Up All Night

I stayed up late last night finishing up A.L. Turner's "I Just Play One on TV." I reviewed it on GoodReads, immediately I had finished, from my new Sony PRS-T1 (which I shall probably be blogging about in the next day or two, after I've played with it a bit more. But honestly, how awesome is it to be able to read a book, love it, and be able to say something about it *right then and there*!? *giddy squees*).

This is one of those books that make me wish I could lend it out to friends a little easier than I actually can.

*Highly* recommend this one!

(& I'm hoping that as I get hopefully slightly less sleep-deprived, I can maybe go back through and write a more coherent and comprehensive review.)

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273557488

*PANIC*

ohshitohshitohshit.

Backstory: Last weekend my grandpa was taken from nursing home to hospital with gallstones. Hospital determined he should have lost the gallbladder ages ago, so he had surgery to remove it (there was an infection which had thankfully not spread to bile duct/pancreas/liver/whatever other organs are in that general vicinity) -- this is not about him. He had surgery, is doing fine, back in nursing home. Since he *is* doing fine, my parents are coming to visit this weekend. By which I mean, they'll get here sometime tonight, and leave Sunday morning.

Over the summer, the Barbarian Horde and I spent a month with them, during which time I raided the attic for booksbooksbooks, went through papers (and found a bunch of stuff -- artwork, certificates, newpaper clippings & other random memorabilia), and dug through the storage closet for outgrown clothes of mine that will work for the Darling Daughter over the next year or two. I filled up two ginormous rubbermaid tubs (yes, the BIG ones. What are they, 50 gal? Maybe more? I don't know.) These tubs are the problem.

They are full of stuff. Srsly, when I say full, I mean I-was-only-JUST-barely-able-to-close-the-lid full. And there was...overflow. Like, two tomato boxes worth of overflow (tomato boxes hold fresh tomatoes from the canning factory -- they will sell them to home-canners, although I'm not sure I understand WHY. They hold about a bushel of tomatoes. Maybe half a bushel? I don't know; it's been a while since I helped w/ the tomatoes. One box holds about a dozen quart-size Mason jars.) And a lot of that stuff is books. Books are lovely, books are good, I firmly believe this:

My husband, sadly, disagrees. And to an extent I can see his point. I mean, the only way to find shelf space for any more books in my house would be to pack up or throw away his collection of penguins, some of my collection of cats, all the kids' DVDs, the adult TV show DVDs, and a lot of craft supplies.

So. Um. Yeah, I'm probably gonna be in trouble later. I shall be doing some reorganizing of the "Do I really REALLY need/want these books?" variety.

I may have to make a spreadsheet of the stuff I end up getting rid of, just so I can buy it again later in digital format (just so it takes up less space.)

Pray for me!

(And one day, I may blog the pumpkin bars. I have a couple or three pictures and everything! I just hate downloading pictures to the computer...)

life and randomness

So we're having a bit of financial iffery right now, due to unforseen circumstances (namely the AC dying in the middle of a freaking heatwave). Which means we're living pretty much hand-to-mouth trying to catch up on bills, with a birthday party on Saturday for our Middle Child. Plus, I got a tattoo on Monday. So my ankle hurts like a b*tch. Anyway, all this means I'm on a book-buying moratorium until we're caught up (which with any luck will be, oh, end of October.)

I'm kinda feeling weird about that whole thing, honestly. There's a little part of me that's all, "oh oh OH!!" at all the new releases that some of my autobuy authors are coming out with (even when the blurbs for the books are kinda leaving me "meh"). But at the same time, there's a part of me that's not really interested in reading Anything At All (although that's not really working, because I find myself re-reading a ton of stuff.) As well, I'm really excited about a new publishing venture I'm aware of, but not so much some of the authors involved (some of them are already on my auto-buy, so, yeah, wanna NOM them ASAP.)

All of this has combined to leave me a very mixed-up kitty indeed, and I've been compensating by trolling the web for free reads, none of which I've managed to download to my reader yet. I've been considering doing a massive reorganization of my digital library anyway (at least parts of it; some of my M/M stuff is improperly tagged in Calibre) but it's going to be, as I said, a massive task and I'm not sure I feel up to it. I do need to back up the newer downloads, though, just in case I ever have to completely reset the reader again. Weirdly (or not) a lot of the free reads I've downloaded are Kindle books which have to be read on the computer which gives me headaches. Swear to God, one of these days I'm going to get a cheap, older Kindle just so I can read those in freakin' e-ink. LOL  I'm not sure it's worth the cost of even a refurb'd Kindle, but even tho I know I wouldn't be pirating, I can't deal with the thought of trying to learn how to strip the DRM (yeah, I know, I'm not very technologically advanced. I have my moments, but overall....No.)

And the Oldest Child *just* told me she  has detention after school today for forgetting her ID 2x, and can I pick her up at 4? She's just lucky that I'm gonna have the van today; we're trying to only drive the one vehicle that gets semi-decent gas mileage.

