In Dreams

The last dream I had this morning before the alarm blared was really, fantastically neat.

I was at a bookstore, probably a Borders, considering the shelf height. I went to the Scifi section and there were all these great books, something about a elfin detective (it had great cover art, and it was a series and they all looked good), and a fantasy Kingdom inside a kid's closet...

And a whole shelf of Doctor Who novels I hadn't seen before. There was a Doctor I hadn't seen before, and some anthology type books, different Companions with different Doctors, stuff like that.

And right there with them, Del Rey edition like the Conan books, was a collection of short stories where Barbara Gordon, as Batgirl, was the Doctor's Companion.

It made me laugh a little when I woke up.

Oh yeah, I finished "Twilight Streets". It was a great read. I keep being impressed how good all the Torchwood tie-in novels are. I've still got my Forever Knight tie-in novels, and I don't know that I'd pick them up again, but I'm not getting rid of them either. I know I've tried reading a Highlander tie-in or two, and couldn't get anywhere. So far all the Torchwood books, especially "Border Princes" and "Slow Decay" have been really great- they're great enough that I'd rec them to people who haven't seen the show. And as much as they're a punch in the wallet, price-wise, I really do like them being hardcover, they feel excellent in your hands while you're reading them.

Top Ten (+1 Honorable Mention) Vampire Books

For Julie. Since I can think of this list much faster than the "you must read this" list. ^_^ Aaaaand, they're not in any particular order.



The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Companions of the Night by Vivian Vande Velde

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice

The first five Anita Blake novels by Laurel K. Hamilton

Necroscope by Brian Lumley (actually not a book I like, but it certainly has it's effect)

Demon Under Glass by DL Warner

Blood Alone by Masayuki Takano



The honorable mention goes to Gerald Tarrant of the Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman.

SWEET AWESOMENESS

OMG LOOK AT HOW COOL THESE ARE AND I MADE THEM ALL BY MYSELF AND THEY'RE TOTALLY FREAKING SWEET!!! YESSSSSSSSS!!!

There's a what in the fridge?

Off the back of my Kroger Brand Coffee. In the spirit of the OMG Cholesterol pic. First, I didn't know there was a "wet" section in the fridge/freezer. Secondly, what do you keep in there?

I bought a new French cuff shirt yesterday, nice cream colored thing with a woven-in sort of pinstripe thing that makes little boxes in the fabric. It made me wish there was a Taxonomy of Men's Shirts site. It's got a strange collar/cuff variation that I couldn't spot on Wikipedia- there's a corner taken out of the cuffs when they're folded over and cuff linked in place. Same thing with the collar- instead of coming to a proper triangle point they sort of swoop back like someone took the corner off them too. I wore the shirt with my keyhole cuff links. ^_^

Oh right. Reason I needed a new shirt was that I was really nervous about Fiction Writing class. We were having our first workshop and Aubrey and I did our stories first, and sent them in over the weekend for people to write critiques about. Faced with fifteen random people who'd read something I'd written in three days (it was assigned late Tuesday night, due Friday, had to do research for it...) I was wanting to climb out a window rather than hear how much they hated it. Anxiety shopping is bad, but... Anyway, turns out no one hated it. A lot of people liked it, a lot of people never read fantasy of any sort and were a little confused by the whole thing, a lot of people thought a sort of minor character was a lot more important than she was. There were a few "explain this more" bits, and someone didn't know the word "warren" (did i miss something and it went out of usage?). The teacher was very impressed I did twelve pages in the amount of time I was given, but told me he thought the story was longer than I'd written it; it was, I just had three days and realized I couldn't hack out the 25-35 pages I thought it was, so I wrapped it up where I could. He liked that answer. (another out of usage moment- apparently "jimmy olsen" is a very dated reference- i forgot Superman was canceled in the 1950s.....?). Apparently I need to tell people the story takes place in England because the hints of "sweets", "petrol stations", "football" (combined with) "Manchester" (in the same sentence), "Blackpool", about five hundred mentions of "toffee", and the curse word "shite" weren't enough clues. I did use the word "gibbous" to describe some moons. It was very awesome to do that; I hope Howard could hear me. The best compliment of the night was a lot of people wanted to see more of the story and know where the character was going. The other best compliment of the night was the teacher telling us some quote about how some people have novels inside them and some have short stories; he then told me I have the breadth of novels in me.

Um. Oh. Right. My friend Allison started a webcomic. It's pretty. There's only about three pages right now, but they're really pretty. Maybe you should go look at them? Forewarning, she's got a splash page up right now with a mermaid on it; you can guess why that's not worksafe. Seafoam.

Great Success!

I hope you heard the title of the blog post in Borat's voice, because that's totally how I'm using it.

I've got bad knees; they've dislocated several times in the past and I've broken one of them. I've got asthma. Pretty much I shouldn't be jogging. Or even thinking about jogging. Back when I used to dislocated them a lot, probably thinking about jogging would have dislocated one...

So, I started jogging. Not full on jogging, but I've been cutting up my walk with some jogging, and most of it has been down this one hill. When I first started jogging I'd have to stop after about twenty seconds, or two mailboxes. But as the weeks have gone by it's been more mailboxes and longer counts until I could almost hit the end of the street.



