lazy day

I had a whole bunch of stuff I should have/could have done today and I voted to do none of it! I've caught up with my book blogging (as you can see) and drank a bunch of water and that is damn near it! Dad did come over and soup up my front door, making it nearly impossible to be crowbarred open again by anyone except maybe Andre the Giant. I am about to make some hot chocolate because it is SO cold in Alabama in July/August....no really, I just have nothing sweet in the house except for diet hot chocolate powder. How hard-core nutritional is that (except for the trans fat)? There is actually nothing in this house to eat except frozen hotdogs and frozen brocolli but I have to wait til payday to buy groceries so I will feast on hotdogs and brocolli for at least a week :-)

My agenda for the afternoon? I am going to watch 3 horror movies, then attempt to slumber peacefully.

that is all. oh, the movies are The Unborn, Session 9, and Shutter. Not the best of horror according to Rotten Tomatoes but that doesn't stop my imagination from kicking into high gear while I'm trying to go to sleep :-)

The Finishing Touches by Hester Browne

I heard about The Finishing Touches on several of the blogs I read but there are so many that I’m hard pressed to tell you which ones they were. This book is everything that I wanted Confessions of a Shopaholic to be. If Rebecca Bloomwood pissed YOU off as much as she did me, give Betsy Cooper Phillimore a try!

An infant is left on the doorstep of the prestigious Phillimore Academy for Young Ladies, a posh London finishing school. Twenty-seven years later, Betsy Phillimore returns with her freshly-minted math degree to try to revamp the rundown academy for the 21^st century. Betsy runs into trouble with the school’s dismal finances, the embarrassing curriculum, the frumpy headmistress, and nosy alumni teaching classes on springboard marriages but she is determined to get the school running free and clear. Funny and sentimental with great little pieces of etiquette advice heading off each chapter, this is the perfect summer read for your vacation. Another beach read for me and I laughed the entire time!

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Old Man’s War is a re-read for me, but I talked the sci-fi book group I recently joined into reading it. I’m terrified now that they’ll hate it, but I certainly loved reading it again.

John Perry did two things on his 75^th birthday. He visited his wife’s grave and he joined the army...well, the Colonial Defense Forces. Earth is full and the planets we’ve colonized definitely need protecting. For that, the CDF doesn’t want young, raw recruits. It wants life experience and a commitment to humankind. It isn’t easy to leave everything behind, but John is ready for whatever the CDF will bring. Or, at least he thought he was. Would you give up everything to avoid old age?

This book has it all. John Perry is an incurable smartass and definitely young at heart which holds him in good stead when the CDF has their way with the new recruits. John is now traveling the universe trying to make it safe for humanity while beginning to have doubts about his own humanity. Love it, love it, love it! Humor, sex, politics, and intergalactic battle, what could be better? This is part of a trilogy along with The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony. There is a companion book, Zoe’s Tale, which is The Last Colony told from another character’s perspective. All good!

Dillinger's Wild Ride by Elliott Gorn

I have been loving the movie trailers for Johnny Depp’s new movie, Public Enemies, so I sought out a biography of Dillinger to read before I see the movie. Dillinger’s Wild Ride SO fit the bill. As a bonus, it was all about the perception of John Dillinger during The Great Depression that last wild year before his death so this satisfied my curiosity AND fulfilled a bookgroup requirement! I like my nonfiction in a narrative style with fast movement. If it gets too bogged down in the details I’ll get bored and stop reading no matter my interest in the topic. This book fit the bill to a T and I finished on the beach in no time! The author struck just the right balance (for me) between the facts and the scintillating details. There is a nice section of archival photos in the middle that I flipped to time and time again during my readings. Dillinger’s story really seemed to touch the pulse of the country during that time and I am eager to tell my book group about this one at our meeting August 25^th!

Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

I have been looking forward to Mr. Shivers ever since I saw it a few months back on Orbit’s website! You’ll still have to wait until January for publication but I got an ARE at the American Library Association conference in Chicago earlier this month and devoured it while I was at the beach last week J

Mr. Shivers goes by a lot of names: the moonlight man, the black rider, the bum’s devil, the vagrant’s boogey man. For Connelly, he is evil incarnate and the murderer of Connelly’s little girl. Connelly has left everything he knows and hopping trains, living off the land, and passing time in the Hoovervilles of Depression era America in his quest to hunt down the man responsible for his now hellish existence. Help comes at different times from unexpected sources but during the worst social and economic time in American history, even perseverance may not be enough to exact the revenge Connelly craves.

