We're doing permanent Daylight Time? I mean I get it but mornings are already so dark in the winter ugggghhhhhhh. Springing forward and never getting that hour back. 😂

My favorite cherries are blooming and the star magnolias are going to be opening soon.

My library hold on the audiobook of the complete Miss Marple stories, which I had forgotten placing, came in. I pressed play and found the narrator is the incomparable Juliet Stevenson. Thanks to the universe for this little bit of comfort.

The generous assumption is that the OpenAI people meeting with the BC government were not people who knew about the shooter's ChatGPT history and the internal debate over whether to disclose it to authorities. But I don't feel like being generous, so fuck all of these people.

@brennacgray.bsky.social You should start a local chapter for your sabbatical.

For the second month in a row, I am going to my reading group having *finished the book.* Sad that this feels like an achievement.

Trying to give up hate-clicking for Lent and Satan is tempting me. 😂

Now I'm watching an episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets where a woman character says "Not a lot of women like to imagine two men in bed together." That dated badly.

Watching a Law & Order: SVU episode I know I haven't seen before, but the plot is familiar. I had to wrack my brains but I *think* it's from one of Michael Connelly's Renee Ballard books.

Today the front end of the cat is out of the bag.

AND if you are a host of a podcast about romance fiction, I would love to interview you for research. Please contact me at (without spaces): pschroyer @ northampton . edu

Little cat feet.

Imagine having $65,000 a year (!!) to spend on your child’s schooling, and using it to subject them to extensive surveillance and AI slop test prep.

Milo began to think as hard as he could (which was very difficult, since he wasn’t used to it).

A book for our time and every time.

I am sympathetic to this idea, but/and depression stole my pleasure in reading and hobbies, and I am still struggling to get that back. It goes both ways.

Listening to Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley, on Alex Karp, and wondering who is Haverford College’s awfulest alumnus, Karp or Howard Lutnick?

Still willing to believe that Not All Men are in the Epstein files, but . . . it sure is a lot of them.

Not Groundbreaking Enough Shonda Rimes’ Shondaland production company has taken Julia Quinn’s charming, lively, sexy Bridgerton novels and adapted them for a groundbreaking Nexflix series. The Bridgerton series has presented a character landscape featuring people of more than one colour.…

Oh, hello spring!

A good way to answer the question “do I really still need therapy?” is for your therapist to take a medical leave. Anyway, mine is back after 4 months away and we were so happy to see each other yesterday.

She loves a paper bag cave on a heated floor.

I am reading Startlement, Ada Limón’s new and selected poems, and I always forget how good she is at hope. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Morning fog and evening fog (I work up the hill from a river).

I am doing the first reading at church tomorrow and it is from Isaiah. Very much in a mood to get up there and let loose with “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away!”

Ramona enjoying some rare January sun.

I got a FB ad for a seminar on renouncing your US citizenship. As an American in Canada I get this every year as tax time approaches and you have to file twice. But this year it hit different.

Really really enjoying my re-read of LOLLY WILLOWES. Her choice to break free of the comfort of inherited conventions and be witchier and more extravagant is inspiring right now. The novel also breaks free of the conventional (if charming and funny) book it seems at the start.

This beautifully written piece by my pal @adambonica.bsky.social is worth your time today. A bit of light amid the darkness. open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

I couldn’t remember what the library hold I needed to pick up was. Turns out it’s a book on burnout. (I also own a book on burnout I never finished). 😂

Me: OK, time to go do errands. The cat:

Two days were enough for this week. Why are there more to come? (The first week of a semester is always exhausting. It's fine).

@joiedevivre9.bsky.social Spending a few minutes with Lolly at bedtime is pure delight and badly needed right now. I’m so glad you organized this!

Last year’s resolution was a monthly dinner with a friend, which she dubbed East Van Ladies’ Supper Club. We cooked a new (easy) recipe together on a weeknight. Up there with “read a poem a day” as my most rewarding and best-kept resolution.

Getting a jump on my “read more, screen less” resolution by starting this last night. The Quiet Ear, a memoir of his deaf experience/identity by the poet Raymond Antrobus. I always like to bridge old and new year with a strong book to start me off right and this is doing it.

This whole thread is interesting, but I especially like the genre & gender breakdown. (It’s what you’d expect, really).

My word for 2025 was “boffo” (from some silly online word picker). 2025 was not boffo, for me or the world in general. But one element of my year was unequivocally joyful. So glad I talked myself into adopting Ramona the Boffo last spring. I smile every time I see her.

I really really want to read more books in 2026, which inevitably means scrolling less. That can only be good for me.

I’m sayin

Someone at my library has a sense of humour.

Most successful Christmas present by far was the butterfly wand toy Ramona.

I am stalled partway through some mystery audiobooks/shows I was enjoying, and I had to push myself to finish the mystery I was reading. Realizing that there is only so much suspense/jeopardy I can take right now. Maybe I should be reading cozy fantasy even though it’s not my usual jam.

Can’t remember if it was @superwendy.bsky.social or @janetwebb.bsky.social that I learned about Sarah Stewart Taylor’s AGONY HILL from, but thank you! I am currently reading the equally good sequel, HUNTER’S HEART RIDGE. Mysteries set in mid-1960s Vermont.

We are basically turning city government and policing over to FIFA for the duration. www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Just realized that tomorrow is the 22nd, not the 23rd, and also that I had mentally added a year to the age I will be turning next week, so turns out that for Christmas I have given myself the gift of time. A year and a day, as the old tales have it!

I have been thinking about how hard and slow it will be to reverse this, in large part because a lot of nominally liberal people are just fine with it.

To mail a package from Canada to my parents in the US, I had to fill out an online customs form, download an app and fill out a second form for US duties, and show the QR code from each at the post office.

Me: Ramona is being good about the tree so far. (it’s her first Christmas with me) Ramona: what if I bite this fake branch? I haven’t put ornaments on yet; should be fun!

Ending semester grading with the creative projects and reflective writing from my literature/gender studies courses, and as always they are a balm for the discouragements of teaching in These Times. Students do really engage and care about their learning!

Only her second semester in the role, and Ramona is absolutely crushing this Grading Assistant thing.