Post-Kentucky new year's post
Jan. 4th, 2005 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperHappy new year and stuff, all! And now, a summary of what I did after I got back from Kentucky and unpacked everything...
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spazzkat was desperate for company on Thursday, so we went and got him and took him out to lunch at Hana Sushi in Bothell. This was pleasant, though we had a bit of a time actually figuring out how to make the waitress understand that we wanted to eat at the bar, thanks, and didn't need her to take our orders if we were sitting right there in front of the sushi chef. But the sushi was good, and so was the mochi ice cream we had for dessert.
After that we had to run a few errands. We went to the bank to deposit the paycheck I'd gotten during the vacation and a couple other random bits of moneys, and we went to the post office so thatsolarbird could mail off the gift she purchased for cow while we were in Kentucky.
Then we scampered off to Ballard to pick up Zoe. Dara had housed her at a place called the Tweetery while we were gone, and this turned out to be a pretty cool place, part bird shop and part birdie hotel. The owner lets people board their birds for a small fee; we wound up paying less than thirty dollars for the entire time we were gone. And we got a kick out of seeing the various birds who were loose in the place, especially a big blue-and-yellow macaw named Harley. Harley did a very good job of putting Zoe's propensity for noise into perspective, because he was WAY LOUDER than our little Quaker. And he was quite friendly, too, flapping about the store and waddling up to us on the floor near the cash register when it looked like we were doing something Interesting. It was fun to see the owner pick the bird up by letting him hook his beak onto his finger.
Also of note were some birdies called "parrotlets" by the sign on their cage and "pocket parrots" by the owner. They were maybe two inches high tops, and yet, looked like actual parrots as opposed to parakeets or finches. They weren't for sale, but the sign said that the store would start breeding them in March and that they were taking advance orders. They were the cutest little things, one yellow, two blues, and a green; the green one was pretty much the exact same color as Zoe.
It was charming to see exactly how happy Zoe was to see us. She perked up and made a bunch of happy birdie noises at us, while Dara paid her boarding fee and the owner told us all about how she'd been quite well-behaved. She'd gotten caught once ripping happily into one of the seed bags on one of the shelves, which shouldn't have been healthy for her, but Dara was happy to handwave it off since Zoe had been on birdie vacation. ;) And, we were informed, she really liked being under the birdie shower they had rigged upstairs.
Zoe was even happy as we covered up her cage, stuck her in the car, and took her home. Once we got her cage settled back into its accustomed place and her squawks and chirps started filling the house, we knew for certain that we were home.
On Friday afternoon Dara and I made oatmeal raisin cookies from the batch of cookie ingredients in a jar that we'd received for Christmas from my uncle Randy. This was surprisingly easy, due to the ingredients being pretty much ready to dump into a bowl. (It was kind of cool, actually; the ingredients were all artistically layered in the jar they came in, with flour, sugar, brown sugar, raisins, and oats from the bottom to the top of the jar.) All we had to do was add butter, eggs, and vanilla, though getting the butter prepped took a bit of effort as I hadn't known how to cream it and the eggs and the vanilla together. Dara pointed out that I should have let the butter sit out and get to room temperature before trying to mix it up. Oops.
But we figured that bringing fresh homemade cookies over tokathrynt and llachglin's house for the Annual Burning of Things That Sucked would be a good thing. For those of you who are not yet familiar with this custom, this involves writing down a list of all things that sucked about the outgoing year and tossing it into the nearest source of fire. In this case, this was a fireplace. It's oddly cathartic, and it's a way to clear the slate and hope that the incoming new year will be better.
In attendance, besides Kathryn and Erik, were Dara, Paul, and myself, Jessica, and Kathryn's friend Llyra and another young man whose name I have unfortunately totally forgotten.wrog and emmacrew showed up as well, later into the evening, and Emma got in on the fiber-geeking already going on between Kathryn and Llyra. Amusing conversation was had in general. Snickers were given to Kathryn's book How to Massage Your Cat and especially to her playing Jonathan Coulton's songs Skullcrusher Mountain and Mandelbrot Set.
