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!

Agave nectar is officially one of my favorite discoveries ever. I first read about it in Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking. It’s a sweetener in syrup form made from a cactus (the same one that gives us tequila), and it has an extremely low glycemic index—meaning it takes a comparatively long time to get converted into blood sugar. Those with blood sugar problems such as diabetes know this is an extremely useful thing in a sweetener.

I hate artificial sweeteners. They leave a bitter, chemical aftertaste in my mouth that I can’t stand. So, I decided to try agave. There’s some history of type II diabetes in my family and I’m prone to mild blood sugar problems, so it seemed like a good idea. Now I’m completely stuck on it. One of my favorite ‘I’m trying to be healthy’ snacks is a tall drink of plain kefir (a cultured milk drink, basically liquid yogurt) with a tablespoon or two of agave stirred into it. I also used it last night when a coffee ice cream soda drink called for a bit of sweetening; it dissolves in cold liquid much more readily than sugar.

The only problem is, the little 8 oz bottles I can get at the Whole Foods Market cost more than $5 each. Ugh. Not something I want to start using wholesale as a substitute for corn syrup in recipes. Then it occurred to me to go look at Amazon. They sell everything now, right? Right. Any moment now UPS is going to show up with a couple cases of bottles that run much cheaper than the stuff I can get at the store. YAY!

Also today, it seems I got tagged for a meme, so why not. Here we go:

• Write your own six word memoir
• Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
• Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
• Tag five more blogs with links
• And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

It doesn’t make sense as a sentence, but that suits me.

I’ve seen this meme just about everywhere, so instead of tagging specific people, I’m going to do an open tag. If you haven’t played yet and want to, just leave a link to your post in the comments!

Today’s review is of The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to More Not So Useless Facts.

I got tagged for this one by Book Nut (aka Melissa) as well as Dolce Bellezza. So, what the heck.

a) What issues/topic interests you most in non-fiction? Cookbooks and writers’/creativity books are my favorite non-fiction books. However, I’ll pick up a non-fiction book on any topic I want to learn more about and then some, and I never know what that’ll be. I’ve reviewed books on subjects as diverse as poop, truffles (the mushrooms, not the chocolates), and composting. (Okay, the weird part is that in retrospect, those books aren’t so unrelated as they first appeared.)

b) Would you like to review books concerning those? I already do, quite frequently.

c) Would you like to be paid or do it as interest or hobby? I post my reviews on my own site rather than submitting them to magazines because I don’t want to be bound by artificial limitations on word counts or the need to be nice in order to make a magazine’s advertisers happy. I’d rather be able to write exactly whatever I think is useful or necessary in order to appropriately review a book. That said, I’m happy to use things like Amazon affiliate links and AdSense ads to make at least a little money at it. After all, I put a fair amount of time and thought into my reviews—they’re more than a hobby.

d) Would you recommend those to your friends and how? I often recommend books that I enjoy. If I don’t plan to need a book again I’ll also sometimes pass it on to a friend whom I think could use it.

e) If you have already done something like this, link it to your post. Heh, you can find all my non-fiction and fiction reviews at Errant Dreams Reviews. There are hundreds of ‘em—literally.

I’ve already linked back to Melissa and Dolce Bellezza above, and rather than tagging people this time around, just consider yourself tagged if you think it would be fun to do this meme. By the way, speaking of non-fiction, here are links to my two latest reviews: Margaret Mason’s No One Cares What You Had for Lunch and Jackie Mills’s The Big Book of Diabetic Desserts.

Oh, and while you’re here, check out this hysterical printing rant I found at book/daddy. Beware the volume, and be aware that the language is NSFW.

I’m almost a month late, but I did get tagged by Dewey on the ‘you make my day’ meme. To quote Dewey, because she said it best:

So let me start off by saying that every single person who reads my blog makes my day just by doing me the honor of reading my babbling about books. But I have to pick 10 specific people and say why they make my day.

The hard part, of course, is picking only 10!

Dionne Galace: Bam’s blog is one of the first places where I discovered that romance and erotica could be fun and delicious instead of silly. And that the silly stuff can be fun too—see also Bam’s cover snark. Then she posted in ten parts Bettie Sharpe’s awesome story Ember, and I embarrassed myself by becoming a raving fan girl.

Sharp Words: That brings me to Bettie Sharpe herself, who has written some absolutely awesome stuff. She’s an incredibly fresh and original voice in erotic romance, and she’s just plain fun as a person.

Treasure Tables: This meme has largely been making its way around the book-blogging sphere, but I have to mention a roleplaying-oriented site, Treasure Tables. They have great discussions regarding gaming topics of all kinds, and have on none-too-rare occasions linked to our roleplaying resources page or articles from it, which is pretty cool. They’re on hiatus—possibly permanently—but they have such huge archives of material that this hardly makes them non-useful.

The Ramblings of a Bildo: I don’t read as much of Bildo’s stuff as I’d like, largely because I’ve not been able to keep up with all the blogs I’d like of late, but he’s a fun writer. His comic is nifty, his art is silly and fun, his writing shows great talent, and I love to read his take on video games. He’s also a genuinely nice and thoughtful guy.

Bookgasm: Bookgasm posts reviews of books that perhaps closest match my own tastes in fiction. This is dangerous, of course, because it means that every time I visit I end up adding to my ever-growing wish list! They write very thoughtful reviews that tell me what I need to know in order to determine whether I’m likely to enjoy a book.

Books and Cooks: Tara shares two of my obsessions—books and cooking–and she’s a really sweet lady to boot!

Musings of a Bookish Kitty: Literary Feline and I have entirely too much in common, and I always look forward to her blog posts and her comments on my posts!

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous: I love Nonanon’s sense of humor and playful approach to books. I always enjoy visiting and chatting on her blog!

Thraveon: Besides being a close friend, Jervis is an awesome writer, among his many other talents. I love dropping by his blog to see what he’s up to (although sadly work has kept him too busy of late to keep up with his posting) when we’re not visiting him and his wonderful family to play D&D, cook, and do other fun things. We’ve also met a ton of other wonderful friends through him.

Burning Building: I have to toss this one in here as my latest fun find. Isaac writes some of the oddest posts and stories, and they’re really neat and imagination-expanding.

As Dewey noted, picking 10 is kind of an artificial limitation on what could be a far more expansive listing of very cool people. So if you aren’t listed here, that’s hardly a slight.

In theory getting noted on this list means you’ve been tagged or something, but I’ve always seen such things as optional, only to be done if the person tagged thinks it would be fun, so decide for yourself.

Today’s review is of Erin McCarthy’s upcoming novel Fallen.