I swear I feel sluggish every week until about Thursday. It gets harder to recover from weekends and late nights as I get older.
You may remember a few days ago when I mentioned getting a review copy of David Rachels' Verse Noir. Well, last night I read it in its entirety and posted reviews for it on Amazon, Goodreads, and Dangerous Dan's Book Blog. Noir poetry is a pretty original concept if you ask me. Anyway, I've shot David a list of questions and hope to post the results shortly after he answers them. Isn't technology great?
I took a couple more lizard pictures yesterday evening but haven't had a chance to do anything with them yet. It's hard getting close with a dog strapped to your wrist.
Joe and I were going to go mushroom hunting at lunch today but it looks like he called in. Drat! I guess I'll have to read during lunch...
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
Yeah, I'm a sucker (and also something about meatloaf)
Remember the other day when I resolved to cut back on acquiring books? Neither did I, apparently.
As some of you know, Subterranean Press frequently offers expensive limited edition hardcovers of popular and/or hard to find books. The new prices are a tad expensive and once they sell out, the prices will quickly run you a kidney and half a liver. Over the weekend, I got an email from them about a special offer. It seems they found a metric shit ton of returned or dinged hardcovers and were offering a special grab bag. Eleven hardcovers for fifty bucks. Visions of John Scalzi's The God Engines and You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop danced through my head, along with the ghosts of ultra-rare Joe Lansdales danced through my head. Yep, I plunked down my 50 bucks and now wait to see if the Rare Book Gods choose to smile on me or urinate in my upturned face.
In other news, I've acquired a taste for meatloaf in my old age. The food, not the musician with his songs that are ten minutes too long. Anyway, Joe had some particularly aromatic meatloaf the other day and gave me a small morsel. It was delicious. I asked for the recipe and he replied that he'd have to ask his wife. She emailed back a short time later saying, and I quote, "I'll take it to the grave."
Ouch. That's a pretty harsh reaction to asking for a recipe. Then again, Joe's been asking for her grandma's Swiss Steak recipe for six years and has only gotten a marginal coleslaw recipe for his troubles. This morning, Joe showed up at my cube fairly early and asked what I brought for lunch. I said "Nothing" since I hate assembling things for lunch, like the fajitas I have in the fridge at home. He told me I had a lunch waiting in the lower right drawer of the fridge in the galley.
The meatloaf was superb. It was a mix of ordinary ground beef, ground pork, and veal, along with onions and some ingredients I was unable to identify as I wolfed it down. I suppose I could have taken my time and savored it but it was too good.
As some of you know, Subterranean Press frequently offers expensive limited edition hardcovers of popular and/or hard to find books. The new prices are a tad expensive and once they sell out, the prices will quickly run you a kidney and half a liver. Over the weekend, I got an email from them about a special offer. It seems they found a metric shit ton of returned or dinged hardcovers and were offering a special grab bag. Eleven hardcovers for fifty bucks. Visions of John Scalzi's The God Engines and You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop danced through my head, along with the ghosts of ultra-rare Joe Lansdales danced through my head. Yep, I plunked down my 50 bucks and now wait to see if the Rare Book Gods choose to smile on me or urinate in my upturned face.
In other news, I've acquired a taste for meatloaf in my old age. The food, not the musician with his songs that are ten minutes too long. Anyway, Joe had some particularly aromatic meatloaf the other day and gave me a small morsel. It was delicious. I asked for the recipe and he replied that he'd have to ask his wife. She emailed back a short time later saying, and I quote, "I'll take it to the grave."
Ouch. That's a pretty harsh reaction to asking for a recipe. Then again, Joe's been asking for her grandma's Swiss Steak recipe for six years and has only gotten a marginal coleslaw recipe for his troubles. This morning, Joe showed up at my cube fairly early and asked what I brought for lunch. I said "Nothing" since I hate assembling things for lunch, like the fajitas I have in the fridge at home. He told me I had a lunch waiting in the lower right drawer of the fridge in the galley.
The meatloaf was superb. It was a mix of ordinary ground beef, ground pork, and veal, along with onions and some ingredients I was unable to identify as I wolfed it down. I suppose I could have taken my time and savored it but it was too good.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Fungi Found!
This morning, I took Belle over to my parents' for her weekly exercise and my weekly notification to my parents that I'm not yet deceased. After a quick breakfast of biscuits and gravy, my dad and I jumped on the gator and headed into the woods to hunt the elusive morel mushroom.
Rather than tout the morel's tasty virtues, I'll merely say that the little bastards are delicious when pan fried in an egg batter.
The hunt did not start well. I'd say for the first 33% of the expedition, we merely stumbled around the woods, acquired ticks, and sweated. Is it really going to hit 90 today? Wasn't it snowing two weeks ago? I did manage to take an interesting frog picture so the first part of he expedition wasn't a total loss.
I was thinking about abandoning the hunt and taking pictures of insects instead, like the bee that kept landing on my arm, when my dad finally found one. I promptly stomped through the woods to where he was standing and found another. Then we returned to the tedium for ten minutes before finding two more.
"How many do we have to find before Mom will cook them?" I asked.
"A lot more than this," Dad said. "Let's try another spot."
At the next spot, the hunt followed a similar pattern. Dad would find one, I would find one nearby, and then ten more minutes of tedium until the cycle repeated. We agreed that another shower would benefit the woods and their fungal bounty.
With eight morels in our bag, we decided to try one more spot. The hunting was much easier in this undisclosed location. We found twenty in less than twenty minutes and decided to hang it up. We had enough to justify cooking.
They were delicious!
Rather than tout the morel's tasty virtues, I'll merely say that the little bastards are delicious when pan fried in an egg batter.