The cookies went over well, as did Paul's providing of jalapeno poppers. Kathryn made apple tinis. And in general it was social goodness. Just before midnight, we broke out the champagne, turned on the TV, and watched the Space Needle fireworks go up as we did the countdown. The one amusing thing about this was that during the finale the fireworks were surprisingly well-synced with the music--the song was Prince's "Let's Go Crazy", and the fireworks matched up rather well with the final guitar solo.
Paul wanted to go out to see Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events at the Woodinville Theater, so we willingly jumped in on this plan. But we carried it out with the intention of spending the $50 Barnes and Noble gift card kindly given to us bytinlail and lyricae (THANKS JOE AND CHERYL!), which Dara ceded to me in exchange for getting full custody of the Victoria's Secret gift card we hadn't gotten around to spending. I happily agreed to this, because, well, BOOKS. And Dara wanted to look for shoes, since her current shoes had started hurting her back; they were the air-sole kind, and the air pocket in one of them had popped. So they'd become lopsided--in fact, pretty much the same thing that had happened to my shoes.
But we had to pick up Paul due to his needing transport, and when we arrived he proudly showed off the work he'd been doing on assembling a DVD about his 2004. He's been playing with DVD software on his Mac, assembling all sorts of photos and videos he's collected over the past many months, and he's doing a pretty impressive job.
Once we reached Woodinville we split up. Dara and Paul headed for Target in search of shoes, and I went and got the tickets and then headed over to the bookstore.
I spent over an hour browsing around looking for books to buy. I'd copied down the titles and authors of several things off my Amazon.com wishlist as well as some things that their Recommendations engine had suggested for me, and wound up finding only a few of both. But I did make it out with six books, including:
* The Poyson Garden by Karen Harper (Elizabeth I as a young princess trying to deal with a conspiracy against her life)
* The Bone Doll's Twin by Lynn Flewelling
* Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
* Light Music by Kathleen Ann Goonan
* Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison
* Thief of Lives by J.C. and Barb Hendee
I made it back over to the theater just in time to catch up with Dara and Paul, and then we headed in for the movie. Jessica showed up to meet us, and we settled in to blow the next couple of hours.
I haven't read any of the Lemony Snicket books yet, but I can easily say that the kids gave a fantastic performance in the movie. I particularly liked little Sunny and her propensity for biting things, as well as the subtitles for her infant gurgles. ;) But I wasn't as enthused about Jim Carrey's performance. There were parts where he came across to me far too strongly as "Jim Carrey doing his usual schtick and trying to show us how wacky he is" as opposed to "scary Count Olaf intimidating the children". And there were also parts of the movie that struck me as all too close to the sort of thing you have happening on MUSHes--i.e., never-ending angst and "unfortunate events" that happen to characters that roleplay on many of the games I've been on, because many players don't know how to RP interesting things without resorting to having angsty things happen to them. This twigged me in a not-necessarily-positive way, since I got real tired of that on MUSHes in the last few years.
After the movie we decided to go over to see if Red Robin was still open, as we hadn't had any dinner. It was. But we wound up getting some pretty crappy service, waiting for long stretches without any attention from the waitress, and then waiting again for her to bring us our order. And we only ordered soup and salad, pretty much. It turned out that they apparently had to prep to make the various kinds of soup we wanted back there in the kitche--perhaps because it was too late in the evening and they'd started cleaning stuff up? I don't know. Regardless, it was annoying, but at least we were given the soup for free by way of consolation.
I woke up on Sunday feeling vaguely sore in the throat and kind of out of it, so I spent most of Sunday morning dozing on the couch. I think I must have actually fallen asleep, because I woke up when Dara placed one of the fuzzy warm blankets we keep around said couch upon me. That was comfy. ^_^
Most of the rest of the afternoon I blew finishing off Sandra Scoppettone's Let's Face the Music and Die. More on this in my next book post.
