adding properties to the blog

 I woke up this morning to a notification that I clicked on. I don’t remember what that one was, but as soon as FB presented whatever it was, I saw a post by Anne Marie Decker of https://nalbound.com/, saying she will be attending the Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC/TRAC 2026) in Denmark. so, of course, I sent a note wondering if she’d also want to come to Umeå University and present at our department seminar. She said that it sounds interesting, so after my morning workout I sent an introduction email to Ivanka, our seminar coordinator this term. I hope it works out, it would be lovely to see her. Even better if we can find museums in the north with nålbindning fragments we could go look at when she is here. Since I was sitting at the computer anyway, I got ChatGPT’s help to add properties to the GitHub version of my blog , since I had them in Obsidian. In the process I tried linking to my notes (adding properties), which file is not in the content part of this blog, and that caused an error message for the missing file such that the blog wouldn’t post at all. So I tried making that an external link to the obsidian URL, and now the link works fine, for me, and if I click on it, from within the blog it will open obsidian and display that page. However, I assume that anyone reading my blog will get an error message, unless they happen to have an obsidian vault with the exact same name and file path.

 

By the time I got the blog working Keldor was up and had eaten breakfast, so I grabbed a quick lunch, packed food for later, and we went into town, where we bought some things for the car and I picked up some fresh vegetables for a salad. Then we went to his job workshop and I borrowed the kitchen to make the salad while he changed burned out bulbs and checked fluid levels of everything that needed checking. Then he washed the outside of the van while I vacuumed the inside, whiped down surfaces, and sorted out stuff that shouldn’t be there.

 

Then we waxed the car and made certain it was dry before heading back into the -15⁰ C weather. Now the car is ready for the drive to Drachenwald 12th Night Coronation on Friday.

After we got home and put everything away I spent some time figuring out how to create some of the year-end financial reports for the shire. I will need to get help from Þórólfr for the others, when he is over his cold.

book review, The King's Dragon

 In between errands and computer stuff I finished reading The King’s Dragon by Kate Elliott. I started it at least a week ago (when I did my first log entry for tracking reading, but was already 200 pages in, so I strongly suspect I just failed to mske a note of it). I remember that I bought the book much longer ago than that, but after downloading the app complained that I needed to activate some sort of Adobe security thing, which I had previously activated for another book, and it just didn’t work, so I gave up and forgot about it for weeks, till I bought another book for school that had a similar issue, and when i solved it, by getting yet another book app, the new book app worked for this one too.

 

However, the delay between purchasing and access means that I have long since whose recommendation got me to buy it, and what they said that got me past my inherent reluctance to buy stuff. Whatever it was, it didn’t warn me about how very, very unpleasant huge parts of the story are, with abusive people being abusive. I almost didn’t finish due to that aspect early on, but decided to persevere, as somewhere, somewhen, someone whose opinion I respect had said something good about the book.

 

I am still not sure what that praise might have been. Our viewpoint characters experience many very unpleasant things, and at no time did I wish I could live in this world, which is full of religious fanatics, sexism, class opression, and callousness. Yah, sure, the sexism is packaged a little different than is the world we live in, as power and inheritance is more through the female line, but it is still very unpleasant.

 

Like many classic fantasy books, this one focuses on young people who are raised to believe they are unimportant and outside the established power structure, and by the end of this book at least one is revealed to be very much part of it after all, and the other has been set up to soon be significant in kingdom scale politics.

 

I have always been an addicted re-reader, loving to go back to books now that I know the overall framework of the story to pick up the details and connections I missed on the first pass, and to learn who everyone is. Especially for a book like this one, where the viewpoint characters don’t cross paths till late in the book, so there are double the number of people to try to kerp track of. However, I don’t know if I am willing to go back and read through those abusive bits again. Once feels like too many, and one can’t un-read to get the bad taste out of the brain.

 

If you can ignore that aspect and enjoy major political upheaval, battles and betrayal, this might be a book for you.