Showing posts with label nook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nook. Show all posts

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Random reading, writing and TV

Criminal Minds, you kill me every year.  And it wasn't the finale, but I love the little glimpses we get of JJ's Will, and the way she decided to work off that bad juju was great.

I have seventeen (!!!!!) pieces, BSG and original, in various stages of done, and having my beta-reader otherwise occupied for the past month is driving me crazy.  I'm hopeful that with school letting out, her life will slow down soon.  Cross my fingers.  I might have to go over there and make her read while we're watching TV.  I can just see that.  "Here.  Read my porn, please.  No, I don't want cookies (I'd be lying), I want to finish my stupid stories so I can post the porn."  lmao

Arrow is not a perfect show, but it's got really great moments, and there were a lot of them during the last four or five episodes of the season.  During the scene where Oliver was trying to tell Tommy he'd be fine, there was so much homoerotic subtext that it wasn't even subtext.  Damn.  I swear I thought Oliver was going to kiss Tommy and I think it might've been hotter than Oliver kissing Lauren.  lol  And what's with Diggle?  All of a sudden he's running around in tank tops and he's even buffer than Oliver?  The shoulders on that man.  See, the show gives me plenty of eye-candy, and for that alone, I will continue to watch it.  John Barrowman.  :flails:  And that little moment with Thea and Roy?  Awwww.  I kind of like the idea of Oliver and Lauren, but frankly, there's more chemistry between Oliver and Felicity, and that's not even considering her continual verbal sexual innuendos.  How is Oliver ignoring those with a straight face?  Hell, how is the actress saying those lines with a straight face?  Every time she lets one fly, I think of the story Like Something Out of a Fanfic and it makes me laugh.

Once Upon a Time is getting too convoluted for me.  These two are conspiring with each other, and she's conspiring with him and he's conspiring with another her and she's become a barfly and where the hell is Red?  And Charming is boring again without his gun.  I still have the last three episodes to watch, and I will.  Ethan Embry is wasted here.  And seriously, this show does not have enough sex - everybody wears too many clothes.

Still have Revenge and Castle to finish up for the season.

I'm liking Grimm a lot better then OUaT right now.  I could listen to Sasha Roiz read the script in a monotone, if he would do it in French.  He has very pretty eyes.  I'm wondering where the Juliet thing is going.  Something's off with that.

I think I'm going to skip the rest of Monday Mornings, except for the shower scene, of course, when I visit my TV friend.  I'm also not going to bother to watch Revolution or Touch.  I'd really like to watch a few episodes of Bates Motel - I love the two leads - and see if it appeals to me.  And A&E is having a marathon of Katee's Longmire today, with the new season starting tomorrow, I think.  I have to catch up on Person of Interest, too, since I can only watch that one on the DVR.

I ran into a professional cook at Kroger today.  I was trying to find something for which I had a "free" coupon, and he asked what it was I wanted to make.  He was describing making something, and he's all "bip bip bip and it's done" and it was adorable.  I explained that I suck at cooking, unless it comes in a box or has very strict instructions, whereas my brother can pick six random things off the shelf and make something fantastic.  He said he could do that, too.  I envy that, but more I envy that he likes to cook.  I just hate it.  Cooking is all hot and sweaty and there's no good payoff.  I mean, yeah, there's food at the end of it, but if I want to eat, I have to cook every day, and that is just a big fat pain in the ass with nothing to show for it but ten minutes of eating and then dishes.  I just need to win the lottery.  Plus, I got back from Kroger and realized that I didn't pick up one of the three things I even went for in the first place.  :sigh:

Having a latex allergy and then finding out that something I used has latex in it?  So not fun.  At least my morphine allergy makes pretty purple poofies on my skin.  The latex makes my skin look like I have leprosy.  Ick.  And ow.

My new Kindle will not let me download the app that lets me read my Nook books on my Kindle.  Frakker.  The Nook is just not as user-friendly, and makes reading slow and cumbersome.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Huzzah!

(original post on livejournal 01/02/2013)

Or something.  lol

Got a wild hair last night and decided to hook up the landlord's A/V setup in the living room.  He'd been making noises about paying someone to come in and do it, because it was pretty complicated, and I just figured that I've hooked up some fairly complicated setups working for a previous employer, so I might as well see if I could do this one.  Turned out it wasn't so complicated.  I mean, everything was labelled and it was just a matter of connecting wires to the right IN or OUT from the right OUT or IN.  Besides, he only has a receiver, a combo DVD/VHS unit and a laserdisc player.  Two things to connect to a receiver then connect that to the TV.  Easy.  Speakers were already done, so Ta Da!  He still wants to get the whole thing connected to a computer, but he's lacking some pieces for that, so it's not on me that it's not done.  Having this all connected does give me the option of watching more things on a TV screen that's bigger than my laptop screen, and in surround sound.  Could make rewatching BSG better.   Or not.  When I watch on my laptop, I wear headphones, so I don't really miss any dialogue.  I might miss dialogue if I watch without my headphones.

