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Friday Fun! (Evil Whore Month From Hell)
Hello my lovely readers! Sorry you only got one review this week. I’m hoping to be fully back into the swing of things next week, as I’m already close to finishing two books and have plans to watch a movie with friends this weekend. That’s three reviews right there! :-) In the meantime, let me tell you what’s been up with me and why my blog has had a rough few weeks.
First, I got some sort of stomach virus. Then I got the flu. Then, to put it delicately, I went through a break-up. Then I had a bit of an incident with a family member that greatly upset me. Then I fell down the stairs at my apartment and broke my glasses. I’m now covered with bruises and have a nasty scrape on my leg that keeps trying to get infected. I know there are tons of people in the world that have it way suckier than all those things. I’m just saying, it’s kind of been an evil whore month from hell for me, so I’m sure you can understand why the posts have fallen away a bit. I’m very grateful to my friends who’ve been so supportive of me these last few rough weeks. Of course all of these things mean that I’m still kinda behind in my graduate work, so that’s keeping me busy, as is my full-time job. The world keeps on turning, even if we’d like it to stop so we can take a break for a few days. I figure the next few weeks can only get better. We hope. *knock on wood*
In the meantime, reading is now, as it has always been, my comfort. When I start feeling stressed or down, I go get lost in another world for a while, and I can’t wait to tell you guys all about them next week. I hope you’re all enjoying your falls, and thanks for hanging in there with me the last few weeks. Things will hopefully start getting back to normal around here starting next week. Cheers!
Friday Fun! (Welcome, Thanks, and Ramblings)
Hello my lovely readers! I want to pay a special welcome and hello to my new subscribers acquired over the course of BBAW. I know personally the overwhelming number of new blogs I was exposed to myself, so I’m honored you found me interesting and unique enough to stick around. I want to let you know that this has been an off couple of weeks for me on the blog as things are a bit rough personally right now. Normally my posts are a bit better written (at least I think so), and a bit more frequent, so, sorry about that. Thanks for hanging in there! I also want to say thanks to my friends who’ve been there for me the last couple of weeks in various ways. If you guys happen to be reading this, I want you to know that you rock.
Fall weather has finally come to Boston, and I am so grateful. With fall you get cool weather but no nasty storms to deal with. It’s the best of both situations. I have yet to go apple picking, but I did have cider for the first time of the season last night. (Ok, ok, hard cider, but it still counts). Grad school continues to be evil and suck the life from me. I can’t wait until I can be just a librarian instead of a librarian and a grad student. Tomorrow I’ll be volunteering at a local food event with my friends Nina and E. Hopefully, it’ll be nice weather.
Next week should see an uptake in the number of reviews. I’m currently about half-way through The Dark Tower, and it’s such a chunkster, I plan on reading a short, quick read after it. I also plan on having some me time on Sunday, which besides exercising and cleaning my apartment will most likely include curling up on the couch with my kitty and watching a movie. I know. I am so exciting. In any case. Reviews. You will have them next week.
Happy weekends everybody!
Friday Fun! (Announcements Galore)
Hello my lovely readers! I actually have a few exciting blog announcements for you today!
First, I set up an aStore. An aStore is your own personal section on Amazon full of items you recommend. I have five categories: books, movies, tv shows, videogaming, and household. Every single item in my store is something I’ve personally read/watched/played/whatever and would give at least 4 out of 5 stars to. Since it’s just recommendations, you’re still buying the items from Amazon or a third-party seller, not me, but I do get a small percentage of the profit as a thanks from Amazon for referring you to them. There is a link to the store on the right sidebar of my blog, so if you want a centralized list of trust-worthy reading/viewing/playing recommendations with easy 1 or 2 click buying, please check it out! It’s good for me and good for you. It’s a win/win.
Next, I realized how embarrassingly odd and disorganized my categories were. I was still pretty much using the same ones I set up the first couple of weeks I was blogging before I really realized what I’d be posting on a regular basis. I didn’t even have genre categories for my plethora of book reviews. How annoying for you guys! I mean, say you like the dystopian reviews, but there was not category for that. Blergh. So, I totally revamped the categories. Not only did I add genres, but I also made these Friday Fun posts and Imminent Arrivals and TBR posts their own categories. It’s exciting and organized and it made me happy! Be sure to check it out, and please let me know if there are any categories that you think don’t make much sense. What makes sense to me might not make sense to people that aren’t me, after all.
