It occurs to me that I have mentioned the kids (a.k.a. the Ravening Barbarian Horde -- doing great, btw, the boys are lounging around in their underwear all day until forced to get dressed, just like Daddy, and the girl is grounded for taking a foray into my seldom-used stash of make-up when she was supposed to be cleaning the bathroom she shares with her brothers) and the books (hoping to get around to a couple of reviews this week; I'm participating in a couple of group reads over on Goodreads, and of course have done some fairly copious reading besides that. I'm better at keeping up with reviews on Goodreads than I am here...) but the cats haven't made much of an appearance yet. Except Stella -- the grey thing up and to your right. Her story will come one day. But first, the gorgeous black mini-panther (which, yes, I know, is not an actual type of cat. Per Wikipedia, it's a melanistic type of another large cat -- here in North America, that would be either a jaguar or a cougar. And "melanistic" refers to the atypical all-over dark pigmentation. See, you learned something. "Any day in which you learn something isn't a complete loss." --Belgarath the Sorcerer, David Eddings.)  (Detour over. I promise.) *Aaaanyway.*

That black --mostly; you can't see them all in the picture but he had three patches of white on his throat, chest and belly -- kitty is Gumbo. When I was in high school, my mom found him in a ditch by the side of the road. She took him home, bathed him (several times, to get rid of all the dirt and blood and ick), and committed the ultimate indignity of taking him to the vet. He was pre-weaned, so we ended up feeding him baby formula with a medicine dropper for a few weeks. Luckily, Mom works at the local college in the science department, so she just took him to work and he rode around in various people's lab coat pockets until he was weaned. He also had a broken tail, and it was amputated almost completely. He went from a scrap of black fur in the palm of my hand to a hugely muscular nearly 20 pounds of cat, with 2 inches of tail. You know how cats' tails poof out when they're angry? Imagine a big cat with a bottle brush on the end of its spine. Too funny.

Gumbo was, to me, the best cat ever. We bonded over baby formula, and he decided I was his Human. He would attack anyone else (especially if they dared get out of bed after dark) but me, he snuggled. His favorite place to be was snuggled down the length of my side with my arm around him and his head on my shoulder, purring till I fell asleep. He also had a little trick: when I was sitting he'd climb on my lap and stretch upward till he could snuggle his head under my chin. I would put my fingers against his throat to feel the vibrations as he purred, and when I spoke to him, he would put his paw up agains my throat in the same gesture. Sadly, when he was about 2 years old, I went away to college for my freshman year. A week or two before I left, he disappeared. I was a little worried and upset, but not too much; he had been known to go off on his own before, usually when stuff was going on (family vacations made him angry!). Sadly, that was the last anyone saw of him until I had been gone about  6 weeks, when my dad found his poor body behind a trash can in some undergrowth. We're not entirely sure, but suspect he was hit by a car and suffered internal injuries, and hid himself away to lick his wounds. No one else was as close to him as I was, but we all still miss him. His fur always had this wonderful smell, like fall leaves.

Love you, kitty!

series rant

Usually, I really enjoy reading series of books. Ever since I was a kid, when I started with Raggedy Ann and Andy, through my early teens with very nearly the entire list of LM Montgomery's various series, and including forays into Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Sweet Valley girls and the Babysitters' Club.  And onward: I still love Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series (and all the other books set in that particular universe --well, almost all of them, anyway) and others in the fantasy/science fiction genres I've come into contact with over the years. I love series that concentrate on one or two main characters over the entire course, with strong supporting characters who you can see develop over time, and a simply-directed story arc. I love series that focus on a group of people, with a different person or couple or whatever as the primary focus of each book.

That said, a series is really tough to do over the long haul.

My first experience with this was with LM Montomery's Anne of Green Gables series. Like many many budding young ladies, I fell in love with Anne when I was about 10 or 11. I read all the Anne books, and loved them all, but I found the last couple of books of the series to be...difficult. Somehow, at some point, there was a shift of focus, from Anne onto her children. As an adult, I realize that the books were directed specifically at young girls, to give them a road map to growth, and at some point Anne had grown as much as she was ever going to within the confines of a young-woman-to-be's ability to grasp. But having Anne on the outskirts of what were supposed to be her own books was jarring to me as a pre-teen, and I had a difficult time connecting with her sons and daughters -- the books skipped from one child to another and it was jarring to find yourself inside yet another head.