The highlight of Sunday, however, was discovering that there was a disaster movie marathon going on on the AMC channel--so we tuned in to catch The Towering Inferno. We knew we were in for cheesearific goodness when, during the opening credits, a gong-and-cymbals crash marked every single occurrence of Irwin Allen's name. And if that hadn't convinced us, there was the 'wire cabinet pops open ALL BY ITSELF in the utility room, a spark jumps out and lands on a bunch of oily rags CONVENIENTLY LOCATED RIGHT UNDER A FAN' scene!
And oh, the badness. The doomed building was hideous and so was all of its interior decoration. Dara took one look at the foil wallpaper in one of the elevators, proclaimed that a war crime all by itself, and we settled in to cheer on the building's destruction. The movie was full of bad acting, too--Richard Chamberlain was particularly wretched as the sleazeball son of the building's developer, and we laughed out loud at the sight of O.J. Simpson playing a security guard. And for the younger set, we had the Kid Who Played Peter Brady as one of two Obligatory Cute Children to Be Saved from Certain Death. There was even a cat, and the moment I saw it I proclaimed, "I predict we will have a rescuing the cat scene!" (We did. O.J. saved the kitty!)
What really doomed this movie, though, was that it was boring. There were huge swaths of bad pacing, and the vast majority of characters were ones you just don't care about in the slightest. Except maybe Paul Newman. And the cat.
Monday morning went to reading Dorothy Sayers' Clouds of Witness, in an effort to get more ofkathrynt's borrowed books read so I can return them to her. More on this in a forthcoming book post.
Monday afternoon went to Dara and I going out on a quest to get her new shoes and to spend the Victoria's Secret gift card. With this as our goal, we went over to Northgate Mall.
Once we got there, I discovered much to my chagrin that I had forgotten my wallet. This was distressing, as the last I'd remembered dealing with it was on Saturday night after the movie, when I'd gotten it out to show my ID to the waitress at Red Robin. But I couldn't remember putting it back in my purse, and I'd had no reason to deal with my wallet since then. Dara figured that it had simply fallen on the floor at home, and I figured she was probably right, but still this nagged a bit.
So, as I was wallet-free and we had an inadequate number of dollars to acquire lunch, we walked all the way back down to the other end of the mall so we could hit the Bank of America ATM and get dollars without having to pay extra dollars (stupid ATM fees), and then we walked all the way back down to the food court end and got food. I was quite disappointed in the salmon chowder I got from the Ivar's there, though. It was all watery and kind of chalky--badly mixed--and had mostly potatoes and hardly any salmon. Bleah. I wound up getting humbow instead, and that was an adequate substitute.
While we were making with the lunch, we spotted a guy that we both recognized from the Norwescon crowd, but damned if either Dara or I could remember his name. He came over and said hi, though, and we had a nice little chat about each other's purposes of the day. Turned out he was also in the mall to buy shoes. We were amused to have this in common with him, and I at least was relieved to not share his recent roof and furnace troubles.
After lunch we got teeny tiny ice cream cones from Dairy Queen and then set off back down the mall in search of shoes. Dara decided she really liked the shoes I'd recently acquired from The Walking Company, so we went there first. They had more shoes of the same type, but unfortunately none in a size that would fit Dara in a color scheme that she liked--though we were amused to discover that the difference between the "women's" shoe of this brand and the "men's" shoe seemed to be that the latter were in darker color schemes. So we wound up having to venture to two other place: The Athlete's Foot (which turned out to be having an impending-bankruptcy please-please-buy-all-our-stock sale), which proved to have nothing Dara wanted, and Finish Line, which actually turned out to have the same brand of shoe that I'd gotten at The Walking Company. In fact, they had a pair in the color scheme I'd picked as my second choice, and after trying on one of my shoes to see how they felt after being broken in, Dara deemed that pair Perfect and bought them. So yay, shoes.
Victoria's Secret, however, was absolutely mobbed. They, too, were having a sale--and half the population of the mall seemed to be taking advantage of it. It is a strange and alien land to both Dara and me, and so we ventured in warily in search of something Dara would find cute to wear and that I'd find cute on her. No dice, though. The chances of getting a salesperson were nil, and nothing really leapt out at Dara off the racks and said BUY ME. So since the card she has specifically claims to never expire, we opted to come back another time.
