What I read, Part 1

I was a bookworm growing up. There was no more favorite place for me than curled up on a beanbag chair in the library, or sneakily reading with a flashlight in my bedroom late at night.

I've gotten pickier over the years - when I was a teenager I'd read anything that had a science fiction or fantasy tag on it - but I still voraciously consume books, either ones I buy myself or ones I borrow off friends (who buy different authors from me.)

My best friend, having moved back in with us for her senior year in vet school, brought along three fresh book cases. I discovered a handful of my books on there, which I have taken back, but a treasure trove of books from authors I hadn't heard of as well.

I used to have a set book budget of $50 every month. When I quit my job, my book budget went away (this is why you do not quit your day job!) but I'll still pinch and scrounge and save up for books from the following authors:

• Terry Pratchett
• Teresa Medeiros
• Mary Balogh

I'm never disappointed with anything they write, so it's a good investment for me. And I can reread and reread and reread and still enjoy it.

I still try to make a little time to read books on a daily basis, although I make sure to space it out from my writing to avoid losing my own voice by trying to imitate the author of whatever it was I just read.

So today's read, borrowed from my best friend's bookshelf, is Lynn Kirkland's Dreams of Stardust.

I read other things besides books. I follow a ton of blogs, read webcomics, and read and post frantically on several forums. But those are topics for another day.

Return of the Room Mates

My husband and I purchased our first house last January. We've lived alone in happy, post-first-house bliss for about six months. We walked around in our underwear without worrying, we did unmentionable things in the living room and the kitchen, and we generally acted like we owned the place. Which we did.

My best friend, who is a vet student at the local university, reached the breaking point at her fraternity and desperately wanted to move out. She is claiming one of our bedrooms. Additionally, a dear friend (and previous room mate of ours) is moving back from a study abroad in Japan. She is claiming the other empty room, and they'll be sharing a bathroom.

It's going to be a shock going from having our own home all the time to having people around again. We've lived with both our room mates before, and love them both dearly like sisters, but this will be their first time sharing a space, and I'm hoping that all goes well.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, not much. I continue to plug along on Book #2 - it's at about 30,000 words now and many plot elements that were hazy have solidified - but now I'm grateful that this "career change" will allow me to stay home most of the day, and act as a sort of mother to my friends. Both will be under very stressful senior years, and they need someone to help take care of them. It's not much harder to cook for 3-4 people than it is for two, once you account for volume.

On the upside, my best friend has a far more extensive collection of books than I do (three tall bookshelves of romance novels alone!) and I'll be pillaging it for the next year for sure. Maybe someday, one of my books will grace her shelves as well.

The dying screams of an aging computer

A few weeks ago, my fuzzy little cat-child Weaver decided to leap onto my desk, directly onto a freshly made giant mug of hot tea. The tea spilled all over the computer desk, the computer, the wall behind the computer, a video game controller, and my external hard drive. Fortunately, the only permanently destroyed piece of electronics was the controller, but the computer itself has been on the fritz on and off ever since.

What started with some skips and freezes eventually cascaded into blue screens of death. I'm no slouch when it comes to computers (having worked in IT for several years), and while I managed to stem the flow of blood from the motherboard by doing a clean installation of Windows 7, I've been having a hard time with the card readers.

I keep all my writing on an 8 gig SDHC card. This allows me to transfer it back and forth from my desktop computer to my laptop (a tiny little Acer Aspire netbook) instantly.

When the tea spilled, several events happened in a rapid sequence. I yanked out the external hard drive, ran to the kitchen for paper towels, and tried to keep the mess from getting into the inner workings of the computer case. The latter effort succeeded, but the act of tearing out the USB external caused me to actually pull out the little black plastic stub that is enclosed in the USB port itself. This means that port is now completely dead and has a tendency to short out the rest of the ports on the front of the PC.

I believe I've got everything working, and under control again. I hope so. The netbook is unable to handle anything that requires more memory than Open Office or Google Chrome!

The time has perhaps come for me to replace the desktop. I will probably build my own to save money, but it's a pity - this computer is only two and a half years old.

Nothing lasts forever.