Kimberly Hirsh

I had grand dreams for Blaugust. I was going to not only write blog posts, but also read blog posts. I set up Feedly again! And the month isn’t over, so I may yet do some stuff.

But I need to recognize that as an educator working on a traditional schedule in the US, August is a month where anything that’s not for work is going to lose priority. And I only feel like doing fun things that don’t require my creativity.

So. I will only prioritize writing my own posts and they will happen when they happen.

I just renewed my family’s membership to the Friends of the Durham Library. Have you joined your library’s Friends organization? It’s a straightforward way to support an institution that’s losing a lot of structural support right now. 📚

Finished reading: Vanish by Sophie Jordan 📚

Finished reading: Protecting What’s His by Tessa Bailey 📚

Finished reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚🎧

James Marsters reads the audiobook and he’s great.

Finished reading: Midnight Pleasures With a Scoundrel by Lorraine Heath 📚

This is an absolutely bananas book. A great ride.

Finished reading: The Last Wicked Scoundrel by Lorraine Heath 📚

Hello friends. I’ve signed up for Blaugust. As you might guess from the name, it’s a challenge that takes place in August, where you blog. The original challenge was to blog every day in August. Challenges that require daily activity don’t work with my life, so I’ve set the bar quite low. According to Krikket, who is one of the people leading the charge on Blaugust this year, you get a Bronze award if you post 5 times in the month of August. So that’s my goal. 5 times, which I’m mapping to about one post a week, with an extra post squeezed in there somewhere. According to the official Blaugust blogroll, I am not a first-time participant this year. Hmm. Let me do a quick search of my blog… I can’t find anything, but who can say? Who can remember what I’ve blogged? It’s been a long time blogging. Belghast, the founder of Blaugust, wrote an intro post as his first post for Blaugust so I thought I would do likewise. Maybe lots of new people are stopping by? So hello! Welcome! I’m Kimberly. I have also sometimes been known on the Internet as Kiba Rika or Kiba. I’ve had lots of various other handles over the years, but those are the main two ways people know me. I am not Kim. Please don’t call me Kim because I will think you are talking to someone else. I’m not sure why it bothers me to be called Kim, it just does. Like Belghast, I was born in that Xennial Oregon Trail generation sweet spot. We had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. Or at least, I did. Really a digital adolescence for me, but my dad is an early adopter so I’m a bit unlike my age-group peers. Also like Belghast, I started this blog in/around 2009. Archives older than that are imported from elsewhere, because I have had more blogs than I can remember. For a while I had topical ones. My first blog was a personal blog, hand-coded in HTML and CSS, hosted on some old free webhost like envy.nu or something. I had a Xanga dedicated to movie and other reviews and one for my poetry. I had a LiveJournal. (Technically still do.) I’ve had blogs about crochet, theater, video games, and I don’t know what all else. But eventually I decided to just put all the things here. I’ve been extremely online for at least a quarter-century, which is why I identify as an escribitionist. This blog has had shifts in focus as my life has, so its archives reflect that. I’ve spent A LOT of time in school, so often it will be about that, especially getting my MS and PhD in Library Science. I also have been book blogging since 2007, so you’ll find a lot of book reviews in the archives, for books released as recently as this spring, and even a few interviews with authors if you go back far enough. I’m an elementary school librarian and my students are big fans of the graphic novel Amulet. It’s really fun to be able to tell them that I interviewed Kazu Kibuishi when Amulet was first published. I blog a lot about dealing with chronic illness, too. I’ve got a pile of diagnoses and they make me variably disabled, so sometimes I have a lot of energy and almost no pain, but other times I am in very bad pain and it’s a lot of work just to get out of bed. I write about how that feels and dealing with doctors. For work, as I mentioned, I am an elementary school librarian. I work with the first through fourth graders at an independent, secular Quaker school. I don’t write about that a lot lately, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m just too tired? It’s a half-time job but it eats up full-time energy. In the spring I told my supervisor that my long-term goal/wish is to actually use the other half of what would be a normal person’s week for something other than recovering from the energy expenditure at work. I’m going into my second year in this job, which I love. I do help kids choose what books to read and help them find more books like books they’ve already loved, but I also collaborate with teachers to provide them rich resources to support student learning. One of my hopes is to do more instruction moving forward, maybe embed some research instruction into the work the teachers are doing so students see the skills in context rather than isolated. Last year I pulled together resources for fourth grade classes on several different forms of government, including finding examples of each form, and I learned a ton that way. Being a librarian is a great gig if you love to learn, because anytime you help someone else you’re learning something yourself, too. In addition to this job, I’ve also been a middle school librarian, academic researcher, university outreach public communications specialist/managing editor, and Latin teacher. In my time when I don’t work, I love to read and play both video and tabletop games. I’ve been a theater person and an improv comedy cult member (only kind of joking, read Bossypants) but haven’t done either of those in almost 10 years. I live with my almost-9-year-old son M, who attends the school where I work (and did even before I got the job there), and his dad/my spouse, W. W and I met doing theater when we were very young (I was in high school and he was in college) and have been together ever since. If you find someone awesome that young, you’re super lucky, and I am. The three of us have a cat named Midnight, who is a smol boy (under 6 lbs full-grown, the vet’s not worried about it) and very fluffy. We live in an area with multiple universities and a thriving local food scene, where farms that were once focused on producing tobacco now grow incredibly delicious produce. We live near our parents and siblings. Big sister/eldest daughter is my longest-standing identity and I’m not gonna lie, it’s exhausting. But I do love my people. So that’s me. What else would you like to know?