We swung southward to MurkSouth rather than going directly home, with the thought of picking up rent from folks there. This was not to be, mostly, as we learned frommamishka that Dara's monthly utilities mail had not gone out. DOH! But we found a package for Meems on the front porch and I conveyed it to her, and so was able to get a gander at her nifty new additions to her collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer figures. The Taras were pretty cool and resembled the character nicely, but the Anyas--not so much. However, Bunny Suit Anya is worth a giggle for the tiny bunny suit alone.
We stopped at Wild Birds Unlimited to pick up a new suet cage to put outside for the birdies, and with that, we were home. The rest of the evening went to more usual weeknight routine, as I got back into the groove of editing--and finished off Chapter 10 of Faerie Blood. Also chatted some withveiledpanda who had regained Internet access, and discussed the fate of Two Moons with larias.
spazzkat was desperate for company on Thursday, so we went and got him and took him out to lunch at Hana Sushi in Bothell. This was pleasant, though we had a bit of a time actually figuring out how to make the waitress understand that we wanted to eat at the bar, thanks, and didn't need her to take our orders if we were sitting right there in front of the sushi chef. But the sushi was good, and so was the mochi ice cream we had for dessert.After that we had to run a few errands. We went to the bank to deposit the paycheck I'd gotten during the vacation and a couple other random bits of moneys, and we went to the post office so that
solarbird could mail off the gift she purchased for cow while we were in Kentucky.Then we scampered off to Ballard to pick up Zoe. Dara had housed her at a place called the Tweetery while we were gone, and this turned out to be a pretty cool place, part bird shop and part birdie hotel. The owner lets people board their birds for a small fee; we wound up paying less than thirty dollars for the entire time we were gone. And we got a kick out of seeing the various birds who were loose in the place, especially a big blue-and-yellow macaw named Harley. Harley did a very good job of putting Zoe's propensity for noise into perspective, because he was WAY LOUDER than our little Quaker. And he was quite friendly, too, flapping about the store and waddling up to us on the floor near the cash register when it looked like we were doing something Interesting. It was fun to see the owner pick the bird up by letting him hook his beak onto his finger.
Also of note were some birdies called "parrotlets" by the sign on their cage and "pocket parrots" by the owner. They were maybe two inches high tops, and yet, looked like actual parrots as opposed to parakeets or finches. They weren't for sale, but the sign said that the store would start breeding them in March and that they were taking advance orders. They were the cutest little things, one yellow, two blues, and a green; the green one was pretty much the exact same color as Zoe.
It was charming to see exactly how happy Zoe was to see us. She perked up and made a bunch of happy birdie noises at us, while Dara paid her boarding fee and the owner told us all about how she'd been quite well-behaved. She'd gotten caught once ripping happily into one of the seed bags on one of the shelves, which shouldn't have been healthy for her, but Dara was happy to handwave it off since Zoe had been on birdie vacation. ;) And, we were informed, she really liked being under the birdie shower they had rigged upstairs.
Zoe was even happy as we covered up her cage, stuck her in the car, and took her home. Once we got her cage settled back into its accustomed place and her squawks and chirps started filling the house, we knew for certain that we were home.
On Friday afternoon Dara and I made oatmeal raisin cookies from the batch of cookie ingredients in a jar that we'd received for Christmas from my uncle Randy. This was surprisingly easy, due to the ingredients being pretty much ready to dump into a bowl. (It was kind of cool, actually; the ingredients were all artistically layered in the jar they came in, with flour, sugar, brown sugar, raisins, and oats from the bottom to the top of the jar.) All we had to do was add butter, eggs, and vanilla, though getting the butter prepped took a bit of effort as I hadn't known how to cream it and the eggs and the vanilla together. Dara pointed out that I should have let the butter sit out and get to room temperature before trying to mix it up. Oops.
