24 Hour Read-A-Thon

Doesn't that sound delicious?  Twenty-four hours of nothing but reading books, any books you want.  That's pretty much my idea of heaven.  I just heard about this a few minutes ago, so I haven't had time to make elaborate plans or anything.  (There are people on twitter who are baking right now, so that they have special snacks for the read-a-thon.  Baking!)  But here is a selection of possible books for tomorrow's word orgy:

Obviously, I'm not going to get all these read in 24 hours.  In fact, I may wake up tomorrow and pick something entirely different to read.  But these are at least a start.

If you want to sign up for the read-a-thon, too, you can do that here.

Oh, happy day.  Books!

In Flux

I don't know about you, but for me the week between Christmas and New Year's is always an odd one.  The old year is over, but the new one hasn't started yet.  It's a time for wrapping up old business and gearing up for the new.

For the old business, I'm mostly making sure that my book and knitting records are up-to-date, bills are paid, that kind of thing.  Reading the last of the holiday stories-- tonight's is Carol of the Bellskis, a m/m Hanukkah story.  And wrapping up a stray knitting project-- a hat made from the leftover yarn from my brother's Christmas socks that I intend to donate to a local homeless shelter.

For new business, I've started my first knitting project for myself.  It's this sack sock to collect all the random plastic bags that I keep finding all over my room.  (For someone who rarely leaves the house and shops almost exclusively online, I have a shocking number of plastic bags floating around the place.)  (Bonus, it will help me keep my room clean!)  I've picked up a couple of songs that inspire me for the beginning of a writing soundtrack.  I'm not working hard yet, but I'm poking in that direction.  And I've got my eye on a reading challenge over at Goodreads that should help me control the ebook buying issue.  I felt like crap today (monthly surge in symptoms, plus I'm just worn out from the past week or so), so no activity whatsoever, and no cleaning.  I think I might need the same for tomorrow.  But Wednesday, look out!  I'll poke around and do something or other.  My favorite Wii game encourages me to compete against myself, to always go just a little further, so once I get into it again that should help keep me motivated.

So, progress.

And with that, I will leave you with a picture.  I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back I discovered someone had stolen my spot.

It's a little hard to tell, because the bed is so cluttered.  But that green thing is the hat, almost finished then, and completed now.  There's also a cone of white/black/pink yarn that I'm using to make my sack sock.  I'm getting an interesting swirling stripe effect as it knits up.  I'll take a picture in a day or two, when I'm further along and it's easier to see what's going on.

'Night, all!

Today Was a Good Day

I had an excellent day today.  First of all, I had the house to myself all day long.  Mom and Dad went with their Sunday School class to some sort of Jesus museum.  (It had dinosaurs.  I don't even pretend to understand that one.)  Anyway, this place was a couple hours away, so between driving there, touring, having lunch and dinner, and driving home again, I didn't see them until 9pm.  It was lovely and peaceful.

And then the thing that I'd been waiting for since Wednesday finally happened.  My brand new Kindle arrived!  It's light and little and adorable.  I spent some time loading books for the quarterly reading challenge that started at midnight, and then I started a library book that I was able to download wirelessly onto the new Kindle.

As if all of that wasn't happy making enough, my name was drawn in a contest on twitter.  I got a free advance copy of Carina Press's holiday m/m anthology!  In it is a new story by one of my very favorite authors-- Josh Lanyon.  Woo hoo!

Some craft supplies that I'd ordered were delivered, and I ate queso dip and tortilla chips for dinner.  (I'm a grown up, I can eat whatever I want for dinner.  Also, my mommy wasn't here to say no.)

After that, Mom and Dad came home, and we talked about their trip, and then we watched about half an episode of Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives, which happened to feature a place here in Indianapolis and another place in Bucks County, PA (which is where we're from originally).  And then we all retreated to our rooms, Mom and Dad to zonk out in exhaustion, and me to watch some random stuff off the dvr and write this post.

Really, it was a fantastic day!

Loss and Gain

After multiple "you really look like you've lost weight" comments from my mom this week, I dragged out the Wii and checked.  (I haven't been feeling up to getting my Wii on lately, so it's been collecting dust for a while.)  Lo and behold, I've lost another 6.6 lbs.  That's a total of 22 lbs since the end of August.  I'm not really sure where it's come from, since I don't see the difference at all.  But 22 fewer lbs crushing down on my joints can only be a good thing.

