Nollaig

Partner confirmed he's got the time off for going to London, yay! My wench costume (we're going to a medieval banquet) should arrive today. I'm crossing my fingers and toes that it fits - it's a few inches shy on the waist as I'm a bit of a barrel but if it stretches at all it will hopefully be okay. It's going to be massive on the bust, but I'm used to that! Once it either stretches, or I can find a way to adjust it, I'll be happy So glad it's Friday. Happy weekend!

I finished Turtles All The Way Down by John Green. It was sub-par. Which is a shame, as I really like John himself and a couple of his other books. Now reading The Good People by Hannah Kent and really enjoying it. I'm from the broad region it's set in, and I can confirm that she has absolutely captured the feel of the people and culture, it's uncanny. I'd swear it was written by a native Kerryperson.

Fellowship of the Ring For the first time in my life, I read through this entire (first) book. I doubt I'll bother with the other two. I love the movies, but this book just isn't very good. There's zero character development, in fact the characters are barely discernible from each other, and the majority of the prose focuses on descriptions of landscape and poetry. There is a good story there underneath, as seen in the films, but how anyone ever dug it out from this book I'll never know! Dead Souls - Angela Marsons The 7th and most recent installment in the Kim Stone series, I really enjoyed this one. Kim is assigned to a joint investigation with a former colleague she now doesn't get on with. This opens up the rest of her team, Bryant, Dawson and Stacey, to take more center stage in their own investigations. As a result, their interactions develop their relationships a bit, and their characters are developed more in general - particularly Stacey. The storyline with Kim and Travis working together reveals the source of the tension between them as well, so overall, while the story is very good too, I particularly liked this one for the character development aspect. 4/5 Turtles All The Way Down - John Green Disappointed by this one. It's characteristically John Green, populated by wit and philosophical insight by the kind of wise teenagers who simply don't exist in the real world. I recognized several things from John's vlogs, so this more than ever felt like him channeling himself through this characters. Which, for me, would be absolutely fine, as it has been in his previous books, if it all served a greater purpose. I adore Paper Towns despite the unrealistic characters because I love what it explores about identity, our perceptions of ourselves and of others. This book explores..... nothing. Except anxiety, manifesting in one of the most uncommon ways I've ever heard of. I know tons of people who suffer from anxiety, myself included - none who worry about the microbes on peoples' tongues. Not to say that it isn't a valid depiction, and the battle between reason and demon is, particularly towards the end, excellently portrayed. Just that I hope I'd be able to relate, and largely can't. There's no real greater story, the romance is utterly baseless and forced (and happens waaaaay too quick), and as such it's a disappointingly flimsy read. I'm giving it 3/5 simply because I still love John's wit and insight, but the book was only okay. I approve this prescription

It's actually not caused by Winter Bleahs at all - I adore winter, dark evenings, cold weather, I can't get enough of it and am sad it hasn't been colder this year! I get very moody in summer as I can't take the heat, volume of people, or endless daylight. My mood picks up from September onwards and lasts til about March or April hehe! Thank you x I'm trying to get out of my detective crime thriller reading rut. They're easy books for me to read, but I'm sure I'm missing out on tons of great stuff. So I'm starting with The Good People by Hannah Kent, and need to scour this forum and Goodreads for other ideas!

Thanks ladies. Helplines wouldn't be very effective for me Madeleine I don't think, even a counsellor would have a hard time dragging things out of me. Regardless, I'm feeling a good bit better now. Still not 100% but am back to looking forward to my masters and not feeling too crappy about being at work! This has probably been helped by the fact that my partner has agreed to go to London to meet my best friend and her partner - I only met her partner at Christmas, but he's lovely. I really want the four of us to spend time together as my bestie is so important to me, and so it's important to both her and me that she meets my partner, as well as us hoping our partners get along (they both like video games and comics, so that's a good start!)

I've started reading Turtles All The Way Down, the new novel from John Green. Reserving judgement so far, but as always with his books it's a witty and occasionally insightful read.

Bright and dry here, cool but not that cold (around 9 degrees C). Bit cloudy though.

Hehe! That reminds me of one time my family played a golf game, not sure what console, but we were all terrible at it. We were all like 10-15 over par all the time, and towards the end when I'd hit the ball back and forth past the hole several times and was right on the edge, the commentator said, 'perhaps this shot will end the misery'. In other news... Back to work today after a week off. The week off was nice enough, although a few nights poor sleep meant a couple of days were effectively wasted on catching up with sleep. It's never long enough though, had trouble sleeping last night knowing I was facing back into work, and have been awake since 5am so my mood is particularly low this morning. I'm grateful for my job, it's a good job, I just hate having to work. I also have to get my next lot of meds sorted this month for my anxiety/depression. I've been on one dose for a year now, and gradually my mood is declining again. Not sure do I need a higher dose or what. Maybe I should start going to counselling but that's a 200 euro commitment a month, it's just so much money. It's funny, all those years ago when I was unemployed for 2.5 years, I produced tons of art and was really creative. Now that I've been in employment for 2.5 years, I don't want to draw, I'm struggling to keep up my cross-stitch, I just read, watch tv or play video games. My creativity is pretty much dead. You'd think financial security would make me happy, but I think all is does is relieve one aspect of anxiety/depression, which is immediately replaced by the depressing tedium of spending most of my life doing a job simply to pay bills. I'm even starting to feel unenthused about my masters, which starts in the next two weeks.

Back to work today after a week off. The week off was nice enough, although a few nights poor sleep meant a couple of days were effectively wasted on catching up with sleep. It's never long enough though, had trouble sleeping last night knowing I was facing back into work, and have been awake since 5am so my mood is particularly low this morning. I'm grateful for my job, it's a good job, I just hate having to work.

