Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

 

 Well, it's been a while since I've actually written a blog post, because... hell if I know, I'm just not as structured as I used to be. Or I'm structured in different ways. I don't know. But it is just a couple days away from the end of 2021 so I figured I'd wrap it all up. In terms of what I did this year, the answer is actually quite a bit. In some weird twist of something, I read 333 books this year. And I've got a few days left, so I might hit 340 or something. This is my highest reading year to date, beating out my previous high of 240 in 2015. Now that I've looked that up I definitely want to hit 340 just so that I can be 100 higher than my last time.  Uh, it's currently -20 outside and we got like three feet of snow over the weekend + also today so that's fun, and I've discovered another use for masks, it's called, I don't have a scarf and hey, this is actually better than a scarf when I have to walk to the Neighborhood Grocer...

 

 

 

 

 So, my freshmen have been playing D&D. I made it part of English class; they have to keep up a character journal, 300 words a session. We play once a week.  This is my first time DM'ing. I've been playing, as a player , for like... god, it's been like three years now? Maybe four ? I don't even remember. But it's been one campaign, so like, I'm very familiar with Bard and vaguely familiar with Barbarian (because I MULTICLASSED), and have a touch-and-go-sort of familiarity with like, cleric and warlock and wizard and rogue and paladin. So when our druid is like, "What do I do?" I'm like, "fuck if I know."  But it's been... fun? I decided to start them out on the first adventure that we did, so we're going through Waterdeep: Dragon Heist currently, and whenever I'm like, I need a NPC I can play well, boom, wow, there's my level 14 Bardbarian Kosef. My little sister is one of the freshmen, so like, she knows him--when I s...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It's weird coming back to teach instead of just going and teaching for the first time. First of all, I know what to expect now, like how the seventh graders are sweet and sit still now but by October will be little helldemons. It's also that now, apparently, the principal thinks I did a good enough job that he gave me a Read180 class and populated it with three kids that probably don't need to be in there (one who DEFINITLEY SHOULD NOT BE IN THERE) and one kid who does need to be in there instead of just like, putting them in the Learning Center.  My seniors graduate this year. Hopefully. One out of seven didn't come back, and I know three will graduate, one will if she decides she will, one's good enough at pulling shit together last minute he'll probably make it, and one that I'm... a little worried about, but can do it. Hopefully we don't have any more dropouts.  One thing that's new this year is that Steven is student-teaching across the hall in...

 So, school starts tomorrow, I got certified to teach with literally sixteen hours to spare , and it's time to look at my summer to-do and see... what I failed at and what I completed. So.  My first goal was to move. I did move. I no longer live fifty miles away from my job. Now I live twenty miles away from my job. Yay, not spending 125$ on gas a week!  The second goal was to get my Guns'n'Roses tattoo. This is one that did not end up happening. Moving took an entire month and then there was just so much going on and I got a stupid job ?? For the summer??? And also infrequently during the school year??? I'm back at the library. Long story short, I'm still working on that one.  Third goal was to take and pass my PTK test, which I did. Professional teaching knowledge, by the way. Uh, took this one remotely, hated that.  Fourth was to take my English test. Did that as well. Took that one in a testing center and that was a lot better.  Fifth was to read 100 bo...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It's always kind of funny to me, when the book wall gives me one of my own books, because of course I get copies of my own books and of course, if I get a book, I have to read it, so it goes into the book wall, and I'm never really mad about it. I love my books. I wrote them because I liked them, you know? I wrote what I wanted to read. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't have written it. I would have written something else. So right now I'm reading Forty Days . This book has Allan in it, which is great, because I love Allan. I think it's fine. I think it'll be fine. I've put it on Goodreads and everything, that I'm reading Forty Days, because I am , and I'm going to count it for my challenge. Will I rate it five stars? I don't know. At least four, probably, but I won't know until I've read it.

 

 

 The answer is... yes? There should be two more books out of mine before the end of the summer. One of them will be a collection of short stories and essays, and the other one will be the second Vendettic book. So, if you're interested, now would be the time to pickup Spahn . If you've got Kindle Unlimited, it's free on there; otherwise, it's .99 for Kindle, 8.00 for paperback. I still have to contact my cover guy for the Vendettic books and format the damn thing, but it is done.  So, in the interest of interest, here's the first couple pages of Sacrifice , book two: CHAPTER ONE             Danny doesn’t even give Niko time to put his shit away before he says, “It’s a good thing that you’re back, because we start our tour with XXXmass next weekend.”             Niko’s so shocked by this that he nearly drops his guitar. “What the fuck, Danny.”    ...

