(no subject)

So... Brunch was canceled.

Not hugely surprising (although part of me is wondering how many of the brunch regulars trekked out to the H&C despite the cancellation.

I, for one, went back to bed and slept until noon.

"Noon". Strictly speaking, my body still thinks it's 11am, but what can you do. (And this is insane. Daylight savings time should be abolished. Period.). :-P


Anyway. Aside from sleeping heavily, I have accomplished a couple of things this morning.

1) I wrote a letter to my sister. Which I haven't done in quite some time. So with any luck that'll get to her just fine and I'll have a letter (e-mail) back in a few days. :-)

2) I re-organized my office bookshelf.

I took a bunch of stuff downstairs to the dining room shelves, and re-organized what was left.

Top shelf: Ritual Studies + Starhawk, Carol Christ, + other Pagan Primary Sources and Goddess Secondary Sources (Wendy Griffin, Cynthia Eller, etc).

Second shelf: Sex, Gender, Sexuality, women's bodily stuff (birth and menstruation, but also a few other things), Goddess Poetry, and books on how to write fiction (mostly).

Third shelf: Women & Religions stuff (classics, like Mary Daly & Merlin Stone + compilations like Her Voice, Her Faith and Feminist Poetics of the Sacred), + various dictionaries (Oxford Canadian + English/French, English/German & English/Russian).


I still need to find a spot for my various divination cards but, none the less, I'm quite pleased with how my shelf turned out. :-)


Paul is doing some pre-tax spring cleaning, too. Going through his drawers full of receipts and sorting out the stuff he can toss vs the stuff he needs to keep for tax (or other) purposes.


I think I'm going to do some baking today. And/or make some pancakes. :-)

Mmmm... Pancakes... :-) (I've got frozen raspberries, and so might do raspberry muffins[1] or something. I think it could be good. :-)


Anyway. Must bustle off to get some food into me, some way, some how. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)


[1] While at Torrain and TheWeasleKing's housewarming party, I found out that you can substitute apple sauce for about half the oil in a cake recipe. It occurs to me that this (A) would work with raspberry sauce, too, and (B) would make for some awesome raspberry muffins without making them totally soupy and/or prone to falling apart. Hurrah! :-)

Books 2008 (I)

Okay,

I've seen a number of people doing the whole "fifty books in a year" thing, or whatever, and I figured "Hey, why not jump on the band wagon?" It's a nice wagon. I like the band. Sounds good to me. :-)


So.

So far, I've read (as in finished) the following, in 2008:

Trickster’s Choice by Tamora Pierce. YA Novel. Super-good. :-) The Raka (the oppressed native people in the story) appear to be based on Thai people, but I could be wrong. I kept picturing them as Maori, myself, but that's just me. <*shrug*>

Trickster’s Queen by Tamora Pierce. YA Novel. Second part of the Trickster series. Also super-good. Incidentally, it's really awesome to have a hero who Does The Right Thing specifically through lying and stealing and such-like because that's what she was trained to do. I like that she's snarky and wild and gets rid of her 'oh-poor-me's relatively quickly.
And I *love* that Tamora actually recognizes the need for freaking birth control!!! :-D It's done through magical means - a charm that you wear around your neck - but it's still acknowledged! YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!! :-D

Beka Cooper: Terrier by Tamora Pierce. YA Novel. Good, although I'd have preferred it if she'd done first-person PoV without the journal-entries style. I understand why she chose to do it that way (I think), but I always find it difficult to believe that anyone (even someone with a... sonographic(?) memory and OCD) would write out entire conversations, verbatum, in their diaries. (Okay, blogging an MSN conversation is different, because it's all about cut-and-paste, but someone living in the equivalent of the middle ages? Yeah, right...) That's just my personal taste, though.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson. Awesome! Canadian book about Voudoun in near-future post-apocalyptic (sort of) Toronto. Everyone should read this book, because it's totally cool and fantastic! :-D

Amazons: Sexy Tales of Strong Women edited by Sage Vivant & M. Christian. This has a lot of cute stuff in it. I particularly enjoyed "The Girl From Pelucidar" (geeky pulp-readers, take note!) and "Sex with Ducks" (not actual quack-quack ducks, I should point out), and a whole wodge of other ones. Sweet stuff, fun stuff, five-minute mostly-erotica that mostly makes me smile. (Some of it makes me angry or squicky, I grant you, but *most* of it was quite a lot of fun, so yay). :-)

Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. this in non-fiction about sex and love, eroticism and snuggliness, mystery and security, within marriage.
It's really, really good. I actually took a highlighter to it because so much of it was ringing bells for me.


Currently reading: Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns (a BDSM primer) and Look Both Ways (a book about the politics of bisexuality).