Zella

Yes I was really disappointed that the show tried to make Clara and Max and Oskar and Therese happy endings. I could never root for Max and Clara to be together after the way Max treated her in the first 2 seasons, and I could never root for Oskar and Therese to be together after the way she treated him last season.

I always have two going at a time too. My only rule is they have to be about different topics because otherwise I confuse myself. LOL I'm on the 5th book of the Ruso series, which I mentioned several weeks back. They're really funny mysteries primarily set in Roman Britain, though one of my favorite books was an excursion to Gaul. I'm also reading Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait, which I have enjoyed so far. When I first saw a summary of it, I noticed the words Lucrezia and Ferrara and assumed it was about Lucrezia Borgia, but it's actually about Lucrezia de Medici.

He was only shot once, though the gun was fired three times. Hence the speculation he fired two shots as a distraction before then shooting himself. The official report makes for some interesting reading: https://www.baltimorepolice.org/sites/default/files/General Website PDFs/Suiter Report Public.pdf After reading the report and watching a documentary that pushed the idea he was murdered pretty hard, I came to the conclusion it was likely a suicide but definitely a very weird and sad story all around. I enjoyed the book too. There's also a good one on the case by the federal prosecutor Leo Wise. It's a touch dry comparatively speaking but very thorough.

Beav-O-Rama is also unincorporated. I'd honestly never even heard of it until I saw that map, but it was the first thing I noticed and I couldn't take my eyes off it. LOLOL

Every time someone says something impacted them, all I can think is "it gave you a painful bowel condition?"

Yes! Gavin de Becker talks about that in The Gift of Fear, which I was also reading around the same time as all the cult stuff. Predators bank on people, especially women, not wanting to appear rude. Most of my coworkers are very nice people, and they want to be kind and nice to everyone. But I have decided I do not want or need to be kind/polite to assholes. LOL With the one who won't speak to me on the phone anymore, I straight up told him I did not want compliments from him. Because really his compliments were sexual harassment.

One of the most enlightening realizations I've had as an adult came on the heels of reading about a lot of different cults. One of the things that cult leaders had in common, whether it was Jim Jones or Charles Manson, was they would test people's boundaries early. The people who pushed back were pushed out, but the ones who allowed it then got further boundaries tested on them until things escalated to the point that you were trapped. I have since observed this at work with a lot of people, including just garden-variety assholes and perverts. I have started pushing back on it hard when I see it, and it has done wonders for divesting my life of deeply unpleasant people. I work at a public library, and we deal with some really inappropriate people on a regular basis. Not necessarily budding cult leaders and scam artists but definitely socially maladapted people who see the library staff as a captive audience. And they all really do start out testing your boundaries at first, and I just don't even let it get started now. One of them is visibly scared of me now and immediately gets off the phone when he realizes it's me. I've told my other coworkers my methods, and the ones who've adopted them also no longer have to deal with his bullshit either.

I never really had an opinion on him either. His quotes about a lot of topics were inescapable online and I liked the one book of his I read well enough, but I just never paid him much attention one way or the other. Though, I will say, I was super weirded out when he suddenly left his family in New Zealand during the COVID lockdowns. I saw a lot of people throwing his wife under the bus for that--and truthfully I'd never heard of her before then and stuff I read about her at the time did seem unpleasant--but I still felt like that didn't reflect well on him. But I would never have extrapolated these allegations from that. I read some of the details today and really wish I hadn't. They were nauseating. Since this first came out last summer, I have read stuff that said women were warning each other about him on the fantasy writing circuit for the past 25 years.

I learned a long time ago not to try to apply logic to the Duggars. It's that way madness lies. On a side note, the episode of The Rockford Files I'm watching right now has a character who looks just like Jim Bob, and it disturbs me every single time I look up at the screen and see his face. LOLOLOL

Yes you basically know you've crossed into another town because the signs say so. LOL The bigger towns do have their own distinctive cultural identity from each other, but geographically that's not super obvious while driving through most of it.

They are right on the edge of a metropolitan area of over half a million people. As someone who actually lives in rural Arkansas, I've always been frustrated by them pretending like they aren't literally minutes away from hospitals and universities. Where I am, it is an actual hardship for people to make the 3-hour round trip to the NWA Metro area for doctor's appointments, better-paying jobs, higher education. All those opportunities right there, and they pretend like they don't have easy access to it.

One from the show I have really repurposed for everyday use is from the late great Carl Weathers. A lot of times when I'm cooking, I say, "Baby, you got a [insert dish] goin'." Can be applied to everything from the original stew to chili to stroganoff.

Lucille has all the best lines and I do quote her a lot too.

I use that all the time too! Dare I say, there are dozens of us who do! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I'm also not a fan of the Max-Clara romance. I like Max on his own, and I like Clara too. But I feel like the way he treated her earlier in the series was really horrible, and I just really cannot root for that relationship.