Happy birthday, Ms. Bond! Many fabulous returns!

What I learned over the last two days. 1. The smell of puppy poop is very difficult to remove from your skin when you can't take a shower and use your beloved scrubber until later that night. 2. A squirmy puppy will get its poopy self all over you including your forehead and the back of your neck behind your hair. 3. Six poopy puppies... well, we're not even going to go there. 4. There's nothing like exposure to sarcoptic mange to make you feel itchy all over.

P.S. The puppies are much less poopy and will hopefully soon be mange free.

Tired. Sick. Need to go to bed.

Can't stop watching Gambit charge and retreat from the June bug on the living room floor.

June bugs! Summer must be here.

I am the big 4-0 today. Except for the fact that it is a multiple of 10 and so invites some looking at life milestones, it doesn't really have a huge amount of significance for me. Life is very good and the only thing I can complain about is lack of time to do everything I want to do. One thing I am thinking about is getting a tattoo to celebrate. In my twenties, I held off because I didn't know how I'd feel about it when I was 40, 50 or 60. Now that I'm 40, I don't see my attitude changing at all and of course, a tattoo isn't such a big deal these days. My mom surprised me last night by saying she was thinking of getting one, too. (She first got her ears pierced when she turned 40.) My dad looked at both of us and didn't say anything. He's had years to learn that that is probably the best response! At our family get together last night, I did get to tease them both a little about being so old they have a daughter that old.

I've had two days of ice cream cake, gifts, flowers of both the delivered and natural kind (our crabapple tree is in full bloom today) and lots of good food. Sushi is on the horizon. Who could ask for more?

Here was my fortune from lunch today:
Age can never hope to win one whose heart is young.

[This is me sticking out my tongue at the stupid thing.]

OMG! Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed's dog, Snippy, looks just like our dog, Gambit.

Snippy
http://www.aetv.com/genesimmonsfamilyjewels/gsfj_meet.jsp

Gambit
http://www.goblinmercantileexchange.com/index.php?s=Gambit&submit=Search

How could I resist? Doesn't everyone want a Daemon?

Baby squirrels! Last week, one of the vets, Jim, brought in a box with holes drilled in the top and told everyone he was fostering four Peruvian lynx cubs. They were actually baby squirrels found after he'd livetrapped and released the mother out of his attic. It brought back memories of the time when I was 11 years old and tried to raise a baby squirrel who had been kicked out of the nest in the fall. That story did not have a happy ending. Though very sad, it was a good experience--I remember having to get up for feedings every two hours. That little guy was so young (and bald) that we didn't know ay first if he was a squirrel or a rabbit. I had him long enough to see his eyes open and his fur get glossy and full before he got very sick. These guys are already that old. They are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and are starting to get very fluffy tails. They sleep most of the day but are good climbers and pretty active when awake. I'm hoping they've gotten enough of their mother's immunity to make it. Jim asked if I wanted to spend some time socializing them so I took them into my office and had them one at at time on my lap as I returned phone calls and e-mails. One of them climbed out of the box and was halfway up the inside of the my pants leg before I noticed his escape. The box is now secured with a rubber band. I got to feed them with a syringe on my lunch break. Jim had shaved a spot off on a different leg for each of them so we could tell them apart. We had quite an audience watching through my office windows. I don't think there's anything cuter than a baby animal who is still on milk (or milk replacer in this case.) I got to see (and play with) them again today when I stopped by the St. Paul shelter at the end of the day. One of the other staff took two of them to foster so Jim only has to juggle the frequent feedings for two now. Their tails are fluffier and they are a little bigger. I'll try to get photos next time. They were a little too wild for me to handle both the phone camera and squirrel. Everyone else was still on duty and I didn't want to interrupt their work.

