Enemy of Entropy

Archive for December 2007

Movie Overdose

31 December 2007, 8:42 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Family, Movies.

We’ve watched so many movies in the last few weeks that they’re all run­ning together. We just fin­ished The Trans­form­ers. Yes­ter­day was Baby­lon 5: A Call to Arms (we’d seen that before, of course) and Catch Me If You Can. Some day before that was Harry Pot­ter & the Pris­oner of Azk­a­ban as well as Gob­let of Fire. Sam watched Order of the Phoenix, but I haven’t seen it yet. He also watched Gods and Gen­er­als, but I couldn’t even pre­tend to be inter­ested, and the accents were too offen­sive to my ears. There’s been at least one sea­son, maybe more, of West Wing. We’ve still got Star­dust and some other stuff that Sam rented. My brain is explod­ing and I can’t remem­ber the rest, but I know there was more.

And what do I want to watch? Fire­fly. Which I can’t see, because Sam’s par­ents have our Fire­fly DVDs. Includ­ing Seren­ity. Bah.

Sam really, really loves movies. Can you tell? I love my man. I wish he had a movie-​​viewing buddy nearby so he could see stuff in the actual theater.

Sam’s last day off is tomor­row. It’s been so good to have him home! I’m ter­ri­bly spoiled all the time, but more than a week with him at home has been absolutely incredible.

KT Tunstall’s “Big Black Horse & the Cherry Tree”

30 December 2007, 10:13 pm. 4 Comments. Filed under Music.


Sam just sent me a link to this video. Incred­i­ble! I’ll def­i­nitely be look­ing for more of her music.

I Have Done More Than Twittering!

23 December 2007, 6:19 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Family, Health, Kvetching, Needlework, Reading.

For one thing, I have sev­eral draft posts sit­ting around here, but I haven’t been able to stay focused long enough to fin­ish any of them.

Sam caught some kind of flu-​​like crud, which Katie and I both caught, of course. Now he seems to be get­ting it again, which is grossly unfair. Poor bear!

The girl is finally feel­ing a wee bit bet­ter, but she still had a fever last night. We aren’t with my fam­ily today, because we’re too wor­ried about get­ting the twins sick. They’re still so tiny!

I should be stitch­ing. I want to be stitch­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems that I need to add a good mag­ni­fier to my Ott Lite, and maybe get my eyes checked/​glasses changed, too. My eyes go all wog­gly every time I try to focus on the linen now. Very annoying!

One of the few things I have fin­ished lately is lots of library-​​enabled read­ing. That has included Bone of Con­tention and Chains of Folly by Roberta Gel­lis, the third and fourth books in her Magde­lene la Bâtarde series. Magde­lene is a whoremistress in medieval Eng­land whose House is reg­is­tered on the tax rolls an Embroi­dery shop. She and her women do, in fact, pro­duce and sell fine needle­work, but that isn’t their main source of income.

This is one of two series I learned about when I was read­ing rec.crafts.textiles.needlework. I’m glad, as would have been very unlikely to run across them with­out the recommendation.

I have some­thing to con­fess: I am guilty of judg­ing some books by their cov­ers. And if I’d seen Chains of Folly first, with­out already know­ing that Gel­lis is a good author and I enjoy this par­tic­u­lar series, I wouldn’t have had any rea­son to pick it up for a look. I might have taken it for a text­book edi­tion of some­thing fre­quently assigned to lit­er­a­ture classes (read: bor­ing!), but not the lat­est vol­ume in a good series by an estab­lished, award-​​winning author. Tor/​Forge pub­lished the first three, and they were of much higher qual­ity than what Five Star Books has put out.

That Tor/​Forge didn’t buy book four tells me that Gel­lis prob­a­bly had a con­tract for a tril­ogy, but it didn’t sell as well as the pub­lisher hoped, so they weren’t inter­ested in more of that tale. Still, I loved the first two books, and was def­i­nitely pay­ing atten­tion to see if there was a third, but didn’t hear that it was actu­ally out until recently. It was pub­lished in 2002! I know that Gel­lis is one of the authors I put in my Ama­zon “Eyes” list (which seems to have stopped work­ing at some point), and I didn’t hear a thing. I have to won­der if the pub­lisher just didn’t bother to mar­ket the book at all.

These days, Gel­lis is bet­ter known for co-​​authoring fan­tasy books with Mer­cedes Lackey. That’s too bad, as her his­tor­i­cal fic­tion is richly detailed and authen­tic. Lackey’s name has been used to sell so much crap that I just don’t bother any more, even if I like what the co-​​author has done on her own. Any­thing Lackey has touched in the last decade, at least, is for­mu­laic and trite. There were some good points in some of her ear­lier books, which I might even be able to re-​​read some day — but after the first few trilo­gies they were just too predictable.

I also read two books by Vicki Pet­ters­son this week, the lat­est book in Tanya Huff’s Con­fed­er­a­tion series, and Her Royal Spy­ness by Rhys Bowen. That last jumped off the new book shelves at me because of the cute name and nice cover. I don’t know that I’ll read any­thing else by Bowen, but it was an inter­est­ing depar­ture for me.

I’ve got sev­eral books of poetry and some non-​​fiction in the mix, as well. I tend to read those in lit­tle nib­bles, as I like to think about the poems rather than rat­tle on through them. I’ll share some of that soon.

Tweets for 12-​​22-​​2007

22 December 2007, 10:04 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Tweets.

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Tweets for 12-​​21-​​2007

21 December 2007, 10:07 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Tweets.

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