 

 where the hell did that weird 'let's make an overcomplicated Plan for everything' come from? Everything else I managed to shove onto a deeply flawed teenage boy in whatever media I was obsessed with at the point, so where did my Plans come from?  Does the fact that I'm capitalizing Plan help?  It was Gary fucking Barkovitch from the Long Walk, by Stephen King. I still consider this book to be my favorite book, because it's fantastic, and also, the last time I read it, re-read it I mean, it hit me how fucking young all of these kids are and so I almost cried, but for the longest time and also again, Gary Barkovitch was my favorite character. You know, the little racist asshole who immediately alienates everyone else on the Walk.  But the thing is. He has a Plan. And this isn't just 'don't get shot,' it's obviously a deeply complicated Plan that makes sense to nobody but him. Case in point: the 'rest' that he took at the beginning of the W...

 

Recently, I read the first volume of the manga for SDR2. Hajime edition, like the game, not the Komaeda edition because I don't like, hate myself, and really, I was not expecting much. When I read the first volume of the manga for the first game, I was like, "Well that was fun, but it sucks as a manga." When I read this one, now I'm reading fanfiction again, so that's like, chill.  I'm also realizing, recently, how much of my weird stuff right now is directly correlated to the shit I waded through in high school. Like my clown thing?   Pretty sure that's where the clown thing came from. I mean, I read IT before I read that, I think, but I was that motherfucker for Halloween my junior year, for some reason, and I still have the shirt, but I'm also realizing, in my new Dangan Ronpa funk (Which by the way--what the fuck there's so much more to this series now???? I know the first two games and the animation for the first game and that's IT, mother...

 

 

 I am entirely unprepared for Camp NaNoWriMo this month. I sort of forgot about it until about 8:00AM this morning, and I only started working on my project at about 3:30 this afternoon. I'm about 600 words in. If you're interested, I'm doing kind of an experimental thing... if you've read the Pentalogy of Hell there's a character who gets a stupid amount of attention, and I'm writing the lead-up to his death in the form of police interviews? I thought it was fun. It was randomly chosen for me. It was between that, the first in a sequel trilogy to the Tinon series, and the next Aughts Boys book.  But I think I'll get back in the swing of things. Like I said, I'm only about 600 words in. And I can't exactly walk right now, what with my feet being half-blister from yesterday's 25k monstrosity  (walked 4.5 hours straight, would not recommend), so I might as well make myself useful and write.

 I don't get along with lighters.  I don't know what it is; if it's like self-checkouts which hated me for so long but now will stand me, or if I'm just never allowed to use lighters ever, but right now my candle sitting on my desktop's tower was lit by the little box of matches that lies next to it. Matches are not ideal, because I suck at matches, too; for every one that lights, I have three that I have to chuck. I can at least get some fire from them, though; I might need to stop at the M&H when I walk down to put our two electric bills (bleh on a moving month, right?) in the post office box, because all I have is this little book and I've wasted so many matches already.  But I think it matches what I've got going on. It makes sense for matches to be the only thing I can start fires with, because why the fuck would something that makes your life easier and with less waste be something my person would be good at?

 

 Throwback to this post. So, it's been about a month, so I figured I'd update where I've been on my summer goals.  Move Steven and I are planning on moving thirty miles down the interstate to be closer to the school we will both be teaching at come fall. We cut the commute in more than half. This is looking good--we're going to go and look at an apartment tomorrow. We have moved! Everything is out of the other apartment! We still have to clean and not get my security deposit back before the end of the month, but at least everything is out , you know? G'N'R Tattoo  I had my students vote on what tattoo I should get over the summer, giving them three options, and they decided I needed a Guns'n'Roses tattoo, so sometime this summer I've gotta make that happen. I didn't get any tattoos last summer, with COVID and all, so I'm excited to get back in that chair.  This is, TBH, pretty low on my list of priorities. I was on Facebook the othe...

 I' m not just talking about the internet but, yes, that too (Steven and I moved at the beginning of June and shit has been crazy), but also, well.  We moved back to the town that I went to college in, because it's closer to our jobs (not mentioning the fact that the due date for me to get those certification tests in is growing closer and closer and man, thanks Michael at American Board because you are always saving my ass), but it's also the college I used to work at the library in. It's the library that I met my DnD friends, some of whom still work at the library (the Paladin and the Wizard; Paladin is married to DM, then we have my old psych professor who is the Cleric, her husband the Warlock/Bard, and someone... someone works with as the Rogue, to my Bardbarian. RIP other library coworkers that were Druid, her husband Ranger, and First Rogue), and it remains the job I have had for the longest amount of time.  So, soon after we moved back, we stopped by the library...