Amazing, beautiful, open all the windows weather. I'm actually sitting here in a t-shirt! In Minnesota, in March! Our first thunderstorm was late last night and I was awake to hear it because of a ill-considered, evening mocha. We are supposed to pay for the weather later today with more thunderstorms and the possibility of hail and tornados. Despite that, we are headed to a nearby theater for The Host and later I have The Merchant of Venice at the Guthrie with my family and uncle who is here from Beijing.

We were at Borders last night for some writing time in the cafe and were pleased to see Hal's Ink and Jon Armstrong's Grey on the new book table.

I'm partway through Wizard of the Crow and loving it. I've got Kristin Lavransdatter, recommended by the wonderful Mr. Schwartz, sitting stand by. How can I not love a book that has the spelling right? Over the last month, I've also discovered and developed a fondness for Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

If you have a dog or cat and missed the news of the food recall, you should check out my post at One Tough Puppy right away.

Here's a link:

http://1toughpuppy.blogspot.com/2007/03/pet-food-recall.html

So two whole months have passed without a post. I wish I could say it was because I was so busy but, while I was immensely busy (juggling two jobs, travel to Erie to visit Alan's family, frozen and leaky pipes, lots of reading deadlines, city citations and levies,) I was also struggling with some writer's block. It didn't seem right to be spending time on the blog and not doing other writing I was supposed to be doing. I think I've broken through the block -- it was primarily stress induced -- so I can post again.

I've reached the end of my week (at least for the humane society) and have a warm dog cuddled up on the couch next to me. We've been doing a lot of Netflicks watching and I've been reading up a storm. I haven't been able to get to the library so I was browsing through all our books to see what I missed including some free books we brought back from various places. Boy, have I been reading some bad stuff lately! Some things really stood out, though, so I thought I'd take some time to make a few recommendations:

I just finished Kirstin Allio's Garner: A Novel which I loved and highly recommend. (Garner was the LitBlog Co-op's Read This selection for last winter.) It's set in a small town in New Hampshire at the turn of the previous century. The language is lyrical and the characters quirky and unique. I'm going to take another look at at least parts of it because I'm not completely certain I understand what happened in a couple of places but the unreliable narrators are part of the novel's beauty. Allio is definitely someone to watch.

A couple nights ago, we finally watched The Descent and both of us loved it. I've always been addicted to scary movies so most of the time, I'm the one who pushes Alan to watch them with me. Alan was very excited when he heard that Neil Marshall of Dog Soldiers was coming out with another movie. We somehow never made it out to the theater to see it, so we had to wait for the DVD release and then remember to bump the movie up our Netflicks list. If you somehow missed the trailers, the story has a group of women embarking on a caving expedition. It had strong, believable women characters, a very scary setting and terrifying plot twists -- what's not to like? I've been claustrophobic as far back as I can remember and I think that having asthma makes it worse. I'd probably be okay descending into a large caverns despite some acrophobia. The tight spots are a different story, though, and one scene made me hyperventilate and physically sick. (I watched the movie a second time (with one of the commentaries) and I had the same reaction. Even thinking of it makes me panic. Terrifying! It was great! But there's much, much more. Highly recommended if you like chills like I do.

More recommendations to come.

Thanksgiving Evening in Front of the Vast Waste of TV Land

"You know what movie this is?"
"Yes, it's Conan the Destroyer. I saw it when you had the info on."
"But do you know which one it is?"
"Is it the annoying one with the girl and the island?"
"I don't know why everyone disses this movie. It has Grace Jones in it."
"Grace Jones is the best part of this movie."
A short discussion ensues about the annoying and not so annoying characters in the movie as the heroes move to rescue the magical Asian character from being roasted alive.
"How is this different from The 13th Warrior?
"You're kidding, right?"
"Other than Grace Jones, of course... They both have sword fighting."
On TV, the bad guys are riding across a vast plain.
"Well, they both have villains on horseback dressed in black with skulls on their heads. And, the main characters have accents."
"They're both taciturn."
"Yes, both have taciturn main characters with accents."

