I’m not a risk-taker

I went outside today.  For about 10 seconds.  John is trying to figure out why the airbag light is coming on in his car, so I stepped out into the driveway to see how it was going.  John said, “Um…” and pointed to the layer of pollen on the hood of the mustang.  Point taken.  I went back inside.  I just finished the third Dresden Files book, and I’m probably going to pick up the 4th next.  Mostly because I’m too lazy to put much thought into what I really want to read next.  And because I don’t think I can concentrate very well on anything that isn’t brain candy.  If I had another Dean Koontz novel, I’d probably read that, too.  Instead.  Whatever.  I’m staying inside today, and maybe, if John loves me, he’ll bring me egg-drop soup.

I knew the way you know about a good melon

The produce guy at Wegman’s praised my apple-choosing skills today.  Good to know I have a fallback if my current job doesn’t work out.  I’m not sure where, other than the produce section of a grocery store,  I can market this new-found skill o’ mine.  I also noticed that finally, as of yesterday, there is NO MORE SNOW in the front yard.  It’s mid-March – if it snows again (this season), I’m moving south.

I finished Run today.  Loved it.  I think I’m going to head for something lighter next, like maybe the next book in The Dresden Files series.  Mindy is using my book list (see Books and Movies in the sidebar) for inspiration so she can take a break from her school reading.  That makes me very happy.

Daylight Saving Time started today, but it’ll probably be Tuesday before I’m used to it.  It’s almost nine, and I should be thinking about getting ready for bed (I plan to get up early and run, if it’s not raining), but it doesn’t feel nearly that late and I’m not remotely tired.  Those tiny insignificant issues aside, I’m thrilled about the time change.  I need more hours of daylight.

Wet dogs

It’s been raining off and on all day (mostly on), so during a break this afternoon, I let the dogs out to play.  They were amusing themselves, sniffing around, eating dirt, and I went back to my book.  A little later I realized I was hearing rain hit the windows pretty hard and I remembered the dogs were still outside.  I rushed over to the sliding glass doors and found two soggy dogs huddled up against the door, trying to get under the overhang.  Adorable.  They’re in now, mostly dry, and being a little clingy.

I’ve already shelved my new books (I had to move about a shelf’s worth of books all over the house, one shelf at a time), and now I’m relaxing.  I think John just gave up on his projects for the day, so we’re going to cuddle up and watch TV.  And skip dinner.  We had a big lunch with Jess and Chuck after the book sale.

I forgot about this part of spring

The rain is messing with my running plans.  It was raining hard this morning when the alarm went off, so we slept in the extra hour and I went straight to work.  When I got home from work (less than an hour ago), it was raining enough to keep me in.  It’s supposed to rain into the evening, slack off for a little (when it’s too dark and too late to run), and then pick up big time over night and all day tomorrow.  So even if I wanted to get up super extra early (we’re already getting up extra early to meet Jess and Chuck at a book sale in Maryland) to run tomorrow morning before we leave, I couldn’t ’cause it’s supposed to be pouring cats and dogs.  I like rain and everything, but I was on a roll!

</whining>

It’s Friday, it’s the weekend, I get to buy books tomorrow (Hi, I’m Zannah.  I read.), and I get to hang out with people I like.  And I can sleep in on Sunday.

[Pause while I peruse my bookmarks.]

I really and truly just gasped.  Out loud, by myself.  I think I found the house I’m supposed to live in.  At the very least, I need lots of money and an interior decorator who can read my mind and find these pictures years from now when I can afford to redo our entire house.

Go here and read this.  (You don’t have to.  Next time I’ll ask politely.  But it’s a nicely written post about being alone during a power outage.)

I’m done for now.  I have very important things to do, like going through my books and writing down titles I’m missing and authors I love so I can look for their books.  I think we’ve already discussed my need for lists.  I can browse through a book sale forever, but if I don’t bring a list, I might browse right past something I’ve been looking for because I didn’t recognize the author.

