these things may not interest you, but here they are anyway

We had an actual thunderstorm come through last night (as opposed to the one last week which kindly gave us high winds and lightening without bothering to drop any rain) with 2.7" of rain, which may be more than we've had at a time all year. In theory, there's more to come over the weekend, too, and if nothing else, it's been beautifully cool and I have had a semi-productive day. The big thing was managing all the housework-tetris steps to get the smoky bookshelf unloaded into boxes & other shelves so that I could get the stupid thing *out* of my house. Ha!

(Er, I bought the thing at an estate sale some years back, not thinking quite hard enough about the fact that the house kind of reeked of tobacco as I walked into it, and several years in the shed & sun were insufficient to get the smell out of the shelf. This is not too much of a problem in the winter, but in hot and/or humid conditions the entire living room starts to smell... so at the moment, anytime I shut off the a/c. But! it is on the porch now, and the books that were on it (also tobacco-infused, as they came from my grandparents' house, where my father's father smoked a pipe for sixty years) are a) in boxes, and b) not nearly as smelly. The shelf also held the DVD collection, but as nobody sticks their nose in a DVD case for hours at a time, I don't consider this a serious liability. Yes, I was once poisoned by a tobacco-infused book. I don't recommend it.)

In the process of getting out boxes to put the books in, I did some rearranging in the shed, and got the grauwulf to help me pull out the steamer trunk of clothes I packed up shortly after we got married, since there wasn't much in the way of closet space a the time. So I just spent a while digging through glorious piles of clothing. Some things, while still fantastic, I can allow to leave the house (in hopes that they will go to someone else who will love them! and will maybe actually fit in them!) and then there's a pile of things to try on, and a few piles of things I was delighted to rediscover where they'd gotten to. And now I have space to hang them up, even. (mmm, walk-in closet...) Of course, at the moment everything is sitting in piles all over the bedroom floor, but since grauwulf is on his way to Vegas for exciting computer con stuff, I don't suppose it matters. I have had decades of practice at not tripping over the random crap I pile on my floor.

these things may not interest you, but here they are anyway

We had an actual thunderstorm come through last night (as opposed to the one last week which kindly gave us high winds and lightening without bothering to drop any rain) with 2.7" of rain, which may be more than we've had at a time all year. In theory, there's more to come over the weekend, too, and if nothing else, it's been beautifully cool and I have had a semi-productive day. The big thing was managing all the housework-tetris steps to get the smoky bookshelf unloaded into boxes & other shelves so that I could get the stupid thing *out* of my house. Ha!

(Er, I bought the thing at an estate sale some years back, not thinking quite hard enough about the fact that the house kind of reeked of tobacco as I walked into it, and several years in the shed & sun were insufficient to get the smell out of the shelf. This is not too much of a problem in the winter, but in hot and/or humid conditions the entire living room starts to smell... so at the moment, anytime I shut off the a/c. But! it is on the porch now, and the books that were on it (also tobacco-infused, as they came from my grandparents' house, where my father's father smoked a pipe for sixty years) are a) in boxes, and b) not nearly as smelly. The shelf also held the DVD collection, but as nobody sticks their nose in a DVD case for hours at a time, I don't consider this a serious liability. Yes, I was once poisoned by a tobacco-infused book. I don't recommend it.)

In the process of getting out boxes to put the books in, I did some rearranging in the shed, and got the grauwulf to help me pull out the steamer trunk of clothes I packed up shortly after we got married, since there wasn't much in the way of closet space a the time. So I just spent a while digging through glorious piles of clothing. Some things, while still fantastic, I can allow to leave the house (in hopes that they will go to someone else who will love them! and will maybe actually fit in them!) and then there's a pile of things to try on, and a few piles of things I was delighted to rediscover where they'd gotten to. And now I have space to hang them up, even. (mmm, walk-in closet...) Of course, at the moment everything is sitting in piles all over the bedroom floor, but since grauwulf is on his way to Vegas for exciting computer con stuff, I don't suppose it matters. I have had decades of practice at not tripping over the random crap I pile on my floor.

Xposty from dreamwidth.

I never seem to get around to talking about books.

