Today's Subjects Are . . .

To all those who love Halloween, I admire your enjoyment of the holiday season. I love watching the little kids get excited about dressing up for Halloween, and the amused self-derision of indulgent parents. I enjoy the commonplace complaints about how it is ridiculous that the stores have all the holiday decorations out, while everyone starts buying madly. I adore going window shopping under any circumstances, so this is just the best. Driving around at night and seeing all the decorations is a blast and I love seeing how creative people can get.

In fact, on my way home there is a place with a small hay wagon, complete with hay, loaded with pumpkins and other gourds, and in the front are 2 scarecrows, both with pumpkin heads, driving it. The rest of the fence is also decorated and the house has small pumpkin lights in each window and its just cool to drive by it at night. I am dying to see what they will do for Thanksgiving & then Christmas.

It does not change the fact that this is a lousy time of year. As anyone who has had to live with me over the years can testify, I become steadily edgier, snarl-y, paranoid, and generally not a lot of fun to be around. It does not help that it is not necessarily all that safe to be around me during this time. This is when I get sick, anyone who is ready to die in my family does it during this time of year, something bad happens with my car, work stress levels go up so my choke the living shit out of someone quotient goes up, and anything negative possible comes down the pipe line. Throw in the chaos that Thanksgiving always is in my family because this is the holiday that we spend with the “other family,” and all the emotional black mail and angst that comes along with that. None of these are insurmountable, or even all that big of a deal individually, just all of it within a 3-4 month period. The week AFTER News Years is when I celebrate. That is when life returns to blissful calmness & I am so looking forward to it already.

Subject change – some recent reads.

I finished last weekend several dozen teen/manga books. They were fun mangas. What more can I say?

I also read Nora Robert’s latest, “Blue Smoke.” For fans of hers, this is 1 of her best in a while. What I really liked was how she put so many details about how fire’s are started and arson and just important details to explain the how’s of the book, which explained why people reacted the way they did. For the reader, there was no mystery as to who the guilty party is, but it she managed to pull of being blatantly obvious but kept the characters in the dark until the right point when they had all the necessary clues. Reading it, you knew who the bad guy was in the prologue. But by the time the characters were in their early 30’s, late 20’s, they had figured it out & it all made sense.

Next I read Sherrilyn Kenyon’s “Bad Attitude.” What can I say? She wrote yet another fun read with obnoxious characters. Her books always tend towards a snotty sort of humor that makes me laugh. If you like books with great one-liners and one-upmanship, then try her out. In this one, the male lead is a sniper who gets pissed off (justifiably) at his superior officer & shots his superior officers helmet off in a combat zone. Some reason, he goes to jail. The B.A.D. agency make him an offer he can’t refuse, so he gets out & goes to work for them, undercover & the under the covers with his new partner who is a defensive, sarcastic soul. There is a wonderful scene based in the Grand ole’ Opry that had me laughing out loud. And the ending helped set up the future books, even though it did not really tie well into her previous novels set in this area. While I can’t say this is the best yet, it was worth re-reading several times& I will buy it.

I also read Karen Marie Moning’s “Spell of the Highlander.” This continued the saga of the Druid family who protect the barrier between the Sidhe and us. In this 1, an ancestor who managed to get himself trapped in a mirror finds his mate in the form of an archeology student, working towards her PhD. They go through several adventures, meet up with the descendents he did not even know he had, and managed to not only defeat the bad guy but set up the scene for the next book. I was impressed. Part of the reason I like her books is because they are all interconnected and she definitely has a strong sense of family. So, like Kenyon’s, while I can’t say this is the best yet, it was worth re-reading several times& I will buy it.

Finally, I read Mercedes Lackey’s “Wizard of London.” The 1st ¾’s of the book were great. The actual last chapter was incredibly poignant and has me wishing she would write faster. The ending itself? It could have been fleshed out more, especially since the 1st few chapters were taken directly from a short story she wrote years ago. I liked how she fleshed the characters out, showed how they worked and loved and relied on one another. I enjoyed reading the book in general. But the big battle ended with the bad guy being swallowed up by the demon. And that was all she wrote. Unless there is going to be more based on this book, that was a huge let down. I’ll buy it because I already have everything else she put out, but it will definitely not be a frequent re-read.

Subject change – lack of a car stereo

Let me stress to everyone that not having a car stereo is a very bad thing. You can hear the gas sloshing. You can hear the rubber bands in the engine whining and the little gerbil’s toe nails scrambling as they run madly on the treadmill in the engine. You can hear every ping and pong and thud as you drive. When an 18-wheeler passes you, it is an entirely new experience. You can’t block out as many of the annoyances of driving because there is nothing to distract you. It is awful! I think I am going to have to get something, anything for the car because this is beyond awful.

Subject change – applications

I am looking at yet another job, this one for the Beaufort County, SC schools. They need a school librarian. Their application is 14 pages long. I have filled out government applications that were shorter and required less B.S. than this thing!