But we figured that bringing fresh homemade cookies over to
kathrynt and llachglin's house for the Annual Burning of Things That Sucked would be a good thing. For those of you who are not yet familiar with this custom, this involves writing down a list of all things that sucked about the outgoing year and tossing it into the nearest source of fire. In this case, this was a fireplace. It's oddly cathartic, and it's a way to clear the slate and hope that the incoming new year will be better.In attendance, besides Kathryn and Erik, were Dara, Paul, and myself, Jessica, and Kathryn's friend Llyra and another young man whose name I have unfortunately totally forgotten.
wrog and emmacrew showed up as well, later into the evening, and Emma got in on the fiber-geeking already going on between Kathryn and Llyra. Amusing conversation was had in general. Snickers were given to Kathryn's book How to Massage Your Cat and especially to her playing Jonathan Coulton's songs Skullcrusher Mountain and Mandelbrot Set.The cookies went over well, as did Paul's providing of jalapeno poppers. Kathryn made apple tinis. And in general it was social goodness. Just before midnight, we broke out the champagne, turned on the TV, and watched the Space Needle fireworks go up as we did the countdown. The one amusing thing about this was that during the finale the fireworks were surprisingly well-synced with the music--the song was Prince's "Let's Go Crazy", and the fireworks matched up rather well with the final guitar solo.
Paul wanted to go out to see Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events at the Woodinville Theater, so we willingly jumped in on this plan. But we carried it out with the intention of spending the $50 Barnes and Noble gift card kindly given to us by
tinlail and lyricae (THANKS JOE AND CHERYL!), which Dara ceded to me in exchange for getting full custody of the Victoria's Secret gift card we hadn't gotten around to spending. I happily agreed to this, because, well, BOOKS. And Dara wanted to look for shoes, since her current shoes had started hurting her back; they were the air-sole kind, and the air pocket in one of them had popped. So they'd become lopsided--in fact, pretty much the same thing that had happened to my shoes.But we had to pick up Paul due to his needing transport, and when we arrived he proudly showed off the work he'd been doing on assembling a DVD about his 2004. He's been playing with DVD software on his Mac, assembling all sorts of photos and videos he's collected over the past many months, and he's doing a pretty impressive job.
Once we reached Woodinville we split up. Dara and Paul headed for Target in search of shoes, and I went and got the tickets and then headed over to the bookstore.
I spent over an hour browsing around looking for books to buy. I'd copied down the titles and authors of several things off my Amazon.com wishlist as well as some things that their Recommendations engine had suggested for me, and wound up finding only a few of both. But I did make it out with six books, including:
* The Poyson Garden by Karen Harper (Elizabeth I as a young princess trying to deal with a conspiracy against her life)
* The Bone Doll's Twin by Lynn Flewelling
* Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
* Light Music by Kathleen Ann Goonan
* Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison
* Thief of Lives by J.C. and Barb Hendee
I made it back over to the theater just in time to catch up with Dara and Paul, and then we headed in for the movie. Jessica showed up to meet us, and we settled in to blow the next couple of hours.
I haven't read any of the Lemony Snicket books yet, but I can easily say that the kids gave a fantastic performance in the movie. I particularly liked little Sunny and her propensity for biting things, as well as the subtitles for her infant gurgles. ;) But I wasn't as enthused about Jim Carrey's performance. There were parts where he came across to me far too strongly as "Jim Carrey doing his usual schtick and trying to show us how wacky he is" as opposed to "scary Count Olaf intimidating the children". And there were also parts of the movie that struck me as all too close to the sort of thing you have happening on MUSHes--i.e., never-ending angst and "unfortunate events" that happen to characters that roleplay on many of the games I've been on, because many players don't know how to RP interesting things without resorting to having angsty things happen to them. This twigged me in a not-necessarily-positive way, since I got real tired of that on MUSHes in the last few years.
