November 20th, 2006

Quick business note, here. Last weekend I happened to notice that a legitimate comment got swallowed by Kurt’s Mighty Mighty Spam Filter. I usually wouldn’t even know this, but the system emailed it to me instead of just dumping it on the floor (though it did not post said comment, so the filtering part was in order). Why it sometimes emails me and sometimes doesn’t is a mystery I have not yet solved. At any rate, after fooling around with the blocker and such, I realized that anything in a comment marked http:// will be marked up by the commenting software prior to posting, and that the spam blocker reads that as two URLs. So, remember when I said limit your URLs to four? Your new limit is one. Feel free to post as many comments as you need to in order to pass along the URLs you’re dying to give me. Thanks.

Alright, admit it, you didn’t think I could do a whole week of posting daily. We’ll see if I can make it two.

So, the snow didn’t come last week, and we are actually supposed to hit mid-sixties this week. Thus the thing that had become a trend to me, snow before Thanksgiving two years in a row, seems to have ended. However, there was frost everywhere this morning, sub 30 degree temps, and the windshield had to be scraped.

Today I went into a (small, very organized) used book shop I’d never been in before and found Elizabeth Bear’s new book Blood and Iron. I snapped it up with great eagerness, unable to believe my luck. In the last two months I’ve almost bought it like four different times, but the price tag is just a little too steep for me. To be fair, I did buy the whole Jenny series out and out, so I’m not totally stealing food out of the author’s mouth. I also referred to my experience of salivating over Blood and Iron as “almost buying it at the unused books store” which my husband thought hilarious. I’m not sure why. I checked for Dhalgren and Little, Big while I was there, but no dice.

So even with my reading holiday coming up (I mentally think of my visits to my in-laws’ gorgeous lakeside home as reading holidays. They don’t care at all if I just hole up and read all day, only communicating at meal times. Their house is a reader’s heaven of comfy chairs and huge windows with tons of natural light.), I think I may have more books that I want to read next! now! today! than I can realistically take care of over this anticipated vacation. So, I’m thinking about posting a list of a dozen and picking the top five recommended ones to bring with me. Stay tuned. There’s always at least one book foisted onto me while I’m there (last year it was The Kite-Runner. Visit before that it was The Da Vinci Code) so I have to leave some space for that.

I keep hearing about the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries. I’m starting to feel guilty about eating sushi.

I need to buy seville oranges, but all the local grocery stores only seem to carry navel. Ideas?

P.S. Deirdra I fixed your comment by dropping one of the URL’s and reposting it. Thanks, that studio is just down the street and I’m going to check it out as soon as I can and maybe take a class or two with different folks to see if any suits me.

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