The hunt did not start well. I'd say for the first 33% of the expedition, we merely stumbled around the woods, acquired ticks, and sweated. Is it really going to hit 90 today? Wasn't it snowing two weeks ago? I did manage to take an interesting frog picture so the first part of he expedition wasn't a total loss.
I was thinking about abandoning the hunt and taking pictures of insects instead, like the bee that kept landing on my arm, when my dad finally found one. I promptly stomped through the woods to where he was standing and found another. Then we returned to the tedium for ten minutes before finding two more.
"How many do we have to find before Mom will cook them?" I asked.
"A lot more than this," Dad said. "Let's try another spot."
At the next spot, the hunt followed a similar pattern. Dad would find one, I would find one nearby, and then ten more minutes of tedium until the cycle repeated. We agreed that another shower would benefit the woods and their fungal bounty.
With eight morels in our bag, we decided to try one more spot. The hunting was much easier in this undisclosed location. We found twenty in less than twenty minutes and decided to hang it up. We had enough to justify cooking.
They were delicious!
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Fighting Atrophy
I think I'm suffering from the writing form of muscular atrophy. I wrote the first five hundred words of a story I conceived last night and it felt like five thousand. It's coming along though. I went with mutants and a DNA rewriting virus rather than zombies since I plan on using more SF concepts and I find some aspects of an ongoing zombie apocalypse illogical. Now I just have to find the time to write the rest of it, along with my crime story and the one about the Dyson Sphere and the wormhole train. And all the others.
Last night, I was getting ready for bed when a charitable organization that shall remain nameless called me twice. Twice, after 8:30! I'm of the school of thought that you shouldn't call anyone after 8 PM. Unless they have kids, then the cutoff is 7. The second time, I told the caller "You know it's after 8:30, right? What time is it at your house?" He hung up.
If tonight's as conducive to photography as last night was, I'm going to try to get more pictures of those lizards, as well as the buzzards I keep seeing flying over the neighborhood.
Last night, I was getting ready for bed when a charitable organization that shall remain nameless called me twice. Twice, after 8:30! I'm of the school of thought that you shouldn't call anyone after 8 PM. Unless they have kids, then the cutoff is 7. The second time, I told the caller "You know it's after 8:30, right? What time is it at your house?" He hung up.
If tonight's as conducive to photography as last night was, I'm going to try to get more pictures of those lizards, as well as the buzzards I keep seeing flying over the neighborhood.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Note to self: Stop being such a whore for free books!
Ladies and gents, I have a problem. When it comes to free books, I just can't seem to keep my figurative pants on. In the last few days, I have done the following:
- Entered a contest to win four Ross MacDonald books
- Entered four ARC giveaways on Goodreads
- Bought Muscle Memory by Steve Lowe so I could get a signed free copy of his other book
- Requested a review copy of Verse Noir by David Rachels.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Sunny Morning
Today has been gorgeous and there's still around five hours of daylight left. I hauled Belle over to my parents' house this morning, getting some good buzzard pictures on the drive over. After a quick breakfast, Belle and I took to the woods. I followed the creek for about half a mile, then went up one of the dry creek beds that feed into it when it rains. I took a couple pictures of fossils too large to carry back and uncovered a salamander, one of the elusive animals I've been wanting to photograph for a while but haven't run across.
Belle and I eventually emerged from the woods after reaching the top of hill that spawned the dry creek bed and followed a farm road back to the vicinity of my parents'. After a few minutes of reading The Drawing of the Three, Belle subtly signaled that she wanted to go back outside by scratching the shit out of my leg. I was able to get a few more good pictures, including a spider, frogs, and the second salamander of the day, this one of a completely different species. Photos are forthcoming.
I'm contemplating taking a quick cat nap before I head to Farmington to meet Carrie. I'm hoping there is BBQ in my future...
Belle and I eventually emerged from the woods after reaching the top of hill that spawned the dry creek bed and followed a farm road back to the vicinity of my parents'. After a few minutes of reading The Drawing of the Three, Belle subtly signaled that she wanted to go back outside by scratching the shit out of my leg. I was able to get a few more good pictures, including a spider, frogs, and the second salamander of the day, this one of a completely different species. Photos are forthcoming.
I'm contemplating taking a quick cat nap before I head to Farmington to meet Carrie. I'm hoping there is BBQ in my future...
Friday, April 1, 2011
The Gunslinger - Why Stephen King is better than you think
I'm nineteen pages away from finishing up The Gunslinger for the sixth or seventh time, savoring every word in what may be my favorite book of all time. \
Anyway, as I follow Roland's quest to catch up with the man in black, I'm noticing Stephen King's writing a lot more than I did on my previous readings, probably because I've written close to half a million words since the last time I set foot on the road to the Tower.
King's use of imagery is at the same time both evocative and effortless. Never did I have the thought "Speed this shit up! Enough with the metaphors!" The pacing is impecable. The thing I want to mention most of all is the emotion that King crams into every sentence. The suspense keeps growing and even though this is far from my first time to the dance, I caught myself hoping against hope that Roland would find a way to both save Jake and catch up with the man in black.
I think I'm going to enjoy this re-read of The Dark Tower immensely.
Anyway, as I follow Roland's quest to catch up with the man in black, I'm noticing Stephen King's writing a lot more than I did on my previous readings, probably because I've written close to half a million words since the last time I set foot on the road to the Tower.
King's use of imagery is at the same time both evocative and effortless. Never did I have the thought "Speed this shit up! Enough with the metaphors!" The pacing is impecable. The thing I want to mention most of all is the emotion that King crams into every sentence. The suspense keeps growing and even though this is far from my first time to the dance, I caught myself hoping against hope that Roland would find a way to both save Jake and catch up with the man in black.
I think I'm going to enjoy this re-read of The Dark Tower immensely.
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