After the movie we decided to go over to see if Red Robin was still open, as we hadn't had any dinner. It was. But we wound up getting some pretty crappy service, waiting for long stretches without any attention from the waitress, and then waiting again for her to bring us our order. And we only ordered soup and salad, pretty much. It turned out that they apparently had to prep to make the various kinds of soup we wanted back there in the kitche--perhaps because it was too late in the evening and they'd started cleaning stuff up? I don't know. Regardless, it was annoying, but at least we were given the soup for free by way of consolation.
I woke up on Sunday feeling vaguely sore in the throat and kind of out of it, so I spent most of Sunday morning dozing on the couch. I think I must have actually fallen asleep, because I woke up when Dara placed one of the fuzzy warm blankets we keep around said couch upon me. That was comfy. ^_^
Most of the rest of the afternoon I blew finishing off Sandra Scoppettone's Let's Face the Music and Die. More on this in my next book post.
The highlight of Sunday, however, was discovering that there was a disaster movie marathon going on on the AMC channel--so we tuned in to catch The Towering Inferno. We knew we were in for cheesearific goodness when, during the opening credits, a gong-and-cymbals crash marked every single occurrence of Irwin Allen's name. And if that hadn't convinced us, there was the 'wire cabinet pops open ALL BY ITSELF in the utility room, a spark jumps out and lands on a bunch of oily rags CONVENIENTLY LOCATED RIGHT UNDER A FAN' scene!
And oh, the badness. The doomed building was hideous and so was all of its interior decoration. Dara took one look at the foil wallpaper in one of the elevators, proclaimed that a war crime all by itself, and we settled in to cheer on the building's destruction. The movie was full of bad acting, too--Richard Chamberlain was particularly wretched as the sleazeball son of the building's developer, and we laughed out loud at the sight of O.J. Simpson playing a security guard. And for the younger set, we had the Kid Who Played Peter Brady as one of two Obligatory Cute Children to Be Saved from Certain Death. There was even a cat, and the moment I saw it I proclaimed, "I predict we will have a rescuing the cat scene!" (We did. O.J. saved the kitty!)
What really doomed this movie, though, was that it was boring. There were huge swaths of bad pacing, and the vast majority of characters were ones you just don't care about in the slightest. Except maybe Paul Newman. And the cat.
Monday morning went to reading Dorothy Sayers' Clouds of Witness, in an effort to get more of
kathrynt's borrowed books read so I can return them to her. More on this in a forthcoming book post.Monday afternoon went to Dara and I going out on a quest to get her new shoes and to spend the Victoria's Secret gift card. With this as our goal, we went over to Northgate Mall.
Once we got there, I discovered much to my chagrin that I had forgotten my wallet. This was distressing, as the last I'd remembered dealing with it was on Saturday night after the movie, when I'd gotten it out to show my ID to the waitress at Red Robin. But I couldn't remember putting it back in my purse, and I'd had no reason to deal with my wallet since then. Dara figured that it had simply fallen on the floor at home, and I figured she was probably right, but still this nagged a bit.
So, as I was wallet-free and we had an inadequate number of dollars to acquire lunch, we walked all the way back down to the other end of the mall so we could hit the Bank of America ATM and get dollars without having to pay extra dollars (stupid ATM fees), and then we walked all the way back down to the food court end and got food. I was quite disappointed in the salmon chowder I got from the Ivar's there, though. It was all watery and kind of chalky--badly mixed--and had mostly potatoes and hardly any salmon. Bleah. I wound up getting humbow instead, and that was an adequate substitute.
While we were making with the lunch, we spotted a guy that we both recognized from the Norwescon crowd, but damned if either Dara or I could remember his name. He came over and said hi, though, and we had a nice little chat about each other's purposes of the day. Turned out he was also in the mall to buy shoes. We were amused to have this in common with him, and I at least was relieved to not share his recent roof and furnace troubles.
