So. My first Pubski. Let's do this already.

Books

I've been reading American Psycho. I finally watched the movie after it being on my "To Watch" list for approximately oh 17 years, but I saw and enjoyed it, and decided to read the book. To say I'm enjoying it so far is a little so-so. I'm almost halfway through, and I understand why he's so obsessed with what people are wearing and how much they paid for it, but the word "hardbody" makes me roll my eyes every single time I see it, and it's in there A LOT. This may be one of the rare occasions where I actually enjoy the movie more than the book.

Next on my list - reread A Song of Ice and Fire. The show is ridiculously good, and I never gave the books much of a chance. keifermiller says that the books are better in this case, so I'll give it a genuine shot this time.

Crafting?

I've wanted to brew some beer, but I've been a little meh about my homebrew. It all has the same weird off flavor to it, and it's not particularly cost effective. Fun and enjoyable to watch, but an expensive hobby.

Knitting has been uninspired, as summer tends to do. There's nothing I want to do less than knit warm things when it's hot out, so that's on hold.

I did decide to cross-stitch a piece for my sister-in-law and her fiance for their upcoming marriage. This is by far the biggest thing I've ever done, and my tendency with these sorts of things is to bite off more than I can chew (this project is ~8000 stitches), but since it's only two colors, I think I can manage this. It's been so long since I've done any cross-stitching and it's refreshing.

Other

Floated down Missouri's Niangua River with my sisters and our friend this past weekend. The last time we went was a pretty shit time. I had to babysit drunk people and the river was low and there was just a whole mess of unpleasantness. This time was SO MUCH MORE FUN. We got storms on Friday night, and that was exciting in tents, but it got the river level up enough on Saturday that we weren't dragging our canoe much of the trip. Everyone had fun but did so responsibly, and I got some ghost pepper beef jerky from Osceola Cheese. My sisters and I have been out there several times now, and this was by far the best.

The eclipse was yesterday, and the initial plan for keifermiller and I was to head north of town 90 or so minutes to see totality. Woke up, checked the weather, clouds and rain and general shit weather. I wasn't prepared to drive that far for such disappointment, so we decided to stay in town and see the 99.7% or so eclipse.

Clouds. We had clouds from the start of the eclipse (I did see the first few minutes through my potentially dangerous glasses) til it was over. I was pretty bummed about the whole thing, but it wasn't a total loss. At peak eclipse it got so much darker than I imagined it would, and it was still so eerie to see at 1pm. I'm not messing around in 2024.

I must respectfully disagree - hummus is not optional for this application.

Seriously though, this was good eatin.