I loved this book just as much as I knew I would, even though it wasn’t quite as scary as I thought it would be. What it didn’t have in scariness, it made up for in gratuitous violence. This is a grim, dark, brutal tale not for the faint of heart. My heart is never faint and I lurved it mightily. I look forward to its publication in January 2010!

The Orphanage by Robert Buettner

The Orphanage has a great quote in the front from a fragment of a letter recovered from Omaha Beach, Normandy June 1944. It is a few sentences long but the last sentence of the quote reads “Strip away politics and whatever or whenever, war is an orphanage.”

This quick science fiction read works on the premise that an alien race has taken up residence on one of the moons of Jupiter and is sending down projectiles (no live explosives, just VERY big rocks) that are destroying entire metropolises at a time. The world is in a race with extinction and no doing too well considering space programs kind of slacked off the R&D years ago. Eighteen year old Jason Wander has recently lost his mother to a projectile attack, had a bit of a mental breakdown and now finds himself in danger going to jail. The judge offers him a choice, prison or the army. Jason Wander chooses the army and what follows is the funniest and, at times, saddest of stories. Jason is a big of a screwup and the consequences vary from cleaning toilets with the tiniest of implements to losing good friends. What it eventually comes down to is that we have one chance and one ship to launch. As the book cover says, “Their failure is our extinction.” (I may not have that quote exactly right, but it’s close enough)

I love Jason Wander! This is a series I’m delighted to begin following. The next in line is Orphan’s Destiny and I’m going to start it as soon as I catch up on some bookgroup obligations!

The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

To start with, I love Guillermo del Toro! I have all of his movies and watch them ALL THE TIME! So of course I’m going to read his book!

The Strain is a vampire book, but if you want your vampires all brooding, sexy, and seductive, this is not the book for you. Gore, violence, and every creepy image that had you screaming awake as a child are all crammed into a few hundred pages. If you’ve seen Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone, you know what I’m talking about. This is the first in a trilogy and I am SO EXCITED about the next one. I liked the characters and was thoroughly creeped out. While it isn’t a “creeped out” that stuck with me and caused me sleepless nights, it was certainly worth the few days of elevated heart rate and the pause I had to take before entering dark rooms and, God help me, dark stairwells.

Take a trip back in time to when you were still afraid of the dark, I dare you!

weird

the blog from your phone option is completely useless. So was the computer access at the beach condo though I will admit to gaining some pleasure from the release of the computing leash...up until I got back to a sh!tload of email and RSS updates :-) Then the fubar modem extravaganza took up some more time and I'm sneaking to get this in, so hopefully I'll get to photos and stuff later....maybe

don't give up on me!

health and stuff

I got a little postcard back from my doctor visit with all kinds of happy news on it. I, dear readers, am a super healthy overweight person! Just the weight to work on now since all my percentages, pressures, and levels are above average on a scale of goodness. I even got a smiley face from the lab people, how often does that happen? It's a first for me!

So, yesterday morning I came back to my office and I had a voice mail from the alarm company. Someone broke into my house via the prominent front at 9:15 on a Wednesday morning not 20 feet from a main road. I had been at work for one hour. So, I turned around and made the trip back home. Nothing was missing so apparently they bailed immediately after crowbaring the door open when the alarm went off. Yay for alarms! Dad is coming over this afternoon with a semi-homemade device to deter any future crowbarers and by all accounts, it sounds good and industrial. If it is also photogenic, I'll share!

On a more pissy note, the sherriff asked me if it was possible that I had not secured my door properly that morning. "Yes, Officer. I always set the alarm and leave the front door open. It's so festive." He also asked me if the crowbar marks were on the door previously. Like you do. But, I do want them to respond if I need them in the future so I answered all of his questions very politely and thanked him for his time. What else can you do?

Gotta run, it's lunch time!

I am in an American Girl store, in the middle of a mildly Hannah Montana-ish atmosphere. Give me strength.