Sadly, that's not where it ends. That's just where it begins, I've since learned. I am -- or I WAS -- a fan of JR Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood. Perhaps, I'm both. I still currently love the books I loved initially, but the more recent books, not so much. There's just too much going on. The last one I read was Lover Mine (I think? John Matthew and Xhex?) and I just...it didn't work for me. I tried, I really did, but I couldn't keep track of all the story threads. I ended up having to skim through the book with color-coded post-it flags, flagging each change of character POV, and then go back and read each storyline individually. There were, like, 8 storylines. It was exhausting, and I wasn't ever really able to just immerse myself in the story. It was the written equivalent of budding hoarder, and I freely admit that I'm just marking time on the series. I own, but have not yet brought myself to read, the latest installment. I'm not interested any more in any of the main characters. I'd like to see a bit more of some of the former couples, and I'm heavily invested in one minor storyline, which is the m/m relationship (Blaylock and Qhuinn), which is probably never going to be a major storyline. She's said it's most likely to end up being a focused novella probably published digitally so as not to offend the readers who are against m/m pairings. 'Cause, y'know, we should protect people from the realities of life.

And I'm sad to admit that there are several long-running series that friends I trust have recommended, but I can't even get into the first books. I've tried, I really have. And I have to admit, the series I've loved the most have been the ones that I discovered about 4 books in, on a whim or out of desperation, like Katie MacAlister's Dark Ones or Alexis Morgan's Paladins of Darkness.  Both of those ladies are at 8+ books for those series with no immediate hints of stopping, and both series continue to hold my attention in a way others don't.

The Darkness Beyond by Alexis Morgan

I really really love Alexis Morgan's Paladins. They're strong silent types (except that they're not so silent with each other -- they yell, throw things, have temper tantrums and brawls...) who protect our world from the crazed Kalithians who attempt to cross over a barrier between their dimension and our own that exists  deep in caves along the faultlines of the Earth. (Not that all the Kalithians are crazed, but the bulk of the ones who try to cross the barrier are.) Kalith is a dying planet. And apparently, the Paladins share some DNA with them. They're warriors, and they're always male. And just to make it *that* much better, they can, for an indefinite period of time, come back to life after being killed -- although each death and resuscitation (resurrection?) takes something out of them, and eventually they go crazy and have to be killed.
D.J. Clayborne is a Paladin and a computer genius/hacker who is *famous* in the cyberworld as the hacker Knightwalker. Regina (Reggie) Morrison works for a company that is hired by other companies to track hackers. She's been tracking Knightwalker anyway because she's curious and can't resist a challenge, but lately, her company was actually hired to find him. Part of her's reluctant to admit that she's found him, because she enjoys their little game of barb-and-prod, cat-and-mouse. But on a side trip while trying to confirm details, she accidentally stumbles into the system of the Regents, who manage and fund the Paladins, and finds, downloads and prints a history of the Paladins. Also, I should mention there's been some internal unrest in the management levels between the Regents and the Paladins (security, finance, medical...all that fun stuff).
I'm gonna stop there because I tend to get all involved in synopsis stuff and don't want to tell the bare bones of the story in under six paragraphs.
Ms. Morgan has managed to write a series that is just as interesting and compelling in the 8th book as it was in the first, or the fourth (which is actually where I first picked up the series and started glomming. Seriously glommable.) We get some time with past characters, and just enough of some new and interesting ones, and some of the bad guys too--but just enough that we know a little about where things are going rather than so much that we begin to wonder just who the series is about. But the primary focus of the book is D.J. and Reggie. They get moments of fear and joy, anger and love. And, of course, the bad guys get got. Spectacularly. AND we get a new Paladin out of the whole thing--Reggie's friend and coworker Cory, who grew up in the foster system and always amazed and freaked out his foster parents with his amazing healing abilities and crazy energy and metabolism.
I just can't wait to see who's next of the Paladins to get his HEA!!

about my eReader...

I feel the need to rant and rave today about my eReader. I have a Sony Touch (PRS-600)--NOT the latest model, but the next-to-latest. Choosing it involved about a year of dithering, researching, comparison shopping, and acknowledging that a Kindle would bleed me dry in a week, as I have a tendency to GLOM backlists. My darling Sony limits that somewhat, in that I have to actually physically hook it up to a computer in order to download books onto it (although it's still ridiculously easy to shop at all my favorite sites: Diesel, All Romance EBooks, Samhain, Torquere...the list goes on.) And just because, I kind of want a Kindle, too. Just because (sorta).

So anyway. Today, my lovely red Reader decided to be a little B*tch today, when I hooked her up to the computer. I kept getting the message that the computer could not read the USB device (or something along those lines, anyway...) so I visited the Sony support webpage for help. I downloaded firmware. I tried uninstalling the device driver. I uninstalled/reinstalled software, I restarted the computer (like, a million times). I poked around on my external hard drive, trying to make sure I'd successfully backed up all my books when the other laptop (MY laptop; I'm currently sharing the DH's) started having issues. As it happens, I didn't. (boo) Luckily, however, I tend to mostly buy direct from small pubs, and was able to re-download everything, so I only lost one book. It was a "free limited time" offer, and now it's regularly priced, so I may one day get busy with the malfunctioning computer and see if it will cooperate long enough to try and rescue that one particular book...

