And not quite

 * just under three more rounds of ribbing, then I bind off for the cowl. I just couldn't do any more tonight.

* And I am beat, those 5 pm interview video-calls are exhausting. I forgot how tiring Zoom is when you have to be "professional" - the Zoom knitting is very different as you don't have to maintain something like eye contact, and you don't have to speak if you don't want to, and you have your knitting. Two more of the video interviews. Hopefully one of the people works out for us, we really need a new person. 

* I kind of hit a wall on reading "Dracula," I had forgotten how horror novels go and I've reached the point where they're realizing what exactly happened to Lucy and while I don't remember if they literally behead her or not.....well, maybe I take a break for a bit. Last night I started a mystery novel (Another ECR Lorac novel set in "Oxbridgeshire") She wrote a LOT of mysteries and luckily a lot of them are being reprinted now, because she's enjoyable to read - not totally unlike Ngaio Marsh, and as I said, I think Lorac is a better writer than Christie (if she doesn't have a very recognizable and eccentric detective as her lead - she has a Chief Inspector as her main character who does the detecting - C.I. Macdonald who is an interesting enough character but he doesn't have all the odd quirks like a Poirot does)

* Linked on Metafilter: When History Happens, an essay from 2020 about Connie Willis' writing (among other things). And while a lot of pieces from that time give me a real frisson (I remember times in April/May when I wondered if there'd even still BE humanity at this point in time), there's also the note that Willis' writing in many ways is something I find fundamentally hopeful. I think it's because in some cases a fairly ordinary person is able to do something that helps or makes things better, and that's something I desperately want to believe is REAL even if I have doubts in this world that anything I do helps anything. 

I also realize I never bought or read Blackout/All Clear; that will be rectified (an order has been placed with Bookshop). 

I enjoyed "To Say Nothing of the Dog," which is a more comic novel of the time travel ones I've read. I also liked the long short story Fire Watch - which is also time travel, and someone desperately trying to figure out what they need to do to stop a Bad Thing.

The one that really got me though was Domesday Book, (which I initially misremembered as Doomsday Book, which is what I think the original "Domesday" was meant as - basically an accounting of the souls of people present at some point in time). I will admit I remember crying pretty hard at some points; it's that kind of book (but I still loved it). 

I kept my copy and want to re-read it some day - just not yet, given that a plague (The Black Death, in this case) is a major, major plot point, and I don't think I'm ready yet. 

She also has a book of Christmas short-stories; some comic, some designed to make you think.
Most of her fiction is what I'd call speculative fiction - close to science-fiction but not science-fiction in the sense of being space-opera or shoot-up-the-aliens type stories. 

I guess some people dislike her writing; there's a "Fan Fare" for both Domesday Book and Bellwether (which I have not read) and at least for Domesday Book, there were people who panned it. I don't know; I liked it a lot. 

and a quotation from the linked story, about how awful, really, it is to live through momentous historical times: "We are, in Walter Benjamin’s famous image, blown backwards through history, seeing only the wreckage that comes before."

Yes. I also think of what I read of "observers" in the ordinary British public during the Second World War, and how uncertain everyone was - there were people who figured they were done for, there were others who wanted fundamentally to capitulate to Germany, there were still others who were planning to fight like hell and probably die doing it in the case of an invasion. And I think one thing we forget as modern people is......when you're in the middle of a fight, you don't know who will win. You won't know until later, and even then, you might not know for sure, or at least all the nuances (given that history is written by the winners, and often the experiences of the less-wealthy or otherwise-marginalized are kind of flattened over - all the poor saps in the trenches in WWI, even if the US/UK/France did "win," a lot of those men sure didn't, they came home sick in body - like a great-uncle of mine - or mind and soul - as some other men did)

But yeah, a common joke these days is "I am tired of living in unprecedented times and would like to try precedented times for a change" and that's a mood. One of the most exhausting things for me about 2020 until now is all the unsureness - you don't know what's the right thing to do, my mom regularly asks me if I think she should be masking up everywhere again (she goes almost nowhere, anyway - out to church and to the grocery and maybe a couple times a month to the farm store - she masks at church because it's in a space with people for over an hour but thus far I've told her the grocery is probably OK unmasked; she goes early in the day and is never close by anyone). But oh, just everything. It took me very long to eat a meal in a restaurant again and I'm still not entirely comfortable with it. It took me longer than literally every one of my colleagues to stop masking up routinely in class (other people have spent periods re-masked, after they suspect they were exposed, they mask until they're ten days out from the exposure or have three negative tests over a span of about five days)

And I hold by my "I do not want anyone to interview me in fifteen or twenty years, if I am even still around, to find out "what was living through the pandemic like" because I'm not sure I want to think very much about it again. 

* Desperately hoping that as Christmas draws closer I can find some hope and cheer but they're a bit thin on the ground right now, I'm just extremely tired in a way that alarms me a bit - it's a tiredness that sleep doesn't seem to really help, and it's almost coupled with a resistance to doing the things I need to do.