Well, that was interesting.  So, how’d you all weather the election storm?  I’m guessing probably about as well as I did – which is to say you freaked out and fell screaming into a black hole of thinkpieces about the dismal fate of humanity.  As you all know, I have been a fan of HRC for a long time, and I proudly cast my vote for her on Tuesday – but despite our votes, and despite the fact that she’s up about 1.8 million votes in the popular vote total (with millions more ballots still to be counted, mostly on the stalwart blue West Coast) we have instead a President-elect who rode to office on a tide of bigotry and misogyny.  (Tell us how you really feel, Jac…)  Suffice it to say I’m disappointed, discouraged by an electoral system that has outlived its usefulness, horrified by the reports of people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, religious minorities and other groups being targeted for hate crimes and bullying and especially horrified by the President-elect’s refusal until the eleventh hour to disavow the crimes being committed in his name.  (And I think his disavowal was lukewarm when it did come.) We’re in for a really hard few years, friends.  A really hard few years.

Anyway, this weekend we mostly laid low.  I’m pretty beat down and depressed by the turn of events, and – very unusually for me – I didn’t want to do much.  I’m exhausted; Steve was traveling for work last week so I had to fly solo and balance the kids and work on my own without help for four days, which always takes a lot out of me.  Plus I haven’t slept too well in the past week – now why might that be?  So we just hung out at home, mostly.  We took a couple of walks around the neighborhood – including our usual weekly stroll to the library, and a walk down to the waterfront to see El Galeon, which has been visiting the harbor for the past week.  Other than that, I just wanted the comforts of home.  We did a lot of playing in the kids’ rooms, I worked on some unpacking and food prep, and we relaxed and tried to rest up for another week ahead.

What with all the news pieces I have been reading this week, I haven’t spent much time in between the covers of an actual book.  I finished Crowned and Dangerous, the latest “Her Royal Spyness” mystery from Rhys Bowen, early in the week and enjoyed it very much, as I always enjoy a visit with Georgie.  On Tuesday I picked up Before We Visit the Goddess, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, whose 2012 book The Palace of Illusions I had read and loved.  (She has a long bibliography, as it turns out!  I’m going to have to seek out more of her work.  Her writing is so beautiful.)  Although Goddess is short – only just over 200 pages – it took me almost a week to finish, between watching election coverage, reading news article after news article, and general fretting (not to mention working full time and taking care of both kids full time while Steve was away last week).  I finally finished it late in the week and turned to the next new release on my library stack, The Invasion of the Tearling (second in the Tearling trilogy).  But I still can’t seem to focus, despite having loved the first book in the trilogy.  My library stack continues to grow and is totally out of control, so I have to buckle down, log off Facebook and block The Atlantic (I would never) and get to reading.

Hopefully I will be able to turn off the news and get back into my book world, because reading is the most comforting thing for me and so I really do need that.  When I do finally manage to sit down and read The Invasion of the Tearling, the next book on my agenda is (finally!!) Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen.  I’ve heard such wonderful things and I can’t wait to read it at last.  And after that – I don’t know!  Maybe Bloodline, the new book about Princess Leia.  Maybe something else.  We’ll see!

On the blog this week, some slightly more organized thoughts about the election on Wednesday – maybe; I’ve scheduled the post, but I could still change my mind and take it down – and then something light-hearted on Friday: my book-buying rule and a list of exceptions that render it basically meaningless!

How are you holding up this week, my friends?  And what are you reading?