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!

I will spare you. I will not do the ‘omg I just got a new camera and have to illustrate EVERYTHING’ thing of taking a picture of the mountain of tissues next to me. And I was only tempted to do so for a fraction of a second, I promise. I was up at 3 am this morning because lying down made me feel like I was drowning. So, here’s the slightly punchy result: a 3 am review of Lynn Kurland’s With Every Breath. (Is it just me, or is there something ironic about that title under the circumstances? Maybe I should call it ‘With Every (Gurgling) Breath.”)

What is it with the apparent popularity of Scottish Highlands time travel romances? And how many of them are out there? Is this a micro-genre? Mini-genre? Or has it gotten to full-blown sub-genre status? And if so, why? I mean, yeah, it’s fun, but wow is that a specific set of constraints for a group of books!

So, that review there is the reason why that book doesn’t make an appearance in my latest photo of my review book stack. And Lynn Viehl’s Twilight Fall isn’t in it because I’m reading it today. The hysterical thing is that it’s only two days since I took that last photo and I already feel compelled to update it.

By the way, I’ve now updated the designs in the entire MMO category of Gamers’ Heaven (well, those that I planned to update). Take a look, and more will come!

You know you’ve been receiving too many review books when the FedEx guy thanks you for keeping him in a job.

You know you review too many books when a relative tells you they might be gluten sensitive and the first thing you say is, “I have a review copy of a book about that…”

You know too many of your review copies are of the ’spicy’ variety when you have to start a separate book to take with you to the gym most nights. (It’s a family-friendly gym.)

Speaking of review books, here are two more reviews: Janelle Denison’s Wild for Him and, from Sensorotika, Erotika: Bedtime Stories.

And now, for today’s re-worked T-shirt design, perfect for roleplayers and gamers:

I see dead people…

Okay, I didn’t get a review written yesterday. But I have two books read & ready to be reviewed for this coming week (one fiction, one non-), and a cookbook almost ready (cooked from, but I need to read more of it). Speaking of cookbooks, this week we’re cooking from Food 2.0, the cookbook from the chef who cooked at Google for years. Our first experiment from it—a smoothie—was awesome. In order to get everything we needed we made a rare pilgrimage to the Whole Foods Market. Usually the prices there are insane; however, the prices there don’t seem to be rising as fast as elsewhere in response to the higher gas prices, so it no longer seems quite so ridiculous to shop there now and then.

We went to see a movie today (Ruins? The Ruins? Whichever). It was definitely fun, if not overly new or different, and it had some nice touches to it. Mostly it made me curious to read the book, which at this rate will happen on the fifth of never. Sadly, the movie popcorn was so bad it made us mildly ill. I’m used to cruddy movie popcorn, but this went above and beyond. Blech.

I felt like doing something semi-productive this evening, so here are two more re-worked MMORPG T-shirt designs:

It’s our “Murlocs of War” and “Gnomes for Breakfast” designs (’Cry havoc! and let slip the murlocs of war’; ‘Gnomes they’re not just for breakfast any more, they’re also for between-meal snacks’).

Hopefully tomorrow I can get a little gardening done around chores, cooking, reading of review books, etc. Hope you’re all having a good weekend!

Many things have changed since we first started selling shirts & stuff through cafepress at Gamers’ Heaven and Caffeinated Chicanery. I have a better sense of what will translate well from my screen to a T-shirt, mug, or poster. Cafepress now allows us to use the same transparent-background image on dark and light items since they have better printing processes. I have a copy of Photoshop. I have some actual—*gasp*—experience!

Now that all of these things have happened, I noted that our earliest designs were kind of… embarrassing, frankly, next to the recent ones. So, bit by bit, I’m going back through and re-working them. I’m also cleaning house on the designs that never did well. Here I will present you with some of the new/old designs that I’ve done so far; I’m starting off with the gaming shop. First, “I’m not lazy I’m just out of mana,” also known as our first runaway bestseller, which won second place in a Cafepress holiday contest based on sales:

(more…)

Today’s book review is

…

*Sigh* Let’s start over. That’s where the timer beeped and I had to move banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (part of testing a review cookbook!) to the cooling rack.

…

Take three. That’s where my husband got home from work, still deep in the throes of a conference call. So far today I’ve written two book reviews (today’s review of Donna MacMeans’s The Trouble with Moonlight and tomorrow’s queued up review of Emmett James’s Admit One). I’ve cleaned up cat puke from the doorway of the guest room. I’ve put up a new design at Caffeinated Chicanery:

Still looking for my muse

I visited a goodly handful of cool book blogs (just check out the blog roll on the reviews blog if you want some ideas for where to start!). I made a marinade for Chinese BBQ pork (cha siu, if I recall correctly). I got a package of gardening stuff and got all that put away. I still need to do a load of laundry and clean up the living room and dining room, and my husband gets to vacuum.

The cleaning is because an old friend of mine is coming tomorrow and staying for a week (yay!). The rest of it is just me apparently going a little crazy.

