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.

More specif­i­cal­ly (I hope), some­thing in it. Not Sam, hap­pi­ly, but every time I go in there, I’m all stuffed up with­in a few min­utes.

We keep that room closed and have a win­dow a/c unit in there, because the house a/c just does­n’t keep up so well.¹ I’m won­der­ing if there’s some­thing about the air not cir­cu­lat­ing to the rest of the house that’s caus­ing dust to set­tle in there?

The cat is sel­dom allowed in the room at all, and we don’t have any oth­er pets. There aren’t any plants in the room.

We haven’t been using the air clean­ers, because I can only get their fil­ters by mail-order and just did­n’t get around to get­ting new ones. I guess I need to order them and see if that helps.

Bah.

In nicer news, the girl and I went to the nice library today. I had gone through my “to-read” shelf at Good Reads and request­ed a bunch of books. More of them than I expect­ed came through all at one time, where­upon I learned that they allow a max­i­mum of 75 books to be checked out at once. Whoops! I had to put two back.

I have plen­ty to read now, though!

That was not pain­less at all. The import fea­ture is tetchy, at best. I had to go through the entire list of 1300+ books and fix their “book­shelf” assign­ments, and add some that just did­n’t import at all. I had over 1400 books in Now Read­ing, and I haven’t quite fig­ured out why there are few­er books in Good Reads. Oh well. It’s pret­ty much done!

The dates I’d read books, my rat­ings, and my reviews did NOT trans­fer to Good Reads, which is high­ly annoy­ing.

I was able to go through and update a bunch of books that I’ve read since NR stopped work­ing, and use the to-read cat­e­go­ry to request books from the library. As a result, there are 33 books await­ing pick­up now, and anoth­er 61 pend­ing (most­ly books that are real­ly new or not yet avail­able). That does­n’t include the inter-library loan items I request­ed.¹

Sam and I had bonus gam­ing time tonight. He’s stor­ing up brown­ie points before Dragon*Con. Katie, unfor­tu­nate­ly, could­n’t sleep last night, then slept all day until about 11:30. Now she’s re-hydrat­ing and get­ting some food now. I hope she can go back to sleep. She’s def­i­nite­ly hav­ing a fibro flare. 🙁

Yes, the girl and I man­aged a library run (to the GOOD library) on Fri­day. It took more time and ener­gy than expect­ed, of course, but we got a bunch of very good books.

I read My Big Fat Super­nat­ur­al Hon­ey­moon last night, with much gig­gling. The sto­ries were a bit uneven (nor­mal for an anthol­o­gy), but worth­while over­all.

I espe­cial­ly liked “Heo­rot,” the Har­ry Dres­den piece from Jim Butch­er. I love the way he brings in mythol­o­gy from so many dif­fer­ent cul­tures.

Kel­ly Arm­strong’s “Stalked” was fun, too. Her were­wolves are just more wolfish than most, in my opin­ion.

P.N. Elrod’s “Her Moth­er’s Daugh­ter” was­n’t bad at all. I’ve obvi­ous­ly missed some of her Jack Flem­ing nov­els, and I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up.

I want to find some of Mar­jorie M. Liu’s longer works, as “Where the Heart Lives” isn’t the first of her short sto­ries that have impressed me. What’s even bet­ter is that WtHL is a total depar­ture from the ear­li­er sto­ries I remem­ber.

New tiles for the Uroko house

Orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by akamé

I sup­pose it could be called a Book­case Tree, because of its iasic deis­ngn. It would­n’t be the best choice of design for sleep­ing quar­ters for a claus­tro­phone lke me, and pro­crati­na­tors wpuld find it even hard­er to quit read­ing and go to sleep. I would love to have this for a lit­tle one

Warn­ing: The fol­low­ing pho­to may engen­der extreme reac­tions in bib­lio­philes. View with cau­tion.

Well, that’s what it felt like. Poor Sam had to take time off from work, because it was Pain Doc Day. The pain doc­tor is off in the wilds of Cobb Coun­ty, because that’s where we lived when I start­ed see­ing a pain doc­tor, and it’s darn near impos­si­ble to get a ref­er­ence to a new one (much less trust that a new one will, in fact, keep writ­ing pre­scrip­tions for the meds that actu­al­ly work). Then we head­ed to Big Ware­house Store to get the RXs filled, and also hit the bank and the post office because they’re just so much fun! And then it was time to go see the friend­ly ther­a­pist lady.

Hap­pi­ly, we were able to game off and on dur­ing the day, which made the whole busi­ness far more pleas­ant than it would have been oth­er­wise. And we picked up a great big bag of fat-lady clothes from a nice freecy­cler! Some of them are so cool the girl is eying them cov­etous­ly, so I need to be sure they go to my room and don’t wan­der off to hers.

While we were gone, though, a sweet fairy girl washed our quilt and com­forter! Sam put fresh sheets on the bed, so I’ll be crawl­ing into a nice, clean bed next to a fresh­ly-show­ered, cud­dly man soon. That part of the day, I’m look­ing for­ward to!