Thanks Janet! I think games are something you either grow up with, or don't. I don't really know anyone who's gotten into it if they didn't grow up with it. Thanks Claire! I'm still practising with it... not sure I like the colour in it, so we'll see! I got watercolour pencils to try those and they just soak through the pages too easily so I think it will be either black and white, or simple pencil colouring! Thanks Hayley! I've played 2 - Ark of Napishtim, which I played years ago on PS2 I think, and loved it - because it was short, easy, and a typical hack-and-slash jrpg. Oath In Felghana (review above) proved to be more of the same, so I'm definitely going to play more, as there are several that have been ported (or entirely redone) for the PS Vita

Ys: Oath In Felghana The graphics are a little hard on the eyes at first as they're quite pixellated, and the boss battles take a bit of getting used to due to the hack-n-slash battle system which has you mashing buttons. I realised early on that as it's a port of an older game onto the PS Vita, that I needed to remap the buttons a little to make them more convenient, and that made a huge differece to gameplay. I played it on easy (one of 5 difficulty modes), as I always do, and I flew through it pretty easily - I only really struggled with finding out the patterns of a couple of bosses, as like Zelda and similar classic games, this one's bosses do have specific patterns they follow while healthy, then change when at half-health etc. The characters were likeable, but not really developed. This is a pretty common thing with classic jrpgs, and given that the game is only about 15 hours long, it's not that surprising. All the same, while it was underdeveloped, there was a good core at the core of the game. All in all, it was a fun game, easy to get through, enjoyable gameplay, a solid enough story for a short game, and quite characteristically Ys. Rating: 4/5

It's been foggy all day, it still hasn't lifted. Very unusual.

Also, (copied from What's Up In January): I've started making progress on my one real new year's resolution (is it a resolution if it's not difficult?) which I only realised earlier this week I wanted to do. Based off the extremely popular bullet journals around, my underwhelming experiences with various mindfulness and gratitude journal apps, and my knowledge that gratitude is the one area of mindfulness where I still really fall down, I have invented - the gratitude visual/bullet/sketchnotes journal! Yeah, it's a blend. So basically I'm going to fill a double spread once a week, one page will be a gratitude prompt (one of the best ones I've collected so far is 'where did you rest your head last night?' which got me thinking about warmth, comfort, security, having a partner, having a spare room when one of us is snoring or sick, having a roof over my head, having the money and job security to pay for it, and thinking about the homeless). The other page will be a sketchnotes/visual journal of a few things that week which I am grateful for. So I'll doodle and use doodles to represent these things alongside short descriptions (the 'bullet' element), and thus also work on my drawing skills. I'll be posting pages of it here most likely

I'm still slightly in holiday mode as I've booked next week off work. Purely just to have some downtime before my Masters starts at the end of the month. That will continue until the end of May, so any days off taken then would not be fully restful. I've started making progress on my one real new year's resolution (is it a resolution if it's not difficult?) which I only realised earlier this week I wanted to do. Based off the extremely popular bullet journals around, my underwhelming experiences with various mindfulness and gratitude journal apps, and my knowledge that gratitude is the one area of mindfulness where I still really fall down, I have invented - the gratitude visual/bullet/sketchnotes journal! Yeah, it's a blend. So basically I'm going to fill a double spread once a week, one page will be a gratitude prompt (one of the best ones I've collected so far is 'where did you rest your head last night?' which got me thinking about warmth, comfort, security, having a partner, having a spare room when one of us is snoring or sick, having a roof over my head, having the money and job security to pay for it, and thinking about the homeless). The other page will be a sketchnotes/visual journal of a few things that week which I am grateful for. So I'll doodle and use doodles to represent these things alongside short descriptions (the 'bullet' element), and thus also work on my drawing skills. I'll probably post pages of it in my book-and-game-reviews thread, if anyone is interested. Now to buy a sketchbook to do it all in!

First review of the year. I'm probably going to do relatively short reviews this year, to make them less daunting to keep up with. The Tin Man - Sarah Winman 3/5 I liked this book - more than expected once I got to Michael's section - and while I feel the raw ideas and characters were there, I also felt that I couldn't get at them through the layers of whimsical, fractured prose that seemed more intent on conveying a style than a story. Beautiful writing, it just didn't convey the story very well. It was like looking through a dirty window, trying to get at the full effect but being unable to. It was also too short to adequately tell the story, though I don't think I could have read much more of it in its current style. I'd love to have known more about Dora, Annie, Ellis's childhood, Mabel, Chris's life etc. They're wonderful characters. Also, perhaps due to my own inattention, I was a bit confused for the first while about when people left and came back and left again, but I don't think the time hopping, divided by character, was the best. I might like it more with a second read, which I probably will grant it now that I know how to set my expectations, but I think I would always want more from this book.

Happy reading in 2018!

Dull and misty here. Dry though, and that's what matters.

If you come to the republic telllll meeeeee! (We have a very nice Waterstones in Cork )

I'm reading The Tin Man by Sarah Winman, which has very good reviews. I like it but am not blown away so far.

We're watching season 4 of The Blacklist, which we're enjoying, and last night we started watching The Sinner on Netflix. It's good so far - I don't think quite worth the rave reviews but I'm really looking forward to finding out what happens.

I have yet to watch the new season as my partner isn't really into anything too depressing (even if it is brilliant). I must get back into cross-stitching, as that's when I get my solo watching done! I'm disappointed to hear this season hasn't been as well received.

Happy reading in 2018!

Happy reading in 2018 Frankie!

Happy reading, and good luck with the rest of your course also

Happy reading and happy read-a-thon-ing in 2018 Gaia!