biopsy, and may still do that, to determine whether I really am there, but honestly, then I'm just going to be doing pretty much the same thing I'm doing now, because I'm essentially doing what Dr. Li does for maintenance on people who've gone through stem cell transplants or the new hotness, CAR-T cell therapy. I am sure there'll be some fiddling with drugs, but considering the nightmare of the insurance situations right now, I don't know what will happen.

I had a mammogram today and a DEXA scan (which just seems so nuts to me, as it's for osteoporosis and I feel like having bone marrow cancer means that osteoporosis is kind of a silly thing to worry about), and next week I go to the dermatologist, and hopefully I will get some of these things done before the nazi pricks can take everything away.

As always happens, at the mammogram, the technician, who was nice and did a pretty good job of not hurting me, mentioned knowing someone with multiple myeloma who's had it for 18 years now. I cannot tell you how often someone tells me about their family member/friend/co-worker who has it and who's lived with it for X years, and I just...I have to smile and say oh wow. I HATE IT.

It used to be a death sentence, but until just recently, there were new drugs being approved constantly so the survival rates and times have been increasing constantly, but it's by no means an easy survival for most, and there is no such thing as a "cure" where it disappears completely. It always comes back, and I've been confronted a lot lately with that because some people in our support group have died, both of whom had lived with it for a long time, going back into treatment each time it returned. It always does. Ugh, I wish people would shut the fuck up about it. I know they think they're being positive for me, but it's just not as simple as they think.

Otherwise, I just keep plugging along. Blues is definitely getting pretty frail and fragile, but his appetite is great, so I'm hoping he hangs on for a while longer. He has a concerning thing on his lower jaw that might be a cyst or might be cancer or anything in between, but it's in a tricky spot, so all we can do is watch it for now.

I know there are other things I wanted to talk about--including my rewatches of everything from the X-Files to the Good Place--but I'll save that for another post, this one's long and boring enough!