The top of the street is the higher gold star, by the way. So I'd jog really hard and make it to the red star before I thought I couldn't do any more.

But tonight, just as I'm getting done with my stretches at the top of the hill my iPod put on OK Go's You're so Hot, which is a pretty darn good motivational song, and I figured I'd try for the end of the street again. And I'm running and running and I get most of the way there and I'm like 'Let's see if we can get to the first house on the next street.'. And I do! So I'm thinking 'Let's see if we can get to the first house on the next street.'. And I do! So I just keep running until the end of the song, which wasn't really that much longer but by then I was huffing and puffing and the dog was staring at me like I'm evil since I drag her along on these things too.

And that was Two Minutes and Thirty-Eight Seconds of running! Which is the most I've done so far, or possibly ever. Asthma and knees considering. All I could think of was this I Can Has Cheezburger-esque dog I saw online.



We stayed out til I clocked 45 minutes of running and walking, not that there was that much more running. Nothing that epic, at least. And as we were coming up the street at the very end Orbital's version of the Doctor Who theme started playing, which is really thematic. And awesome.

I took a look at the Extreme Makeover guy's Two Week fitness plan a few days ago and it sort of scared/creeped me out. He promises some serious results, but he wants an hour and a half of cardio work a day, and for you to only have one meal and two protein shakes. (I explained this to Mom and watched her eyes light up like it was Christmas) What he's hoping for is for you to burn 1,500 to 2,000 calories in your workout, and consume a piece of chicken and a salad, which leaves you in a huge calorie negative. And he wants you to do this for two weeks. Granted it's two weeks only, and then you're on to something less (or more, foodwise), but still. (Mom's eyes were still lit up and she started trying to explain to me that that's the only way to lose weight. To be negative in the calorie count) (which is really, really scary). I'm amazed people don't get sick or hurt doing it.

And while we were doing the second lap I saw something really scary. One of my neighbors has these...things...on her porch. My Grandma used to have this three foot tall faceless doll that stood up on it's own and faced the wall, like it was in time out. It gave me the creeps. She thought it was really cute, though. On this porch there's two things that really look like that, only they haven't got heads. They're planters of some kind, with flowers coming out the top. I found them incredibly unnerving.

Also, I dropped 2% in body fat, but nothing in weight. That's still good, right? Not sure how much good though...

Edit: Weighed myself again (the other thing was from last night, but I was just really excited after my run, so I didn't care about the whole morning/night weighing thing) and this time it's three pounds less (than last night) same (2% drop) in body fat.

Hrm.

Haven't felt much like blogging lately. I quit checking Google Analytics so I have no idea if I've any readers anymore which helped a lot with wanting to post. Haven't felt much like writing either, even though I keep opening Rome and typing a scene or so a week, I guess. It's nothing like the 10k days I'm capable of when I'm full of coffee and the words won't stop. Maybe it's the weather?

School starts this Thursday for those with Thursday classes. I'm not one of them so I start next Monday. Film 2 and Fiction Writing this summer. Hopefully it'll shake out as well as Film 1 and Field Archaeology did last summer.

Blah. Wish I had a picture of something I'd cooked I could jam right here. There's some banana bread cooling downstairs since Mom kept forgetting to eat the bananas I bought for her and they got all brown and repulsive, though they were repulsive to me while they were yellow too. It's not really photogenic, so just imagine a brown loaf full of mashed walnuts and squishy banana bits. Shudder.

Been playing Rock Band at Aryeh's house a lot. A LOT. I can't do anything but sing since I haven't got the rythem skills to play anything. And I haven't got the range for anything with a female lead, or Sting. Which means no Roxanne which is just a sign this is a cruel and unjust universe. Shouldn't we all be able to sing Roxanne? However, I can own Oasis' Don't Look Back In Anger. Aryeh's wife swore that Perfect Drug couldn't be done, and when I proved her wrong I got Chocolate Mousse Cheesecake for a reward.

Started learning to knit. So far it hasn't really gone anywhere beyond noob level scarves. I did one with alternating colors, like a Harry Potter scarf only it's navy and cream and the colors change mid row since I was trying to figure out how you'd do it right. I did this really long, narrow cream one (maybe the same color as the other scarf? the ball wasn't labeled) that looks like a "tape worm stuffed animal". I kept screwing up the ends of the rows and not knitting them back in so instead of being rectangle shaped everything I knit was a pyramid that kept going out... My friend's mom showed me what I was doing wrong, but it wasn't until about eight feet of scarf later that the nice lady at Strings and Strands showed me how you end the thing. One of the customers this weekend told me about a knitting meet up at The Whole Nine Yards, so I'm heading over there Tuesday night. The lady at Strings and Strands also showed me these blankets she'd done with several strands of yarn being used as one at once- not to make a pattern, but different colors and textures. I thought I'd try it out with this pale lemon and pale pink yarn we've got, and while I like the color effect up close it's too pale and from two feet away you've got no way to see there's two colors, but it's sort of a pale strawberry now. Nice looking, actually.

Watched the first part of "The Andromeda Strain" remake. It was scary. Now I feel really itchy. Too much scary disease stuff for me, I think.

Wow Photoshop

Apparently there's a setting in Photoshop to make it look like you can actually draw. Not just the thing that makes sketchy lines, but I mean, it makes you look like you have real drawing skills. Woot.