Last night was just a quick after-work trip while waiting to pick up Carla at the airport, so I didn't do a whole lot but I did have a nice dinner!

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Currently Reading
A Botanist's Guide to Rituals and Revenge
6%. Newest mystery in the series and my current audiobook. This series has developed more of an overarching plot than just stand-alone mysteries and I do not remember much of the book before this but hopefully it will come back to me.

Break in Case of Emergency
8%. YA novel set in the mid 90s about a girl living on her grandparents' farm after her mom dies, reunited with her estranged father who turns out to be gay. Sounded interesting. Just read the first couple chapters so far.

The Fourth Girl
35%. Twenty-five years after their friend disappeared on prom night, three women reunite in their home town on the anniversary of the disappearance. But when someone else connected to their missing friend dies on that same day, it seems like more than a coincidence. This is pretty good so far.

Horrorstör
10%. This is the second horror novel I've read set in an Ikea-type store. I've had this on my to-read list for a while and just happened to find it in a neighborhood Little Library so now seemed like a good time to read it.

Riding the Rails
39%.

How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
52%.

Recently Finished
Architectural Follies in America
Finally finished this! This is such a short book and has pictures so I thought it would be a quick read but honestly it turned out to be kind of a slog. There are not enough pictures, so a lot of it is just reading about these supposedly interesting building but now getting a visual representation. And the pictures that are included are all black and white, and some are not the best quality. This seems like someone's hobby project, so I guess they couldn't put a lot of money in it, but it could have been a much better book than it was.

Red Hail
This was pretty interesting!

Murder in Season
Well, I take it back. After mentioning last time that this is one of the few historical mystery series I've read lately that doesn't have any queer or non-white characters, this book did turn out to have a gay character (and he wasn't the murderer).

Murder at Hambledon Hall
New Cleopatra Fox book! This was a good one. And there was an announcement at the end that the next book will be out by the end of the year. This author has multiple series going, so I don't know how they manage it, but I'm not complaining.

Baby Drag Queen
Grabbed this off the Pride display at the library last week as it looked interesting and is very short so would be a nice quick read for a time when I needed one (I read it in about half an hour this morning). It's about a trans boy who is interested in doing drag, which is not a topic I've seen in other books with trans characters. But the book itself was a huge let down. The writing is very stilted (especially noticeable with the dialogue) and there were so many things that made me go ??? that I couldn't get into the story because I kept trying to figure out why the author was making these choices and at some times trying to figure out what was going on altogether. One big one is that the character is referred to by a male name throughout, but his mom does not know he is trans. So I was left wondering if it was a writing convention where the mom is really calling the character by another name but the author is using his preferred name instead, or if the kid has requested to be called a male name and the mom has gone along with this to the point of getting it legally (?) changed (the kid goes to school using that name and also gets multiple jobs under that name, with no one noting anything about a different legal name) but still is completely gobsmacked when the MC says he's not a girl. (It's definitely not a situation where that would ever be the name his parents gave him.) I just could not stop wondering what was going on with the name throughout the book, but there were a bunch of other smaller things, too.

Bokura no Hentai vol. 5-6
Was not expecting the trans girl to be handled this well, but I was really impressed with the sixth volume.

1. Today was a long day with a lot of meetings, but I did manage to get all the other stuff on my to-do list done in between at least.

2. Most other businesses in Little Tokyo are already shut down temporarily so we made the decision to close our store tomorrow. While the protests (or rather the response to them) has been disruptive to business for that store, it's still been worth keeping it open, but those protests were more spontaneous and the planned events tomorrow for No Kings Day are going to draw a huge crowd. The only business we'd get would be some protestors buying lunch or snacks, and considering employee safety it's better to just shut down. We also had the store boarded up just in case, since one whole side is all windows and a lot of the front is as well. I definitely think closing tomorrow is the right choice, so I'm glad we were able to convince the company president to give us the okay.

3. While Carla's out of town I moved one of the cars all the way up the driveway into the back yard so I don't have to worry about moving it from one side of the street to the other on street sweeping days, and Tuxie seems to like having the car there lol.