Wrote some more stuff.  Posted it over at lucywritesfic.

I'm not making resolutions; I never do.  However, I do have mental sticky notes to myself all over the place, and one is to keep exploring this writing thing.  My pieces so far are short, mostly smut, and I'm unreliably stricken by the muse.  But it kinda feels good to finish something and be satisfied with it, even if no one ever reads it.  Not that I don't grin when I notice something has gotten hits over at AO3.  Heehee.

The person I've been bouncing stories off of has been in the midst of a brand-new love affair and her happiness over that has pretty much taken over her life.  I'm thrilled for her, and I'm also waiting for some of the shine to wear off so that there's room in her life for other things again.  Friendship can be so complicated.  :sigh:

Another mental sticky note is to write in my blog more often.  I use to have so many things to say and wanted to share them.  Maybe it's just December that sucked the energy out of everything fun.  For me, anyway.

Last year, in January, I won a Kindle Fire.  It took me a day or two to fall completely in love with the thing.  I never imagined I would find digital words as compelling as actual books in my hands, but truth is, in my efforts to downsize my possessions as much as possible, ebooks fit my new lifestyle so much better.  I still have thousands of print books, and I'm still reluctant to give up my old favorites, or the ones I haven't read yet.  No idea how long it would take me to get through my TBR pile.  There are dozens of books there.  Anyway, in the process of learning to love ebooks, I made much use of the local libraries' catalogs of works, and found a few that I could not access on my Kindle.  So I bought a Nook I found at a fantastic price.  It's the first-generation Nook with WiFi and 3G internet.  It does some things that my Kindle doesn't do, and BN lets people lend books to each other, which is pretty dang nifty.  Still, I don't love it like I love my Kindle.  Maybe I never will, but I wonder if some of it is that I just don't know all the things my Nook can do.  Does anyone have a Nook that they adore?  Can you teach me to love my Nook better?

Another of the weird things that happened in 2012 (how strange to type that instead of 'this year') was people finding my reviews on Amazon and emailing me asking me to review their stuff.  I thought I would love it.  I love reading more than almost anything.  Maybe not more than my grandson.  I also love sharing what I think about a book, or at least writing it on my blog where someone might or might not someday read it (lol).  When I first started getting these requests, I was really flattered and tried superhard to turn the review around within a week, and I did pretty well with that for a while.  I realized, though, that the request obligated me to read the book, even if it sucked, and I'm not really comfortable telling an author directly, "I can't finish reading your book and then reviewing it because it's just not readable."  Whether it's grammar or plot or characterization or spelling or whatever else, I don't mind detailing what I didn't enjoy about a book, and also sharing what I did enjoy, if anything, but I don't like telling the creator directly that I can't even finish it.  No matter what reason I give, the subtext for them is that the book sucks, in my opinion, particularly if I can't even finish reading it.  I also got bogged down because I read four or five books in a row that were just short of awful, but since I had committed myself, I had to slog through.  Avoiding going back to a terrible story made me read less, making it take much longer to finish each one.  The last review I did, a week or so ago, is from a request I got in October.  That's just too frakking long.  And I look at my list (yes, I had to make a list) and see three dozen books on there, and just don't even want to read anything on there, even though some of it's got to be good.

I made myself go to a Meetup last Friday.  I joined a social Meetup a couple of months ago, just ladies looking to make new friends.  I need to socialize more, keep myself from isolating so much.  I didn't know what to expect from a group of strange women, but I had a lot of fun.  Their Bunco rules are different from the rules by which my church ladies play, but not so different that I couldn't adapt fairly quickly.  Several of them were just as irreverent and raunchy-humored as I am, and I doubt a single one is under 40.  The only negative about it is that this group of ladies always plays in a back room at the local La Madeleine.  I may be the only person in the State of Texas who does not adore La Madeleine, but I just don't like the food.  On the way home, though, I decided that from now on, I can eat before I go and just get iced tea there.  That way, I don't have to eat something I don't enjoy, and LM still gets their toll for me passing through the doors.  On another note, their pumpkin pie was good.  They had a flaky yet moist crust that I've never experienced before.  Even my mother never made a crust like that!  The pie crust tasted good, not floury, and I need to know how they did it.

Enough rambling.