Printed so that it read upside-down (yes, I can read upside-town text quite easily; it’s one of those useless skills you pick up in childhood and never quite lose):

Today’s book review is of Eldress Bertha Lindsay’s Seasoned with Grace, and today’s entertaining t-shirt design is:

The Human Gee Gnome Project
Discover the little oddities in life

Last week I wrote an entry in my Epiphanies blog (it’s a place for posting writers’ exercises and such for people to play with) that explored my grandfather’s history just a tiny bit. He’s one of those people who has a naturally story-inspiring life, and I happen to have very vivid memories of visiting him and my grandmother as a child.

I don’t tend to think of technology in connection with my family. Which is odd, because my mother has been a programmer, and became a programmer at a time when that wasn’t a common field for women to go into. My grandfather was a chemist. I guess it’s just that when I think of that side of the family mostly what I think of is visiting my grandparents at their old rural house in the seventies and eighties, strolling through the apple orchard and swimming in the pond. My grandfather was born in 1900 and died in 1994; he wasn’t exactly around for the height of the internet age. So it was with some amazement that I heard from relatives we’d fallen out of touch with after my grandfather’s funeral, thanks to their having found that post that I made. Emails and addresses were exchanged all over the place, all because of a spur-of-the-moment blog post.

That feels kind of surreal, but very cool.

This morning’s review is of Val McDermid’s The Grave Tattoo. Also, I’ve posted a new T-shirt design at Caffeinated Chicanery and another at Gamers’ Heaven. The monthly newsletters with their subscribers-only sales go out tonight barring a hiccup in Cafepress’s software, so if you aren’t subscribed already, this is a good time to do so (there’s a form at the bottom-left of the front page of the storefronts). Since I’ve been reading & reviewing so many mysteries lately it seemed appropriate to do a mystery addict shirt:

Mystery Addict
Where’s the body?

I also couldn’t help adding to our alignment series. Don’t worry, we have plenty of stored-up design ideas to present to you this year:

chaotic brilliant!

But first… the latest book review is of Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s The Perennial Boarder. Also, since people have been asking me for more detail about the bar code scanner option over at LibraryThing after I mentioned it the other day, I promise that once I’ve gotten my scanner and played around with it a bit, I’ll make a full report/review of what I think of LibraryThing. I can tell you so far that I’m totally addicted, however, and that the 200+ books I’ve entered by hand are barely scraping the surface. I also still have to decide whether I want to use LT with tags the way some people do to keep track of those books I’ve read but don’t end up deciding to keep—some of the books I review, for example, I end up donating to the library when I’m done if I know I won’t read them again.

Now, to pass on the latest T-shirt designs. First, we’ve added one to the Caffeinated Chicanery shop; great for creative people who are tired of always finding out that someone thought of their brilliant idea first:

I hate people who steal
my ideas before I think of them

And we’ve also added to the Gamers’ Heaven shop:

“What do you mean I don’t get frequent flyer miles for gryphon flights?!” and “Invalid Target”.

Today’s review is of Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Soups. It’s good, but it didn’t bowl me over. Which is too bad, because it’s exactly the kind of food I could use right now.

Sorry for so few reviews, posts, visits to other folks’ blogs, etc. this week. It’s been a very low-energy week. I finally saw the gastroenterologist yesterday, and he basically told me this: yep, looks like my gallbladder is slowly deteriorating and on its way out. But until a test like the HIDA scan or ultrasound shows that unequivocally (the HIDA results were borderline), a surgeon won’t be willing to take it out. So in the meantime, we try a few drugs that probably won’t do much but might if I’m lucky, and mostly we wait until my gallbladder gets bad enough that tests aren’t equivocal and a surgeon will take it out.

As the doc said, “welcome to 2007.”

On the one hand, I’m glad to have surgeons be a bit conservative, and not want to just open patients up and take out our innards at the drop of a hat. Every time we go under anaesthesia and they open us up there’s some risk, even if the procedure is incredibly minor, like this one. However, when they know a certain set of symptoms and test results mean they’ll have to do it eventually, then I can’t help thinking delaying is mostly about insurance: i.e., they won’t do the procedure unless they can prove to insurance they had to. Which means that in the meantime, I have pain and nausea.

*grumble, grumble*

Well, at least it’ll force me to eat a very low-fat diet, because damn do I hate nausea with a passion.

Anyway, I am aware that most of the site (the regular pages, rather than the blogs) is inaccessible right now. Unfortunately I need to wait for Jeffrey to get home from work to do anything about it if it doesn’t recover on its own. In the meantime, I can distract you with the rather hysterical shirt design Jervis came up with:

Level 70 Hottie

Also, since most of our old WoW guild has kind of died away until nearly all that’s left in terms of active players are a bunch of us who all know each other in real life, Jervis decided it was time to just go form our own guild, so we could have a guild vault and all that fun stuff. I don’t know who suggested it, but somehow we ended up with a guild name of “Innocent Bystander.” I find it incredibly funny to have that under my character names!

Since I’ve been so low-energy this week I’ve been playing around in the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta. I love that game, and look forward to perhaps writing something of a review of it. I adore playing around with the economy. Wealth is your friend. Of course, going out and pirating merchant ships is an awful lot of fun too…

Oh, and I almost forgot. Apropos of nothing, you’ll need a whole box of tissues for this story.