Today we spent a large part of the day trying to clean out the office/attic room, where there has gathered a ton of stuff, including most of our "keep this forever" fiction. We filled three bins full of books and there's still more in there, and very, very little of it needs to be culled (although some of it I'm hesitant to pack away, since a lot of it is on my "I need to read this" list). Anyway, some of what DID get packed were a lot of beloved children's books.

( Children's Books )

Anyway... The room needs a whole lot more work, mostly because we have way more books than boxes, and I still have to winnow out a lot of crap. I've bitten the bullet and gotten rid of some of it, but it's going to take a lot more biting. Why do I have this desperate need to keep every thing I've ever owned?

Truck repairs cost only $300.00. That was just exactly how much extra money I had from this paycheck. I am now completely broke. But they fixed not only the window motor, but the broken door lock AND the sagging headlight (for free), so may I add my huzzahs to sillymagpie's comments about the awesomeness of Stanley's Service Center, one of the finest service centers in Phoenix (when I was looking up their phone number this morning to ask if they did electronic repairs, I noted that they had across-the-board 5-star reviews from users). They also washed the truck and threw out the trash. Great guys.

The pay raises were handed down. They were FAR less than our supervisor was hoping for -- but as I assured him, we ARE getting them this year, so yay. And mine is hardly shabby, even though smaller than last year (and because I'm past the halfway point in my pay grade, I get more bonus cash and less merit increase), it's still considerable; of course, my supervisor does focus strongly on giving the money to those who deserve it, and while I know that my raise came at the expense of someone else's, I say... hey. This is an EASY job. If you slack, then you lose. I deserve it.

One thing about riding the bus is that I get a chance to read. Every time I read a book by Steven Brust, I am struck again by just how freaking GOOD a writer he is. Now I think I will knuckle down and read all of the Jhereg books (honestly, I don't know why it's taken me this long to start reading them -- I think it's just been procrastination coupled with "other things to read" and then being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers... I'm starting at the end via the beginning, with the "history" books... so good. So really good).

Lunch was delicious and fun - all the usual tailgate stuff, burgers and chips and really good salsa and little dill pickles and potato salad and delicious ambrosia salad; my cookies were cheered by all and I have some left, so yay. One note about said recipe (a new one), is that they didn't indicate parchment or greased cookie sheets, and there was some amount of stickage in getting them pried off. Next time, parchment.

Now I'm wishing I hadn't spent money on some useless stuff last week... ah, well, I'll pull through. Fortunately, third paycheck of the month had a little extra in it, so... and then by the end of February the raise will kick in. I'll crawl along. At least Fry's had Coke on sale last week, so I'm well stocked on THAT necessity.

This morning the house smelled like bacon. I'm not sure why, no one was cooking bacon. At least bacon is a pleasant smell… mmmm, bacon.

I was rocked to my foundation that, in his last 15 days in office, George Bush has done something of which I not only approve, but applaud him for. *is shocked* (Of course, my cynicism regarding said Bush tells me he's only doing it to preserve his shoddy "legacy," but still, preservation of the oceans is preservation. I just wish he'd done so on land…)

Today's calendar entry:

"shamocrat": One who pretends to be possessed of wealth, influence, rank, or indeed any quality which is only conspicuous by its absence. -- John Farmer's Americanisms Old and New, 1889

Death of 'Emperor' Joshua Norton (c. 1815-1880), an eccentric San Franciscan who corresponded with Queen Victoria and became known as "His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton." His portrayal of royalty--which included a plumed top hat, pseudomilitary getup, and a sword he brandished for effect--earned him a reputation for lunacy. But he received the royal treatment in San Francisco and even had currency bearing his name issued which was accepted in his favorite saloons and eateries. In the mid-1850s he bankrupted himself buying up existing rice supplies in an attempt to corner the market. In 1859 he appointed himself emperor--first of California and later of the United States--before "ordering" the dissolution of Congress. He was also the first to decree that San Francisco not be called "Frisco." Norton died on the streets, largely abandoned by his former friends and business associates. But shamocrat or not, 30,000 people attended his funeral. The "king" in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was reportedly modeled after him.

Why is it I remember books I read as a child/young adult I can remember clearly yet books I read last year are completely gone from my memory? (I know the answer to this in theory, but it just doesn't seem fair. I'll have to spend the rest of my life reading the last ten books I just read…)

Another good meal - I took some leftover browned ground meat and layered it into a casserole with a can of ranch beans, a can of diced tomatoes, and arboreo rice made with broth rather than butter. It came out very well. Eaten with peas & onions and the last of the salad. When we were coming back from California we stopped at Hadley (Southwestern folks know of Hadley as the Home of the Dates - it was a shocker to find it was no longer the only building visible for miles, but instead suddenly in the middle of a little town), I picked up a little bottle of perhaps the tastiest vinegar I've ever mixed with olive oil for a salad - it's late harvest Reisling vinegar, and it's just lovely on a salad. I have to see if I can find it a little closer to home.

