C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 13

citizenship!

In June, after a journey of 18.5 years by one count and 22 months by another, my husband got his Irish citizenship.

The ceremony was in Dublin, and we went down a day early to have a celebratory dinner and not risk missing the ceremony by counting on the trains on the day of. :)

It was actually VERY EMOTIONAL and we both cried all over everything, by which I mean, I sniffled gently while he wiped away a few manly tears, of course. The ceremony itself was really quite nice, and primarily featured...

physical therapy and stuff

A few weeks ago my husband, who is suffering from tendonitis in his achilles, went to have his feet scanned and better insoles found and stuff, and thought it was interesting enough that I should do the same. Especially because I have stupidly wide feet, although as it turns out, they’re apparently only wide, not STUPIDLY wide. That’s something, I guess? Except they remain too wide for most women’s shoes, so, y’know, oh well.

Anyway, so I went in and did this thing and it was in fact interesting...

alligators all the way down

I’ve been reading the A Girl and her Fed webcomic the past week or so, which has the usual effect of making me want to do a little webcomic of my own.

It in particular, though, has made me vaguely think perhaps I’m not, IDK, weird enough to pull off what I want to do. Like, ok. Girl. Fed. Cyborg conspiracies. Gotcha. I could probably get that far on my own.

Ghost of Benjamin Franklin? Look, I’m sorry, I wouldn’ta thought of that.

Hyper-sapient koala? NOPE. ‘Fraid not. Checking out of Weirdsville...

Recent Reads: The Freddy Pilkington-Soames Adventures

Recent Reads: The Freddy Pilkington-Soames Adventures, by Clara Benson – a pretty satisfying period-piece murder mystery series

I picked the first book up as a free book on Kobo, and it did its job: I have now read the entire series, and have another book by the same author in another series to start.

Our Hero, Freddy Pilkington-Soames, is not as half-witted as his name suggests he might be, but he’s not a serious young man, particularly in the first book in this series, A CASE OF BLACKMAIL IN B...

five things make a post

Thing One: I have this mild fascination with watching makeup reels and tiktoks. What I find particularly mind-blowing are the “side by side comparison of 2 makeup styles” ones in which they say things like “heavy makeup vs light makeup” and then on the ‘light makeup’ side of their face they put on more makeup than I have ever worn at once in my life.

I would genuinely love for somebody skilled at conturing makeup to do a full face on me once. It’d just be really interesting. But I absolutely can...

Picoreview: What Happens Later

Picoreview: What Happens Later – not what I was expecting.

editor’s note: I saw this last Decemberish, and while writing up another picoreview realized I hadn’t posted my picoreview of it here, so I’m doing that now, as if it was a new watch. :)

~~~~

I only heard about this a few days ago: on the surface, it appeared to be a Meg Ryan romcom with David Duchovny as the leading man, which, well: I figured it was either going to be quite wonderful or quite terrible.

It was neither, but more importan...

a pokemon weekend :)

I spent basically the entire weekend playing PokemonGo, and it was GREAT. :D

Please know that I do not expect many of the following words, in these sequences, to mean much to most people. :D

It was the PokemonGoFest weekend, and I got in the region of 2 million XP, which is an extremely large amount for me. I am T R Y I N G to reach 50th level in this wretched game because, see, I do not play video games, and I never level out in them on the rare occasions that I do, but I happened to hit 40th...

irritated rant

IRRITATED RANT INCOMING

I just got one of my trad publishers’ for-the-authors newsletter arrived and one of their topics is “how to grow your newsletter organically!”

You know what the #1 best way to grow it would be?

The NUMBER ONE BEST WAY to grow it would be for THE TRAD PUBLISHERS to let us put OUR NEWSLETTER LINKS into THEIR EBOOKS

But they don’t want to do that. Not because it’s hard, because it isn’t: they could just put it into the About The Author at the end, or on the Also By page. It ...

Irish govt climate crisis survey

The Irish government is asking people to take a survey on climate change action. If you live in Ireland, this affects you. It took me about 20 minutes including the screed I had to cut down because it was too long, because apparently you’re only allowed to have a certain amount of opionion on the climate crisis. It’s worth filling out.

But then, why would I let a good screed go to waste? I wouldn’t, so here it is in a blog post. Feel free to adapt any of it as you see fit to your own needs as y...

Recent Reads: Fake Flame

Recent Reads: Fake Flame: very cute.

This is a a fake-dating book that has the brass tits to actually examine the trope of fake dating from within it own pages. Our Heroine, an English lit teacher, is being harrassed by her ex who won’t take no for an answer; in an attempt to get rid of him, she ends up almost setting a piano on fire, and Our Hero, a firefighter, arrives on the scene.

Sparks, as one might say, ensue. Our Hero ends up offering to be her fake boyfriend in hopes of driving the ex a...