Like a shimmering of the dark air

Important cat health update (with companying common sense trigger warnings for the subject): Grey has been diagnosed with renal disease. This has been an extremely scary two-month long trek through veterinary hell, but we are hopeful that she may have finally turned the corner with the aid of accurate(-ish) diagnosis and a hospital stay while on fluids to flush the (probable) kidney stone from her system that was causing a blockage. We've had to be trained to administer said fluids ourselves and tomorrow will be our first attempt to do so, so wish us luck.

Grey is home and displaying all her worst coping mechanisms for the extreme stress she's under, namely pulling out all her fur. But fluid and food intake is so important right now that the vet agrees that a cone would be more harmful than helpful, so we've just got to monitor and try to mitigate/treat any resulting injuries.

Things are looking a bit more hopeful now, but the last few days were a dark time. Work has been very understanding of my need to take calls and step away from my station, which has been most helpful. Thankfully, it's the weekend now and I am finally allowed to cry.

Unfortunately, this is all at the worst possible time because I am still supposed to be preparing for a move. My progress towards which has vacillated between slow and nonexistent this week.

If there can be said to be an upside to this nightmare, I've been consuming a lot of books/media.

Possibly the most important of which was Chain of Thorns, the third and final installment of the Last Hours trilogy in the Shadowhunter Chronicles series. Reading that book was An Experience(TM), which I still have not completely processed. It's definitely Cassie's most mature work to date. Other books I might like or love better, but Chain of Thorns is just possibly the best. Anyway, that lead directly into a Dark Artifices reread, of which I have completed Lady Midnight and am partway through Lord of Shadows.

I've continued my trend of reading copious amounts of BL. I've read through all of what is currently available of Black or White, which I am enjoying a lot as it develops past its growing pains. I've also read Midnight Rain, which I loved, and Toritan, which I did not. Midnight Rain, in particular, has been living rent free in my brain ever since I read it. It's definitely flawed, but it hits that crime BL subgenre nerve just right, and it is certainly A Whole Mood.

I am also slowly exploring danmei. I finished the donghua of Heaven Official's Blessing, which was lovely, as well as the first volume of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, which was rather a miss for me. After that I read the first volume of The Husky and His White Cat Shizun, which I like better than Grandmaster at least (not least of which due to the vastly superior translation, at least in terms of a smooth reading experience), but is still somewhat uneven in quality. But it's interacting with tropes I like (supremely almost cartoonishly evil and explicitly textually queer main character, yes please), and exploring tropes with Grandmaster overlap but in a way that I, personally, prefer (by that I mean HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND. Like, the book breezes past the moral event horizon within its opening chapter and never looks back). That said, pacing is probably going to be my enemy as I explore this genre. Slow burn is absolutely Not My Thing and it seems to be pretty baked into the territory, if I may horribly mix metaphors.

P.S. Lana Del Rey dropped a new song, which is now my personality. I don't make the rules.