 

 

 

 

 So, school's been out for about a full week and some change, and I have been doing a lot more exercise. So much exercise in the form of walking around town for hours on end that I had to take today off even though it's beautiful outside because I've got several large blisters that have formed and plumped up over the past few days so I'm giving those feet a rest.  I am starting to brown up a little, too; I started late this year so I got a little too much sear on my shoulders a few days ago but that's faded to brown. I also started yoga? That shit does not fuck around. I just go on Amazon Prime and watch Julia Marie videos and she's made me do way more chair poses than I have ever wanted to do in my life. But I do feel like I'm loosening up a little. Really, I didn't realize just how out of shape I'd gotten teaching until this past week and a half or so. It was nine solid months of sitting, walking around occasionally, yeah, but then sitting in a ca...

 

 

 So I'm trying to cut caffeine. It was getting pretty bad at the end of the school year, like, two-Mountain-Dew-Rise-Energy-Drinks-a-day bad, and so I decided to just cut cold turkey. This has not been entirely cold turkey; sometimes the withdrawal's a little too rough in the 'caffeine headache' variety and so I have like, a Coke, which is only like 30mg of caffeine, far cry from the 180mg-a-can energy drinks. Today I have had none. I told myself if I could at least make it an hour longer than yesterday... and now I've already brushed my teeth and so I don't want to drink pop.  I've cut caffeine before. I used to be a big coffee drinker; I had a Keurig through college that I had a lot of fun with. Right now I have a coffeepot that I feel like I should replace with an electric kettle because we only use it for the hot water now. I have pretty much lost my taste for coffee. I can still enjoy stuff like mochas and whatnot, but straight coffee is not my deal any...

 

 So, the school year is over. I've already posted about this on Instagram, but I have set a few goals for myself over the summer. Some of them are fairly self-explanatory; actually, most of them are pretty self-explanatory, but I figured I would explain them anyway.  Move Steven and I are planning on moving thirty miles down the interstate to be closer to the school we will both be teaching at come fall. We cut the commute in more than half. This is looking good--we're going to go and look at an apartment tomorrow. G'N'R Tattoo  I had my students vote on what tattoo I should get over the summer, giving them three options, and they decided I needed a Guns'n'Roses tattoo, so sometime this summer I've gotta make that happen. I didn't get any tattoos last summer, with COVID and all, so I'm excited to get back in that chair.  PTK Test This is for my certification.  English Test This is also for my certification.  Read 100 books I've read... two, so fa...

 

 

 

 Last year, I read War and Peace . It took roughly seven thousand years to read. No. Not seven thousand. Just... an entire month. The entire month of February last year was spent trying to power my way through War and Peace , and this month, when I drew the lot of The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (granted, a whopping half the size of W&P at 750 pages), I was dreading it. Honestly--I knew that it was going to take me another roughly seven thousand years. Well, okay--thirty five hundred years, because it's half the size. But since these are novellas, it's actually been easier, because--after each novella, I just read a different book. That way I still feel productive in my reading but I'm also getting through my Tolstoy and, honestly, bonus--it's a lot easier to read Tolstoy when I get to pause and read something else every fifty pages or so.  I'm not saying that Tolstoy's bad, because he's not. Dude had mad chops, and dude also really understood huma...

 

 

 It is windy.  I live in North Dakota. It is always windy. We have a very flat land and a very minimal amount of trees, so the wind just goes and goes and goes and goes. I feel like the town I live in is cursed, like a Silent Hill sort of thing (I've only seen the movie) because going out the fog was so dense and coming back in there was a solid wall of dust blowing across the road. I didn't know what it was coming up on it (dust did cross my mind, but it didn't make sense ).  Being in the middle of a Dust Wall is very similar to being in little-visibility-snowy-weather, or fog, or something like that, except for everything is brown. It was also raining, because it rained on and off and everything was fucking weird driving back, and so my wipers were going like crazy. It had to have been at least a quarter mile of straight dust.  Then we came out into the sun and it was weirder, almost.  Very windy--when I left gusts were at 29, when I turned north they were goi...