And now on a completely different subject.  If you look over to the right, under the About Me section, you'll see a little ad.  In mid-January I signed up with a site called Swagbucks.  Basically, you're letting them market to you and in exchange you earn points that can be used toward "swag".  A lot of it is stuff I wouldn't be interested in, but they do have one piece of swag I can definitely use-- Amazon gift cards.  Got to feed the Kindle somehow!  So far I've earned $25 worth of Amazon gift cards, and I'm just over half way to earning another $5 card.  There are other gift cards available too, like Barnes & Noble, Travelocity, Paypal, Target, iTunes, or Starbucks.  If Swagbucks is something you think you'd be interested in, I'd appreciate it if you'd click on that banner or use this link to sign up: http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/fibrobabe.  I can earn a few points through referrals, and there's always another book I want to buy!

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Shamrock Shake

Happy Days Are Here Again!

Another round of good news on the medication front.  My doctor's office called this morning.  The makers of Savella (my other Fibro medication) approved my patient assistance, and there was 3 months worth of free meds waiting for me at the office!  Yay!  My Fibro meds are the only ones I take that are too new to have a generic, which means they are the most expensive.  Now that I'm getting both of them for free, my monthly med costs have gone down by about 3/4.  That's huge-- a significant line item in the monthly budget slashed.

In other news, I've got the Kindle down to 724 items.  So far it hasn't made a bit of difference.  In fact, the battery is dying even faster.  But that might be because of all the clicking around to delete stuff.  I'll go back to more normal usage for the next couple of days and see if there's any improvement.

And more good news-- I have a solid story idea to work on.  Last night I was thinking about a story I started almost 15 years ago and abandoned.  The actual pages are long gone at this point (trust me, it's no loss), but the idea lingered.  As I was falling asleep last night it fused with another scrap of an idea, and suddenly I have a viable story idea.  In the next few days I'm going to work on Kelley Armstrong's Outlining 101, and then I want to start writing March 1st.  I'm not going to push myself to NaNo it.  I'm afraid I'll flame out in a couple of days at that kind of pace.  But I'd definitely like to finish March with a nice chunk of pages.  I've also had a little bit of a brain wave about the story I was working on last fall during Discovery.  So I think I may end up outlining both at the same time.  We'll see how confused I get.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gingerale

Cleaning Up My Act

I've noticed lately that my Kindle is chewing through its charge at an alarming rate.  I don't leave the wireless on, so ideally it should be good for 10 days or so.  At a minimum it should last for 7 days.  My most recent charge lasted 4 days.

So today I called Amazon customer service.  Apparently, I have an astonishing number of files on my Kindle, more than almost anyone the rep has seen in the 3 years he's worked for Amazon.  There were only 837 files on my Kindle at the time, almost half of them samples.  And the K2 (the version I have) is supposed to hold 1,500 books.  So even if a sample takes up as much space as an entire ebook, I'm still only a little over half full.

I didn't really understand all the tech-speak, but I guess the problem isn't the number of files on my Kindle per se.  The problem is with one of the 837 files.  There's a glitch in one of them, and it's making the Kindle continuously try to index itself, which is eating up power.  Supposedly there's no way to figure out which file it is, so the only thing to do is delete as many excess files as possible.  Either the bad file will be deleted and the problem will stop, or with fewer files it will spend less time indexing.  As the number of files goes down, hopefully the battery life will go up.

I accept that there's probably no way to know for sure which file is causing the problem, but this still annoys me.  I barely ever leave my room, let alone the house, so it's not like I'm ever in great danger of being Kindle-less.  But the charge really should last longer, and I don't want to have to clear that much stuff off my Kindle!