Been watching the Disney original movies in the Zombies series and these are thinly veiled metaphors for prejudice against different groups.

Original Zombies: racism (zombies basically stand in for Black people).
Zombies 2: prejudice against Indigenous people, settler colonialism (werewolves stand in for Indigenous people) Zombies 3: prejudice against immigrants (aliens stand in for immigrants)

I’m curious to see what they do in Zombies 4, which we’ll watch tomorrow.

🔖 Read Why I’m One And Done (And Not Feeling Guilty About It) by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade).

My experience is so similar to Fallon’s. Before having M, I thought maybe 2 kids. But he’s very high touch and when people ask, I always say, “I don’t have enough Kimberly for a second kid.”

Finished reading: Stranger in My Arms by Lisa Kleypas 📚

💬📚 “Each [major innovation in industrial farming] has benefited the biggest [farms] and penalized the smallest.” Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal

You should go vote for my colleague and friend Erin Dawson Linn & her spouse Alder Linn in the America’s Favorite Couple contest. These two’s wedding was probably the most beautiful I’ve ever been to and left me in happy tears and feeling grateful for all the love in my life. I still have the little bottle of olive oil with a heart charm that they gave out as favors on display in my living room. These are two kind, loving people and it would make me so happy to see them win this contest and have more amazing adventures together!

Finished reading: Because You’re Mine by Lisa Kleypas 📚

📚 Leigh Bardugo has a picture book about death and grief that she wrote with John Picacio available for pre-order.

[This book is] for kids like me who spent a lot of time in graveyards reading epitaphs, who didn’t quite feel safe among the living.

This book is for me. 💀🖤

Finished reading: Somewhere I’ll Find You by Lisa Kleypas 📚

Finished reading: The Bladesmith Queen by Sarah MacLean 📚

They’ve scheduled a 90s Dance Party for our work retreat in a couple weeks. I am tempted to send everyone Rebecca Schuman’s The 90s Are Old Longreads series to read.

Just go ahead now.

📚 Hear me out: sun-soaked summer gothic literature. These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean. The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. What else?

🎮 Had a breakthrough in Blue Prince and I’m so excited about it it’s hard to sleep.

Another day, another autoimmune flare, another medical specialist, another round of blaming myself for chronic illness and also telling myself I should not blame myself. The road goes ever on and on…. (Advice not requested.)

Finished reading: Surrender to the Devil by Lorraine Heath 📚

Lorraine Heath is so good at the job.

📚 Reading Zoraida Córdova’s Labyrinth Lost and realized I had the perfect bookmark for any book by this author.

Finished reading: A Curse Carved in Bone by Danielle L. Jensen 📚

This companion-sequel to A Fate Inked in Blood spends the first third or so revisiting the first book but picks up in the middle third and is gripping and full of revelations for the last third. I highly recommend the duology.

Finished reading: These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean 📚

I will follow Sarah MacLean anywhere, from Whitechapel to Narragansett Bay. If you like family narratives with a strong romantic thread, read this book.