Hokay, finally I wanted to give you guys a heads-up that next week is going to be a bit different as I’m participating in Book Blogger Appreciation Week (BBAW). Basically, it’s a week every September since 2008 that exists “to recognize the hard work and contribution of book bloggers to the promotion and preservation of a literate culture actively engaged in discussing books, authors, and a lifestyle of reading.” It consists of themed posts, visiting blogs new to you, and awards! It’s an awesome idea, and major props to Amy of My Friend Amy for coming up with it. I just missed it last year, and I’m excited to participate this year. So next week in addition to my regular schedule of reviews there will also be the BBAW daily posts. Each day will have a different theme like the first book blog you read, so it should still be interesting for my readers who aren’t book bloggers.
That’s it for announcements! I hope you enjoy the store, the categories, and the BBAW posts next week. :-)
Friday Fun! (Inception and General Busyness)
Just a quick check-in today my lovely readers. It’s a busy Friday!
I had a lovely week in spite of the rain at the beginning. I actually found the cooler weather to be a nice relief, both to me and to my electric bill! I went to see Inception this week, and while my friend and I would have had fun watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt in pretty much anything, the movie itself is truly great! I loved following the plot during it, then thinking out all the possibilities after. (I might possibly have lost some sleep doing just that). I also really enjoyed the soundtrack. I believe it’s by the same composer who did The Dark Knight. In any case, it’s just as powerful.
I finished my final project for my summer session online class, although I still have a bit of forum discussion left to do before it’s officially over at the end of this week. Naturally, my fall online class starts earlier than Simmons–this week to be exact, so I’m getting a bit of an overlap. I have a scheduling strategy though, so thus far I’m not too stressed about it. This semester is my final semester of my MLIS program, and I’m going to be so incredibly happy to be done. I’m not looking forward to my face-to-face class at all. It’s cataloging, which I’ve put off for last for a reason. (I really hate the technical services aspect of librarianship), but it needs to be done, so I’m planning on grinning and bearing it, haha.
Two of my friends are also moving this week, so I’ve been helping them when I can. Last night they crashed at my place as they had a one night apartment gap. This weekend I’ll be cooking a special dinner to help ease the stress for them and also helping clean their previous apartment in preparation for the security deposit check by the landlord. It’s busy, but it’s always nice hanging out with them, even if it is working on something or just them sleeping on my couch. (I have a couch that’s very disproportionately large for my apartment. It’s amazing).
How about you guys? Has the busyness of fall started to catch up with you or are you still in summer relaxation mode? What are your stress management strategies?
Friday Fun (The Hill)
I’ve mentioned previously that in spite of an intense desire to be athletic, I am not, nor have I ever been. I’m not talking about fit or in shape; I’m talking about that ability to just run up a hill or jump into a basketball game and not get hurt or…well, you get the picture. Even at my most fit, when I routinely biked at least 15 miles a day and had rock-hard abs, I still got hit in the face with the ball playing backyard volleyball. Heck, even when I would go running I certainly didn’t look good doing it. When it comes to fitness, I am not gracefully athletic. I am awkward.
Anyway, as part of my bid to get back in shape and relieve my anxiety and do good things for the planet, I’ve been biking to work. Well, not all the way to work. I can’t make it that far yet. It takes two city buses to get to my job, so I’ve been biking to the bus connection, which luckily is just about half-way to work. I live partway down one side of a very large hill. In the mornings, I have a nice, gradual slope up for a couple of blocks followed by around five blocks of downhill easy awesomeness. I’m sure you can see where this is going.
In the evenings, I hit the hill at the end of my ride. It’s like a giant middle finger taunting me about how much easier this all would have been if I’d just taken that second bus today. I’ll be riding along, feeling pretty fit and great, passing all the cars stuck in stand-still traffic and happy in the knowledge that I’ve cut my commute time nearly in half. Then the landmarks start popping up to remind me that the evil hill is nearly upon me. Now this hill is not just a hill. The top of it also happens to consist of a bridge, and bridges in Boston for some unearthly reason are narrower than the roads, which means cars that used to be arms-length away are suddenly at your elbow. And this isn’t a pretty bridge over a river or a gully or anything. No, no, it’s over the lovely commuter traffic on the Pike (translation: interstate, highway, Autobahn with a speed limit).
