My kitty visitor, Ceelo, came over for a second time this past week and it went much better than the first time! He spent his time here either exploring or being lovey. He's coming over tomorrow for another visit and I'm looking forward to some cat petting!

I met a friend for lunch this weekend. We were supposed to have a third friend with us but she wasn't feeling well so it was just the two of us. We're both MRI techs and used to work together at the same hospital. It was really good catching up with her! I was thinking about bailing on the visit because I don't do much these days so I felt like I wouldn't be able to hold up my end of the conversation but I'm glad I went. We're going to get together again with our other friend in a couple of weeks.

I "attended" a virtual potluck on Labor Day hosted by Skep over at Skep's Place. We all chose a recipe or two, made it and sent in pictures and descriptions. I made Gochujang Cookies and Cilantro-Lime Cookies. The Gochujang were stellar although Best Son thought they needed more Gochujang. The Cilantro-Lime were interesting. The cilantro gave the cookie kind of an herbaceous taste. Best Son tried them out and said his mouth was expecting a taco! Anyway, you all should mosey on over to Skep's site and check out the recipes. There were so many delicious dishes!

I know my site has lots of nooks and crannies to explore so you may not realize it but one of my passions is old graphics, specifically coordinated websets. I have a whole page dedicated to that! Well, one thing about old websites is that they disappear and so many have gone by the wayside just since I started my site in 2022.

The Wayback Machine is flaky - sometimes it does an excellent save, including links to zipped files, sometimes you just get a page full of broken link images. Honestly, I feel like the more I want a site, the more likely it is to be one of the latter. I've started trying to save the websites that are still around with HTTrack Website Copier. I'm slowly going through the ones I've cataloged on my site but some of them are disappearing before I can get to them! Just today I came across one that expired and of course it was just full of beautiful coordinated sets and the Wayback saves are not the best. It's like, "Wayback Machine, y u no save this??? You've been capturing images for the past 20 years! Y u no capture the whole thing at some point??"

Listening

Here are some podcasts I've listened to this past week:

Reading

I've started reading Hellburner, the 5th book in CJ Cherryh's Company Wars series. This book is interesting in that the other books in the series share a universe but the stories were not directly related. This one, however, follows pretty closely after the previous book, Heavy Time, and features some of the same main characters. There are 2 more books in this series but I might take a break and read a different genre. I don't have anything in mind but I'm starting to feel like I want a change of pace.

Watching

I'm still making my way through my Babylon 5 rewatch. I've got 3 more episodes to watch in season 3. I just finished the one where Garibaldi discovers an entire floor in Grey zone is missing.

Several years ago I came across a show on Netflix, Empresses in the Palace. I was interested in it because it was historical and the costumes looked absolutely lush but I was ultimately disappointed because the show made absolutely no sense. I did some digging and found out that it was a repackaged version of the Chinese original. I found that on YouTube and spent a glorious time watching 70+ episodes of palace intrigue. Most of the time I even had captions! Netflix had mashed together episodes out of order so they could cram everything into just 6 episodes so no wonder things weren't making sense!

Anyway, that show ended up being my gateway into K-dramas. I haven't found another Chinese drama that grabbed my attention like Empresses did although now I think I may have found something - Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace (allegedly with English subtitles). I can't remember where I saw this mentioned but Wikipedia says it's a follow-up to Empresses in the Palace. I'm looking forward to diving into another gorgeous historical drama!

OK, I think that about wraps it up for this week!

When I first started using Zonelets I had Disqus set up as a commenting system but it looked obnoxiously ugly and I ditched it. Some people are happy to not have blog interaction but I'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts you want to share! You can respond through my guestbook or email. If you found this link on Discord or the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse, you can message me there or leave a message on my Neocities profile page.