I haven't posted in ages. Once you are late, it's very hard to start up again. So instead of making a big deal here's a quick catch-up.

All late winter into spring, balancing two jobs with too many hours--crazy!
May:
My birthday and the Walk for Animals - set-up (rain, cold, cold, rain) walk day (rain? no, no rain! lots of wonderful dogs, other critters, people, volunteers)
Last day at Rain Taxi (very sad, but I'll still be volunteering for the magazine, check out the latest issue just out!)
New full-time position at the Animal Humane Society (scary, exciting, sad because I love working with the volunteers, but I will be there more and may actually see more volunteers)
Week at Rio Hondo writing workshop (with Alan - New Mexican mountains, snow melt streams, hot tub, amazing food, amazing writers, fuel for revising)
Wiscon (with two of my favorite people in the whole world as guests of honor!)
We have book: The Sun Inside by David J. Schwartz!

June:
Dave has another book! (Reading tomorrow Dreamhaven - Thursday, June 12th, 7:00PM)
Alan sold a novel!
The new job is kicking my butt but I do think I'll have it under control soon. I planted flowers this past week--something I wasn't able to do last summer! After a few months of leaving the house at 8:30 a.m. and not getting back until after 8:30 p.m., I am also enjoying having dinner with my husband and playing ball with Gambit while it's still light out.
Life is good.

Minnesota Pet Lovers-we need your voice for animals!

Please call your legislators in the next few days.

The “dangerous dog” bills are on the Minnesota House and Senate floors and need your action right away. Please contact your State Representative AND your State Senator and ask them to vote YES on the bills below.

S.F. 2876 authored by Senator Ellen Anderson

H.F. 2906 authored by Representative Michael Paymar

These bills address a real issue relating to dangerous dogs, which is accountability of the people who own the dangerous dog.

H.F. 2906 and S.F. 2876 strengthen existing law by giving animal control authorities the tools they need to better protect the public from dog bites and dog attacks. They address repeat offenders and the culpability of dog owners who endanger the public. They clarify existing language, require the sterilization of dangerous dogs, increase the dollar amount of insurance required (for a victim of a dog attack), provide due process for a dangerous dog designation, provide for prohibiting further dog ownership, and increase penalties for those who create dangerous dogs through irresponsible actions. The maximum penalty is often paid by the dog,
but there are relatively light penalties, if any, placed on the owners.

• Please mention these points when placing your phone call:
  
• Ask them to support dangerous dog bill S.F. 2876 and H.F. 2906
  
• Tell them you do NOT support any amendments that would include a dog breed ban in Minnesota.
  
• The problem is the not the breed of a dog.
  

Call your State Representative to support H.F. 2906
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/hmem.asp

Call your State Senator to support S.F. 2876
http://www.senate.leg.state.mn.us/members/index.php?ls=85#header

If you don’t know who your legislators are, go to:
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/leg/districtfinder.asp

Thank you!

Annual Humane Society Book Sale

The shelter in Woodbury where I work is filled with books as well as animals for the annual Animal Humane Society Book Sale. We're having it at two locations, Woodbury and Golden Valley. The hours are slightly different between the two sales because we had different hours back when they were setting it up. Thursday night is $5 at the door but the rest of the weekend the sale is free. We'll have books, CDs, DVDs, videos and classic vinyl records. It looked liked everything was under $10 and most is priced $1-$5.

Here are the addresses:
Animal Humane Society, 845 Meadow Lane North, Golden Valley and 9785 Hudson Road in Woodbury.

Here are the hours:

Woodbury

Thursday, February 7
5:00 - 8:00 pm

February 8, 9 & 10
Noon - 6 p.m.

Golden Valley:

Thursday, February 7
6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Friday, February 8
11:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Saturday, February 9
9:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Sunday, February 10
11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

I'm coming out of my winter cocooning to say that we saw Cloverfield today and really liked it. No spoilers here. We usually wait until someone we know sees a movie or a lot more reviews appear but this time we didn't. Coming out of the theater into the frigid winter evening was not so much fun.

Things that make me feel old: the twentieth anniversary of Joshua Tree. This album accompanied me to Japan for my semester abroad and was my jogging music. At that point in time, in that neighborhood, a white woman jogging attracted a lot of attention. I only saw one other person--a very athletic looking Japanese young man--jogging the whole time I was there. (I needed to jog or I'd have to give up our daily oyatsu office treats.) I'd put my headphones on and it was much easier to ignore all of the staring.

Funny things: A few days ago Alan and I were watching TV and an e-surance ad came on. Alan speculated that there was probably fanfic for the hot main character. Tonight, after working late and with my brain fried, I decided to check it out. I should have known because of Rule 34. Anyway, I found this hilarious: http://kissmesuzy.blogspot.com/2007/04/high-risk-insurancethe-time-is-right.html. It's safe to read through the first few comments, after that read with caution.

Scary things: We saw No Country for Old Men over the holiday and I've found a new scariest bad guy eva! He doesn't have the charm of Ralph Fiennes's Amon Goeth or Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter, but he made me want to scream at the screen each time he started his little game. A friend said he's had nightmares all week after seeing it. Great movie!

Christopher Barzak Day

Today is the release date for Chris's book One for Sorrow! I first met Chris at the 1998 Clarion writing workshop in East Lansing. I very quickly fell in love with his writing--probably from the first thing of his I read. It didn't matter what story he was telling, I just wanted to sit in my inner tube and float down the river of his prose. But Chris's writing is more than just beautiful prose--he is a marvelous story teller. He takes everyday people and, through a fabulist sleight of hand, lands them on the precipice of the extraordinary. Go check out his book right now! You won't regret it. And, if you haven't read any of his short fiction, you can find a list of them (many available online) on his website at: http://christopherbarzak.wordpress.com/news/.


For other people's opinions of Chris, please see Mumpsimus.

Happy birthday to my one and only, Alan!

And a belated one to Mr. Barzak!

We had a really lovely weekend at Diversicon with Dave Schwartz, Mark Rich, Martha Borchardt, and all. Got to see Mark and Martha play as Keg Salad again-they need a MySpace page! Listened to two chapters of guest of honor Andrea Hairston's awesome new hoodoo (vodou?) novel which needs a publisher. Chatted with wonderful people about books, writing and movies and got lots of titles to Netflick. Bought lots of used books-not as many as last year-and a big bag of seventies era F&SFs. (The bid was only $1 for them so I had to up it to $2-little did I know there were many more bags of magazines for the auction.)

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.