Bird Box / Josh Malerman

Yesterday I saw the trailer for netflix's adaptation of Bird Box, and my reaction was to immediately (after watching Jeopardy, of course) go get my copy of the book and start reading it because IT WAS FINALLY TIME. I've owned Bird Box for several years, and just never brought myself to actually read it, until now. I started and finished it last night and now here we are.

Usually when I read a spooky and/or scary book, I have to either not read it at night or read a VERY GENTLE palate cleanser before falling asleep. So when it was time to go to bed but I wanted to keep reading, I bundled into bed with Bird Box almost finished and with Age of License / Lucy Knisley to get me to sleep sans nightmares. Now don't get me wrong, Bird Box has some good, evocative scenes, and pages that I read very quickly because the action and the tension were moving so quickly. But when I read the last page and closed the book, I didn't feel like I needed to read something non-scary. I still did, because I luv 2 read, but I didn't neeeeeed it. The ending of Bird Box is fine, it's just a little lackluster. It's a fine book! It feels like it could have maybe taken another round of editing? The way I feel about Bird Box is about the same way I feel about Horrorstor: it's a great concept executed well, it's just not a Triumph of Literary Genius, and that's fine!!! I think what may have happened here is that my expectations for Bird Box were off from what Bird Box actually is and that's why I'm feeling a bit weird about my reaction to it!!!

Bird Box was fine! It wasn't bad, and it wasn't amazing. It was nice. I've lifted a gif rating from Alley to explain how I felt about this book:

Minithon 2018

It is back and it is smaller than ever. The Minithon! Alice is our brave leader and I am so excited to minithon. A time to read mini books and eat mini snacks for a mini amount of time. What counts as mini? Anything can be mini if you say it is. Will I say "mini" until it reaches semantic satiation and no longer holds any meaning? POSSIBLY.

Minithon means we read and snack for eight hours (from 9 am til 6 pm here in mountain time) and we talk about it. It is a joyous occasion and I love it. I won't be joining right at nine because I have a garden plant swap to attend but you can be sure I will be reading and snacking as the day goes on.

Here's what I'm reading today:

• The Little Sister / Raymond Chandler - "little" sister? More like MINI sister. 
• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet / Becky Chambers - "small" angry planet? More like MINI angry planet, AM I RIGHT
• The Martian / Andy Weir - uhhh, he had to eat only a mini amount of food every day? 
• Get Well Soon / Jennifer Wright - what makes it mini? It's about plagues and epidemics, and viruses and bacteria are VERY SMALL. 

The first order of the day will be to purchase mini snacks for me to consume. Want miniature updates?? WATCH THIS SPACE and also watch my twitter: @olyvianne

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Here is an update, which in the true spirit of the Minithon, is a couple days post-thon. It was a good day! Did a lot of snacking and tweeting, and a fair amount of reading. Here's what I read!

• Two chapters of Get Well Soon, the chapter on the black plague was particularly good.
• Thirteen chapters of The Martian, which is fun and goes by quickly. 

Josh joined in on the reading and got about halfway through Ninefox Gambit, and finished it yesterday. We ate mini croissants, hashbrowns, chips and salsa, and had some nice hot beverages. It was a good, quiet day. 

Gardeny Things

I love my garden. I love working in it, I love learning more about plants and soil, I love eating things that I grew, I love bring a plant from seed to maturity, I love seeing the bees at work on the flowers while the birds peck at the ants. It's a good garden now, and will be even better next year.

On our way back from Fernie (via Saskatchewan, where I was given a parsley plant) today we stopped at Josh's parents to pick up even more plants. It's a joy to have someone so willing and happy to share plants with me, and I've now been gifted hollyhocks along with many more bedding plants to fill out the gaps in the garden. The hollyhocks will have pink flowers, and I have seeds for hollyhocks with flowers that are almost black, and I'm hoping they will mix and seed around and I'll have blackish-purpleish-pinkish flowers towering above the other plants in a couple of years. It's a long game with hollyhocks; they're biennial - the first year they grow enough of a plant to survive dormancy in the winter, and the second year they flower and set seed - so I won't see the black flowers until 2020, unless I buy an already-flowering plant. Which honestly, I might do.

The bedding plants mostly went to the front, and the hollyhocks are going to join the delphinium, day lilies, and irises in the side bed. Before I can plant them out, however, I have to carry out Operation Extreme Makeover: Garden Edition, which involves digging out nearly all of the plants in the side bed, doing some major weeding, and replanting things in a way that makes sense. I arrived home to discover that the flowers are done on both the day lilies and the delphinium, so the timing is perfect. I need to get the hollyhocks in the ground within a couple of days, so Operation EM:GE is going to be carried out this week.

I've got other garden tasks to complete this week, including trimming and supporting the tomatoes, doing a huge amount of weeding in the veg bed (there was a heat wave the week we were gone and things have gone wild and are starting to set seed), pulling all the radishes, and eating some of the chard. We've moved from weather hovering in the high 30s to a much more friendly mid-20s, so it's a good time to get out there. We were gone for a bit over a week and I've been missing my plants.

6-10, 2018

I mean, you know the drill by now, right? Guess the movies, etc, etc, etc

oh fyi

I wrote about what I read in February on my other blog in a post HERE, and if you think I'm gonna write the same thing twice you're DREAMING.

Also I'm almost done school! I have like a month left!

Also my other blog is written by me and my best friend Raiah and honestly I think it's very good, go ahead and peruse.