Nerdy Thoughts

Another weekend, another snowstorm but I've got my fingers crossed that this weekend will be our last snowstorm of the year. It started Friday late afternoon, just as I got home from work thankfully and ended Saturday afternoon so we didn't do much this weekend except clean up and relax. I cleaned our long ass driveway with the snowblower on Saturday which took two hours and then spent an hour making it wider this afternoon. I think I've said this before but I am so, so happy we own a snow blower. Also very grateful I am way more comfortable using now compared to 2020. So much faster and easier than shovelling by hand.

Aside from that, I've been relaxing this weekend. Stormy weather can kind of spike my anxiety so to counteract that spike I make a point of only doing easy chores and letting myself game/read/watch as much as I want to. So this weekend I spent my time reading Paris Daillencourt is about to crumble by Alexis Hall, the second book in the Winner Bakes All series, playing a lot of Mortal Kombat 11, and watching Dead Meat's Scream series Kill Counts. I assume most horror fans are familiar with Dead Meat but if you're not, I'd highly recommend their YouTube channel


Storygraph review here if you're curious but the coles notes version is that the main plot is more about Paris Daillencourt's anxiety and mental health journey. The romance is there and it's an important part of the book but I think self-discovery is the larger plot. I liked it, it made me laugh out loud, and I gave it 3 stars.

As for Mortal Kombat 11, it reminds me why I stick to relaxing simulation-style games most of the time. I actually am enjoying it, I've been a big fan of Mortal Kombat since I was pre-teen but it's been a while since I've played a fighting game and I am very rusty. Thankfully it has tutorials, very different from the old SNES games I used to play growing up where you either discovered moves by accident or repeatedly read the manual. It's been fun getting back into an old fandom and catching up on all the new lore and characters.

Last March I signed up for an extra work project from our Archives department and I was assigned a side project of transcribing a diary from 1890 set in rural Newfoundland with an unknown author. It was just something to work on whenever there was nothing from my regular acquisition workload to do. Unfortunately, it got pushed to the back of my project list because my acquisitions work actually became busier since the pandemic began because my individual work focuses on electronic books. As you can imagine, in the remote learning world we live in now, EBooks have gotten to be very, very popular with faculty and students.

However yesterday I finally got to get back at the transcribing project and remembered just how intriguing the journal is. The unknown author is a woman who seems to be somewhat young, it sounds like she's not married yet, and she's originally from St. John's (our capital). So it's not clear why she's living in the rural area of Three Arms when she's not married, I'm thinking perhaps her family sent her to live with relatives to help them out in this rural area.

She writes a lot about her uncles and aunts as well as the visitors they receive, a man named Jack that she kissed and who is a fisherman she's only seen six times the year so far. She writes often about the weather, recording the winds nearly every entry which reminds me so much of my Dad who knew the wind direction every day. It makes sense, the weather & the wind impact fishing and travelling by water that's a huge part of their day-to-day lives.

It's said locally that one thing Newfoundlanders love to talk about is the weather and I think that is very true. Weather talk is not simply small talk here, it can be a full-on conversation. Though I think that this is true for any place that has large fishing or farming or any industries reliant on the weather.

Anyway, getting away from the point. My point is that it's been really enjoyable working on this slice of life journal and I wanted to share it. I hope in transcribing I can help the library find some clues to her identity, I'm interested in knowing what happened to her and how this journal ended up surviving the years.