Turns out what had to happen was a hard reset of the Reader--which means, dumping *everything* and restoring it to fresh-outta-tha-box factory settings. Like I said, I still have everything I wanted to keep, minus the one book, and now (for now, anyway) everything works fine. I need to get on to getting everything on memory card, though. That's why I picked this particular reader--it has memory card slots, so I can categorize my books, and hide the "Inappropriate Content" from the Ravening Barbarian Horde, and have an extra backup of everything  (without having DRM hissy fits) if this ever happens again. The downside to the memory cards? They can slow down certain functions, like deleting individual books from the reader/card itself, and it can be slow catching up when you first insert or remove the memory card. But I haven't noticed any real difference in, for example, battery life. Which is less than I was led to believe but I hear around the internet that those guidelines for battery charge are based on the "average" reader, and, let's face it, I am well above average in terms of the amount of time I spend reading on a weekly basis.

Also, regarding the sucktastic-ness of my old computer--it's the second HP I've had problems with in a year's time. It's supposed to be still under warranty, but it's been dinged a bit so they won't fix it under warranty. I can't afford a new one right now, so for the foreseeable future, I will be using the DH's. And come tax refund time, when I can get a new one? I'm SO getting a Mac. (That's right, I'm going over to the Dark Side.)

Saturday 9--meme time!

Saturday 9: Against All Odds

1. Have you ever tried to rekindle a past relationship against the odds? Not exactly, but I have rekindled friendships with several exes!

2. Do you like your job, or daily routine?  Sorta, sometimes. I'm a SAHM; sometimes it's a bit much, but most of the time it's nice being able to pretty much do what I like. I would like a bit more adult interaction, however.

3. Do you find time to 'smell the flowers' so to speak?  I try to. That's one of the nice things about doing things at my own speed.

4. Do you have any problems thinking of things to write about in my blog?  In your blog? Not so much, no. In my own...occasionally. When that happens, I usually go with a book review (or just avoid it altogether--I should be better about that.)

5. Do others consider you well organized?  I really have no idea. It would be nice, but I know I'm really not.

6. Do you always have a “Plan B” just in case? No, I just kind of got good at going with the flow. I can adapt plan A on the run.

7. How do you find yourself adjusting to new situations?  Usually pretty well--as long as I have access to a method of communicating with friends and family, and plenty of escapist reading material, it's all good...

8. Are you happy with where you are in this point of your life?  For the most part. I also accept that the things I'm not happy with, it's up to me to change. And the things I can't change? Maybe I just need to alter my expectations of myself.

9. Do you find the aging process we all go through easy or difficult?  Honestly, my brain doesn't feel like it's changed that much. It's my body that's having problems...

Sometimes, it's hard.

Sometimes, it's hard to be a mom. Summer break, especially. While I love my kids (hereafter known as the Ravening Barbarian Horde), I'm also one of those people who needs solitude. I just need, on occasion, to take a step--or 12--away from the everyday, and focus myself internally (books, TV, a movie--whatever; just as long as it's all about me, Me, ME). And that can be really hard to do when you have kids, especially when at least one of those kids is always needing contact and reassurance. Yes, it's cute when my 6YO comes up to me, cuddles close, and says, "Mommy, I love you!" But it's less cute when it's happened approximately every 15 minutes of every waking moment of every day for the last week. And wait till we hit a month of it! The bickering starts within an hour of waking up, and the whining for more TV time/video games/I wanna go here, do this, buy that! in three. And then the dogs think, Let's join in! and start rough-housing. And the cats find the catnap mice, or decide the laptop where I'm typing or browsing or whatever would be a *perfect* place for a nap (convenient for me to pet them, y'know...) and next thing I know, I'm all but climbing the walls.

And, as much as I love my husband as well, he doesn't exactly help. He usually manages to come home at least once during the day (sometimes as many as 3 times!) and usually manages to interrupt something (sorry, love, but it's the truth!) which throws whatever crazy schedule I've managed to cobble together all to pieces. And he turns on the TV, which just makes the kids *worse* when he's gone, and unless we're watching DVR'ed episodes of NCIS or Castle or The Big Bang Theory, he's watching stuff that I either find revolting (can't handle fishing or horror) or just inappropriate for the kids (true crime) or just plain unappealing (Man vs. Food). And after the Ravening Barbarian Horde is in bed, I want to spend one-on-one time with the Man of the House--but I'd prefer it not be in front of the TV--but that means I have to put me off till after he goes to bed, which means I end up staying up till 2 a.m. And the kids are still getting up at 7. And fighting.

So, yeah. I'm thinking about re-instituting the afternoon nap, even though we're all supposed to be at a stage in our lives where we don't need such a thing. And OMG it's going to be rough when my alarm starts going off at 6 a.m. to get the boys up and out the door for the school bus...