My arm really freaking hurts today. And I think I notice that, despite it being my right arm, the muscle is not as defined as my left arm. I suppose I really ought to see a doctor when I have the money to pay one...

So, if in England they call cookies "biscuits," what do they call biscuits?

Today was the most boring Monday in the history of boring Mondays. And Mondays are NEVER boring at my job.

I still eat. I am a whale. Three more days, then the (mouth) gates shut.

I thought, "Yay, they're moving Terminator off Monday nights!" Then, of course, they're moving House to replace it. *sigh* I really need that four-channel DVR (and for only that one night, still, apparently).

Finished reading the popcorn book that was lent to me. WHY can't I get published? (Oh, yeah, I haven't submitted anything for months. I suck.)

Started reading a book sillymagpie lent me. Ah, this is much better. Writing that's good, and does not make my eyes bleed NOR make me want to slit my wrists while shrieking "Why not ME?!?" at the top of my lungs. (This one is The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly -- the previous was The Poodle Who Killed No One Heard Her Scream by Jordan Dane.)

One of my winters grew up while I was at work. I have to see if he'll breed with any of my gals.

* *
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Although I've done some like this before, I think some of it has changed. Stolen freely from jennawaterford...

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible [not the whole thing]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not quite ALL of them, but most)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (about half finished)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [this is part of #33...]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [ALMOST finished!)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (see No. 14 – the Complete Works of Shakespeare)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[ Please post comments only below -- I want to see your list on YOUR blog :) ]

Boy, am I glad "Les Mis" is on there - that was one of the most exhausting reads of all time. They should also list Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, and Alex Haley's Roots (I think so, anyway) - because obviously, if you've read The Chronicles of Narnia you've read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe...

The Gold Nugget, Las Vegas, has the coolest pool in the world. See, here:




That's me, swimming with the sharks. I went down the water slide (that goes right through the tank!), too. Neat!!! I had a very relaxing weekend, as trips with Mom go. We did a little walking out, spent a goodly part of Saturday at the spa, and lazed Sunday by the pool. Late Friday night we went out on Freemount Street for a walk and to watch the Experience, when I started to notice a lot of rainbow things - necklaces, pennants, feather boas... and drag queens. And gay couples holding hands. Walking. Waving rainbow flags. I wormed my way through the crowd to find the Pride Parade Vegas 2007 had just ended! I was very sorry to have missed the fun - and that I wasn't there with my wife instead of my mother, who was not exactly understanding of the hoopla - she's fine with me, but she was dismayed at the very public shows of affection... especially in front of the weird, lone freaky protester who stood on the street corner a block or so away from the parade with a horrible sign about how Jesus hates gays (I can't remember the exact wording, but I DID want to go explain to her that Jesus never said anything about gays, but he said plenty about hypocrites who preach on street corners). Of course it would inspire a number of couples to kiss and grope in front of her. The skies did not open up.

I am reading a wonderful, poignant, pithy, hilarious book with intense lead characters, interesting supporting characters, filled with biting commentary on today's society (internationally, not just America), television, politics, people - it's so well written that sometimes it blasts me out of the story as I marvel at the simple ease with with the words are placed. It's Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson - yeah, the comedian/talk show host - and I have to agree with the reviewer blurb on the back that says, "After reading, you will know Craig Ferguson is not a talk-show host moonlighting as an author - it might be the other way around."

Some fun bits:

It was hard to be the minister of a snake-handling cult, after all. Other religions promised community and togetherness and the solace of communal worship, just like the snake handlers but without the rather unpleasant devotional duty of handling icky creatures that might well inject you with a highly toxic venom.

He had to get his snakes under the counter, you can't just buy a deadly snake in America, someone could get hurt. Anyway, if you really need something dangerous, get a gun. It's easy, it's cheap, and it's the American Way.

Then the music started again and the Reverend got down from on high and got a sleepy-looking snake out of a cardboard shoe box that had holes cut in it. He danced around, holding the snake in the air, trying to make it look more evil. (This was the snake's favorite part of the whole deal; if it had had vocal cords it would have gone "Wheeeeeeee," but like all good actors, it internalized the wheeeeee. Less is more.)

Brainyism was the latest funky religion that was catching on with the privileged and bored in the entertainment business in Los Angeles. A bit like the way Christianity caught on with upper-class Romans. Brainastics, or Boondtists, as they called themselves, were members of a cult that had built up in Hollywood around the teaching of a bankrupt ex-carnival roustabout who had died in the 1970's.

Like many people, mostly politicians, Vermont confused the legality of a substance with its addictive properties, forgetting always the biggest killer of all, alcohol, was legal, white, and sanitized for your convenience.

There's tons more great ones, but it would take hours to re-read the whole book and find them all (and I'm still a few chapters from the end; but I devoured this book).

