Hi, Dear Reader. It’s late morning here in New Hometown, Florida on Friday, July 9, 2021. It is a hot morning – noon is not that far away as I start this post – here in my corner of the Sunshine State. Currently, the temperature is 85˚F (30˚C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 51% and the wind blowing from the north-northeast at 1 MPH (1 KM/H), the feels-like temperature is 94˚F (34˚C). Today’s forecast calls for scattered rain showers and a high of 92˚F (33˚C). Tonight, we can expect partly cloudy skies and a low of 73˚F (23˚C). Today’s Air Quality Index (AQI) is 38 or Good.

If you know me in real life – some of you reading this do – or from my many online articles since I started reviewing stuff on Amazon and Epinions 18 years ago, you know that reading is one of my passions. I started reading at an early age – family mythology has it that my maternal grandmother taught me my ABCs even when my father was still alive, and that I could read before I was two years old – and I even still have some of the books I acquired as long ago as the late 1970s.

Because I spend much of my time here at my desk in front of a computer – sometimes too much time – I probably don’t read as much as I used to before the spring of 2010. My life was turned topsy-turvy by my mother’s last half-decade with us, which was marked by a series of illnesses that eventually resulted in her death six years ago (July 19, 2015). An ugly and bitter legal fight with my half-sister Victoria over Mom’s estate, a cross-state move, and adjusting to life in New Hometown have also obliterated any hopes I had of sticking to some of my routines, so I neither watch as much TV or read as many books as I used to before March of 2010.

Nevertheless, I still buy new books every so often. I don’t keep track of how many, but I estimate that I add between 10 to 12 books to my library per annum. Most of the time they’re books about military history or Star Wars-related books (either novels or reference works), but every so often I’ll get writing-related non-fiction titles as well.

As you can imagine, my To Be Read (TBR) pile is…substantial, to say the least. And because the Caregiver crammed me in the smallest room in the house, all of my Billy shelves from Ikea are full, so I actually have a literal TBR pile on my tiny Ikea cubby that is the Caregiver’s notion of the equivalent of a real dresser. And I also have books on my desk and the floor. Most unseemly, but it is what it is.

So far, this is what my current TBR pile of books that I’m actually reading (as opposed to books I’ve read but have no bookshelf space for) looks like.

• The Napoleonic Wars: A Global Perspective, by Alexander Mikaberidze
• The Battle of Britain; Five Months That Changed History; May-October 1940, by James Holland
• Snow & Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45, by Peter Caddick-Adams

I recently finished Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus, so I swapped that book from my previous TBR list and started re-reading the Battle of the Bulge book in its stead.

The Streak

I have not mentioned this before – not on my blog, not on social media, and I only told the Caregiver yesterday – but this post marks the 365^th consecutive day with at least one contribution to my A Certain Point of View, Too blog on WordPress.

Yes, that’s right. Since July 9, 2020, I have posted at least one blog post per day. Without fail.

I didn’t deliberately plan on doing this. My original concept when I started this blog – a move prompted by Trump supporters who resorted to apply “cancel culture” methodology and got Facebook to ban my Blogger version of A Certain Point of View in March of 2020 – was to write here and on Blogger on alternating days.

However, after receiving more support from my readers here than from my followers on Blogger, I unconsciously shifted most of my time and energy to this blog. (I still write an occasional post in the original A Certain Point of View because it is still getting readers and generating AdSense revenue. But I like WordPress better!)

I didn’t want to say anything about The Streak before today because even though I am not extremely superstitious, I didn’t want to announce it and then be “jinxed” by something beyond my control, such as a hurricane strike on New Hometown that would cause a power outage before I reached the 365-consecutive-days-of-posting mark.

However, now that I have crossed that goal line, I can now say, “Hey. I did it! I wrote at least one post per day for a year on this blog!”

I’m going to close for now. Not just because I don’t have anything worth reporting about (my love life being non-existent, and I refuse to make this blog a dull and painful list of complaints about things I can’t control), but because I don’t want to tempt fate and risk ending The Streak because the power went out a nanosecond before I hit the Publish button on WordPresss!

So, see you later, Dear Reader. Stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.