lavvyan

Recently Finished
Strange Pictures
I was going to hold off on reading the novel version of this until the final volume(s) of the manga are released, since I've already read three volumes of the manga, but it came up again as recommended, this time on Hoopla, so I went for it. I do think Uketsu's novels work better as manga. Inserting the illustrations in the novel version feels more repetitive, whereas since the manga is all pictures, having the characters refer back to stuff feels more natural. I'm still going to read the rest of the manga when it's released (Strange Houses was five volumes, but Strange Pictures feels like it could be just four, so the next one might be the final one), just to see if there are any major differences. Anyway, I enjoyed this one but I do like Strange Houses better.

The Bletchley Riddle
Middle grade book about a girl who is trying to investigate her mother's disappearance. When she runs away from the man her grandmother hired to take her to live with her in America, she instead goes to live with her brother, who is working at Bletchley Park as a code breaker. The book is told in alternating POV chapters between brother and sister, and the audiobook had two narrators. I liked it a lot.

Murder on Platform Four
Another Tate and Bell mystery. These are very quick reads.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Speaking of quick reads, this one was super short. I got the audiobook in a sale and figured I'd check it out. It was only about five hours long. I did like the narrator, decent Japanese pronunciation, but the book itself was pretty dull. I think I might enjoy this okay as a manga, where you can just glance at the pictures of food and be on your way, but I don't need to listen to long descriptions. And a lot of what I like about mysteries is the process of the characters finding clues and working things out, but the way this is written is each customer's request is broken into two chapters, one where they come to the restaurant and tell them what kind of food they are looking to recreate. Then the second chapter is the food being presented to them. There is some exposition about how the guy figured out what they were remembering and how to find it, but it wasn't at all satisfying in any sort of mystery way. There are several more books in the series, but I'm not going to bother with them. It's not bad, just not for me.

Maps of the Disney Parks: Charting 60 Years from California to Shanghai
I bought this at Disneyland the other day. Nice coffee table book of maps of all the Disney parks currently in existence, with a small amount of text sprinkled throughout. I noticed several other reviewers on GR mentioned what I was feeling, which is that while this is nice, it's not quite what I was expecting or wanted from the title, which was the actual park maps. This has a few, but the vast majority of the maps are concept drawings and things like that. I would a book that compared park maps over the years.

My Home Hero vol. 18-19

1. Finished up another puzzle today. It's Santa Vader lol.



2. We decided to renew our Knott's annual passes after all. I knew it was cheap but had forgotten just how cheap, but then I've been seeing ads saying it's only $118, and that really is so cheap that even if we only go a handful of times it's worth it. And then when I went to actually do the renewal it turns out that the renew price is even cheaper! It was only $99! And the way their parking pass works is it's an add-on rather than being a higher level of pass, so we only have to buy parking for one pass since we always go together.

3. Not only is it the weekend but I'm now looking at two weeks in a row with four day weekends. And I was able to get off early today, too.

4. I found out the amount for my bonus today. It's quite a bit higher than the last couple times because the company performance overall was higher and also my salary is higher and it's based on a percentage of that. Next time's will be lower because this time I was still an area manager during most of the scope period (the December pay out is for April through October) and the percentage for store management is higher than for the rest of HQ.

5. We ordered from Coco Ichibanya tonight and now I am full of delicious curry.

6. Tuxie's looking handsome.

1. I had a meeting scheduled at 2pm today and then one at 4pm, and was expecting to have to stay at work until after the second meeting was over, but we moved the earlier one up a bit and were done by like 2:15, so I decided to go home and take the second meeting from there. Traffic is a bit better at that time, plus it meant once the meeting was over I was already home and could just get on with my evening, so that was nice.

2. This cutie guy snuggled with me while I had my meeting this afternoon. :)

Disneyland is still way more crowded than I was anticipating. We got over to the parks around 6:30pm and were planning to get dinner from the Festival of Holidays carts at DCA and assumed it would be less crowded there than at Disneyland, but the lines to get in were really long for some reason. Once we were actually inside it wasn't too bad (still crowded, though), so I guess it was just a case of a lot of people arriving for after work trips at the same time.

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1. Today I finished another big part of the project we're working on at work. It was a lot of double checking stuff and data cleanup, which was tedious but now we have workable data to upload, woohoo!

2. I had a couple things to mail today and managed to get to the post office a few minutes before they opened so there were only like four people in front of me and I was out of there in like twenty minutes. I was braced for worse since it's the holiday season.

3. Cutie Chloe.

1. The weather today was very nice. It looks like it's supposed to be in the low 70s for a few days coming up, but I hope it actually stays at those temps and doesn't end up warmer than predicted as it often has recently.

2. I've been waiting for the right size box to ship some stuff out and today I finally got one! Amusingly enough, what I want to ship out is puzzles and the perfect box had some new puzzles I ordered recently in it. (The actual size of the puzzles I'm sending is different from the ones that just came, but the box fits both and came with lots of packing paper.)

3. Tuxie is fattening up for the winter.

Recently Finished
The Girls Who Disappeared
On the 20th anniversary of a car accident where three girls mysteriously disappeared, the MC is assigned to do a podcast on it and goes to the town to conduct interviews, but strange things start happening. I didn't love the reveal of what actually happened, but overall this was interesting.

Mirage City
Fourth in the Evander Mills mystery series. I had no idea a new book was out until I saw it pop up on my goodreads feed. Looking back it seems like every book has come out in October, so I guess I should try and remember to keep an eye out around that time next year. I enjoyed this one a lot.

Murder on Harley Street
Most recent Cleopatra Fox mystery. Still enjoying this series.

The Final Curtain
Final book in the English translated series of Detective Kaga mysteries (and I believe final book in the original, too). I can see why the four books that were translated into English were chosen, if they knew they weren't going to be able to do the whole series, those ones all tie into each other somewhat. I liked these a lot, so I'm definitely going to try and see if I can find some of the ones that didn't get translated when we take our next trip to Japan (sadly they are not available as ebooks).

Murder at Merry Beggars Hall
New-to-me mystery series. And fairly new in general as the second book is just coming out next month. I enjoyed this a lot and am looking forward to the next one.

The Ghostkeeper
Graphic novel about a man who almost died as a child and can see ghosts ever since. He uses his powers to help ghosts deal with their issues and move on to the next life, but one day a ghost girl steals the key to the door to the next life and all the ghosts start flooding the town because no one is able to move on. I liked it.

My Home Hero vol. 17

1. It's the weekend! I had a pretty productive day today and finished up what I was working on earlier than anticipated, so I just ended up going home early (around 2:30), which was nice.

2. It was warm and sunny when I took a walk after work, but it's very overcast and chilly this evening, and we're supposed to have cooler weather for a bit. Tomorrow says it will be overcast all day, which would be nice as we are planning to be at Disneyland and I don't want it to be too sunny.

3. We got burritos and tacos for dinner. Very tasty! Not agreeing with my stomach too well tonight, but worth it.

4. Look at this sleepy boy!