I’m get­ting tired of answer­ing ques­tions at Yed­da or Yahoo!Answers, then see­ing my answers scraped and used as con­tent on oth­er peo­ple’s blogs. I’m prob­a­bly going to keep answer­ing the ques­tions, but just answer­ing with a point­er to a post here or at one of my oth­er sites. Ordi­nar­i­ly, I’d put this par­tic­u­lar answer over at anoth­er site, but I’m rebuild­ing it right now.

And now I have it, too. Damn it. I had tried to get back to blog­ging dai­ly, but good inten­tions just did­n’t hold a can­dle against the entire house­hold com­ing down with the flu.¹

For some rea­son I thought Tam­i­flu was a one or two-pill affair, but I sup­pose I had it con­fused with one of the oth­er antivi­rals. I have to take this for ten days! And appar­ent­ly it gives quite a few peo­ple stom­ach flu symp­toms on top of the mis­ery they’re already in or try­ing to avoid. Hap­pi­ly, that isn’t hap­pen­ing to me so far.

I’m not feel­ing very chat­ty, though. So I think I’m going to curl up with the new deliv­ery of mail­box books from the library and apply myself to some brain­less read­ing. Any­thing that requires brain will have to be sent back and request­ed again some oth­er time, because I won’t be able to appre­ci­ate it. (I admit­ted that I was sick when I kept re-read­ing the same few pages of Halt­ing State with absolute­ly no trace of com­pre­hen­sion.) Now I wish I’d made dif­fer­ent selec­tions!

I’ve tried all the dif­fer­ent plu­g­ins that claim to work with Word­Press for cross-post­ing to Live­Jour­nal, but recent­ly I’ve got­ten errors from every­thing. I’ve asked for help from the authors in their forums and noth­ing seemed to be hap­pen­ing. And then I saw this: Banned Because of Live+Press’ Bad Behav­ior. That’s from the cur­rent main­tain­er of Live+Press, the plu­g­in I’ve had the best luck with over­all.

The fol­low­ing was post­ed to a mail­ing list I’m on. Of course, it was sur­round­ed with the usu­al “send it to every­body you know!” admo­ni­tions. I don’t do that, and I usu­al­ly delete any­thing so marked. But I did find the infor­ma­tion use­ful, so (after edit­ing a bit, I admit), I am repost­ing it. I made no mate­r­i­al changes, and take no cred­it for the infor­ma­tion there­in. I’d be hap­py to give cred­it to the orig­i­nal author if I can find any cred­itable attri­bu­tion.

Walk­ing Dead by C.E. Mur­phy

My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve enjoyed the oth­er Walk­er Papers nov­els, but Walk­ing Dead def­i­nite­ly showed more depth and matu­ri­ty than the ear­li­er vol­umes. Both the author and her lead char­ac­ter have grown very nice­ly. Joanne is far from per­fect, but she does­n’t make the same mis­takes over and over again, which is a pet peeve of mine and occurs all too often in some oth­er authors works. (There’s con­sis­ten­cy, and then there’s refus­ing to learn from mis­takes to the extent that I have to believe that a char­ac­ter is too stu­pid to live.) As for the author, it’s incred­i­bly refresh­ing to read a series that does not fall into the all-too-famil­iar para­nor­mal romance for­mu­la!

I updat­ed the Warn­ing: Fat Lady Ahead page (final­ly!) today. The resources page had to be split into a sep­a­rate page.

Katie seems to be feel­ing a bit bet­ter. She slept through most of the day, and just got up a few min­utes ago (right at the end of my and Sam’s date) feel­ing like she could eat some­thing. Sol­id food, even! That’s progress. Since she did­n’t have any antivi­rals, I don’t think this was real­ly the flu. She should still be much sick­er if it was. I’m not at all unhap­py about that.

My girl has the flu! And she had not one, but two flu shots this year! She caught it from her sweet­ie down at Geor­gia Tech, and if there’s a place in Geor­gia that’s more inter­na­tion­al than the air­port, that’s it. So I sup­pose it’s one of those strains that she was­n’t vac­ci­nat­ed against. But still!

The young infec­tion vec­tor was giv­en a pre­scrip­tion for Tam­i­flu, but I haven’t heard much more about his con­di­tion since the vis­it to the stu­dent clin­ic. She’s bare­ly able to stay upright, but want­ed to go down to stay with him (his moth­er appar­ent­ly hav­ing offered her a ride dur­ing one of her trips to deliv­er a care pack­age). He kind­ly offered to take care of her so as to avoid infect­ing the bear and I. As sweet as that is, I don’t real­ly think it wise to have the two sick kids depen­dent on each oth­er, no mat­ter how good their inten­tions may be.

Yes, I am a Mean, Mean Mom­my, but she’s sleep­ing too much to real­ly protest. There’s also the fact that she can’t stand to speak much due to the sore throat. Of course, she’s curled up in our bed, which is the pre­ferred refuge for sick chil­dren, even when they’re All Grown Up at 19. Kyoshi is keep­ing a close eye on her, with breaks to check on the angle of sun­light in the kitchen and liv­ing room.

That should­n’t be worth post­ing about, but it took more work than it should have. Sum­ma­ry: I prob­a­bly should have stuck with Log­itech wire­less keyboard/mouse com­bi­na­tions, because I did­n’t have a prob­lem with the pre­vi­ous set I had and nev­er had occa­sion to call their tech­ni­cal sup­port. But since I bought a Microsoft prod­uct, it was worth­while to hound them until they came through on their war­ran­ty, despite the fact that the expe­ri­ence was some­what painful.

By Blood We Live by John Joseph Adams

My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
This thing is an enor­mous tome! I don’t know if it has been released in hard­back or not, but if it has, that ver­sion has to be anchor-wor­thy. I request­ed it from the library because Eliz­a­beth Bear and Sarah Mon­ette had sto­ries in it, and I’ll read pret­ty much any­thing either of those wor­thies pub­lish. I did­n’t expect to care for most of the rest, and did­n’t plan to do much more than flip through them.