Lest you think I only blog about convulsing dogs…

…(’cause it sure feels like that sometimes)…I’ll write about something else.   Like how disgustingly good it feels to run when you’re in the third or fourth or fifth mile and you’ve gotten past the REALLY tight calves and you’re running slightly downhill and “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie starts to play and you’re singing along (through the panting) and you know you’re  hungry, but it’s not that long before John will be home and you can hug him (I can hug him – nobody gave you permission), but maybe not until after the shower ’cause no one appreciates a sweaty hug (and did I mention that my fifth mile is mostly downhill and I was flying?), and then we’ll grill hot dogs for dinner.  ‘Cause it’s spring!  Close enough, anyway.  It was 63 degrees out when I left the house to run this evening.

I finished The Road the other day (Sunday, I think).  I know Mom and Dad thought it was the most depressing thing they’ve ever read, but I liked it.  Yes, it was a bit (a lot) depressing, but that doesn’t make it a bad book.  I definitely want to see the movie.  And now I’m re-reading Bel Canto.  I love it.  It’s beautiful, it’s lyrical, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m in a Frank Sinatra song (“You’re much to much, and just too very very to ever be in Webster’s dictionary”).  Anyway, I love it.

5 miles? Not so bad.

SPRING!  I know it’s not spring yet, but it’s starting to look like it.  It’s sunny, it got up to 50 degrees, we ran a race, the dogs spent the day outside, and I almost opened some windows.  More progress on that tomorrow, hopefully, since the high is supposed to be 55 (!).  It’s been a very cold winter, and I am SO ready for it to be over.

For the last two and a half weeks, ever since John coaxed/supported/shamed me into registering with him for the 5-mile race, I’ve been dreading today.  I wasn’t at ALL prepared to run 5 miles (high winds, snow and ice on the sidewalks, and being forced to run in the neighborhood streets are my main excuses), so my plan was to run as much as I could, counting on adrenaline to help a little, keep a steady pace, and then if I need to walk, try to walk only for one minute and then jog for at least three minutes before walking again.  So I had a plan.  I also took a peek at last year’s race results and I knew that at least a handful of people took between 70 and 85 minutes to complete the race, so I was fairly confident I wouldn’t be last.  But you never know.  Maybe those people decided never to run 5 miles again so they didn’t bother registering this year.  I told John (who wasn’t feeling all that great about it, either) to look for me around 60-67 minutes.  Closer to 67.

It was a beautiful morning (and it’s been a beautiful day), but pretty breezy, so it was still plenty cold (wind chill in the upper 20s, I think).  We joined the crowd at the starting line and John asked me where I wanted to fit in: front, middle, or back?  Definitely not the front (I’ll get trampled, plus I’ll just be in the way of all those super-serious, super-fast runners), and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be in the back (why start there?  I’ll get there eventually on my own), but in the middle, there’d be all the psychological pressure of watching all those runners pass me along the way.  I said something to that effect to John as we threaded our way to the back of the first third of the crowd, and he said, “Well, you know what it’s like.”  I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean that I should be used to watching runners pass me.  Pretty sure.  🙂

The course took us through neighborhoods in Ashburn John and I don’t typically see, and there were a few people out cheering us on.  There was a big hill near the end of the first mile, and just after it, a woman shouted from her front porch, “It’s all downhill from here!”  She was mostly right.  There were a couple of times the course doubled back on itself, so I could see that I wasn’t actually last, or even that close to last (definitely in the last third, last fourth, maybe even last fifth – I’ll post numbers when the results are up).  One of the times we doubled back, though, I saw a guy juggling.  While running.  He had 5 (maybe 4, but I think five) red balls in the air at once while he jogged up the hill.  Pretty cool, very weird.

Just after the 3-mile mark, I realized I was doing better than expected, averaging about an 11-minute mile, and I started daydreaming about finishing in under an hour.  I wondered if John would even be looking at the finish line that early.  (Of course he would.  There isn’t much else to look at.)  Any walking I did was for less than a minute and not all that often (4 or 5 times total), and I was still on track at the 4th mile, so I ran the entire 5th mile and managed to pick up the pace at the very end, enough to feel like I was going to throw up as I crossed the finish line.  That’s the way to do it.  🙂  It passed, quickly, and John was there, and my time on the clock was just under 55 minutes.  I don’t remember exactly what, but my official time should be lower since it didn’t start until I crossed the starting line.  My watch said 54:24.  You know that means?  That I can do that without training for it?  It means I can do better.  And it was fun and I liked it and I won’t be afraid to do it again.  Another side effect: my fear of 10Ks disappeared.  I can DO this.

