Whoops… running behind here! Got a couple memes I’ve been tagged on. And since my brain’s a little foggy this morning, what better way to warm up?

First Melissa tagged me for the 6 random details meme. I have a feeling I did something like this once before… aha! Eight random details meme. But what the heck… the last time I got tagged for this one again I just pointed to the earlier post; this time I’ll do a new one.

• Even though I have two cats, I’m very allergic. Allergy shots did part of the job (they don’t work for the majority of people; thankfully they worked for me), and I found a breed I don’t react to as strongly (Cornish Rex). When my husband has business travel the cats keep me from going stir-crazy.
• Most of our friends can’t come to our house to visit because they’re also strongly allergic to cats. This is highly disappointing as my husband and I love to cook for people, and it would be nice to reciprocate our friends’ hospitality.
• When I was 16, two of my best friends died in a car accident. A third friend was driving the car and was in the hospital for months. I didn’t realize until the other day how much of my reaction from the phone call that morning was still locked away inside of me, when I heard that the house of some friends got hit by a tornado while most of the family was home. Thankfully, this time no one was hurt, but boy did that pounding in my chest feel familiar.
• I am virtually unemployable. I have tendonitis from fingertip to shoulder in both arms that acts up if I’m not very careful (or when the weather is stormy), and although I do well in general, stress can make it hard for me to work due to mental illness. Designing shirts and writing book reviews might not make a huge amount of money, but it at least lets me feel like I contribute something to our household finances. The important thing is I do it on my own schedule, so there’s no stress. For me that makes all the difference in the world and allows me to get a lot of work done: on a good week I can review six books.
• I don’t like alcohol. It has nothing to do with morality—I don’t like the taste. I can enjoy some wines in small amounts, or the occasional fruity or chocolaty cocktail (if it’s light on the alcohol). I can also enjoy alcohol in cooking, such as an Irish Cream cheesecake. But that’s about it.
• I consider myself a cynical optimist. I hope for the best and expect the worst. I have the heart of a romantic and an idealist, but the expectations of a cynic.

I doubt that was terribly enlightening or fascinating, but there you have it. If you want to participate, consider yourself open-tagged and feel free to drop a link to your entry in the comments.

And now, for the second meme: the Meme of Fives, from MotherReader.

• The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
• Each player answers the questions about themselves.
• At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
• Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing five years ago?

Living in New Hampshire, tending a vegetable garden, and trying to figure out why I was so restless and unable to work. That’s when I got my PTSD diagnosis.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)


Do a bit of gardening.
Write a book review.
Read another book.
Hopefully make a last recipe from the agave baking book so I can review it soon.
Watch an episode of ‘Wire in the Blood’.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

Hummus with just about anything to dip into it (pita bread, crackers, veggies).
Fruit (cherries, blueberries, bananas, mango, etc.).
Chocolate (the darker the better).
Crackers (like TJ’s water crackers or Passport’s ‘Everything Flatbread’, and preferably with a sharp cheese).
Cereal or meusli.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

Move to Virginia near our friends, probably build our own house with an uber-kitchen and a huge library. Yeah, that’s the selfish one.
Make sure certain family members are set for life.
Donate to some of my favorite charities, like the Cheetah Conservation Fund (cheetahs are just awesome), Child’s Play, local food banks, etc.
Hire someone to clean the house (kinda hard to keep the house clean with tendonitis).
Invest, invest, invest! Money can vanish before you know it, no matter how much you have.

What are five of your bad habits?

I’m the queen of clutter. Give me a day and I’ll have stuff strewn everywhere.
I have the sweet tooth from hell; leave something delicious and sweet in the house and I’m a goner.
I’m also a compulsive eater. It’s a struggle not to eat constantly.
I enjoy playing World of Warcraft a bit too much. Luckily, however, I’m great at multitasking, so I read review books while playing.
I’m stunningly forgetful.

What are five places where you have lived?

Delaware, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland.

What are five jobs you have had?

In high school I had a summer job as a waitress.
In college I worked shelving books at a campus library part-time.
After I dropped out of college I worked as a receptionist, secretary, and physics paper typesetter in one MIT department, and then in another as a receptionist and secretary.
Next I did freelance writing in the tabletop roleplaying industry, primarily for White Wolf.
Now I design T-shirts and write book reviews.

What five people do you want to tag?

Morsie
Literary Feline
Tara
caribousmom
Court
(If you wanna—totally optional!)

And back to the book thing, the latest reviews are: Angela Knight’s seriously smokin’ Warrior, and Edwin Alexander’s fascinating Theft of the Master.

It’s sunny today! Woohoo!

Furniture troubles don’t seem nearly so bad when you find out the house of some friends was torn up by a tornado and they aren’t even allowed on their own street yet.

Thank god they’re okay. When it comes down to it, that’s what really matters.

When I was 16 I got a phone call one early Sunday morning telling me that two of my best friends were dead. I can feel an echo of that reaction pounding in my chest, that sense that in just a moment, something unforeseen can change… everything.

Here’s the good thing about IKEA: while it’s true that a lot of their items are cheap in a pejorative sense, if you look around carefully you can get some great deals on some wonderful pieces of furniture. We found an awesome dining room set there, a couple of very nice dressers, and some bookcases we desperately need.