For the past five weeks, I've been obsessively plowing through Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books. I first encountered Sharpe through our local PBS station's airing of the Briitish series of TV movies which also inspired a long-term crush on Sean Bean. I'm a voracious reader but I don't think I've ever been so obsessed with a series of books and certainly not sustained an obsession through this many different books in a series. [I pooped out after initial obsessions with Stephen King's Dark Tower series, David Weber's Honor Harrington books, and Anita Hamilton's Anita Blake series.] The great thing about starting to read these books now is that I am able to read them almost completely in timeline order versus the order in which they were published. In some cases, I have pursued this order by maximizing my use of the Washington County Library interlibrary loan system. In other cases, I have driven from one library branch to another library branch and visited the adjacent St. Paul Library system to feed my habit. Internet library search is a wonderful thing. During lulls between copies of the book, I've finished a few other books. One, The Requiem Shark by Nicholas Griffin is a novel about the pirate Black Bart which I highly recommend. There's a good review of it up at Salon. Pirates - yay! Sam Enthoven's Black Tatoo, a YA dark fantasy, was next and was one of the freebies from World Fantasy. While there were a few times I looked up from the book to frown in consternation, I was nicely pulled through the book by interesting characters, surprising world building and sword fighting. Sword fighting - yay! I am awaiting the last three Sharpe novels and have to content myself with my new obsession, watching the Sharpe's movies through Alan's B-day subscription to Netflicks. Because it is his birthday gift, I am limiting myself to one of his two movies at a time which he puts up with since he knows the movie will be probably be watched and returned within 24 hours. I will plow through the whole series of movies in just a few weeks. Interspersed amongst these, we'll have our usual Alan's obscure foreign movie picks coming in at a regular pace, too. I was a little disappointed by the first two films in the Sharpe series (the Wellington character made me want to barf) but I've been told things pick up with this next one, Sharpe's Company. [I would be watching it RIGHT NOW but someone is playing something on the Gamecube. The dog is between us destroying his new rawhide bone. We all have our obsessions, I guess.] I currenlty am reading John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades which like his previous novel, Old Man's War, has soldiers, aliens, intrigue and bloody battles. Bloody battles - yay! Unlike the first book, which I did really enjoy, the main character isn't annoyingly perfect and brilliant and always saving the day. On my bedside table waiting to be read, I have Partick O'Brian's Master and Commander and Sabatini's Scaramouche. So everything I've been reading the past few weeks has conveniently though not intentionally had battles or swashbuckling in it. I've been trying to figure out my obsession with the Sharpe books and this focus on warfare. The Sharpe books aren't as well written as some in the genre (?) but I've always been a forgiving reader if the story is compelling, the characters interesting and the writing not so bad it throws me out of the story. I think that Cornwell has hit on the right mixture of romance, intrigue and adventure for my taste and it probably doesn't hurt that I still picture Sean Bean as the main character. Another time, we'll have to have a discussion about why Sean Bean has to always play bad guys in American movies.

I was supposed to be working from home this morning but the website I need is temporarily down, so I thought I'd take some time to do a quick post-WFC rundown.

This is what we brought home:
A cold - despite getting plenty of sleep and no drinking
A burned mouth from hot cheese in excellent Austin Tex Mex food that has turned into a killer toothache

Two awesome freebie bags. We could actually check these bags which allowed us to bring more home than we thought we'd be able to.
From the freebie bags:
Night Wars - Graham Masterton
Pandora Drive - Tim Waggoner
Shadowmarch - Tad Williams
From Black Rooms - Stephen Woodworth
The Mount - Carol Emshwiller - this will be a great Christmas gift for someone
Some recent F & SFs
George and the Angels - Glenn Maganek
The Fair Folk anthology
Best Short Novels 2006 - Jonathan Strahan's SFBC anthology
The Black Tattoo - Sam Enthoven - an ARC - beautiful cover
A Princess of Roumania - Paul Park - nice to see this promoted so much - another gift
Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard anthology
Genetopia - Keith Brooke

We also came home with:
(Hot off the presses)
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #19
Electric Velocipede #11
The Sense of Falling - Ezra Pines chapbook with illustrations by Mark Rich
(as well as)
The Ephemera - Neil Williamson
Summer of the Apocolypse - James Van Pelt

We were lucky to score the Neil Williamson since none of the book dealers had copies and we got one of the few Neil brought with him. Reading the first few stories on the plane going home reminded me all over again why I was so excited when I first found his writing. This collection is highly recommended.