I just checked.  Results have been posted.  My official time (matches my watch exactly, for once) is 54:24.  Out of 280 women, I finished 241st.  John finished 197th out of 316 men with an 8:45 pace.  My pace was 10:53.

I can do better than that.

Anyway, we got home, had breakfast, cleaned up (ourselves, not anything silly like the house), and then John had to stay close to his computer since he’s on call to work today.  I talked to Jess (we’re making lots of plans), and then we filed our taxes.  John wants to buy an external hard drive today (and I need a new Scalzi book) AND I really want sushi for dinner, so we’re heading out soon to do all (at least some) of that.  The big decision for the evening is whether we eat out or bring sushi home (and snuggle in for TV or a movie).  Tough call.

Links within links within links…

The end of the workday couldn’t get here fast enough for me.  Nothing against work, but I really wanted to be home.  And now I am, and now it’s Friday night, and now I have to face a 5-mile race in the morning.  If I can treat it like a regular workout, I should be fine.  I just don’t want to finish last.  Please don’t let me be last.

You know how when you look something up in wikipedia, you end up clicking this link, then that link, then this one over here, and back to this one, until you end up reading an article that has NOTHING to do with the first one you read?  (I know you do.)  That doesn’t happen to me as much out of wikipedia, for some reason.  I tend not to click through, or at least not through as many layers, on other websites.  I wonder why.  Well, I don’t, for whatever reason, but I did today, and I found this blog post about an old Newsweek article from 1995 about how the internet won’t last.

How did I get there?

I’m glad you asked.

I started at the latest post on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, and clicked on the link there to an article from Laptop Magazine where he was quoted about what technology he uses now that  makes him feel like he’s living in the future.  That article links to the Three Word Chant blog post that found the 1995 Newsweek article (and makes fun of it).  It’s this last link (or the first one, several paragraphs up) that I want you to read, but the Laptop Magazine article is interesting, and Whatever can be entertaining.  Have I mentioned that I love John Scalzi’s science fiction?  I’ve read Old Man’s War and The Android’s Dream, and I really liked them both.  Wish I had another of his books to read now that I’ve finished Ender in Exile

Not inspired

I hate when this happens, but I’m just not inspired to write much tonight.  John is in the basement with the band, auditioning a bass player (who, based on an introduction and about 15 seconds of eavesdropping while they got stuff out of his car, seems like a perfectly nice, normal person), so it’s hard to concentrate.  I’ve been trying to read through a few blogs I’ve bookmarked to see if I want to keep reading them, but it’s hard to tell when all I can hear is Lloyd singing “I used to love her, but I had to kill her”.  Kind of distracting.  And the dogs are demanding attention in ways that make it difficult to type.  Roxy keeps licking my hands and Riley was pawing at me.  I played with them a little, but that wasn’t enough, apparently.  They’re outside now.

Oh, I gave up on Bodily Harm.  Nothing was happening.  I need plot.  This is not to say I’m giving up on Margaret Atwood.  Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, or maybe I’d like another one better.  I refuse to believe The Handmaid’s Tale was a fluke.  ‘Cause that’s just not fair.  When I really like a book by an author, I want to read everything they’ve written.  And I expect to like it.  So I’m a little disappointed.  But speaking of reading everything an author has written, my fallback  once I decided to give up the Atwood book was to read a new(ish) Orson Scott Card book.  So I’m very happy.  🙂

From what I can hear, the (possibly) new bass player sounds really good.  We’ll have to see what the guys think about how he fits in.  That’s my favorite part.  I love gossip.

A list

Things I Like (in no particular order):

  • Reading fiction, anywhere, anytime
  • my dogs
  • all dogs
  • PUPPIES!
  • And kittens
  • And cats that actually like people
  • chocolate
  • milk chocolate
  • white chocolate
  • Paul Reiser
  • Mad About You
  • Saturday mornings
  • sunny days (“sweeping the…”)
  • summer days
  • trees
  • books (and their smell)
  • big band music
  • lists
  • flowers
  • BIG bathtubs
  • showers with real water pressure
  • manicured lawns
  • manicured nails (my own, anyway – don’t much care for anyone else’s nails)
  • clean sheets
  • John’s clean, just-out-the-shower smell (much better than his just-came-back-from-a-long-run-sweaty smell)
  • John (duh)
  • everyone else I like (but won’t list here for fear I’ll leave someone I like off the list and that person (let’s call this person “H” for “hypothetical”)  will notice and be mad at me for leaving her (or him) off (even though it was an accident and I really do like H) and she will stop visiting my site, assuming  she was visiting and reading anyway, but if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t know I left her off and she wouldn’t get mad and stop reading, so I guess H was reading, which means, again, that I shouldn’t list anyone because I might leave someone off and she’ll get mad and stop reading)
  • decorating with books
  • my pretty new dining room table
  • Ellen DeGeneres
  • working from home
  • that relaxed feeling as you drift off to sleep

