Enough With the Tattoos

I've read two book recently, both published within the last year, with heroes who are presented as scary, intimidating guys.  Why do the heroines feel this way?  What's the cue that these guys are threatening, criminal, and/or low class?  They have tattoos.

Really?  Because I'm about as non-threatening, law abiding, white bread as it gets, and I have two of 'em.  You can't swing a cat without hitting one of us tattooed weirdos.  They're so routine on college campuses that they've practically become a cliche, and have been since the late 80s/early 90s.  For God's sake, Jenny Crusie has a tramp stamp.  (Which I read about on her blog once, but can't find the post now and therefore can't link to.  I did however, spend a lovely hour rereading posts from 2008, and laughed so hard I scared the cat when I came across a reference to the Korean Restaurant Story.)

So please, authors, lay off the tattoos as Signs of Evil Intent.  There's a pretty good chance that a large portion of your readership has them, too, and we don't appreciate it.

Lip Balm of the Day: Peacock Puffs (lime, blueberry, cake)

Goals

Hello!  I'm not dead!  I'm just up to my eyeballs right now.  (How anyone who doesn't work or take care of a family or do anything really can be up to her eyeballs I don't know.  But whatever.)

Anyway, I'm here to set a few goals for myself.  First (and I can't believe I'm making this my first goal, but that should tell you just how much it's annoying me), I need to clean.  I have not one, but two laundry baskets full of clean clothes that need to be folded and put away.  There's precious little floor space in this room.  I don't need to take it up with laundry.  There's about an inch of dust covering everything in the room, and what's not covered in dust is covered in cat hair.  Or my hair, because I'm shedding like mad again.  At this rate I should be completely bald by next Tuesday.  And there are piles of junk mail and general crap everywhere.  I can't take it any more.  The room must be cleaned.

My second goal for the month is to get my Goodreads "books to read in 2011" list under 100.  That's really not all the books I intend or expect to read this year.  It grows constantly.  But most of the books on that list are things that I've already bought and are languishing in the TBR of Doom.  (Sorry, I just read Shannon Stacey's Undeniably Yours, and now everything gets an "of Doom" tacked onto the end.  Plus, it really is the TBR of Doom.  It's where books I want to read go to be smothered to death under the stack of all the other books I want to read.  Scary, scary place, my TBR file.)  There are 107 books on the list right now, so if I can read 8 of them, without adding any others (Ha!), I'll meet that goal.

My third goal is to blog more than once a week.  That's really kind of pathetic.  Even I, who go nowhere and have no life, can usually come up with something to say more often than that.

My fourth goal is to remember to return Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to Netflix.  I've only had it for a month now.  I've watched some of it, and it's only meh, plus it keeps acting weird and skipping.

So, those are my goals for the month.  I think I'll start out strong by sticking the Scott Pilgrim disc back in its envelope (if I can find it) and putting it on the table with the rest of the outgoing mail.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gummy Bear

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!

Feeling Weepie

After reading several really good books lately I'm in that moody, creative place where I feel like I want to start writing again.  I've been listening to music again, something I haven't done much of in the last couple of months. 

I don't have much on my mp3 player, comparatively speaking.  (Someone I follow on twitter said today that she has 10,005 songs on hers, and was pondering if she should if she should delete 5 songs to bring it back to a tidy 10,000.  My old but serviceable mp3 has about 1/10 that capacity.)  But there's still enough stuff on there that I forget what I have.

So I was cruising through the other day, looking for something good, when I rediscovered The Weepies.  I only have three of their songs, but I've been listening to those three songs on repeat ever since.  I'm thinking about taking the $2 in free mp3 downloads that Amazon if offering right now (promo code: VDAYMP3S) plus some of the gift certificate credit that I have saved up and downloading a few more songs, or possibly their whole catalog.  I could see this music being the core of a soundtrack.  I know I said this before, but I just logged in over at Wiz IQ, and I'm going to go through the Discovery class again, this time with less moving and distractions.

And here is a video I found for one of the songs I've had on repeat.  It's not an official video, they don't appear to have made one, which is a shame.  But it's still pretty good.  I'd love to know where the images are from, if anyone knows.  Looks like something Japanese to me, and while I have wide ranging tastes, this is an area that I'm completely unfamiliar with.  Some of the clips look pretty romantic, and I'd like to check them out.

And now, Take It From Me!

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.

Indiana is Pissing Me Off

Usually I avoid the news, because I don't have enough energy to waste any being annoyed.  But I caught just enough of a news broadcast to skate past annoyed into pissed off.  The Republicans are currently pushing an amendment to the Indiana Constitution to ban gay marriage.  It's already state law, but they want to make really, really sure that no judge can overturn it.  This piece of asshattery was particularly irritating:

“Two percent of the population does not have the right to define marriage for the rest of the population,” said Micah Clark of the American Family Association, referring the minority of Americans who are gay and lesbian.

Does he not see that his 98% (not that I believe that 98% is even in the ball park for those who support this amendment) don't have the right to define something so personal as marriage for that 2% either?  Marriage, from the government's point of view, is a contract.  That's it.  As long as all parties are of legal age to enter a contract and freely consent, the government should be satisfied.

It's religion and the couples' beliefs about marriage that give it personal meaning.  No one is saying you have to let two men or two women marry in your church, if your church does not accept gay marriage.  (It's called separation of church and state.  We'll keep our government out of your church policies, you keep your church out of our government policies, and everyone will get along just fine.)  More than that, marriage is a union of hearts and lives.  It's what each couple brings to the table that makes a marriage.  You can't define that.  You can't control it.  And you have no right to impose your ideas on this most personal of relationships.

For anyone who wants to read a little bit more about the proposed amendment, here's an Indianapolis Star article that explains the situation in more detail.

I'd really like to end this with telling all of those GOP bastards where they can stick their stupid amendment.  But I won't.  I'd just as soon stay out of their bedrooms, and I wish they would extend the same courtesy to the rest of the world.