Currently...

Reading: The Girl With the Louding Voice, Wild, Friends: A Cultural History, and Why We Can't Sleep

Recovering From: Annual Staff Day. This one was my fourth Staff Day; my second as a manager/leader in my organization; my first one that left me absolutely knackered. 8.5 hours surrounded by 160 very different, often very intense people is a LOT. At least we have a year to recover...

Watching: Schitt's Creek. I hope this show never ends.

Thankful for: Grocery delivery service. I seriously hate going to the grocery store, so Kroger's grocery delivery service is a literal godsend.

Dreaming: About past lives. This week, I had a dream for the third time: in it, I am back in California, back at the Rancho Mirage Public Library. I've left my home, my life in Indiana, my current job, to take on temporary work as a favor to RMPL. In the dream, I go about my work at RMPL, but am continuously plagued with a nagging doubt and worry about what I've done, and a sharp guilt, and a vague panic: Why did I do this? Why did I leave all my colleagues behind? Why am I here? Will they take me back? It's an anxiety dream, sure, but I think it's also a very obvious indication that I am not, by any means, ready to move on from my current job and employer just yet.

Wearing: Jeans and sweaters, the same handful in an incessant rotation. I'm at the point in winter where I am ready for a change in seasons, if only for a little more variety in my wardrobe. Which brings me to...

Thinking about: The concept of Hot Girl Summer. I am totally late to the game on this one, I know, and I admit, at first, when I heard this term, I envisioned groups of twenty-something hardbodies in adorable outfits, with flawless skin and no financial concerns, living their best and most beautiful lives. But then I read about how anyone can have a Hot Girl Summer, being themselves, and living their best lives and feeling gorgeous in their own skin. Well, to hell with the Hot Girl Summer--I need a Hot Mel Winter.

Bloomington Restaurant Review: Homey Hot Pot

Here in Bloomington, restaurants come and go pretty quickly. Hell, I guess everywhere restaurants come and go pretty quickly. It's a tough business. But there's one restaurant that's stuck around for a while now--since 2017, which is pretty impressive. My friend Joelle first told me about it: "Homie Hot Pot. You cook your own food at the table!"

Y'all, I'm not a cook. It just doesn't come naturally to me. And why the hell should I go to a restaurant and pay for food that I have to cook myself? I may have said something like that to Joelle before dismissing Homie from my head. 

Well, years pass and people change, and yet Homie remains, an assuming little establishment on Walnut, a couple of blocks north of the square. And somehow, I came around to the idea of trying Homie Hot Pot, which I did on a grey, chilly Sunday afternoon in early January.

(I took Joelle, of course.)

It's not a place that has a noticeable ambiance--that's not why people go there. Homie's is All About the Food. It's, like, $20 or $21 for unlimited hotpot stuff and sushi, to say nothing of the peanuts and pickled vegetables they dump on your table pretty much immediately. (Word from the wise: don't linger over-long on these free little noshes. Focus on the food you order.)

Obviously you cook your food on the burners that are embedded on the table. 

                                        

The server takes your order of your broth type and all the meats and vegetables and noodles and rice and dumplings you want, and in short order comes back, plunks your hot pot on the burner, pours your broth in the hot pot, turns the burner on, and then brings you all your (uncooked) food. 

                        

The broth in the hot pots comes to a rapid boil, much like a witch's cauldron, and then you can start plopping the food in the pots. And once the food cooks...then you eat.

 

And eat.

And eat.

And then, if you order sushi, you eat some more.

The verdict? I'd go back. This is a restaurant where you can definitely get value for your money. Furthermore, there are options here for foods that I daresay it's hard to find elsewhere in Bloomington--lotus root, taro, wintermelon, quail egg, and so on. (Did I eat any of these? No I did not. Don't you judge me!) I was a little put off by the whole cooking-my-own-food thing...like I said, I am not a natural cook. How do I know when I have cooked the shrimp or beef or whatever enough? What if I kill myself from food poisoning? I'm still alive now, so I guess I did okay.

When it's cold and grey and wintery out there, this is a good place to retreat to for a hot and hearty soup with your choice of all sorts of tasty things. I can't imagine that it would be the most appealing place to go to in the summertime, but then...maybe that's when I should review this joint for its sushi!

2020 BookIt List: January In Review

Good golly, Miss Molly...hello, February!

My pride in getting 6 books read in January, despite my neverending sickness, is a little quelled by the fact that each of the books I read was historical fiction. That, in and of itself, isn't so much the problem. It's just that I love historical fiction, and I keep intending to branch out. So, in that sense, I kinda failed in January. Oh well, whatevs. Here's a review of the books I got through:

 The Lady and the Highway Man, The Vanished Bride, and the Widow of Rose House
I'm lumping all of these together, as they all cover my favorite historical time, The Victorian Era. The sad thing is, I'm always looking for a good Victorian novel to devour, but so much of the time, the novels I consume disappoint, somehow. Perhaps it's my expectations that are at fault, and not the novels. The Lady and the Highwayman looks to be the start of a new mystery series involving the headmistress of a lady's school and her partner-in-solving-crimes, a penny dreadful author. It wasn't awful, just not very substantial. Still, I might read a sequel. The Vanished Bride will appeal to those who are in love with the Brontës; in this novel Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, with their nogoodnik brother Branwell, are defying custom and propriety as they scamper about the Yorkshire countryside, trying to solve a mystery. The author does a rather good job with the atmospheric settings, and one does come away with a sense of each of the Brontës as individual--again, I wouldn't be adverse to reading a sequel, should this turn out to be a series. The Widow of Rose House, I found to be the most annoying and disappointing. The plot is okay enough: a scandal-riddled widow returns to America to renovate an old house; old house is haunted and no one will go near it; to avoid financial ruin, Scandalous Widow commences an association with a vaguely Doctor Who-vian Mad Scientist, who is determined to study the ghosts and put them to rest. Of course he's indifferent to scandal, and of course they fall in love. I think my beef is more with the characters--the Mad Scientist is a little to perfect, and the whole thing just felt really insubstantial. 

Basically, The Turn of Midnight is a medieval soap opera about a too-good-(and educated)-to-be-true English noblewoman and her serfs as they try to survive the Black Death and basically revolutionize medieval society. I'm not sure what it is about this book, or its predecessor The Last Hours, that appeals to me. The author does a fine job with the pacing and the unrelenting suspense, and I'm almost disappointed that there doesn't seem to be room or reason for a third book in this series.

Fortunately, not all the historical fiction I read was fluffy. One of the first books I read this year was Homegoing, a family saga that imagines and explores the experiences of Africans involved in the slave trade (both as the perpetrators and the victims), and then follows their descendants through colonisation and decolonisation in Africa, as well as Antebellum America, the Jim Crow and Great Migration years, and well into the 20th century. Now, I've read plenty of books, both fiction and nonfiction, depicting the experience of the people who were enslaved and exploited through these centuries. However, I've never read anything depicting the experiences and histories of the African people who participated in the slave trade, so this is a really valuable addition to the historical fiction genre.

Pachinko was hands -down my favorite book of January. I started reading this just last Friday at lunch, and then brought it home and had this 500+ page book finished by 11 PM that same evening. Set in Korea and Japan, mostly, starting in the 1930s, this story follows the ebb and flow of one family's fortunes as they endure and experience decades of 20th century history. The bonds of this family, fraught with love, loyalty,  conflict, duty, were a profound joy to see unfold.

So! That's my progress on my 2020 Book-It List. What did you read in January, and what was your favorite book?