My cre­ative time today was spent web­mistress­ing. I tweaked some Word­Press tem­plates to work bet­ter, and moved more stuff over from my old site for­mat to Word­Press. It may not seem like much, but I always rewrite and update as I do that, so I fig­ure it counts.

Sam and I had lots of fun in our game tonight. It’s a lit­tle weird to real­ize that some­one is an avatar of a deity and that not only does he not know it, he’s nowhere near ready to real­ize it. Then there’s the whole issue of not let­ting that lit­tle fact slip at all, because an entire race of peo­ple is wait­ing for his return (and they real­ly, real­ly need him now, of course).

I real­ly should go to the library tomor­row, but I don’t know if Sam will have time to dri­ve me there. I have books to return and books on hold to pick up. I’d best go to bed now, to improve my chances of wak­ing ear­ly enough to ask him.

I need to give Kioshi some extra scritchies, though, and I’m think­ing about Jen and her fam­i­ly, who had to let go of their newest feline fam­i­ly mem­ber today—he had feline leukemia. I always think of our Andre and Tom-Tom when­ev­er feleuk comes up. I’m glad Kioshi did­n’t catch it from his par­ents, as our babies and theirs prob­a­bly did. Please, vac­ci­nate all of your pets! Even if you don’t ever plan for them to go out­side!

Please note: Yes, I am refer­ring to today, the 12th, which is my birth­day. Those close to me know that I gen­er­al­ly hate my birth­day, as it’s a reminder of mul­ti­ple mis­car­riages and oth­er nasty things hap­pen­ing around this time sev­er­al years in a row.

Sam and Katie man­aged to make #41 very nice, though.

Sam and I went out Sat­ur­day evening to Barnes & Noble, but I just could­n’t make a deci­sion. So many choic­es! We went over to Out­Write, too, which is always fun. I saw lots of adorable trin­kets there, and plen­ty of inter­est­ing read­ing and lis­ten­ing mate­r­i­al, but still could­n’t make a choice. I real­ly liked this mug, and it felt great in my hand, but I could­n’t find out if it’s microwave safe. (My favorite cof­fee cup was bro­ken recent­ly, vic­tim of my unre­li­able grip. Thank you, fibro/arthritis/CMP!) Have any of you tried a Quotable mug? How did it hold up?

Oh! On the way home, we start­ed to dri­ve past Krispy Kreme and Sam had a sud­den need for donuts, so we popped in there to sat­is­fy that. I’ve nev­er done the dri­ve-through there before, but things were real­ly crowd­ed in the store. The car line was long, too, but we had the advan­tage of pri­va­cy and good com­pa­ny while wait­ing in it.

We enjoyed being out, but I came home with­out hav­ing cho­sen any­thing but donut fill­ings. Sam threat­ened to pick for me if I did­n’t make a choice on Sun­day. I have a lot of trou­ble spend­ing any mon­ey on myself, or ask­ing for presents, and he thought that’s why I had­n’t cho­sen any­thing.

So we went out again on Sunday—leaving the house two days in a row is very unusu­al for me any more! I had final­ly decid­ed on exact­ly what I want­ed, and we tried to go get it, but found the place closed for Vet­er­an’s Day. My man insist­ed on tak­ing me to Bor­ders and buy­ing Kim Har­rison’s A Few Demons More, promis­ing that we’d also go to The Place again on Mon­day. Then he took me to Steak & Shake for din­ner, because when I saw the sign I had a seri­ous crav­ing for their mush­room-swiss burg­er. (Don’t both­er with the new Por­to­bel­lo mush­room burg­er, as you get far few­er mush­rooms that way!)

Katie and I (she’s home from school, sick) had a very nice, low-key day Mon­day, and Sam and I set out again after he got home. This time, suc­cess!

I asked for some­thing that prob­a­bly seems odd to most people—a non-res­i­dent library card so I can access the best library sys­tem in Geor­gia, Gwin­nett Coun­ty Pub­lic Libraries. But I’d checked, and they have 95% of the books I’m real­ly want­i­ng to read, and past expe­ri­ence says they’ll con­tin­ue to car­ry the fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion I love. They have a far bet­ter selec­tion of every­thing than Dekalb, where we live. (Okay, Gwin­nett has stopped car­ry­ing music CDs, because so many went miss­ing. Big deal.)

I want­ed the card instead of a few books, because this way I can read all of them! And, in fact, we came home with nine books that have all been on my wish list for some time, and two or three graph­ic nov­els for Sam.

Now I have a whole pile of new-to-me books, and A Few Demons More! They’re all way too tempt­ing to a girl who still has home­work to do, includ­ing a SWOT analy­sis that’s due for my man­age­ment class this week.

Thanks to all of you for the birth­day wish­es via Face­book, email, Twit­ter, LJ, etc. 🙂