Speaking of that last one, it’s getting close to my bedtime.  More accurately, it’s getting close to that time when I should be in bed reading.

Hooray for Easter? I mean candy….

I don’t care all that much about the actual Cadbury creme egg (John loves them – my favorites are the hard-shell mini eggs), but I always laugh at the Cadbury bunny commercials.  I love the tryouts (particularly the lion in the bow), but you can’t beat a clucking bunny.  I know, I’m easy.  But it’s funny!

My camera isn’t taking good pictures for some reason (grainy with no flash, and there are glare or dirty lens marks all over the picture when I use the flash), and I can’t find John’s camera (he’s in class, so I can’t ask), so there aren’t any good pictures of the dining room.  When I manage to take one I’m willing to let everybody see, I’ll post it.  I really want you guys to see it, ’cause it looks GREAT.  Like a whole different room.  Again.  🙂  The wall where the couch used to be has four dark, very tall bookshelves on it now.  Turns out the floor is uneven along the wall right in the center of the room, so we have two shelves coming from the wall by the fireplace.  The other two are right up against the light switch by the basement door.  Eventually, I want to put a shelf or narrow table or cabinet or something in the space in between with a mirror on the wall above it.  The buffet (blond wood) is still on the opposite wall, between the windows, but I think we’re going to get two more of the dark bookshelves and put them there instead.  We’ll add doors to the bottom halves of the bookshelves so we can use them for storage space and maybe use the upper shelves for wine glass or something.  Ooh, we put glass doors on the upper shelves…  Yeah, I want to do that.  But that can wait for the next trip to Ikea.  I finished rearranging the books last night, and once again (maybe for the first time in this house), all of the fiction fits on shelves on the first floor.  With room for more!  We have a whole bookshelf free.  That won’t last long.  One new book and we’re on the last one.   And of course I’m not counting the books we have in bags and boxes in the basement (that’s our store inventory), and I haven’t even begun counting the books in Mom and Dad’s basement.  Someday I’ll get around to organizing the non-fiction upstairs.  I LOVE how the dining room looks with all those books on the shelves.

Enough about me.  Except not, because I’m posting this link to The Bloggess because I love the way she tells a story and I laughed at this post.  A couple of times.  Loudly.  And Riley came over to check on me.  Apparently, he doesn’t get why she’s so funny.  But he’s a dog.  What does he know?

Should a post have just one subject?

My day didn’t quite live up to its promising start, but how could it have?  I had to go to work.  Not that work is a bad place.  But it’s work, so it can’t compete with anything that’s not work.  No, that’s too big of a generalization.  There are lots of things not-work that are worse than work.  LOTS of things.

It rained today!  That’s the first non-snow precipitation we’ve had since early December.  Well, maybe not, but it’s the first I’ve noticed, and it made a big difference in the amount of snow left on the ground.  I’m SO glad.

I finished The Pillars of the Earth a few days ago.  The last third was much better than the rest, starting just before the (very quick – really, I was surprised)  grand tour of France and Spain.  But I’m not in a hurry to pick up the sequel.  I started a Stuart Woods mystery/thriller instead.  Actually, I read the first Dresden Files novel first (it was okay).  Almost forgot about it.

