Photo looking down on a tall paper coffee cup with a green and white dots and bars design on a white table top. Inside the cup there is white froth on the left side as well as a tiny dried rosebud. On the right side there is dark rose-colored powder. In the background on the right, a cold coffee drink in a plastic cup can be seen. It is dark brown at the top and it gets gradually lighter towards the bottom. On the left there is a green plate with a waxed paper wrapper and you can just barely see part of a large, chunky cookie.Doesn't that look pretty? Best Son and I checked out a new-to-us coffee place, Laymoon Cafe. Restaurants and coffee places don't usually stay open late anywhere around here in the Phoenix area but this place is open until midnight. On Fridays and Saturdays it's open til 3 AM. We went at a more reasonable hour of about 4 pm. That drink is a Cardamom Rose Latte and it was SO. GOOD. The rose was very perfumy but perfectly balanced with the rest of the ingredients and not overpowering at all. I also had a snack, a piece of Honeycomb Bread (which the menu says is also known as Khaliat Nahl) - sweetbread filled with cream cheese and topped with honey and sesame seeds. It was delicious - and very sticky! You can see Best Son's drink in the background - he had a Salted Caramel Date Latte and a decadent Caramel Pistachio Cookie. You can also see that we're sitting outside - the place was absolutely packed. It was about 104F (40C) or so but they had misters so it wasn't bad at all.

I've been a Roku user for years and I was upset and disappointed to read this: Fox to buy Roku streaming firm in $22bn deal. I now feel like I need to gather up all my Rokus and burn them. Once upon a time I had a media PC that Best Son had set up for me. I really liked it except it kept having technical problems. I swear, I think the mini-PC it was running on was made on a Monday by a disgruntled worker. I think maybe Best Son was thinking I was doing something but I swear, it was borking itself. Anyway, I ended up ditching it and going to the Roku but now I'm going back to a media PC. I told Best Son I was looking up how to run Jellyfin and he said he had a PC I could use for this and he'll come over in a couple weeks and help me set it up. Suck it, Roku/Fox!

Listening

Some podcasts I've listened to this week:

Reading

I finished Endurance: My Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly and I thought it was a really good read, although it could have used some tighter editing. The book opens with Kelly waking up one morning, shortly after he had returned from space, in some medical distress. The book then segues into alternating between his growing up years and his time on the space station. But it never gets back to what was going on in the beginning! I mean, he's still alive so clearly he made it through that event OK but it would have been nice for that to have been followed up in the book.

My next book was another pick off the Libby list, Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream. She had a religious experience when her father died and decided to convert to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. This is the story of her 12 years in the Akenside priory. The author really found a true vocation but the priory she landed in was a nest of horrible dysfunction and Mean Girl behavior - bullying, power struggles, favoritism, even physical abuse. Things became so bad that she literally ran away from the priory in the middle of the night. She eventually returned for 2 more years before she finally left for good. She never lost her certainty that she and God found each other. It is very troubling, although maybe not surprising, that others in the religious community - like the bishop and others in charge of overseeing the priory - seemed to know what was going on and did nothing. In fact, at the end of the book she relates that the nun who spearheaded all of this horribleness and one of her followers have been trading off being elected prioress every 3 years.

After that I wasn't really sure what I was in the mood for. I was checking out a site, Fandom Pulse, which is written by author Jon del Arroz. I came across him a short time ago when he posted on social media that CJ Cherryh had stopped writing, stating that due to the medical treatments she's been through she can no longer hold her stories' intricate plot threads together. This is a really nice, newsy site covering all genres of fandom - books, games, movies, etc. He has a couple of helpful articles on the reading orders for both CJ Cherryh's books and also Anne McCaffrey's. Going through the second one, I remembered how much I enjoyed Decision at Doona and realized I had never read the follow up books. So now I'm currently reading Crisis on Doona.

Watching

I finally started on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2! So far I've watched the first 2 episodes. It picks up right where season 1 left off, with Kong big mad at everyone on his island and causing all kinds of destruction. I don't want to spoil things for anyone who hasn't watched this yet but he's not mad at the people on his island - he's highly upset about another kaiju that has appeared.

This is the final season of Grantchester, my British detective and sidekick vicar series set in the 50s and 60s in Cambridgeshire. I'm going to miss that show. It's cozy but even though it's been on a while it hasn't gotten as silly as some other long-running British detective and sidekick vicar series have (looking at you, Father Brown). I've watched about half of the series so far.

I watched the neatest video on Nebula this past week. Thank goodness I read the emails they send listing all the new stuff being shown because I don't think I would have found this on my own. Creator Sarah Davis Baker is starting a new series called Half-Remembered and the first episode, The Wrong Circus, is all about her search for a barely remembered game from her childhood. Man, this was a journey that took all kinds of interesting and unexpected turns. Also - why did so many computer games in the 90s look like absolute fever dreams? Anyway, I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling it but I would highly recommend it. I'm really looking forward to the next episode!

Link Lagniappe

OK, that's about it for this week!

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