So I got in at close to midnight and still had to get up and go to work today. It was a very fast day, though, thankfully, and I'll hit the hay as soon as Heroes ends.

Yay!

I haven't posted since Tuesday. Let's see, what has happened in my life?

Hmmmm.... nothing. Nada. Nothing there.

Okay, there was some good TV this week. House and Boston Legal were particularly enjoyable (whoever the writer was who came up with the idea of splicing in scenes from 1957's The Defenders just totally rocks), and so was Lost. Go Hurley! Scrubs, that little sitcom that could, has been once again deeply moving, making me laugh and cry at very nearly the same time.

I want real bagels. Why are the only good bagel shops in Phoenix not actually IN Phoenix? (They are in Chandler, Gilbert, and Tempe.) I don't count Chompie's - they're okay, but the last few times I've had them, they are less New York and more of that round bread with a hole in the center like the grocery stores sell - largely because we generally only get the packages of Chompie's that are sold in the grocery stores. I want a real, hard-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside, can-use-as-a-spare bagel, like the Hot Bagel Bakery used to make. I found a place online that sells them, straight from New York, but working out the cost disturbs me (.80 per bagel is an all right price, but orders must be for no less than a dozen, and they recommend overnight FedEx shipping for freshness... I want bagels, but I'm not sure I want them THAT much. Yet).

My Coke Rewards to date: Retractable ear buds, an Alan Schwartz evening gown, a SpaFinder gift certificate (will pay for my next body wrap), and an Adidas gift certificate (bought a very nice exercise bra-top). I can't say drinking so much Diet Coke is a bad thing. *g* Of course, I have to thank sillymagpie for giving me all HER points, too.

In reading Doctor Eight novels, I'm finding I really like his companions. I may need to get a few more of 'em, find out how Fitz ended up on the TARDIS. If they're at all canonical, then events in Halflife are pretty interesting...

I'm miles behind in everything. I don't know where time is going....

Oh, yes. I really enjoyed ( this article )

This weekend:

Delightful booksale. Too tired for words, but still found a few gems, including a few thing that have been on my wish list for a while (which I now need to cull a bit). I was still too blurry to really get as down-and-dirty in the books as I normally get, so I came out with only about $40 worth - sometimes I do myself a LOT more damage than that - but I did find at least one good Indian cookbook, a Thai one, and a Middle Eastern one, as well as getting my liberal on with books from Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd, Senator Byrd, and of course, America - The Book, by Jon Stewart. No plain reading books (fiction), but that's because I'm still not completely over the cold. We came home and got some sleep afterward, then went out for Ethiopian, which was delicious, and then I slept 12 hours last night.

Right now I'm a little weary; just sort of washed out and weak. We went to CostCo to pick up a few essential (if slightly expensive) items, then back to do a little laundry and peel the coconut we bought last weekend - good coconut. Otherwise, trying not to do too much. I'm poking at a scene I think might should be cut, but I'm not sure. I'm in this "I need a scene from Sean Patrick's POV here," but nothing really happens important, so... blah blah blah. I think I'll plow through and then decide later.

Tired, still a little sick, and defective internally. Serious case of the blahs.

I have no ideas for weekly goals other than making it through, five days without being sick, maybe getting back to the gym (don't want to push it), finishing a review for Friday, and that's about it.

The world is a fascinating place. I'm watching old episodes of The Crocodile Hunter and watching Steve Irwin swim with - and hand-feed - freaking BULL SHARKS, the most dnagerous sharks in the world, and to think he was killed by something as normally relatively harmless as a stingray... freaky, this old world, innit? (The Discovery Channel and Animal Planet are simulcasting Crickey, What An Adventure! - a tribute to Irwin and his work, later tonight.)

Sometimes I read something and I'm motivated to either kill myself or seek out the author and bow down before him/her... and I'm not sure which it is. When I read popcorn mysteries that I like, or romances, or a lot of your standard, run-of-the-mill genre fiction, I feel secure in myself as a writer and I think, "I can do that... or a whole hell of a lot better." But then I read a book where the writing is SO GOOD I want to bite my own wrists. Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange was one of those; I'm finding The Prestige to be another. They re-wrote the story significantly for the movie, so if you've only seen the film, DO read the book. It's fascinating and gripping and written from so many angles it's breathtaking. I wish I could be so amazing, so innovative, so unusual and new and brilliant and all that stuff. Aiee, my work is derivative and boring and of course no one wants to read it... (SLAP!) Okay, anyway, it's a really good book (and I'm not even done with it yet).

New package going out to an agent this week. (crossed fingers)

I'm heading off to Vegas with Mom on Tuesday, and will be gone until Friday; will likely bring along the laptop if only to use the new rolling laptop case Mom bought us for Christmas. I will have to check some baggage, of course, though, because, duh, toothpaste and lotion and such.

Well, back to work. Making some progress on third novel. Just keep writing!