 

 School is just about over. We've got thirteen school days left (counting finals!), and then we are free, free, free. Next year (assuming I actually end up getting certified), I will have a better handle on what I'm doing, more money per paycheck and overall, and, if I'm lucky, copies of Life After Death to teach to my American Lit class.  I'm not saying that this year was all bad. It wasn't. I genuinely like a majority of the kids, and of course I don't hate children, because they're children and still changing. I think I've made some good relationships with some of the kids and I'll be sad if Steven gets a job far, far away because there are a lot of these kids that I will miss.  Also there's the fact that probably I'd never teach anyone other than my current school, because I was not built for teaching, probably. I don't know. I know a lot about English and literature and history and books and writing but man... I dunno. I dunno! Eithe...

 

 I have always been a fan of Romeo & Juliet. I loved reading it for school, I loved all the film adaptations--it was my first real introduction to Shakespeare, and I enjoyed it. It's not my favorite Shakespeare play, but it's probably the one I know the best and the one that I've read, re-read, and re-read again the most. So, I agree with the author of the book I'm currently reading, which is a retelling of Romeo & Juliet, and on the back, on the author description, she says, " Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's best plays and doesn't deserve its slander in pop culture." And you know what, hell yeah? (The book is, of course, These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, which is R+J retold with the backdrop of 1920s Shanghai + some ~mystical elements.) The thing with this play is that it is not a grand love story that people interpret right but hate. It has a love story in it, sure, but the real thing about this play is that is the story of two f...

 

 So, I just got my first pair of Bluetooth headphones. I know, I know, it is The Year Of Our Lord 2021 and these shits have been available for actually ever, and just now am I getting my first pair, but keep in mind that I still have a Walkman. A legitimately Sony Walkman that I use to play my Metallica Cassette Tapes, Thank You Very Much.  (I also know that I am only 23 years old and this is entirely the hipster in me that I keep denying.) But they came today! To be honest, the only reason I bought them is because they did come with a cord (so, yes, I can use them to listen to my Metallica Cassette Tapes On My Sony Walkman), and... it's actually impossible to find a good pair of over-the-ear headphones without Bluetooth capabilities. I've looked. Believe me, I have looked . The only other pair of over-the-ear headphones are a pair I got with a GE portable cassette player that have the distinct disadvantage of only playing at a very low volume... of course, this becomes a posi...

 A few more updates because things just! Keep! Happening! First up, I was... interviewed? And had an article written partially about my book recording habits? Article is by Amelia Tait and can be found on penguin.co.uk, or here for a direct link. It is a really well-written article and I am definitely super honored that she was able to use some of the interview to help out with her article! I got another essay published! This one is online at don't die press ; " Write the Person First " which is really just. A Poorly Disguised Reasoning Of My Overwhelmingly Male Protagonists. But I'm proud of it, and I'm glad that the ladies over at don't die press found it good enough to post.  The book wall shrinkage is going well. The last of my large boxes of books came in and so I have no more giant boxes of books coming in, so that's fantastic. Three more books to read before I can make a ThriftBooks order!

 

 I have come to realize something about my book buying ban habits, and that is that I really only tend to go on one when I have a lot, and I mean a lot , of packages of books coming in. Then as soon as they all come in, I'm straight back at it. This is unsurprising, and might be called 'pretty predictable, honestly,' but it does amaze me that it's taken me this long to realize it. I'm still in the honeymoon phase of my book buying ban (well, not ban, restrictions ) right now, and so I don't have any real feelings toward purchasing books other than it would be nice but I can hold off. It is also the honeymoon phase because I am reading like crazy . I'm hoping both stay on board. I've been good with Camp NaNo, and doing enough work during the day that I don't have to do much, if any, at night to stay on track. Hopefully that can stay as-is so that my evenings can be for reading. In a choice that is probably stupid, I have chosen to let any and all book...

 I got a short story published in an online lit mag! Read " Creaks " for free at Red Rover Magazine. I believe the editors may be doing a limited print run of this magazine, but I'm not 100% sure--either way, the story's available for reading.  I started my book buying ban again? My Instagram photo is correct in stating that this is my third attempt at this point, in this apartment, with this method, and hopefully third time IS the charm. I have too many books . Like most things in my life, this was brought on because of instant gratification: BookOutlet was having a good sale, and I told myself, "You can only get books if you go back on a book buying ban," and now I have eleven books coming from BookOutlet, not to mention all the eBay purchases that are going to be trickling in. All I can say is, oops.  Camp NaNo is happening! I'm working on Promise Me , which will be the sixth book in the Aughts Boys series--the first two are already out. They're m...