I haven’t mentioned yet how nicely John planned my birthday.  We got up early to go to Ikea for the shelves, but not before waiting half an hour or so for this woman who answered the craiglist ad to show up to take the old dining room table.  She didn’t show, so we left.  In the car, John said, “I got you this for the ride to Ikea,” and handed me a card and the new Michael Buble CD.  At least half of the songs are standards, with a couple of new originals, and another couple of covers.  I really like it.  We went to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast (yay bagels and boo coffee), and then we shopped at Ikea, which is always fun.  When we got home, John put all the shelves together, and sometime in the middle of that, the other woman who answered the craigslist ad showed up for the dining room table.  So it’s gone.  We went out to dinner at the  Woo Lae Oak in Tysons Corner (it was really good), and as we were leaving, John said, “I didn’t bake you a cake, but we can’t let your birthday go by without dessert, so what do you want?”  I decided we should go to Wegman’s and visit the bakery ’cause they were likely to have chocolate-covered strawberries.  They actually didn’t, but when I asked them if they knew where else I might find some, they said they’d make some for me.  🙂  They did, and they were yummy.  So we got home (with the chocolate-covered strawberries and some peanut butter fudge for John) and I found another card and another present on the coffee table.  John planned our evening, too, and bought me a copy of the movie Clue, which neither of us had seen in I don’t know how long.  So we sat on the couch with our chocolate-covered strawberries and fudge, opened a bottle of the dessert wine we bought in Charlottesville when we were there for Jess and Chuck’s wedding, and watched Clue.  Pretty much until we fell asleep.  I couldn’t have been happier.  And that’s why my birthday was so wonderful.  John planned it.

Brunch is for babies

We met Baby Alex today at brunch with Greg, Amanda, Erik, and Margaret.  He’s SO cute.  See?

And he was on his best behavior.  He only fussed a little, and only right before we left the restaurant.  Margaret and I are in love.  With the baby.  🙂  (It was good to see Greg and Amanda, too.)

After we left our friends to head home, we stopped at Hole in the Wall Books, our favorite local used bookstore in Falls Church.  It was supposed to be a quick stop (John’s looking for something in particular), but of course that didn’t happen.  We chatted with the owner for a while about the snow, then we browsed (I found about 12 books right off the bat), and then we chatted some more while the owner rang us up.  And since we were chatting, we took our time, and I found three more books.  I love used bookstores.

We got back to the house much later than we originally expected (and yet, not at all annoyed  by that because, come on, books and babies (and friends, right, can’t forget about them)), but the sun was still shining, so John disappeared into the basement to play his guitar and I took the dogs on a short walk (really cold).  Walking the dogs is only noteworthy because of what I overheard.  There were three girls playing on top of a mountain of snow in someone’s yard, and one of them said:

“I’m a 12-year-old girl, but my mom keeps telling me I have to be proper.  I mean, I’m twelve.

For a second, I thought she had to quoting from a movie or something.  What mom would say that?

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

It’s time to leave San Francisco.  Almost.  I’m jumping the gun a little ’cause this is the last time I’ll be able to post before actually leaving town.  I started reading Outlander the other night…I might not finish it.   Of course, my only alternatives right now are another Dean Koontz book and something short by Dorothy Sayer.  I”ll make sure I have both of those handy on the plane.  And uninterrupted reading time on the plane might be just what I need to get more involved in this book.

I got up extra early today to make sure I’d have time to pack after I got ready, and I’ve spent most of that extra time on the internet.  And that means I have to go or I’m going to be late.  Can’t be late.  If all goes well, by this time tomorrow I’ll have been home for 8 hours or so.  I hope I hope.

