Inky

I read Below the Surface by Tina Transformation and gave it only two stars. It was a standalone novella in a series called "Devastation," and I don't plan on reading any more books in the series. The narrative was confusing with alternating POVs of a "watcher" and a "stranger" (who were not the same person but sounded like they could have been), and for a while it was unclear whether either/ both was male or female. They weren't given names until several chapters in, just to make things more unnecessarily befuddling for the reader, but after that they were still sometimes called the original names. The reason for all this subterfuge was to keep the identity of the murderer under wraps, but it had to be either the watcher or the stranger because the book was only 100 pages long! At times, the disappearances of the women at Yellowstone seemed to verge on the supernatural, but ultimately this was just a normal psycho thriller. The two main characters met via a dating app which matched them, but even that was annoying because while every detail of their emotional landscape was documented in the narrative, the sexual encounters were strictly behind closed doors, so we never got to see their feelings while they were actually together. The ending was a letdown, basically "oh, it's him," ho hum.

Since I have already read over 100 books this year, there's no point in continuing to update that Reading Challenge with new arbitrary categories, so I won't. You lucky readers, you won't have to hear about the 2025 Challenge any longer! 

Occasionally I have some issues with my eyes and one or both gets all red and itchy and gross. That has occurred this week to my right eye, so I figured it was a good opportunity to give an audiobook another chance and rest my eyeballs. Most of the books I have downloaded for my Kindle do not show a free audio option however (I do not want to join the program for a fee), except for one by Dean Koontz, but every time I try to grab the audio file it shows an error. Oh well. Instead, I watched a romcom called My One True Love, where the entire premise was that a fortune teller with an accent told the heroine that her soulmate's name was "John" but she really meant "Sean," and this was obvious immediately, but we had to watch the MC date a whole bunch of Johns until she figured it out. In the movie's favor was that the heroine actually cared about more things in life, particularly her career, than finding a man, though she did go along with her friends who wanted her to go on at least one date with every man named John that they could find.

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Oh, this morning I adopted an adorable small black kitty with green eyes and named her Inky. She's a little over a year old and very shy. She's mostly been staying under my bed and occasionally poking her head into the living room where I am watching TV. When she sees me looking at her, she scampers back to safety, though she did venture into the closet at one point and knocked over a pile of leggings. It's nice and quiet and peaceful here, so hopefully soon she will feel secure enough to hang out with me. She must be hungry, but so far she hasn’t been tempted by food. I'm sure she will gobble some after I'm asleep tonight. I don't expect her to be a "dog-cat" like Gatsby was; Inky was on the streets and probably already gave birth, so she might need a lot of time to feel safe. Her medical records show she wasn't doing great when they brought her in on May 16, but she's fine now, as far as we know. Since we don't know her birthday (likely April 2024), we'll just celebrate her gotcha day every year on June 27. I'm not going to pester her with photos until she's more comfortable with me ~ I will let you all know when I've posted some to Instagram.

Happy to have a kitty in my house again even if she's completely silent for now.