weather and books

I got an email from my church saying all Saturday and Sunday activities have been canceled, which is not very surprising. It's not snowing at the moment, but we had light snow from ~9am to 11:30ish, and it's expected to pick up again around 4pm and then just snow like the dickens through ~10am Sunday morning.

I am at work, since Susan and I canceled her visit, and aside from a spate of furious activity in the first half hour, it's been slow. We do have an apartment tour scheduled for this afternoon, and people have expressed interest so I expect at least a few people to come, but after that I suspect activity will once again drop off as the weather closes in.

In mostly unrelated news, I applied for a New York Public Library card today, since all New York state residents (and apparently even people who just work and/or pay taxes in New York) are eligible for a free card. I am now in a weird sort of limbo where I have an account and can log in to place holds on stuff, but can't actually check anything out until my account has been validated and they mail me a physical card. Anyway, I took a photo of my drivers license (both the old card with photo and the paper temporary one for my renewed Real ID version), so hopefully that will get handled promptly. The NYPL, you see, has access to A LOT more ebooks than the Finger Lakes library system. :)

I've been reading a lot of books this January, which on the one hand feels weird -- I'm out of practice at it -- but on the other hand is a return to old habits and patterns. I have always been a voracious reader; it's just that in the past decade or so I switched more to fanfic, magazines, and random internet articles. I'm still kind of "eh" on a lot of original fiction, but nonfiction has always been my jam and there's something really sort of... hmmm... let's go with satisfying, about finishing a book and closing the covers on a journey. I've missed that.

I'm not sure how much of my shift away from books was related to getting internet access at home and how much was related to depression (I am much more likely to seek comfort and/or low-effort reading when I'm in a funk, and fanfic saves me from the work of getting invested in and figuring out a new world and new characters), but I am very sure that not trying to juggle college on top of work has freed up a bunch of both time and mental energy that I haven't yet managed to effectively corral into regular writing. (Even high-effort reading is still lower-effort than writing, alas. And also easier to do in disorganized scattered patches.)

Anyway, back to my current book: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. :)