Her Two Dads

This was a sweet story; I really enjoyed it. I loved that Sri went through the "new parent panic" stage (we -- parents -- have all been there, but with a bit more preparation than he had) but that he had his friend Jaime by his side supporting his choices throughout. (*Note: Jaime is the son of Mexican immigrants to the US; I vaguely recall the correct pronunciation of his name from HS Spanish classes but couldn't get it to gel in my mind. Purely my own fault.)
Sri's friend Jill used Sri's sperm to get pregnant when she could feel her biological clock ticking with no husband on the cards. Sadly, she dies in childbirth, leaving her daughter alone in the world. Unexpectedly (they had agreed that his name would not be a part of the proceedings), she has named Sri as the father to the hospital. He originally plans to give her up for adoption, but is unable to do so once he's seen and held her. (I'm just glad there was no family waiting in the wings to adopt whose hearts were broken.) Sri is a gay man who shares his condo with two other men: Jaime, who has been living there for three years or so, and Nathaniel, who hasn't been there as long and is in med school. Jaime comes from a large, tightly-knit family and has admitted to having kind of a crush on Sri, although neither of them has acted on their feelings of attraction in deference to preserving a good homeowner-tenant relationship. With the addition of little Sophie, Nathaniel leaves, and they decide not to acquire a third roommate so as to free up a bedroom for the baby; but splitting child-care causes them to grow closer emotionally.
Eventually, they acknowledge their feelings for each other and set about developing a relationship deeper and more lasting than friends and roommates. This is derailed when Child Protective Services is called on an (unfounded) abuse charge -- based, apparently, on the fact that Sri and Jaime are gay. Sri panics, Jaime withdraws; they are forced to communicate to fix things (but ultimately do. C'mon, you knew there'd be a happily ever after.)
There's a wedding, a family dinner, a date or two...definitely a feel-good story, and Sophie's a little charmer (I just wish my kids had been more like her -- I love them, but...even-tempered they were NOT.)
Things I wasn't so crazy about:
 -- Several times, Sri mentions Jill as having been his best friend, and yet aside from mentioning her as Sophie's biological mother, he seems to have no contact with the end of her life (he doesn't go to the funeral, nothing.)
 -- Even though Sri had not planned to be a significant part of Sophie's life, Jill seemed to have nothing set in place to care for her daughter in the case of her (Jill's) death or injury. It would have seemed logical for her to name him as the guardian, but he would, presumably, have been informed of that at some point.
 -- Frankly, the guys had it really easy. I don't know anyone whose babies were as calm and stress-free and illness-free as Sophie. I get that they had a lot to deal with, between CPS, work, estrangement from family, and whatnot...but still.

Life, Love and Lemon Cookies

This is a sequel to Love's Evolution (which, according to Amazon, was first published in print in Nov 2006; so it's been a few years...Matt and Chris have married and settled in to their relationship when a fire destroys The Falls, the Asheville, NC, restaurant where Chris has been head chef for 15 years. The owner chooses not to rebuild, leaving all the employees searching for work. The stress of being unemployed and overqualified in a poor economy makes Chris depressed, and strains his relationship with Matt. However, with a lot of love and understanding, they eventually make it through until finally Chris has a brainstorm that fixes everything.

I really enjoyed Love's Evolution, so I was happy to get this further peek into Chris and Matt's life. I love that they're still very much the same: Chris still worries a bit about Matt's health, even four years after a snowboarding accident landed him in the hospital with some pretty bad injuries. And Matt still understands that the kitchen and baking are Chris's safe place, the place he retreats to to think things through and lick his wounds. They can make space for each other, and still be supportive of each other, and even when they're fighting, the love shines through.

Ally does a great job of capturing the stresses that this kind of catastrophic loss of identity can cause (after all, Chris is left with essentially nothing to show for the past 15 years of his professional life) and the strain that can put on a relationship. Matt is loving and generous with himself in his attempts to help Chris get past this, but at the same time, he doesn't let Chris walk all over him in his anger at the way life is turning out. Granted, sometimes things come out that maybe shouldn't, or at the wrong time, but that's the way things go sometimes. And ultimately, it's an argument that brings everything to a head and leads to the solution to Chris's crisis of self-faith.

The thing I didn't like about this book? Something that bugs me about all of Samhain's pubs. The last 10 pages or so are blurbs and excerpts for two other books. The ePub file logged in, according to my eReader, at 60 pages, but the story was over before page 45. I don't mind the author bio and list of her other work, and I wouldn't mind a list of other stuff released in the same month, but the excerpts? It's a bit too much, especially for such a short story. Between all that and the cover/title/dedication, etc., fully a third of the file is non-story. Also, the excerpts are frustrating because if one catches my eye, but I can't immediately write it down or wishlist it, it can disappear into my library for ages, unless and until I either re-read the story or start just skipping straight to the end of Samhain books looking for a specific blurb. So I could live without that...

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.)