Evening commute, new reading, and woot! More userpics!

[annathepiper]

Snurched from sarekofvulcan, I bring you news that the userpic count for paid users has doubled! Plus, they've added a new thing to give you extra userpics the longer you've been a paid user. SWEET. Time to start making more icons. :D

Meanwhile, the 308 is solidly turning into my evening commute bus. I really prefer the 522 for the sake of more comfy seats, but the 308 wins for being way less crowded and actually reliably letting me sit down in the first place. This should be adding .3 miles to my usual daily count. Woot!

I'm working on reading Thief of Lives, the second book about Magiere and Leesil by Barb and J.C. Hendee. This series always makes me giggle a little since it's got two heavy stock concepts as the heroine and her love interest--a half-vampire and a half-elf. Halfbreed city here. (ETA: Not to mention that the whole concept of a "half-vampire" always makes me snicker. Because a half-vampire means some human had to not only get it on with a vamp, but also impregnate or be impregnated by a vamp, and exactly how the hell is that supposed to work then if the vamp is physically DEAD?) And the blurbs on the cover of this one try to pitch it as "Anita Blake dropped into a standard fantasy novel". And yet, so far it's working for me. The story in the first was fairly complex, and this one's starting off well too. The one quibble I'm having so far is wanting to smack both Magiere and Leesil for the obligatory Oh We Really Like One Another But We're Going to Be Seriously Obtuse About It romantic tension. We'll have to see whether this gets any more annoying through the rest of this book.

Tuesday evening miles: 2.15
Wednesday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 780.35
Miles out of Rivendell: 322.35
Miles to Lothlórien: 152.35 ETA 3/17/06: 141.65

Comments

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

In Romany legend, the child of a human and a vampire is a Dhampire.

[annathepiper]

And that gets invoked in this book, too, as Magiere is referred to as a 'dhampir'.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

In a completely random note, Ael's currently working on "It's So Amazing!", so I'm going to scan the cover and make it into an "I Read Banned Books" button for her. :-)

[annathepiper]

I have no idea which book that is, but sounds like a neat icon idea anyway!

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

It was number 10 last year on the ALA list (http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=News&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=119074). Its sister book, "It's Perfectly Normal", was number 1.

Here's the Amazon version of the front cover (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0763613215/ref=dp_otherviews_0/102-3273004-5203328?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books&img=0)...

[annathepiper]

A-ha! Cool. :)