Archive for March, 2020

Books

Comfort Reads

I posted some of this on Twitter over the weekend and thought I’d expand on it here. I’m a wimp under the best of circumstances. You could call me Wimp Empress of the Universe. I know that conflict is the heart of story, but I have a strong aversion to conflict. I have an overreactive sympathetic nervous system and have to take beta blockers to keep my heart rate and blood pressure at somewhat normal levels, and I’m rather empathetic, so I overidentify with other people’s emotions, even when they’re fictional.

Now, more than ever, we need some lower-stress entertainment. Some people may enjoy the catharsis of intense drama. But I think I’m not alone in wanting something comforting.

I’m sure everyone has their own stress triggers, but here’s what I consider a low-stress read:

  • Nothing really bad happens to main characters
  • Personal, rather than global, stakes
  • No emphasis on darkness or evil

I don’t think this has to be boring. Here’s a brief list of recommendations:

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis may be my all-time favorite book, and is a great comfort read. It’s a charming idyll in Victorian times. The goal is to find an ugly urn (and not break the space-time continuum). No villains or evil, but so much fun. The related books, The Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear, are a lot more intense, but if you want a sometimes funny and ultimately hopeful book about pandemics, read The Doomsday Book, but it will hit pretty close to home right now so may not be the best thing to read (it’s a time travel book in which a character lands in the middle of the Black Death, and meanwhile a virulent flu is sweeping through the area in the “present,” so no one’s up to getting her out of where she is).

Terry Pratchett is a go-to for comfort reads. Funny, insightful, and even if things come to the worst, Death is a decent guy, so it’s not too dire. Maybe not the Guards books because bad stuff tends to happen to Sam Vimes. I’d probably lean toward the Witches books now, with Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad. You feel like Granny Weatherwax has things totally under control, and that’s reassuring.

I’ve been rereading the 500 Kingdoms series by Mercedes Lackey. In these romantic fairytale fantasies, stories are magic, and knowing them gives you an advantage. Start with The Fairy Godmother, but after that they don’t require any particular order. They may be hard to find in print but seem to be available in e-books.

Neil Gaiman’s Stardust is a lovely fairytale fantasy of the sort that makes you sigh when you close the book after reading it. It’s much lighter than most of his other work.

Romances, especially romantic comedy, can be good at times like this, but one of my stress triggers is humiliation or embarrassment, and since a lot of the comedy comes from embarrassing things happening to the main character, sometimes those are too much for me. When I was a kid, I didn’t hide behind the sofa for scary monsters. It was sitcoms that sent me fleeing or hiding from secondhand embarrassment when the characters had humiliating things happen to them.

Jane Austen is a good bet. The writing style gives a bit of emotional distance, so it doesn’t trigger the intense empathy that makes the books painful to read. There’s humor and happy endings. Some of Georgette Heyer’s books work, but she tends to have plots involving gambling (another one of my odd stress triggers — I’m too cheap to gamble, and reading about people throwing money away bothers me), and she can get pretty racist.

One book that I think might work is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. It’s a spoof of the “rustic romance” that was apparently popular in the early part of the 20th century. A sophisticated young woman goes to live with distant relatives on their farm, and she sets about tidying things up. There are helpful stars marking the most beautifully written passages. (The movie is also brilliant, but I’ll deal with movies later this week.)

Cozy mysteries might work, depending on how much peril the sleuth gets into and how much you worry about the victims. I like the Royal Spyness series by Rhys Bowen. I don’t recall being too terribly tense while reading them. Agatha Christie is also usually a good bet.

I think my books are generally good low-stress reads, though I’m sometimes pretty mean to poor Owen and Lord Henry. Still, it’s mostly light and fun. For contemporary fantasy, try Enchanted, Inc. For steampunk, Rebel Mechanics.

There were some responses by others on the Twitter thread. I don’t want to endorse something I haven’t read, but you can see the thread starting here.