Much more busyness so no posting lately. A couple of things making me insanely angry. The last straw was this interview of ignorant homophobe Paul Weyrich from the Free Congress Foundation by Michele Norris on NPR this afternoon. I almost slammed on the breaks in the middle of traffic, it made me so angry. It happens right away so you don't have to listen to the whole thing.

Conservative Groups Call for Accountability on Foley

If you don't want to listen to it (and I don't recommend it if you are trying for a low stress day) he said that Foley shouldn't have been in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus because the Republican leadership knew he was gay and as we all know "gay men are preoccupied by sex."

Busy, busy week. I feel like I'm juggling about a million things right now. I posted at One Tough Puppy about the new job a little bit and the money-pit but lovable dog. The job is going well. I love working around animals and the people who volunteer are great. I spend a lot of my time on the phone since we're starting our annual phonathon. It is probably the hardest thing to recruit people to help with but is also our largest fundraiser so we have to keep trying. At home, I've been plowing my way through all the Diversicon books and only have two left. Alan brought me more library books today. I love how he helps feed my habit. Work prevented us from a more formal 3rd anniversary celebration tonight. We'll be doing something this weekend when we are both available and have time to relax. Tonight, we opted for pizza and a quiet night on the couch bookended by pets. Life is good.

Last weekend, we headed up to my parent's cabin in northwestern Minnesota for Friday night. The next day, while my parent's took care of the dog, we headed up to Duluth to the Northern Lights bookstore for Alan's book signing. The drive is beautiful with lakes and mixed pine and deciduous forest. We found the bookstore right on Canal Street in the peak downtown tourist area near the lift bridge and the lake walk. For a small store, it packed a lot books in and had a great selection of Great Lakes related and regional materials. I decided to treat myself to a book, although we'd recently hauled two books full from Diversicon, and went around browsing and trading through books. I found the winner, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Rufiz Zafon translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves, on their Booksense Picks shelves. It was a pick back in February when it came out. Despite its satisfying thickness, I blew through it this week. I'm still gathering my thoughts about it and will write more but I highly recommend it. It was kind of a literary mystery set in Barcelona during the 40s and 50s with a great gothic feel and compelling characters.

It was Alan's first visit to Duluth and long overdue. We poked around Duluth a bit before doing part of the North Shore Scenic Drive up to Gooseberry Falls State Park. On the recommendation of one of Alan's co-workers, we stopped for pie at the New Scenic Cafe and, tempted by the menu, ended up eating an early dinner and taking the pie with us. At Gooseberry, we toured the falls and then took the Gooseberry River trail to the lake and Agate Beach. Alan grew up next to Lake Erie, so it was nice to finally be able to show him Lake Superior, which has a quite different feel to it. We headed back in the dark to the cabin and cool sleeping temperatures. The next day we swam, read, ate good food and played with the dog until it was time to go home. After chasing squirrels and chipmunks all weekend, as well as swimming and playing fetch, he was a very tired dog on the drive home.

Very busy, very social couple of weeks passed.

We had a last minute weekend with the families of Haddayr and Karen. Wonderful people. Great discussions. Nice relaxation. Some birthday, ice cream cake goodness for Alan. What more can I say?

