‘Tis the season to play Christmas Q&A

I got this via e-mail from one of my offline book club buddies, and thought I’d answer it here. If you’d like to play along, please do – just leave me a comment so I’ll know to go check out your answers! 1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Depends on the gift. Sometimes I wrap it and then put it in a gift bag.2. Tree – real or artificial? Fake3. When do you put the […]

Five Things, and another Five Things

I’ve come across two very different versions of the “Five Things” meme recently, so I’ve decided to combine them in one post. The first group comes via Literary Feline: 5 Things I was doing 10 years ago:1. Planning the first Christmas in our new house.2. Looking for a new job.3. Training new people at the job I already had.4. Hoping for snow.5. Reading. 5 Things on my T0-Do List today: 1. Get the November cash-receipts […]

Booking Through Thursday  12-13: Catalog

Booking Through Thursday 12-13: Catalog

Do you use any of the online book-cataloguing sites, like Library Thing or Shelfari? Why or why not? (Or . . . do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin)) If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything? Don’t forget to leave a link to your actual response (so people don’t have to go searching for it) […]

Book talk: “Eat, Pray, Love”

Book talk: “Eat, Pray, Love”

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia Elizabeth Gilbert As she mentions in her responses to the FAQ on her website, Elizabeth Gilbert is aware that not everyone gets the opportunity to travel the world on a personal discovery (and recovery) mission paid for by a book advance, but as a reader, I’m glad she was able to. At thirty, Liz faced the painful realization that the life she […]

Wiki Wednesday 12-12-07

Time to learn something! 1. Go to Wikipedia.2. Click on “Random article” in the left-hand sidebar box.3. Post it! It came from outer space! The Borealis quadrangle is a quadrangle on Mercury surrounding the north pole down to 65° latitude (see also: geography of Mars). It contains the Goethe Basin, whose diameter of at least 400 km (250 mi) makes it the sixth-largest impact basin observed on Mariner 10 images[1][2][3](Murray and others, 1974; Boyce and […]

Ten on Tuesday 12-11: 10 Things You Want for Christmas

My husband actually requests a wish list from everyone in the family at Christmastime. He’s the administrator, passing out items from the list to extended-family members who need gift ideas, and keeping others for us. (Of course, he also makes his own wish list, which he gives to me to manage.) In any case, I’d already done some of my homework for this week’s assignment. “iPod my car!” This would involve a new iPod-compatible stereo […]

Christmas spectacles

Christmas spectacles

The Cavalcade of Bad Nativities (see below)* has inspired me to contribute my own favorite bit of Christmas wackiness. I took these pictures last year at a house in town – not in my neighborhood, thankfully! – and they really don’t do full justice to a display that puts the “spectacle” in “spectacular.” My son posted them on his Flickr account (you can go there to see larger shots, and to check out his captions […]

Relationship bargaining

I started following the Aisledash wedding blog because a couple of my favorite bloggers became contributors, but there’s a lot of good content there even if you’re not currently a bride- (or groom-)to-be. If your interest isn’t just in weddings, but on the marriage relationship that follows one, they’re talking about that too. This relationship-related item, about a story from the Today Show‘s website, made me cringe: In short, a married man asked Dr. Gail […]

Remember, it could always be worse

Remember, it could always be worse

Welcome to another Monday. Christmas is just two weeks away! (And this is my 300th post. In hindsight, I’m not altogther proud of that content-wise. On the other hand – 300 posts!?!) Sometimes I’ll do my posting the laziest way possible…basically, forwarding an e-mail (as long as it’s one that didn’t require the Snopes treatment) to my blog. I wrapped up last week’s posts that way, so I might as well start off this week […]

iPod Random Ten 12-7-07

Bonus tracks edition this week – free lyric excerpts and commentary! “But he made too many enemies Of the people who would keep us on our knees“ – “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” XTC, Nonesuch(A catchy little song about persecution, sort of a companion piece to their earlier “Dear God” if you read a little too much into it) “I’m not here for your entertainment –You don’t really want to mess with me tonight“ – […]

Friday Funny: A Second Opinion

Because it’s Friday, and it’s rainy and chilly, and it’s only been a week since NaBloPoMo ended, here’s one lazy way to get a blog post: paste in a joke that someone e-mailed to you. This one came from my sister. Second Opinion The doctor said, “Joe, the good news is I can cure your headaches. The bad news is that it will require castration. You have a very rare condition, which causes your testicles […]

M is for Meme, and F is for…?

As usual, I was not tagged for this meme, but have just lifted it – this time from Misty at Rainy Day in May, since it just looked like fun. *UPDATED 12/21 after I actually was tagged, by Serena. I’m applying it retroactively.* Using the first letter of your name*, answer these questions. They have to be real answers, nothing made up, and you can’t use your own name as an answer. (*That’s meant to […]