The New Normal

Life has been pretty much put on hold around here. It feels kind of like a snow day, even though it doesn’t change things all that much for me. I was thinking about how much more I can get done, then realized that I’m gaining maybe about five hours a week.

This was going to be a busy weekend, with a get-together Saturday afternoon, a party Saturday night, the usual church service Sunday morning, and a choir rehearsal Sunday afternoon. The get-together was canceled. I bowed out of the party (the weather was nasty, plus I figured it everything else was being canceled, going to a party would be silly). The church went to an online-only service for Sunday morning, and choir rehearsal was canceled. This week, I don’t have the usual Wednesday-night stuff. Otherwise, it’s my ordinary work week. I need to get my act together and not treat it like a holiday, even though that’s the temptation.

I’m fortunate in that I already didn’t have any author events planned. I don’t have a book being launched. I’m just hunkering down and writing new books, though I’m finding that the mysteries are less appealing to work on right now. I want to play in a fantasy world.

Are you finding your reading interests changing right now? I’m trying to read the books on the Nebula ballot so I can vote, but a lot of them are darker or more intense than I’m up for at the moment—even the middle-grade books. I want fun, fluffy fantasy stuff right now. Science fiction, even space opera, isn’t doing it for me.

I will need to go out tomorrow because I need milk. I’m hoping the stores might have calmed down a bit by then. I’ve got plenty of food, and I even have some evaporated milk I could use with my tea, if I get desperate. In fact, I’ve probably overcooked already. I could get through the rest of the week just with the food I already have cooked. I made a batch of jambalaya yesterday, so that’s enough leftovers for a week. I may have to freeze some. I also have the sauce for cheese enchiladas. There may be soup later in the week. It’s going to be rainy all week, so I’ll probably be cooking even more.

Hang in there, everyone. We’ll get through this.

Rainy Weekend at Home

Most of my weekend plans have either been canceled, or I’m canceling them, which means I now have a rainy weekend at home. I have a lot of reading to do, so that will be my plan for the weekend.

Tonight’s movie night is going to be the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, mostly because I just read a book on the economic system of pirates back during the prime age of Caribbean piracy, so I’m in the mood. It was fascinating seeing how they operated as a constitutional democracy long before the Declaration of Independence, and they had profit sharing, healthcare, and disability pay long before that became a thing — not because they were wonderful people, but because that was what was most profitable. They were also really good at marketing, so they probably weren’t nearly as bloodthirsty as the stories make them sound. They made a point of spreading that reputation so that the crews of ships they captured would be quick to surrender and they didn’t have to risk their lives or their profits in a battle (since battle damage and payment for injuries suffered in battle were taken out of the prize before the profits were divided among the crew).

Anyway, that made me think about pirates, so that’s tonight’s movie. I scored some pizza crusts on the bakery overstock rack at the grocery store yesterday, which means pizza tonight without having to make a crust. The urge to “quarantine bake” is pretty strong, especially on a rainy day, and I’ve found a brownie recipe I want to try.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to read as much as possible from the Nebula Awards ballot so I can vote by the end of the month. I still have several books to read and a bunch of short stories, novellas, and novelettes.

And I’m trying to come up with titles for the books in the mystery series I’m working on, which means coming up with the pattern for titles, since those kinds of books tend to have some kind of pattern that ties the series together. I’m drawing a complete blank so far.

Pandemic Precautions

I ran my weekly errands this morning, and it does look like the panic shopping is a real thing. The shelves of things like toilet paper and dried beans were empty. Fortunately, I stocked up on toilet paper a couple of weeks ago, mostly because Target was having a sale and was giving a $15 gift card if you bought $50 worth of household items. But that means I’m set for a few months. I haven’t stocked up on dried beans, though I do have a couple of bags of lentils. I wonder how many of those panic-bought beans will ever be cooked.

I think I could survive two to three weeks without leaving the house, if I had to. I’ve figured out meals I could make with what’s in my pantry and freezer. It might be lighter on veggies than I usually go, since I eat a lot of fresh produce, and I might have to cut back on dairy. I have some shelf-stable and evaporated milk, but that’s mostly good for cooking or putting in tea.