It kind of boggles me that the customer service guy was so surprised by the number of samples I have.  I can't be the only weirdo who uses her Kindle the way I do.  I find shopping directly from the Kindle to be a bit of a pain.  Also, I spend a lot of time cruising around reading websites, so I probably hear about another 2-3 books I want to check out every day.  I pop on over to Amazon, download the sample, and move on with my day.  When I want a new book I go through the samples until I find something interesting, and then with a couple of clicks I can purchase directly from the Kindle.  I can be anywhere to do this, including a doctor's office or the bathroom (prime book buying locations for me, btw).  As far as I know, the Kindle can't tap in to your Amazon wishlist, so adding all those books I'm interested in to my wishlist just won't work as well for me.  (I do wishlist books that haven't been released yet, since there are no samples for those.  Then, I check the wishlist every once in a while, and anything I'm still interested in I'll sample.)

I spent a good bit of my reading time today working my way through samples and deleting books that I didn't love and won't be reading again.  But the rest of my day was spent trolling Goodreads and adding more samples.  So I'm only down to 829 items-- a net decrease of 8 files.  Unless I got really lucky and deleted the problem file, I'm pretty sure that's not going to make a difference to my battery life.  I guess I'm going to have to spend the next couple of days reading samples.  That's fun in its own way, I guess, but I'd rather do it on my own schedule!

Why Can't They All Be Ebooks?

Small pet peeve time, folks.  As I'm sure I've mentioned 8,000 times around here, I love my ebooks.  Now that I've moved into a tiny room with no bookshelves and no storage, they are vital to my existence.  That's not hyperbole, y'all.  If it weren't for ebooks there'd be no books at all.  And I can't live like that.

So why, oh why, must so there be so many books I want to read that don't have a digital edition?  In the last week I've been all over Josh Lanyon (in the metaphorical sense), and now I want to try some f/f fiction.  (Apparently it's Gay Week here in The Little Bedroom in Indiana.)  I've done some research.  I found a title that comes highly recommended.  It looks like it has a lot of humor.  Score!  Except that it doesn't have a digital version.  No score!  No score!

The problem isn't so much that I want to buy, download, and begin reading an ebook while never leaving my bed (the only sitting surface in my bedroom), because I could buy it off Amazon and have it delivered right to the house without having to risk contamination by any of that icky ice and snow that's going around right now.  The problem is, once I have it, what do I do with it?  It's gone beyond a little scary and right into "call the EPA" at the moment.  I desperately need to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!  Or more realistically, CLEAN SOME OF THE THINGS!  If one more thing comes into this room, it may just pop like a zit.  (Now there's an image for you.)

So all that means, no lovely, funny f/f story to read.  It makes me very sad.  The moral of this story?  (My mother would say it's "clean your room," but that is never the moral of any of my stories.)  Publishers, put out digital versions, please.  Because those of us with small living spaces and snow allergies want to read your books, too.

Off My Game

I'm feeling weepy and out of whack today.  Too much news, too much misery, not enough sleep.  Troubbie the Wonder Cat woke me up at quarter to six this morning wanting to be fed.  (Yes, he's still alive.)  I have a doctor's appointment this morning, and I have something I'm scared to show her.  Think it's an abscess that will need to be lanced, possibly requiring minor surgery and costing a million dollars.  The book I've been reading, The Awakening by L.J. Smith, is angsty and depressing.  Only 50 pages or so to left, and I don't want to go there today.

So what should I read?  I'm seriously considering breaking my self-imposed book buying moratorium and downloading a book for the Kindle.  What do you suggest?  Something happy happy, please.

Alien Revealed by Lilly Cain

I'm not calling this a review because it's really more of a recommendation.  Alien Revealed is hot, sexy fun.  The scifi world that Cain has created is interesting, and I'm hoping this is the beginning of a series.  I liked Alinna and I really like David.  There's some bondage, not super intense, but just a heads up.  I know it's not everyone's thing.  My only gripe is that it starts a wee bit slow-- Alinna and David don't start interacting together until page 18, which is pretty far in when the story is only 112 pages long.

This is a Carina Press title and can be purchased from all the usual vendors.  But I recommend if your reader can handle epub that you hightail it over to Kobo Books by the end of the day today.  They've got a $2 coupon running this weekend, which makes this an absolute steal.  The coupon code is "twodollars".  Enjoy!

And just so we're clear, I don't work for Harlequin or Kobo, and I don't know Lilly Cain or any other Carina Press authors, as far as I know.  I just enjoyed a good book and a good deal, and I thought you would, too.