My GOODness

The last…lots of hours have been both a whirlwind and the longest…lots of hours I can remember.  John dropped me off at the airport at 2:30 yesterday afternoon, and I met my coworker, Millicent (not her real name), in front of the United counter.  She’s got some kind of special frequent flyer status, so we got to get in the short line.  Usually, she (and anyone checking in with her (that would be me)) gets a free upgrade at least to Economy Plus, but we were on a full flight and no upgrades were available.  Sad for us.  Especially as we boarded the plane and realized that we were in the two middle seats on either side of the LAST aisle on the plane.  Yeah, those seats don’t recline.  We were in the first boarding group and got on the plane about 3:30.  Supposed to take off at 4 and land just after 7 PST.  My first seatmate, window seat guy, arrived.  He’s a big guy, a little too big for the seat, gray hair, very nice.  He was reading David Eddings, so we chatted about that for a few minutes.  Then Mr. Talkative arrived.  Tall and skinny, also with gray hair, he started talking the minute he sat down.  He travels ALL the time apparently, all over the world, and knows everything.  He tells funny stories, but because he knows EVerything, it got old fast.  (And he scared the 10 year old in the row in front of us with horror stories of flying in bad weather.)  But I was being nice, so I didn’t bury my nose in my book or reach for my headphones.  Anyway, while everyone was still boarding, a maintenance guy came by.  We heard the flight attendants talking about how the potable water system wasn’t working.  Then they made the announcement.  “We’re fixing the problem and will get in the air as soon as possible.”  At about 5pm, an hour late and after another announcement that didn’t give us any clue when we might actually go, I called John and told him I’d just text him when I landed, since who knows how late it would be.  At about 5:15, they made us all get off the plane.  They were either going to fix our plane or find us a new one.  But all other flights to San Francisco (and to anywhere that might get us to San Francisco) were full.  They weren’t saying where another plane might come from.  Everyone ran for the customer service desk.  By the time we got there, United was telling us to wait and see.  A decision would be made by 6:30 one way or the other.  So either the plane would be fixed or the flight would be canceled and we’d be getting on a 6am flight Monday morning, if such a thing existed.  It was just after 5:30, so we figured we had an hour and we’d go find somewhere to sit down and eat.  Wendy’s was the only place nearby with seating, so Mildred grabbed us a table and I ordered.  We got a frosty to share.  (We felt we deserved it.)  JUST as I got our food and was heading for our table, I heard the announcement for immediate boarding of our flight.  It was about 5:45.  Maybe another 15 minutes later, we were on the plane again, this time with food.  And now people were jealous.  But we had a frosty to share, so we were trying to figure out how to sit next to each other, just for a little while.  I convinced Mr. Talkative to switch with me, so I had an aisle, and then we noticed that her aisle seatmate hadn’t arrived yet, so I figured I could sit there, next to Miranda in her middle seat, and let Marcella’s aisle seatmate have the aisle seat that belongs to Mr. Talkative.  Just for the length of time it would take for us to eat our dinner and our frosty.  Everyone went for it, we all switched around, and the plane took off.  And then we gave away our fries ’cause we had WAY too much food.  So people liked us again.  Until the flight attendant (who wouldn’t take any fries even though she was starving ’cause she said it wasn’t professional) yelled at me for getting out of my seat too early.  I could have sworn the captain made the announcement.  He did make an announcement, but it was about something else.  That I totally missed.  Anyway, we all switched back when we were allowed to move about the cabin.  And then my rather large seatmate, window seat guy, started getting claustrophobic.  For real.  At first, he was just feeling a little overheated, and he’d ask me and Mr. Talkative to let him out so he could stand in the aisle.  That happened two or three times.  He got some ice, he had my air thingy and his pointed at his head, but it wasn’t helping.  Then he panicked a little and said, “Okay, I gotta get out of here.”  So we got up in a hurry and let him out.  I had already considered offering him my seat, but I didn’t really think putting this big guy into a middle seat was going to help at all.  I was working on how to bully Mr. Talkative into switching with him and letting him have the aisle, but when window seat guy panicked, the mom in the row ahead of us offered to have her daughter (in the aisle of that row) switch to his window seat (next to me).  Nice lady.  Window seat guy calmed down and was fine in his aisle seat for the rest of the flight.  It worked out for me, too, ’cause the daughter didn’t take up nearly as much room.  No more crowding.  That’s more drama than I need on a flight.  Mr. Talkative finally shut up, I was able to finish This Rough Magic (I liked it), and I got more than 2/3 of the way through my Dean Koontz novel.  But I was SO bored!  I didn’t have any puzzle magazines (stupid oversight on my part – won’t happen on the way home), I was uncomfortable, I didn’t watch the movie (it was The Informant!, which I really want to see (so does John), but the airplane was loud, and I couldn’t hear the movie very well, and I figured I’d just miss lines, so I’d better wait), and I wasn’t sleepy.  I don’t usually get bored with reading, and now that I think about it, I don’t really think I was bored at all, but I was uncomfortable and restless.  The rest of the flight was uneventful (yay), and we landed around 9:30 or so.  We were at the hotel by 10:15 or 10:30 (felt like 1:30), and then I collapsed.  I’ll get into today tomorrow sometime.

Who needs paragraphs?