I’m not too worried yet, though there has been a Covid-19 case in my city. If it ramps up, I may avoid people more than I usually do, mostly to reduce the risk of being a vector. I used to work with the epidemiology department when I worked at the medical school, and one thing I learned then was that something like this can spread exponentially. One person can spread it to multiple people, who can each spread it to multiple people. The cluster they have in New York now came from one guy. Each person you remove from that chain can drastically reduce the number of infections. Even if you’re not at high risk, you may spread to others who are. If you’re not infected, you can’t spread it.

It’s probably good that they’re canceling big public events. One of the things that allowed the 1918 flu to spread was a parade that wasn’t canceled. Anything that slows it down helps, and bringing hundreds of people together really amplifies all the vectors.

The big thing is washing hands with soap. That’s more effective with this kind of virus than alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Wash your hands after using the bathroom and before handling food, which I hope everyone is doing already. A new habit to make is washing your hands when you come home from being in the outside world, before you do anything else. I’ve also started intermediate cleaning measures, keeping a packet of wipes in my car (hidden in the console container so my car doesn’t get broken into), and when I come out of a store, I wipe off my hands and the surfaces on the car I touch, like the steering wheel, parking brake, gear shift, and door handle. Then I do a more thorough washing when I get home. Avoid touching your face, if at all possible (which is tough when you wear glasses that tend to slide down your nose and when you have wispy hair that likes to get tangled in your eyelashes). Fortunately, I’m set for soap for ages, thanks to gifts and hotel soaps. Dish soap is also quite effective because it’s designed to break down grease, and this virus has a lipid layer, so the best way to kill it is to basically de-grease it. Panic buying soap, to the point you have a year’s supply and you’re hoarding it, is silly. You need everyone around you to be able to wash their hands in order to protect you, and if you’ve got all the soap, you make it harder for them to do that. A couple of weeks ago, I was in line at Target behind a guy who had literally an entire shopping cart full of hand sanitizer. I hope he was buying for something like a school or office building. If he was just hoarding it or planning to profiteer, then he’s part of the problem.

Because of allergy season, I’ve already been using a saline nasal rinse when I come in from outdoors to get rid of pollen. I don’t know if that’s at all effective for getting rid of a virus, but I do know that keeping those tissues moist can help protect you, in general. That’s what they’re there for, to catch things before they get into the lungs.

Take care of yourself to maintain your health, in general. That means sleep, exercise, nutrition, and hydration.

We really are all of us in this together. This kind of thing can bring out the best and the worst in humanity. I really hope we see the best.

writing life

Working from Home

It looks like a lot of people are going to be working from home in the near future as we attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus. I’ve been working from home for twenty years, first as a telecommuter and then as a freelancer, so here are some tips that may help you cope.

First, although it seems like one of the benefits of working from home is being able to work in pajamas, it really does help to get dressed in the morning before you start work. When you stay in the clothes you slept in, you don’t feel like the day has started. It’s like a really lazy weekend morning or a sick day. But here’s the fun thing: you can have “work” pajamas. The clothes you change into don’t have to be the kind of clothes you might wear to work. They just need to be different from the clothes you slept in. Of course, if you have a videoconference, you’ll want to put on a decent shirt and do something with your hair, but otherwise, wear something comfortable.

If you’re at all self-disciplined, you’ll probably get a lot more done when you’re working from home than you do in an office. When I started telecommuting, I found that I could get a full day’s work done in half a day. It’s amazing how much time is wasted in an office with other people around. This may not apply if you’ve got a micromanager boss who insists on daily conference calls or videoconferences while everyone’s working from home, but you may be able to multitask during a pointless conference call in a way that you can’t in a face-to-face meeting. Because of this increased productivity, don’t feel guilty about adjusting your working hours accordingly, especially if you have to keep time sheets. Log the time a task would have taken you in the office or else you’ll end up actually doing more work.