In the midst of bookshelf rotations and various other things, I have been reading Mary Roach's Stiff. Probably mostly because I've run out of Ilona Andrews's Magic [Verbs] series, which was also recommended by several mostly unrelated people on the internet (a different set than the Mary Roach book) and I'm still trying to decide if I went through them like a tray of brownies because they're good, or because I was very much in the mood for that sort of fluff. Either way, I recommend them for being urban fantasy that managed to avoid almost all the things that irritate me about urban fantasy. The last few were disappointingly "and now we need a bigger, more horrible threat than the last book!" but the characters are good and complex and their arcs actually go places rather than all being about unresolvable romantic tensions. Also, I like her vampires. (They're non-sentient.)

Anyway, Mary Roach... I find her book on dead bodies weird and somewhat disturbing not because it's about dead bodies, but because of the authorial voice. She goes out of her way to come across as potty and obnoxious; half the time she mentions talking to a new person she has to tell us that no, she wasn't actually *invited* as such, she just bothered so-&-so until s/he agreed to let her come and sit in on this other kind of dissection. I think the other people who've talked about this mostly interpreted it as an attempt to soothe the reader regarding the subject matter, but to me it comes across as obnoxious lady trying to pass off her obnoxiousness as being quirky and I get the feeling that she would also titter irritatingly and then I would want to punch her. Which may have colored my interpretation of the bit where she goes haring off into the "wilds" of non-english-speaking China because someone on the internet posted some kind story about cannibalism... because I could totally see her doing that anywhere. Besides, she starts off telling us in the introduction that we call our food "beef" rather than "cow" as a distancing tactic, which is not linguistically true either. (It's the anglo/norman divide again... the people raising the animal got to name it, and the people feasting on it named the food.) If she gets something I knew in high school wrong right up front, there's got to be stuff I'm missing, too. So, I'm not too impressed by the consistency of her research techniques and annoyed by the authorial voice, but I'm also on the next to last chapter, so it must be readable. Some parts interesting and some kind of ghastly, as advertised. Next read will involve something that doesn't have any primate experimentation in it. I think that's just about everything else in the house at the moment, so I should be safe.

I never seem to get around to talking about books.

In the midst of bookshelf rotations and various other things, I have been reading Mary Roach's Stiff. Probably mostly because I've run out of Ilona Andrews's Magic [Verbs] series, which was also recommended by several mostly unrelated people on the internet (a different set than the Mary Roach book) and I'm still trying to decide if I went through them like a tray of brownies because they're good, or because I was very much in the mood for that sort of fluff. Either way, I recommend them for being urban fantasy that managed to avoid almost all the things that irritate me about urban fantasy. The last few were disappointingly "and now we need a bigger, more horrible threat than the last book!" but the characters are good and complex and their arcs actually go places rather than all being about unresolvable romantic tensions. Also, I like her vampires. (They're non-sentient.)

Anyway, Mary Roach... I find her book on dead bodies weird and somewhat disturbing not because it's about dead bodies, but because of the authorial voice. She goes out of her way to come across as potty and obnoxious; half the time she mentions talking to a new person she has to tell us that no, she wasn't actually *invited* as such, she just bothered so-&-so until s/he agreed to let her come and sit in on this other kind of dissection. I think the other people who've talked about this mostly interpreted it as an attempt to soothe the reader regarding the subject matter, but to me it comes across as obnoxious lady trying to pass off her obnoxiousness as being quirky and I get the feeling that she would also titter irritatingly and then I would want to punch her. Which may have colored my interpretation of the bit where she goes haring off into the "wilds" of non-english-speaking China because someone on the internet posted some kind story about cannibalism... because I could totally see her doing that anywhere. Besides, she starts off telling us in the introduction that we call our food "beef" rather than "cow" as a distancing tactic, which is not linguistically true either. (It's the anglo/norman divide again... the people raising the animal got to name it, and the people feasting on it named the food.) If she gets something I knew in high school wrong right up front, there's got to be stuff I'm missing, too. So, I'm not too impressed by the consistency of her research techniques and annoyed by the authorial voice, but I'm also on the next to last chapter, so it must be readable. Some parts interesting and some kind of ghastly, as advertised. Next read will involve something that doesn't have any primate experimentation in it. I think that's just about everything else in the house at the moment, so I should be safe.

Xposty from dreamwidth.