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Fall has fell The trees are bare I wonder where the birdies are?
Happy Halloween/Blessed Samhain! | |
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Daylight Saving Time ends tonight in the US. Turn your clocks BACK one hour when you go to bed. | |
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I just finished Lauren Willig's The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. Why did no one tell me of this book before? I mean, I had heard of it, but no one mentioned it was so far up my alley it's practically in the next street.
The reviews made it sound rather Scarlet Pimpernelish. And it is, kind of, but that's not all. What it really is is a Regency romance with a pair of intelligent and witty protagonists who drive each other crazy as they fall in love. Plus the frame story of a historian researching dashing English spies is a delight, with a romance brewing there as well.
When the book ends, Eloise (the historian) is off to the Purple Gentian's descendent's country house to investigate further. There are several more books, which should keep me happily occupied for a while. | |
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Rosemary and Rue, by Seanan McGuire, is a welcome return to the roots of urban fantasy, which originally meant Faerie intruding in a modern urban setting, in this case San Francisco. October Daye is a changeling, half human, half fae. She is a private investigator and in the service of a powerful faerie duke. As the story begins, she is trying to track down the duke's abducted wife and daughter, but things go horribly wrong. After fourteen years out of circulation, Toby is trying to pick her life back up again, working as a late-night supermarket cashier and avoiding the fae as much as possible. But when her former mentor/patron is murdered, Toby is sucked back in.
The plot of this is classic murder mystery, private investigator subtype. But the real charm is the interaction between our world and the world of Faerie. Toby is an appealing character, strong but flawed and damaged by life.
There are two sequels in the works; I am eagerly looking forward to them. | |
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I just emailed Verizon again about the bounced emails (a few trickled few, but the vast majority bounced). Any bets on whether it'll help? (Personally, I'll be surprised if they even acknowledge my query.) | |
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I hab a code id de head ad a dup-dup doze. | |
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I recently read (okay, skimmed) the new, authorized Pooh sequel, Return to the Hundred-Acre Wood. It's not awful, but there's no spark. And the new character, Lottie the Otter, turns out to be quite annoying. Doubly so since she's the only girl (Kanga's a mom, not a playmate), and she's vain, bossy, and full of herself. Ugh!
Don't bother with this; read the original two again instead. | |
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Aaaaaaaand, it's been three days and I still haven't heard from Verizon. So much for getting back to me "within one business day."
But at least I'm getting my emails. | |
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I haven't heard back yet from Verizon (didn't expect to, their site says "within one business day" and this is Sunday--fair enough), but the email bounce problem seems to have resolved itself. No idea whether my contacting them made any difference. | |
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I hate!hate!hate! company contact webpages that force you to choose categories, none of which fit my question, then won't let me send the email. DO NOT WANT!
Yahoo did the former recently; I was able to send the email--twice, choosing two different wrong categories--but they then never responded. Verizon just did both. When I picked "support" as being closest to what I wanted, they dropped me on their FAQ page--which I had just unsuccessfully searched, which is why I was trying to email them.
GAH!
(Why do I need support? A mailing list I subscribe to is being bounced. I haven't had a message get through in weeks.) | |
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Good: I-Con will be returning to SUNY Stony Brook next year after all, instead of being at Suffolk Community College again.
Bad: It has also been moved to the last weekend in March, and I'm scheduled to work that Sunday.
Good: I can either find someone to switch with or only go on Saturday (which I often do anyway).
Bad: It wasn't in my budget, since I hadn't planned to go while it was at Suffolk CC. | |
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When I moved into this apartment, the overhead light in my small kitchen was this large, stained glass chandelier-type thing, which hung down almost two feet:  I like stained glass (although salmon is not a color I would have chosen), but this thing would have looked much better in a large room with a cathedral ceiling. I finally got tired of dodging it when I needed to get into the top cupboards, and hitting it with the mop when I'm wringing it out at the sink, and asked the super if I could buy a new one. He said yes, so I did, and he put it up today. Ta-da!  (The side of the fridge, visible in the lower right corner, is the end of the kitchen area. And that's my tomato plant in the window.) | |
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I got my trifocals yesterday evening, in trade for my progressives. It will take a little while to get used to the third lens, but it's already a vast improvement over the progressives. My only complaint with these so far is that the reading lens is surprisingly skinny. Bigger frames would fix that, but the lenses are already pretty thick at the corners, and bigger is worse.
These lenses are thicker than my last several, because the high-index plastic wasn't available in trifocals. (That's the only reason I tried the progressives at all.) But it's okay. | |
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As of this morning, I have lost all of the weight I gained on the cruise. Hooray!
Now to lose more.... | |
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This morning, I went back to the optician to trade my progressive lenses for trifocals. (It takes a week for the lenses to come in, of course.) It's been a bit more than two weeks, and the progressives are still driving me crazy. The seasickness passed off after the first night, and the warping when I move my head is less. I could probably live with the remainder. But having pages be fuzzy around the edges is Not Acceptable. Books are bad enough (they're relatively small, so the effect is relatively slight)--magazines and newspapers are impossible. So are computer screens. The whole point of new lenses was to make computer use easier--not infinitely worse. Pass! | |
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