It’s also possible that you’ll go nuts with the freedom and do less work, especially if you’ve been really stressed or if you hate your job. No one will know if you’re playing online, watching a movie, or sleeping late. It’s easy to put off work, figuring you’ll just work later in the evening.

Whether you find yourself working more or less, sticking to a schedule really does help. Set an alarm and get to work at a regular time. Take a lunch break. End your day at a regular time. Try not to let work bleed into the rest of your life. Yeah, easier said than done, but it’s easier to hold the line with other people than it is with yourself. I used to have two different phone greetings I used, depending on whether I was at “work” or off-duty. If someone called me after hours, they got my casual “off-duty” greeting, which was a signal that they’d called me at “home” rather than at “work.” Now that I have caller-ID, it would be easier to distinguish between work calls and personal calls, but I think I’d still give a “home” greeting after hours. This also works in the opposite way for dealing with friends or family who call you when you’re at work but think you’re free to chat because you work at home.

Also, it’s a good idea to learn to always sound alert and with-it when you answer the phone for work, no matter what you happen to be doing. I got to the point that I could answer the phone in the middle of the night when awakened from a deep sleep and sound like I was at my desk. This was an issue because my main client was in Sweden, and when they were being weasels and doing something like canceling a launch we’d been working on, they’d try to be sneaky and call in the morning at their time, which was in the middle of the night our time, so they’d get voice mail. I think I scared them to death when I answered the phone. They quit the overnight phone calls. This skill is handy when you’re having a slow day and really need a nap, too.

Make a point of scheduling breaks. You don’t realize how often you get up and move around when you’re at the office. Working at home, because of that increased focus that allows more productivity, it’s easy to get in a zone and not get up to move. Try to give yourself at least a few minutes every half hour or so, even if it’s just to refill your water glass or coffee cup. Walk around a little and stretch a bit.

If you’re an introvert, you may find that you suddenly have a lot more energy. You’re not spending your social energy on the people at work, so you may find yourself wanting to socialize more than you usually do. Though that may be a problem if you’re supposed to be self-quarantining.

The really tough part will come when you have to go back to working in an office. Extroverts may be glad to go back. Introverts may be spoiled. We’ll have to see if employers learn from this experience to see that working from home makes some employees a lot more productive and if that leads to policy changes. I’m sure there are people who will be less productive because they need external accountability and supervision, but work situations shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all prospect. It seems silly to reduce the productivity of some workers because of the needs of a few other workers, but then that’s why I’ve worked for myself for so long.

Life

Today’s Ideal Life

The movie nights I’ve been having lately are the result of some thinking I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing a lot of long-term planning, which starts with thinking about what your ideal life looks like. After all, if you don’t know exactly what you want, you can’t make plans for getting it. But there’s a downside to spending a lot of time imagining some ideal future. It tends to make you unhappy in the present, especially when that future is a long way down the road and depends on things that aren’t entirely in your control. There’s a really fine line to walk. You tend not to grow when you’re comfortable and content, but it’s also bad to be unhappy in the present because that’s where you live. You need to find happiness where you are while you aim for something even better.

I decided to do some of the same exercises, but about the present. What would my ideal life look like in my present circumstances — in this home, with the career and income I currently have? And what could I do to get that ideal life now? In doing that thinking, I realized that I’ve inherited my grandmother’s tendency to “save it for good.” In her case, it was saving nice things like the good dishes for special occasions. In my case, it’s a weird manifestation of my perfectionist streak in which I tend to avoid things I enjoy unless the circumstances can be ideal. I’ve nearly let gifts of things like food or bath products go bad because I waited for the ideal time to use them. I don’t watch movies I’ve wanted to see or that I want to rewatch or read books I’ve anticipated until I hit some magical combination of mood, weather, timing and occasion, which means it never happens. I’ve got a ton of spa-type items, like massagers, foot tub, facial sauna, and various products that I never get around to using because I save them for some idealized spa day that never happens.