After lunch we got teeny tiny ice cream cones from Dairy Queen and then set off back down the mall in search of shoes. Dara decided she really liked the shoes I'd recently acquired from The Walking Company, so we went there first. They had more shoes of the same type, but unfortunately none in a size that would fit Dara in a color scheme that she liked--though we were amused to discover that the difference between the "women's" shoe of this brand and the "men's" shoe seemed to be that the latter were in darker color schemes. So we wound up having to venture to two other place: The Athlete's Foot (which turned out to be having an impending-bankruptcy please-please-buy-all-our-stock sale), which proved to have nothing Dara wanted, and Finish Line, which actually turned out to have the same brand of shoe that I'd gotten at The Walking Company. In fact, they had a pair in the color scheme I'd picked as my second choice, and after trying on one of my shoes to see how they felt after being broken in, Dara deemed that pair Perfect and bought them. So yay, shoes.
Victoria's Secret, however, was absolutely mobbed. They, too, were having a sale--and half the population of the mall seemed to be taking advantage of it. It is a strange and alien land to both Dara and me, and so we ventured in warily in search of something Dara would find cute to wear and that I'd find cute on her. No dice, though. The chances of getting a salesperson were nil, and nothing really leapt out at Dara off the racks and said BUY ME. So since the card she has specifically claims to never expire, we opted to come back another time.
We swung southward to MurkSouth rather than going directly home, with the thought of picking up rent from folks there. This was not to be, mostly, as we learned from
mamishka that Dara's monthly utilities mail had not gone out. DOH! But we found a package for Meems on the front porch and I conveyed it to her, and so was able to get a gander at her nifty new additions to her collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer figures. The Taras were pretty cool and resembled the character nicely, but the Anyas--not so much. However, Bunny Suit Anya is worth a giggle for the tiny bunny suit alone.We stopped at Wild Birds Unlimited to pick up a new suet cage to put outside for the birdies, and with that, we were home. The rest of the evening went to more usual weeknight routine, as I got back into the groove of editing--and finished off Chapter 10 of Faerie Blood. Also chatted some with
veiledpanda who had regained Internet access, and discussed the fate of Two Moons with larias. ![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 04:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 12:50 pm (UTC)Good stuff there, IMO. They've also released Dhampir (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0451459067/qid=1104928866/sr=8-2/ref=pd_ka_2/002-4288113-4225661?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) and, just recently, Sister of the Dead: A Novel of the Noble Dead (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/045146009X/qid=1104928866/sr=8-3/ref=pd_ka_3/002-4288113-4225661?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). I haven't yet read the newest book. The other two, however, I enjoyed!
"Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison"
I'll look forward to your review of this book. I've looked at it and looked at it and never brought myself around to actually paying for it. The storyline looks interesting, though!
And now a recommendation based on the prior two titles:
Bitten (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0452283485/qid=1104929004/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/002-4288113-4225661?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) by Kelley Armstrong - Ms. Armstrong is a relative newcomer, as an author, and Bitten is an excellent introduction to her writing. I've read both Bitten and its sequel, Stolen (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0452285933/qid=1104929004/sr=8-4/ref=pd_ka_1/002-4288113-4225661?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) and enjoyed them both!
Dead Witch Walking
Date: 2005-01-05 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 06:56 pm (UTC)I have already read Dhampir, which is why I picked up Thief of Lives. I found Dhampir kind of fluffy but not bad, and was just enough interested by the dynamic between the two main characters that I thought I'd give Thief of Lives a shot.
I'm aware of Kelley Armstrong's books, yeah, but the summaries didn't quite grab me well enough to make me go check them out. But we'll see if I get any other book cards any time soon. ;)
Re: Dead Witch Walking
Date: 2005-01-05 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-05 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-06 05:02 am (UTC)Me and my Fallen Angel live right down the bloody street from the Needle. Like, I could probably hit it with an arrow from a moderately strong bow.
Our building manager opened the door to the roof (he did this on the 4th too) so that we could all go and freeze our assorted bits off whilst watching the fireworks.
Long about 9pm me and the FA snuggled up (with Smeghead the cat) and next thing we know, we're being awakened by the sounds of the explosions.
Yep, we missed the fireworks even though we're close enough to get our hair set on fire by them.
What a drag it is getting old.
HH
no subject
Date: 2005-01-06 05:42 am (UTC)However, I love your cat's name. Is that pronounced "smeehrrr"? :)