This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share series we’d like to catch up with, start, or finish. I thought I’d share ten series that I’m interested in beginning:

1. Fractured Fables by Alix E. Harrow
2. The Scholomance by Naomi Novik
3. Brontë Sisters Mystery by Bella Ellis
4. The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi
5. Autumn by Ali Smith
6. The Moomins by Tove Jansson
7. The Christmas Chronicles by Jeff Guinn
8. Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landry
9. Mycroft Holmes and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
10. Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine

How about you? Are there series you’d like to read that you haven’t gotten to yet?

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past couple days about sticking things out.

There are some things I’m quick to quit: books I’m not enjoying, parties, situations that bore me.

But with most things in life, I’d say that I’m there until the bitter end, regardless of how it comes.

Sometimes that’s good. Democracy, for instance. When evil people take control of our government, some people are quick to suggest leaving. But if everyone who hates a new regime goes, who will bear witness to the demise? Who will help to right the ship? Who will put out the fire?

But sometimes, it’s bad. With my last job, there was a period of six months where I knew that the situation was untenable, but I thought that because I was good at my job that if I could ride out the uncomfortable, I could make it through to smooth seas again. I know now that I should have cut bait, should have gotten out when I knew that I couldn’t make the changes I knew would have to happen in order to stay and be happy.

A dear friend once told me that was both my superpower and my fatal flaw: I was deeply capable of holding on in uncomfortable situations. He was right. I can and I do, regardless of whether holding on or letting go would be better for me.

Less personally, I’m thinking of that specifically about Twitter, as are many users of the social media platform this week. The new owner is a stereotypical super-villain, who is used to getting his way by throwing money and power at problems. And I could live with that, if we agreed on what the actual problems were. But we don’t, and I wonder if this is a situation, like my last job, where I should leave while I see the writing on the wall, or if this is like democracy, where if I leave, I’m part of the problem, turning the platform over to trolls and bots and dooming it to failure.

A periodic consideration of what’s going on around me:

Seeing: The glow of the Halloween fairy lights on the living room wall.

Tasting: Toothpaste. I’m heading to bed as soon as I hit publish.

Hearing: Tires on wet roads. (But not the dripping of rain anymore. Corey shifting on the rug and trilling at me to hurry up so we can join Rudi in bed.

Feeling: Sore. I played volleyball for a couple hours today and came home with a couple minor aches and pains. And glad of the extra hour of sleep ahead.

Smelling: The faint whiff of laundry detergent, since these are fresh pj’s.

Give us a sense of what your world is like in the comments.

Things on my radar for this weekend:

• Finish reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
• Play volleyball
• Go on a Lewis Carroll-themed scavenger hunt with friends
• Cook quince
• Do laundry
• Clean the kitchen
• Find where the Goodwill stuff has migrated to and get it out of the apartment
• Drop off donations for Toys for Tots
• Knit
• Finalize some plans with friends

What are you hoping to get around to this weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. We’ve hit playoffs in both volleyball leagues, and with my team tonight, the list of available players shrank rapidly until I was down to four. The bad news is that that league sets the mandatory minimum at five players. So the other team would have been within their rights to call us on it and to force us to forfeit the game. But they didn’t. They said we could play with our four against their full team and they’d abide by the outcome, which was tremendously decent.

2. Our friends invite us to a Halloween party, our first in years. We don’t stay for long, but I’m so glad we went for a little while.

3. New Christmas music has started coming out. I’m mostly playing it after Rudi goes to bed so it doesn’t annoy him too much, but it feels good to be working on this year’s mix already, particularly since the last couple have come down to the wire.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

D.C. is an interesting place, because while there is an airport just over the river, less than five miles away from my apartment, there’s also generally a no-fly zone over much of the city. This means it’s rare we see airplanes overhead (and it can cause panic when they do occasionally have to approach over the city because of the wind).

But we do have periods when we have helicopters circling overhead at low altitudes. Inaugurations, for instance. Massive protests. Increased times of security threats. For much of Trump’s presidency, it seemed like he had helicopters keeping an eye on things. (That may be an exaggeration, but he definitely had more than Obama or W or Biden.)

And other times, like tonight, you just have to turn to Twitter to ask if anyone knows. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and it’ll be someone you’re friends with info. But other times, you just have to turn to the Twitter accounts that specialize in local helicopter circling or copter spotting in the hopes that info will let you focus on other things, such as sleep.