So I’ve started making a point to do the things I like to do without having the ideal circumstances. If those circumstances come up, I can always do it again. Thus, the regular habit of movie nights. I do like to fit movies to my mood and often the season or weather, but if I want to watch something, I watch it without getting too caught up in a sense of the ideal. I still try to make a special occasion out of it, with candles (both electric and real) to provide some mood lighting so I can turn the lights out and carefully chosen snacks. I’m also trying to use the spa stuff as part of regular life. The facial sauna has come in handy when my sinuses were blocked. It’s starting to get warm enough that I can take the foot spa tub out to the patio. I can do a thing or two that feels good without having to turn it into a fancy spa day — or I can do a fancy spa day.

The other thing I need to do is finish getting my house organized and then maybe take a look at my decor. I’ve been in a holding pattern for so long in which I was hoping to buy a new house and move but couldn’t, so I may be here a year or two longer. I don’t want to buy all new furniture, but I can fix things up with what I have. I really want to get my office back to where it’s pleasant to work in because that will allow me to have better work/life balance if I generally leave my computer there. I need to be better about working during working hours and then switching it off, especially when it comes to things like social media or the impulse to do research every time a thought strikes me. Having a good office that I go to for work has been a big part of my visualization of my ideal life, and I can do that where I am, to some extent (though maybe not with the secret recording studio behind the bookcase door).

movies

Back to Middle Earth

I did my Lord of the Rings movie marathon over the weekend, watching the films for the first time in nearly 10 years. The last time I recall watching them was when I was gearing up to write No Quest for the Wicked and I watched them to make a list of quest story tropes to play with for when I put a quest in modern Manhattan (that book was so much fun to write). I thought I was checking the extended editions out of the library, since the illustration with the listing was the extended edition box set, but they just turned out to be the Blu Ray versions of the edition I already had. I would like to see the extended editions at some point, since I suspect a lot of what got added was the character stuff, and that’s the part I like. I have a feeling some of my friends have a set I can borrow, so maybe next winter I’ll do another viewing.

I also need to re-read the books. I first read them when I was in sixth grade and was utterly captivated. I tore through them. I re-read them in college and found them to be a bit of a slog. I wonder what I’d think of them now. As I rewatched the movies, I was trying to remember what it was that captivated me so much when I first read the books. I think a lot of it was the characters. The hobbits were really relatable to a kid, perhaps less so to an adult, and maybe that was the difference in reading between the ages of 11 and 21. I liked the relationships among the characters. I loved the Shire and Rivendell. I recall that my favorite part of the series was the first book, before things got really awful and dire. I think a lot of the stuff I liked in that book got cut from the movie.

I kind of feel like the movies went overkill on “epic.” It got almost too big to care too much. I was really involved in the character moments and found myself tuning out when it was massive CGI army of good guys vs. massive CGI army of bad guys. Even in smaller fights, they went to overkill in a way that I felt undermined the situation, like in a case when a swarm of at least 50 orcs attacks Aragorn while he’s on his own, and he manages to hold them off until backup arrives. Really, he’s just fighting about six of them, probably the ones who were stuntmen in costume, while the rest are CGI that don’t interact with him at all. If they’d only shown the six stuntmen, it would have actually been a more engaging fight, one I could imagine him winning with great effort. When he’s outnumbered at least fifty to one and they can’t easily beat him by just swarming over him, I figure he has plot armor and am not too worried about the outcome.

I do think that, in general, they did a good job of translating the books to film. The imagery is just about perfect (though I think the Ringwraiths in the 70s animated version were scarier). I just wish it hadn’t been so focused on massive battles. That was also the flaw in the Hobbit movies.

But I’m kind of a weirdo in that I’d have been okay with a story that was just hobbits living happily in the shire and maybe having some minor adventures, like traveling to Rivendell and hanging out with elves, then going home.