Most Awesome Day

Today was a really good day.  Most awesome, I might say.  Mightn’t I?  I dare say I might.  🙂  For reals.  Seriously, I spent the day BUYING USED BOOKS (Hello, my name is Zannah.  I don’t believe we’ve met.  I read.) and hanging out with my very best girl friend, and THEN I got to spend my evening with my very best boy friend.

I got up before the sun (maybe not as awesome as the rest of the day) and was on the road by 8am (with stops for gas and Starbucks, so really on the road by 8:15) to meet Jess in Maryland for the B.I.G. book sale.  B.I.G. (Books for International Goodwill) has a book sale every six weeks, and this is the first one we’ve managed to get to since Jess told me about it sometime last fall.  It’s held in this big warehouse – you know, I don’t even know if they use the whole building.  The sale part was only in one corner.  A big corner, but not even a quarter of the warehouse.  The books were well-organized, and the place was pretty crowded.  We quit after about two hours, mostly because the place wasn’t heated and our hands were frozen.  I will definitely go back.

We left my car in the lot at the warehouse and drove to Chesapeake Beach for lunch.  I had an ulterior motive for choosing Chesapeake Beach, though.  Dad was stationed there – wait.  He worked at the Pentagon then, right?  Why did we live all the way out there?  Anyway, we lived on the base, right on the cliff above the bay, just south of Chesapeake Beach, and I wanted to see if we could get on the base and see the house.  Didn’t happen.  We found the base, parked outside, walked up to the security guard at the gate, and got turned away.  She wasn’t even nice about it.  Not rude exactly, but no hint of sympathy.  We drove north through Chesapeake Beach again (took about 3 minutes – that place is tiny) looking for lunch.  Found it in North Beach.  I have no idea what the name of the place is (Something Seafood Pub), but lunch was really good.  Lunch was over, but we weren’t done hanging out, so we found another cafe and had some coffee.  We still weren’t done hanging out (when are we?), but it was after 3 and we needed to head in opposite directions to go home.

John was studying for his new class when I got home, but once he finished, we both camped out at the dining room table with our laptops.  He started working on the database he’s building for our books, and I backed up this website’s database and all the files so I could upgrade my version of WordPress.  It took a while (the backing up part), but I’m running the latest version of WordPress now, and I plan to spend some time messing around with the look of the site tomorrow.  Oh, I got the parent/child page thing to work, so if you go to my Books and Movies page now, the links on it should work.  And I’ll get better about updating those pages.

Don’t forget about the Name Our Bookstore contest!

Contest!

Name our bookstore!  Someday, John and I are going to have a real live physical used bookstore in a wonderful smallish town somewhere.  Someday sooner, we’ll be selling used books online, so for that someday sooner, we really need a name.  And we’re not very good at coming up with names.  You should have seen the torture we all went through while looking for a name for John’s band.  We could only think of terrible names.  So…contest!  The person who comes up with the best name for our bookstore will get….something.  No, really, there will be a prize.  I just don’t know what yet.  But it’ll be something not free.  Not free for me, I mean.  Of course the prize will be free for the winner.  Duh.  Anyway…CONTEST!  Name our bookstore!

Catching up with myself

Some things I meant to talk about and kept forgetting about:

  1. I finished Pope Joan a couple of days ago.  Really liked it.  It was one of those books Mom sent me.  She usually sends good ones (there have only been a couple bad ones), but for some reason, I resisted this one.  I’ve had it for several years, but never wanted to read it.  Never had a reason not to read it.  I wasn’t being rational.  It’s good historical fiction.
  2. I started reading Anathem, by Neal Stephenson.  This is another one I was putting off.  Partly because it’s huge and in hardcover.  Huge is never a turn-off for me, but huge and hardcover makes it hard to carry around (and I do tend to carry my books wherever I go).  Now that I have a short commute and absolutely no possibility of reading at work (not that I ever did that…), I won’t be as tempted to carry it around and I can just read it at home.  I’ve really liked everything else Neal Stephenson has written, and I’m enjoying this one, too.  Except for one small thing.  It really is a small thing, ’cause it’s not keeping me from enjoying the book.  It’s just a minor annoyance.  Science fiction and fantasy authors, fantasy in particular, have a tendency to make up words.  They think it’ll help the reader immerse herself in this alien/fantasy world.  Sometimes they’re right.  When it’s done well.  Often, they’re wrong.  Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, in their introduction to the novel Nightfall (a book I LOVE), addressed this directly.  They pointed out that this story takes place on an alien world, and while they could make up terms in an alien language to use when referring to hands, shoes, dogs, etc, they’d rather just write hands, shoes, dogs, etc and save the reader the confusion.  That’s the way I prefer it be done.  Make up a word (or merge a couple of words to make a new one) when you need to refer to something that doesn’t have an equivalent in the real world, but otherwise, stick to English.  Makes sense.  And it makes for some really good writing.  (I wish I could have met Isaac Asimov.)  Neal Stephenson, in Anathem, seems to be going too far the other way.  He seems to have made up words where it’s not really necessary to make them up.  It makes me work harder to figure out what’s going on.  I shouldn’t be confused.  I’m sure (really, I am) that once I get past the learning curve here, I won’t notice it, and I’m equally sure that the payoff for all this work will be worth it ’cause I’ve read his other books and they’re always good.  But generally, don’t make me work so hard to decipher what should be English!  Last I checked, English is my first (and only, but I’m working on that) language, and I’m pretty good at it.  Carol Berg, in the two books I just read by her (Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone) is in the middle.  She made up a few words where necessary, and they worked in the story, but then she’d make something up completely when referring to units of measurement.  Why?  I don’t know.  But I’d be reading along, everything’s fine, and I’d stumble across “quellae” when she mean inch or mile or something.  (Yes, I’m aware there’s a big difference between an inch and a mile, and in context, there was no confusion.)  Why would she do that?  She said horse when she meant horse, wagon when she meant wagon, monk when she meant monk.  Why not mile when she meant mile?  Or league?  Why those words and not other basic words?  But again, I really liked those books.  The stories and characterization were well worth the occasional stumble.  But it could have been better!
  3. Apparently, I was just itching to talk about that.
  4. We watched Grace is Gone Saturday night.  What a depressing movie.  John Cusack is in it, which is why I DVR’ed it in the first place, without really looking to see what it was about.  John (my John) warned me that it was sad, but Saturday was kind of a sad day for me anyway (no particular reason – I was just blue), so I figured it was better to watch a sad movie when I’m already sad rather than make myself sad on a happy day.  Oh, I cried.  And then I cried some more.  And then I was like, “Why are you doing that, John Cusack?”  And then I cried some more.  And then I made John (my John) promise he wouldn’t die.  Did I just give something away?  Nah.  That’s in the description of the movie.  Stupid movie.

Salmon tonight, with horseradish cream sauce (courtesy of Wegman’s, naturally), broccoli, and mashed potatoes.  Apple noodle kugel for dessert.  Unless I have a banana nut muffin instead.  Tough choices.

Cold in Kentucky

Well, the weather outside is chilly (not very frightful), but inside is nice and toasty, made more so by the Yuletide Fire DVD Mom got.

I had a very weird few moments at the Canadian Brass concert (where they played only a couple of Christmas songs) Saturday night.  They played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which I know from their Greatest Hits album.  I listened to that album on repeat while reading The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through, by Stephen R. Donaldson, years and years ago, and ever since then, whenever I hear that album, I’m returned to that story.  That’s never happened to me with a live performance before, but it did Saturday night.  For the length of the song, scenes from the books were shuffling through my memory.  Strange.  But cool.

Then Jess and I stayed up to watch Love Actually and drink champagne.  🙂  Until 2am.

I wimped out on my run this morning.  I took Howdy with me, but I left my ear muffs and gloves behind.  We only made it three blocks before I decided I was too cold.  That was dumb, ’cause it’s going to be even colder tomorrow.  I won’t forget my ear muffs and gloves again, but I don’t know how much that’ll help.

Dining Room Makeover, Part II

Sanding sucks.  My arms are very tired.  And I’m not done.  But there are paint samples on the wall, so I’m making progress.  I think I know which one I want, too, but John needs to see them first.  As long as he doesn’t hate the one I like, we’re fine.

No pictures today (because I don’t want to show you my splotchy walls).

I don’t have much to say today.  Except that the more I think about it, the unhappier I am with Her Fearful Symmetry.  I don’t think I would read it again.  I enjoyed the journey the first time, but thinking back on it (and talking it out with Mom) made me think of all the unnecessary plot contrivances.  Maybe not unnecessary, but not very well done, I think.  Things don’t add up.