So, I’m at the end of my ride, tired, hungry, sweaty, and there’s the hill. I dutifully switch down a gear, but something’s fucked up in my bike’s gears and it won’t catch when I go down from 6 to 5. I have to go 6 to 5 to 4 then back up to 5 for it to catch. This makes me wobble for a moment in a way that makes the cars near me worry that I’m about to tip over into them. (This is a fair concern as I did tip over into a car once when I was in highschool, but that’s another story). Anyway, so after the wobbling, I try to regain my speed, generally to no avail. And there I am, moving at a pace that eventually becomes so slow that pedestrians are passing me and giving me that “Why don’t you just get off and walk the bike?” look. No matter how many gears I’ve moved up since starting this project (5, thank-you-very-much). No matter how much faster I get. No matter what, this hill is always just as difficult, and I always reach a near stand-still at the top of it.
It just refuses to get any easier. It refuses to stop making me look like an out-of-shape loser. In a way, this hill reminds me a lot of my anxiety. I want to just breeze through the day perfectly happy and not conjuring up new things to worry about and not get stuck in a loop of obsessive thoughts. I want to get up that hill looking powerful and athletic. But no matter what I do, no matter how I start the day, no matter how many times I tell myself this is going to be an awesome day and I’m going to do the right things and I’m going to treat the people I care about with the peaceful trust and respect they deserve, I still wind up sitting at home or in my cubicle at work with a racing heart and panicky thoughts powerhousing through my head.
My anxiety is just like that hill. It makes me look like an idiot and makes me feel real shitty about myself, but nothing I do seems to make me able to conquer it. And yet, I get up each day and say “today is going to be the day I beat that goddammed hill.” And that’s what I say every day about my anxiety too. Someday I am going to power through the ride and realize at the end of it that that hill felt non-existent, and someday I’ll be at the end of the day and realize that my anxiety is non-existent too.
Friday Fun! (Exercise and Zombies)
Hello my lovely readers! I hope you all had lovely weeks and are enjoying your Augusts. Remember that scientific studies have proven that you’re more likely to have a bad Friday the 13th if you believe in the curse, so just don’t believe it. ;-)
I’ve had a busy, but fun week. As a way to try to strategize against my anxiety until my doctor’s appointment next month (where I’m hoping to finally get some anti-anxiety meds), I’ve been seriously increasing the amount of physical activity in my week. If I’m exhausted then maybe I’ll be too tired to be anxious, eh? Well, it worked in uni anyway. So I started doing the 30 Day Shred
One of my pepper plants is blooming! But the blooms tend to wither up after one day and die. I have no idea if this means I’ll be getting peppers or not. Are the blooms supposed to whither? Anyone know?
So I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the increasing zombie trend. (If you haven’t heard much about it yet, trust me, you will be). Where is this obsession with a global pandemic coming from? I think maybe, on some level, everyone knows that the way we’re going right now isn’t sustainable. We have too many people using too many resources. A key element of a lot of the zombie lit is that it wipes out the population to a sustainable level, and the survivors are forced to return to the ways of our ancestors–growing their own food, going to sleep when it’s dark out, being physically active, etc… So people clearly know that two of the main issus are overpopulation and over-use of resources, and yet most people do little to nothing about it. What used to be a key element of our survival as a species–the instinct to reproduce as much as possible–is now our downfall. Whereas we used to lose a lot of people in childhood (seriously, as a history major I can tell you, kids were so disposable, some families named all the boys the same name because statistically only one would survive. It was that bad), now you pretty much have a really good shot at living a long, healthy life as long as you live in a western nation. And of course there’s that problem on top of the overpopulation problem. We currently have plenty of resources, but they’re unevenly distributed. I’m not saying there’s something wrong with there being some variance in the levels of comfort, but it’s so incredibly wrong that we have some people with multiple million dollar homes and an entourage they pay for and clothes that cost thousands of dollars while other people are living on the street or in dirt huts or are starving to death. And the thing is, I think everyone knows that the world is fucked up, but we’re tired and we’re beaten down, so we just figure the world is coming to an end, may as well have fun imagining it. My friends and I started talking about whether banding together to fix things was possible or if it’s just too late. One of my friends thinks it’s just too late. I’m inclined to agree with her. I think there’s just too many people who would rather live in happy ignorance than face the facts they know and make drastic changes to fix it. Of course, that’d be a lot easier if so much of the population weren’t debt slaves…., but that’s another rant for another post.
Anyway, so that’s what’s been going on here this week! Lots of physical activity and lots of philosophical discussions, lol. Oh also, I bet you’ve figured out by now that there’ll be a review of a zombie book next week. Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know which one. ;-)
What do you guys think about zombie lit? Where’s the popularity coming from?
Happy weekends!