Books

Hooking Fantasy Readers

There’s been some discussion on fantasy author Twitter lately about recommending books that will hook people into reading fantasy. Quite frequently, if someone asks for a fantasy recommendation, no matter what they stipulate they’re looking for, the same books tend to get recommended, usually the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Wheel of Time series, and that sort of thing. Someone did a survey, and they found that nearly half the people didn’t get hooked on fantasy because of the usual recommendations. It was something else they read later when they tried again that worked. But there is a very vocal crowd that seems to think there’s something wrong if you don’t immediately fall in love with fantasy because of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings.

I personally don’t believe in the idea of one book that totally hooks you. I think it’s more of a process, and it starts in childhood. I started with Disney movies and Dr. Seuss books, which I think paved the way by getting me used to the idea of magic and strange alternate worlds. Someone who didn’t start out with that sort of thing may have more trouble getting used to the idea of things that can’t happen in our world. When I got to the “chapter book” level, I read pretty widely, usually by topic rather than genre — every horse book I could find, for instance. I seem to have gravitated toward books with a fantasy or magical element, whether it was talking animals, witches, or other worlds. I read The Horse and His Boy from the Chronicles of Narnia when I was reading horse books, and didn’t connect it to the series or to the genre. I read all the Roald Dahl books, read a few of the Oz books, and I read The Hobbit when they came out with the animated movie.

Around this time, there was Star Wars, which got me into science fiction, but I think it also laid a lot of groundwork for being a fantasy fan, since it’s essentially fantasy wearing a science fiction costume. Yeah, there are spaceships and robots, but it’s about a group of wizard warriors with magical powers, and there are princesses in need of rescuing. It’s structured so well as a fantasy that it’s easy to rewrite the same story as a fantasy. Lucas himself did it in Willow, and Eragon is basically a scene-for-scene rewrite with dragons instead of X-Wings (incidentally, that survey showed that book as one of the big entry-level books that hooked people on fantasy). I suspect it has a lot to do with the hero’s journey structure that’s so universal.

I didn’t really click into the idea of fantasy as a genre until sixth grade, when I read The Silver Chair and became obsessed with the Narnia books. Around that time, I re-read The Hobbit and moved on to the Lord of the Rings. From there, I got into other fantasy, mostly that written for children. There was Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, then I got back into the Oz books. But I was also reading pretty widely in a variety of genres, and I didn’t glom onto fantasy in a big way, to the point I wanted to write it, until I discovered the Katherine Kurtz Deryni books in high school, and from there I found the Shannara books and a few other of the series that were big then.

I tend to give The Silver Chair credit for making me a fantasy fan, but it was more of a tipping point in an overall process. That’s really how just about anything works. They say you need to introduce a new food to a child at least three times before you can really tell if the child dislikes it. The first time is bound to be a big dislike because it’s new and different. We resist the unfamiliar. It’s not until the second time that the kid can even really try it once they’re past the unfamiliarity. Then the third time they can make a more honest assessment and decide they like it.

With that in mind, I don’t think you can hand a person a book and instantly turn them into a fan of something. It’s a process, and it’s going to vary by background — was the person exposed to fantasy-like stories as a kid? Does the person read fiction at all, or was the last novel they read assigned reading for a class? What kinds of other things does the person like? Maybe start with something in their chosen genre that has some mild fantasy elements, like a paranormal mystery or romance. (Enchanted, Inc., is apparently a really good entry-level fantasy because it appeals to those who like mystery, romance, chick lit, or liked the Harry Potter books but haven’t read other fantasy.) Handing someone who hasn’t read a novel since college a doorstopper of a book that’s the first in a trilogy and that’s full of songs written in made-up languages is probably not going to go well.

One thing we need to be really careful about is the high-pressure recommendation, when we hand someone our absolute favorite book, which is in a genre they aren’t familiar with, and expect it to have the same impact on them as it did on us, with the strong sense that we can’t be friends anymore if they don’t like it and immediately like everything else we like. That’s doomed to failure. Maybe start with something that has lower stakes for you emotionally, and only move on to your all-time favorite book once you’ve laid some groundwork — and then maybe leave off the hype and the importance that book has for you.

Done!

