A while back I started using an app called Goodreads. I scraped my memory to think of every book I'd ever read and entered it into the app with an approximation of the date I read it. The grand total was abysmal. I realized I had severely abandoned reading in my adult life, which was completely counter to just about every goal I've ever had.

It was also around the time I was getting fed up with social media, Reddit in particular. The other apps have really subpar algorithms, but Reddit is so dialed in. It just sucks you further and further down the rabbit hole. So the first idea of how to combat that was to allocate an hour before bed for reading books, instead of laying on the couch halfway paying attention to some streaming show while I endlessly scrolled Reddit. That turned out to be a fantastic idea that really stuck.

I then made it a Febrehabruary thing to set a reading goal. And from there I set a goal to have read 43 books by the time I was 43 years old. I know that's not a stellar average, but I felt like one book per year sure beat nothing. Well I happily crushed that goal and kept right on going. Granted I'm 44 now, but my total is up to 82.

I'm also really trying to focus on the classics. Those books that "everyone" has read. And sometimes that means I'm stuck with a book I hate. Pride and Prejudice was like that. Man, I could cut that thing down to about 35 pages and make it a compelling read. Other times, I deviate and read some science fiction space odyssey or something as a little treat. And sometimes those two genres overlap, which is always nice. I certainly have a ways to go though. My "Want to Read" list is at 250 books, which at my current cruising speed of one book per month equates to about a 20 year runway. Which is fine, but that list is growing much faster than its dwindling. I suppose I could allocate more than an hour before bed each day, but for now I'm liking this change of pace.

It's so stupid that I have to STRUGGLE to stop looking at my phone. These things are so sinister, but so hard to ditch. Anyway, that's all, leave me a comment and let me know what book I should read next. On a side note, another reason I decided to blog today is because my "This Day In History" has no entry. I've NEVER posted on Aug 23 in my life. How weird is that. Now I have to go edit the code for my website to take that section away if nothing exists. Literally hasn't ever happened before. I wonder if there are any other days of the year where this is true. Oh well, not true for today any longer!

In our series of returning to blogging, I thought I should maybe fill in the larger details with a wide brush. I could probably sum it up as steady as she goes. And that probably wouldn't surprise any of my loyal viewers.

I just had my 21st anniversary at work (shocking I know). Daniel and I will have our 20th anniversary next year. We still live in Dallas, although we have switched houses a couple of times since we last spoke. Up until recently, I was driving the same car, but I sold it to my brother for my nephew to drive. I was sad to see it go, but glad it stayed in the family. Now I lease, which is against my religion, but with EVs, the technology is improving so rapidly that you don't really want to drive one for 10+ years.

For a long time, I would write in my Book of Secrets every year on my birthday. I would make predictions for 1, 5, and 10 years in the future. The idea behind it is to illustrate how terrible humans are at actually predicting the future. You always think to yourself, "I knew it! I KNEW that would happen!" but that's hindsight bias. You actually had no clue. Except, in my Book of Secrets, I'm almost always right. Mostly because I predict that nothing will change. Then I make concerted efforts to not change anything. Then I pat myself on the back for being right. Solid as Iraq!

Some time around the height of COVID (hey, remember COVID? That was crazy), I had filled one of our patio planters with potato vine. Unbeknownst to me at the time, squirrels LOVE to eat potato vine and they were absolutely decimating my plant. I thought, what if I put a pile of pecans off to the side to distract them? Then they might lose interest in the plant. I was partially correct. It did get their attention for a short time.

There was one squirrel in particular, though, that didn't act like all the rest. She didn't run away at the slightest sight of me. She also never ate the nuts on the ground. She would pick one up, jump up onto the comfy couch, and eat it there. When she was done, she would go down and get another, and then right back up onto the couch. I thought it was so funny that leaving some nuts out became a regular practice.

Also during this time, I had been partially furloughed from work. I was working from home just 3 days per week, and with lockdowns in full swing, had shit all to do the rest of the time. So I set out to see if I could befriend this squirrel. That involved countless hours sitting motionless in the backyard, hands outstretched with pecans. Little by little, we gained the trust of our new friend, we dubbed "Muffin."

As an aside, a lot of people ask me how I know she's a girl. Well, first of all, the girls are way sweeter. They're timid and gentle and cute. Boys, on the other hand are mean and aggressive and like to injure the girls. They also have scrota the size of their heads. So in review, to sex a squirrel check:

1. Demeanor
2. Da ballsack

I wish I knew the exact moment we met her, but all I know is that by 2021 we were regularly documenting her visits with photos and videos and posting on Instagram. It's now August of 2025 so we have known her for 4 or 5 years. She doesn't come every day, but for periods of time she will. A few times we've gone months without seeing her, convinced she would never return, but she always does. One time she showed up severely injured, unable to use the right side of her body, and we just knew she would be a goner. But we left out clean water and plenty of nuts, and damned if she didn't bounce right back. She has a pronounced lean, a slight limp, and a split right ear, so she's very easy to spot from far away.

There was also a moment when we were feeding her that we realized the ear no longer had a notch. And we realized this was a second squirrel who looked, and more importantly, acted just like Muffin. Enter: Cookie. So we have two squirrels now who come by almost daily, will eat from our hands, and enjoy year round guaranteed food sources. They have a little picnic table our friend Ashley got for us, and our days are centered around checking to be sure nobody is waiting for a handout. I even repurposed our old Nest doorbell as a motion sensing camera so I can be notified when we have a customer.

So much of my life centers around squirrels now. I've taken two squirrel rehabilitation classes from the ASPCA, and know more about these little animals than I ever thought I would. Anyway, for the sake of catching up on what's been going on for the past 15 years, I felt like introducing Muffin and Cookie was a key piece of the puzzle.