Alan got Netflicks from my parents for his birthday. Yay!! Now instead of checking the mail for rejection letters we look for movies. So far we've seen:

Irma Vep which was a strange but compelling movie by the director of the very twisted Demonlover. While both movies had unsatisfying endings, they were worth the trip.
and
Dog Soldiers which was an interesting twist on the traditional werewolf movie by the writer/director of The Descent. The werewolves were cheesy but the acting was strong (including Kevin McKidd from Rome) and the characters sympathetic.

Up next are Dave Chappelle's Block Party and Walk the Line. Suggestions for movies to add to the queue would be very welcome.

Diversicon was last weekend. We've only been once before two years ago when SP Somtow was guest of honor and Mark Rich was special guest. We missed it last year because we were out of town. This year we had the magnificent Kelly Link as guest of honor and very cool Bryan Thao Worra as special guest. I missed most of the panels due to absent mindedness but also because I was helping out or gabbing with Gavin at the Small Beer Press table. It's a small convention but packs a punch with programming, lots of time to meet and visit with the highlighted guests, and lots of other interesting attendees. Highlights included seeing Lyda glammed up as Tate; stocking up to feed my reading habit with two bags of used books from the dealers room; an affordable live auction with booty including more books and original Mark Rich artwork; a long chat with Eleanor Arnason (check out her new blog here); Bryan Thao Worra's awesome presentation on Laotian mysterious places (see Dark Wisdom #9 for his article on the Plain of Jars) and mythic creatures (toe sucking forest spirits!), music from Mark and Martha as Keg Salad, and a great film discussion with Andrea Hairston that included one of my favorite films, Lonestar, and a new, eye-opening take (to me) on Rush Hour. Andrea will be guest of honor next year, so you'll have to come and ask her about it.

Once again, the past two weeks reminded me how blessed we have been with such a great group of friends and writing/SF community around us. As one of my new co-workers said on the way out the door today, "Peace out, y'all!"

Discussing musical taste, that is whether someone has good musical taste or not, led to a slight disagreement this evening. I would tend to be more inclusive in defining someone's musical taste. For instance, in addition to such obvious things such as music purchased, music played and music shared with friends, I believe that songs one chooses to sing at home, out of the view of the public but in the presence of roommates or family, should also be included. The manner of such singing, and if there is also dancing, could also be considered. What do you think?

*WARNING - Hex Spoiler*








Last night I tuned BBC America for Hex and found out Cassie had died. I swear I caught the episode last week but did not remember losing the main character. I immediately zapped into on demand just be sure, and yes, the last episode showing up was #6, the one I'd watched. I sulked a bit and decided I must have missed it and they were just slow to put up the next episode. I checked back later and found out they'd put up last night's episode, #8. Same thing today, episodes #6 and #8. I feel so betrayed. I haven't felt like this since I was a kid and somehow skipped the whole Gandalf dying in Moria scene and found out he was dead when I opened the next book. I cried that time. This time I wasn't sad (she could be so mean to Thelma) just angry with Comcast or BBC America or whoever blew the surprise for me. I expected some commiseration from Alan but he already knew she was going to die having read all the episode summaries on some website or other. What's the fun of that? And why the hell am I getting so hyped up about a consistently inconsistent show I know is already cancelled without a nice series wrap up at the end?

This new job is going to do wonders for my writing discipline. With the way my schedule is structured, I need to lose a few hours each week during the day and have been alternating camping out at the two nearby coffee houses. And, in case I ever entertain the unproductive idea that I will work at my desk (not just catch up on blogs and news), overcrowding has someone needing to use my computer, desk or chair any time I'm away from my desk for more than ten minutes. I've been avoiding the heat by heading out early to make use of their free air conditioning, too. This week has taught me that although I think I can get writing done at home, I'm really just treading water since they're too many distractions.

About the new job... I'm about one week into it and am loving the work. I'm coordinating volunteers part-time for the local humane society shelter, a position that draws on my weird assortment of past volunteer and work experiences. It's amazingly close to home and I can keep my low paid but promising job with the start up company while having a steady paycheck during our slow season. Best of all, it's so good to be working in an animal shelter again.