Here’s the problem: since there’s no way we could fit that stuff in our car, we ordered it over the internet and arranged to have it delivered. It arrived last night, and about half of it is going to have to go back.

Three bookcases were totally loose. As in, the shelves and hardware were stacked freely in the truck. The delivery folks even looked shocked when they saw that. One of the pieces of backing is cracked through; several shelves are splintered, crunched, or broken, even just at first glance; and we have no idea whether anything’s missing.

Several other boxes had been so thoroughly broken open that things got damaged or, once again, we have no way of knowing if anything’s missing—that’s a fourth bookcase and BOTH dressers. In fact, the only things we’re going to be able to hold onto are one full-sized bookcase, one narrow bookcase, and the dining room set. Truthfully a couple of those boxes were damaged, too, but the damage was little enough that we could see the items themselves weren’t damaged or missing anything.

Well, it’ll be an interesting test of IKEA’s customer service to see if we end up with what we ordered, and how difficult the process is.

In the interests of not simply griping on this rainy Friday morning, here are two review links and two cute cat pics. First, reviews of Crichton’s classic The Andromeda Strain and Pamela Clare’s new and fantastic Unlawful Contact. Finally, cuddly cat photos. Well okay, the first one isn’t so cuddly; if you tried, you’d probably get a few playful scratches:

The agave nectar baking book is coming along well. I look forward to telling tales of cupcakes when I write my review. Meanwhile, since I received a gorgeous pie plate to review, clearly I’ll have to make a pie from the book!

Feeling somewhat inspired by the superfood cookbook, I tried adding several spoonfuls of pureed cooked pumpkin to my morning meusli, along with a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon and some agave nectar. Nothing like feeling almost as though you’ve had pumpkin pie for breakfast, knowing that you’ve just tricked yourself into adding a healthy vegetable to another meal. All healthy things should be so easy.

Speaking of healthy, this is so cool: Wellternatives is a frobby you can access to help you get nutrition info about dishes at restaurants, and healthier menu suggestions as alternatives. I played with it a bit and it seems genuinely useful.

And finally, not at all apropos of healthy things, here are some new reviews for you: while I wasn’t at all fond of Savannah Russe’s Under Darkness, I had a lot of fun with Jasmine Haynes’s Show and Tell!

MotherReader is hosting the third annual 48-Hour Book Challenge. To quote:

I’m setting the date for the 48 Hour Book Challenge — that special contest that allows you to read guilt-free for as long as you can stand it! I’m avoiding ALA and Father’s Day weekends, plus I like having the Challenge on my birthday. So the chosen weekend is — ready for it? — June 6–8, 2008.

…

Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. …

The books should be about fifth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine …

It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. …

The length of the reviews are not an issue. …

For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. Write your final summary on Monday, and for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak. …

Your final summary needs to clearly include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading/reviewing, and any other comments you want to make on the experience. It needs to be posted no later than noon on Monday, June 9th.

You’ll need to sign up in the comments section of the above-linked post.

I’m definitely hoping to play along, although I’ve no idea how much of that weekend I’ll be available for. I also have at least one friend who’ll be doing it as well and who, since he doesn’t have his own blog, will be joining in with a user account on this one. I’ve created a ‘guest posts’ category and we’ll come up with some way to make it obvious who’s posting at the time.

Speaking of books, today’s reviews are: Patricia Cornwell’s Predator and Janice Maynard’s upcoming By Appointment Only. I highly recommend the former!

Oh yeah… Iron Man was great! Very fun, although the odds of an MIT grad forgetting his social security number so quickly after spending his entire time there using it nearly every day as his ID number for EVERYTHING is a little small. (Yes, you can roll your eyes now.)

Oy… I meant to post a bunch of stuff today. I put up some new designs in the Gamers’ Heaven cafepress shop, finished a book to review, wanted to chat a bit about a 48-hour reading marathon coming up in June (and some friends who will most likely be guest-posting here as a part of that)… lots of stuff like that. I also wanted to do more agave nectar-baking today, although I think that’ll have to wait until Sunday.

Anyway, at least I did get some gardening done, and I’ll post a slideshow of the latest pics at the bottom. I’m also going to see Ironman tonight—usually I try to avoid opening weekend, but it’s one of those ‘meet up with a bunch of friends’ things. It’s also at 11 pm, which is rather late for me. And tomorrow there’s a friend’s retirement picnic…

But I’m babbling, so I’ll just post those pics and go. Have a great weekend!

I know there was something I wanted to post about, but my brain seems to be in a fog and I have no idea what it was. Oh well. I can at least link to the new site stuff.

First, the reviews. There’s yummy stuff in The Superfood Cookbook—how can you resist a combination of delicious, easy, quick, and nutritious??

I’ve also posted reviews of Mathias Freese’s enchanting Down to a Sunless Sea and Robert Cutler’s The Secret Scroll. In case you ever wondered whether all those high-scoring reviews indicated that I was too easy on review copies, worry no more—I don’t pan books very often, but that latter one made me want to tear my hair out.

Next, two more T-shirt designs. There’s a bit of relationship humor called going unsteady and a shirt for the Gnomish Air Force:

If I remember what I was going to say, I’ll just post again later!