I changed my mind

Last week my History Meetup discussing the Roman Empire's fall attracted a dozen people, and I changed my mind about quitting. (Props to Maria and Sergey for encouraging me!) Next month's topic will be the Kingdom of Prussia.  I'm now reading another good history book, Sebastian Haffner's The Rise and Fall of Prussia.

In fact, I'm going to try a couple of new Meetups.  One will be on French culture, and Maria will co-organize with me.  Next week for our first event we'll each discuss a French book we liked. (I'll do The Count of Monte Cristo.) I'm also going to make another try at people coming together online and reading a text aloud.  I'll be doing both English and French texts, and start with easy stuff like children's stories. (No idea if anyone will be interested in it, but it won't add to my organizing fees.) Maria's also interested in the French reading.

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago and last week the family got together for a joint birthday party for me and Donald.  Moira baked a vegan birthday cake, but it was a bit too big and we couldn't finish it.

I finally quit the online Elvenar game after playing it for about five years.  I went back to Candy Crush Saga, where I'm at around Level 2000.  I tried to open some other games on Facebook, but they also got stuck at the "0% loaded" level!

I've gone back to watching the anime Dragon Ball Super.  I've also been watching Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a remarkably creepy British puppet show from the 1960s that I saw a bit of when I was young.

Yesterday I had lunch with Maria, Sergey, Debi and Sylvie at What a Bagel!  We discussed my Meetup ideas.

Burnout

I've quit as organizer of the History Meetup.  Nobody came to my last monthly event, discussing the Gilded Age.  I've been doing it for a decade and I guess I'm a burnout.  I'm showing two more movies in the Friday watch party--Isadora and My Life as a Dog--and doing one more monthly event, then I'm done.

My last monthly event will be about the fall of the Roman Empire, so I've been reading Peter Heather's book on the subject. (It's pretty good!)

I've now started catching up on my long backlog of Lapham's Quarterly issues. (I'm still reading the music issue.)

A few weeks ago I saw Michael Mann's Ferrari, which was pretty effective:  Adam Driver got to show some range.  The other day I saw Noryang:  Deadly Sea, about Korean admiral Yi Sunshin's final defeat of the Japanese in 1598.  It's a sequel to Hansan:  Rising Dragon which I saw a while ago, and now I really want to see The Admiral:  Roaring Currents, about his biggest victory.  I'm a sucker for these Asian naval movies...