I finished my draft yesterday, so I’m taking a couple of days to get other stuff done, like getting my car inspected (now that the mirror is fixed) and running a few errands, maybe even going out for fun. There are a couple of things I’ve been saying I was going to do, and it’s a lovely day. There may also be reading on the patio, and there will be a library trip. Then in the next few evenings I’ll be viewing the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, since the DVDs came in on my library hold.

Yes, I do know how to celebrate. Woo hoo.

But I do have a bit to celebrate this week, what with finishing writing a book and finally managing that mirror repair. It’s like the two biggest things that have been lurking on my to-do list for weeks (months) are both off my plate at the same time. I feel like I could float. And then I will look at the rest of my list and sink, but for a moment I’m going to enjoy the freedom. Next week is spring break around here, so I need to do my out and about stuff this week while all the places aren’t crowded with kids.

Now, off to tackle the day!

Life

Minor Personal Triumph

I had a minor personal triumph yesterday that was a long time coming. It all started last summer, on my birthday.

To set the stage, the layout of my neighborhood is a little odd. It’s a townhome complex with detached garages. The houses are set back from the street, with garages in front, opening directly onto the street-like driveway that runs through the complex. The garages are one-car, and pretty narrow (they were built in the 80s, when compact cars were common). You have to go in at just the right angle, but when I came home the day before, someone had been parked (illegally) in the drive just in front of my garage, meaning it was really tricky to get in, and I came in at a weird angle. The next morning, my birthday, I was rushing out to get to music and art camp, and I noticed someone driving way too fast down the drive. Meanwhile, I noticed another car heading toward me from the opposite direction. That meant when I backed out, I was really looking out for a car that might be coming and stewing over the fast driver, so I forgot I was at a different angle and soon heard a weird sound.

Yep, I’d hit the passenger-side mirror on the side of the garage doorway. It was more or less intact, except for the cover coming off the back, so I threw the cover in the car and went on to the church. I later realized that while it looked intact, the mechanism inside that controls the positioning of the mirror had snapped. I was pretty upset about it all because that’s not the way you want to start your birthday, and you really don’t want to get a new mirror for your birthday.

My friends who know more about this than I do said it shouldn’t be too hard to replace. I looked up some info about it, even found the replacement part. But I guess I just didn’t want to deal with it. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I didn’t like to think about screwing up like that. A little black duct tape held it all in place, and I forgot about it. I might think about it when I was driving somewhere, but when I was at home where I could do something about it, I put it out of my mind.

But I was pretty sure the duct tape repair wouldn’t pass the state inspection, which I have to do before the end of March. I finally ordered the part online and figured that if I couldn’t change it myself, I’d at least save myself the markup on the part if I just had my mechanic install it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos about how to change it, and I was getting pretty nervous because some of them made it look like a big job. Sunday afternoon, I decided to tackle it, but I ran into a roadblock because the stuff inside the interior trim looked different than anything I’d seen in the videos. I finally figured it out late in the day, but then it turned out that I didn’t have the right tool to get to one of the bolts. I was either going to have to remove the interior door panel (which might also have required a new tool) or get a flat socket wrench that could fit into a narrow space—or pay someone with the tools to do it. The wrench was about $3.50 at Home Depot, so yesterday I went and got it, and I completed the repair pretty easily. All done in about 15 minutes once I had the right tool, and after months of fretting and stewing. I was even having nightmares about this.

I think maybe all those videos were counterproductive, aside from telling me how to remove that piece of interior trim to get at the mirror bolts. The repair jobs they were showing were total overkill, including removing door panels, dealing with stripped bolts, etc.

So, now I know how to do that one job, and I feel very accomplished. It’s such a relief to have that weight off me. I may tinker with the old mirror to see if there’s a way to fix it. Maybe if I’d known how to take it all apart back when it happened, I could have done something. There was too much tension on the mechanism with it attached to the car.

And now I can get my safety inspection done. I don’t think I want to open an auto repair shop, though I did find that my small hands were quite useful for working in tight spaces.