Friday Fun! (Being in Your 20s)
Hello my lovely readers! Sorry for the relatively small number of posts this week, but I do hope you enjoyed them! Things will be back up to snuff next week. I’ll have at least two book reviews plus my very first product review for you all in spite of the fact that I have a rather large homework assignment due next week. Yay!
Last weekend was pleasantly relaxing. I went shopping with one of my friends, primarily for shoes, as I tend to wear through mine like nobody’s business. I blame the large amount of walking that’s necessary when you live in city. I also saw Dinner for Schmucks (definitely worth the ticket price) and had Thai food. Yum, Thai food!
Last night I was hanging out with two of my friends and we got to talking about our experience with being in our 20s so far. We all started our 20s highly idealistic and determined to change the world (samples: hippie tendencies, tv is evil mentality, save the planet, etc…) only to now have fizzled a bit on that. We got out of university and encountered the real world and the real world kind of beat down on our aspirations. Now we don’t want to save the world; we just want to be happy. I’m wondering if the next phase of our 20s will be some sort of moderation between the two: helping the world but striving for personal happiness and improvement simultaneously. That sounds like a happy medium to me, but I guess we’ll see. Anyone currently in their 20s or someone older who wants to reminisce on the experience? I think it’d be interesting to hear.
I hope you all have lovely weekends! Anyone have any special plans?
Friday Fun! (Scott Pilgrim, How I Met Your Mother)
Hello my lovely readers! I hope you all had great weeks and got some time in for reading. To my fellow Scott Pilgrim fans, I hope you got your hands on the final installment already. If not, best get to it before the movie comes out next month, eh? I don’t know if you’re aware, but the movie adaptation of the graphic novels was started before O’Malley had decided how the story was going to end, so the script writers kind of wrote their own ending. O’Malley says he’s happy with the film ending, but I’m curious to see if I will be as well. I was surprisingly happy with the ending of the graphic novel series. Generally I can find something to gripe about at the end of series, but not this time. I’m not sure if the movie can live up to it, but oh the third trailer has me really hopeful.
I was sick the beginning of the week with some sort of stomach thing, so I wound up watching a lot of tv. I started watching How I Met Your Mother and in that sick haze, wound up getting almost all the way through the first four seasons. It’s not a bad show. A few of the episodes are hilarious, such as Slap-Bet. The rest are at least entertaining. I have to admit, though, if I knew the main characters in real life, I would absolutely hate them. That doesn’t make it a bad show, but I doubt that’s the writers’ intention, since they based two of them on themselves. Obviously the womanizing Barney is a character we’re supposed to love to hate, but I don’t think that’s the case with the rest of them. Honestly, they’re all basically those people who just pick on anyone who isn’t exactly like them and apparently have no actual goals in life or morals. It seems like kind of an empty existence for characters who are in their late 20s to early 30s, but oh well. It’s good entertainment, but Friends is still better.
You can tell I spent a substantial portion of the week in bed, as I’m mostly yakking to you about tv shows and movies. Hm….oh! One of my pepper plants appears to finally have buds! I may have blossoms soon! I’m rather stoked.
Are any of you guys Scott Pilgrim fans? How do you feel about the upcoming movie? Any other thoughts on How I Met Your Mother? I hope you all have lovely weekends!
Friday Fun! (Gardening, Kindle App, Swiffer)
Hello my lovely readers! Thanks to my friend Nina, my tomato plant now actually has a cage instead of being held up by a contraption made up of random bits of my blinds, yarn, and my refrigerator. It is surviving…barely. It’s this tall gangly thing. On the other hand, my peppers keep getting bushier but not blossoming. Get on that, peppers! The basil is behaving quite well. I highly recommend it to anyone who forgets to water plants until they get wrinkly and then desperately drowns them with so much water that the dirt floats. That might just be me. In any case, the basil is thriving in spite of my abuse.
Oh in bookish news, I got the Kindle app for my iTouch, partly because it’s free, but also because I was wondering if I’d actually successfully finish an eBook if it wasn’t a classic. So far all the ones I’ve tried have been classics because that’s what’s free. Anyway, I heard that you can get some romance novels for free from Amazon via the Kindle app, and lo and behold you can! So expect a review of reading on the Kindle app, and possibly the book, if I actually finish it. I have yet to successfully finish an eBook, and I only plan on reading this when I’m standing up on the bus with one free hand or in line for something. So we shall see what we see.
Also, pet owners, for the love of sanity get a Swiffer
Happy weekends all!
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 