Shari.com: Having Just Downed a Good, Stiff Book

Only one near-sleepless night this week, and I'm sure that has something to do with this being a better year. That, and eating lunch almost every day. Huh. Amazing.

But, because of that one night of tossy-turny, I had to crash as soon as I came home yesterday, and to avoid split sleep I took a Tylenol PM. I'm not sure these are as good as their "Simply Sleep" brand as I've yet to get a full zonk after taking a couple of "buttons" (seriously, have you seen these things?), but Fresh & Easy doesn't carry SS. And we all know I have to do my shopping at Fresh & Easy. But here I am, not long after midnight, ready to start the day. You can ask my sixth period later, 14 hours later, how well this works out.

I'm so pleased with how the year is going so far. Yes, I have troublesome kids, but I have a pretty amazing supervisor who is also in charge of discipline, and he (or she, I'm coy) is redefining the terms "hands-on" and "pro-active." So, I feel like I have this ally who's around all the time, supporting our common vision, as opposed to someone who's going to pop in unannounced three times per year and judge me. (Perhaps it doesn't hurt that she - or he - was one of my coworkers just a couple of years ago. The classroom is not a distant, idyllic memory of some other time and place.)

That said, whether this person will be satisfied with my teaching is a big question mark, but I feel on top of my game at the moment, so (at the risk of making some inevitable jinx bigger by the breath) if s/he isn't happy, I'm sure the problem can be fixed. All I know is that it's only the second week of school and pretty much every day I have ACTUALLY TAUGHT. And, more importantly, I think some of the kids have ACTUALLY LEARNED. Maybe... maybe someday they will all learn.

Or this could all be the oatmeal raisin cookies talking.

We had the free tickets for Cosby last weekend, but I was too infirm to go. (Dudettes. If menopause doesn't happen Really Soon, I'm going to sue the Acme Uterus Company.) No plans for this weekend, other than making something with potatoes in the crock pot. I've been hankering for some kind of savoury, long-simmered potato dish, but I was waiting for Mike's mom to send us a potato peeler.

Yes, we have to use a potato peeler from Australia. Apparently Mike doesn't like the potato peelers here. Or they're too expensive. I forget which. Both? So, he asked his mother to send a good ole Aussie potato peeler when she was sending him some underwear.

Um, yeah, the underwear here is no good, too. I admit he has a point on that one. Mike doesn't like boxers, but the briefs these days all seem to have a tiny bit of "leg" on them, which Mike finds annoying. Do you know what I mean? He likes a bikini-style leg but the rest should be like an ordinary guy's brief (as opposed to, say, a thong).

And then let's not get started on how I had to break it to Mike that you can't return underwear that you've already tried on. Apparently this is not a big deal in Australia? (One of the undies Mike's mom sent was too small, and she asked if he wanted her to take it back. What a country!) Or am I insane and making up bizarre U.S. store policies in my head? I assume that, since you can't return swimsuits, you can't return undies. Except maybe for store credit? It doesn't matter - it's not like I'm setting foot in Wal-Mart again (except, as always, for hamster food).

Anyway! Now we have an unwanted six-pack of Fruit of the Loom "leggy" briefs if anyone wants them. Do holler.

Lest it sound like Mike and his mother are working a transpacific umbilical cord of steel cable, I also got some loot from the Mother-in-Law Down Under - a plush wombat! It's totally adorable. I will take many pictures later and provide them for on-screen snuggling.

What else? I've been winning stuff! Okay, so remember back in July? All those contests? One of them pointed me to author Terri Garey. I was a runner-up in her contest, won a bag of author promo loot from a recent conference, and one of the items in the bag was from author Lynn LaFleur. Her pen and post-its (mmm, I'm a pen-and-post-it glutton) just had a website name, so I was intrigued and checked it out.

Well, it turns out Lynn is from Granbury, Texas, where my great-grandparents settled down after coming from Arkansas as kiddos in the 1890s. (Then they met at a dance, where Popo sent Nanny a cookie from across the room, and on the cookie he scratched out a request for a date. And yes, I've always wondered, what kind of cookie? Me, I'd use peanut butter. Big, soft, smells nice.) Lynn's website was so personable, not at all distant-and-generically-slick, that between that and the Granbury connection, I just had to give her a shout.

She shouted back, and she offered to send me a copy of one of her books. Wow! Triple wow! BOOKS! And, um, BLUSH. Because Lynn writes, erm, erotic romance.

Like I've said here before, I want to like romance novels. The Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog is more entertaining by the day, and of course I think lurrrve is the greatest thing and blah blah, but I'm just so dang picky. I can't stand overly contrived misunderstandings or characters that have no depth beyond their raven locks or aquamarine eyes or whatever. I just want a lot and a lot and a lot of Mr. Darcy, okay? That's hawt.

But, I love books, and probably another reason this is a better year for teaching is that teaching isn't interfering with my reading as much as it used to. (Says the woman who has yet to collect, read, and grade 160 essays this year.) I mean, I'm not just coming home and dying; this week I've been losing myself in Maskerade (more excellent Pratchettyness) and Stiff. (Which is not a romance novel. Ahem. However, thanks to Stiff, I have enough conversation fodder for the rest of the month, and I'm only on page 40. Did you know that if you donate your body to medicine, your head may be placed in an aluminum foil roasting pan so cosmetic surgeons at an all-day seminar can practice face lifts?)

So I took Lynn up on her generous offer and asked for Seduction's Spell. North Texas mansion-resort? Enchanted water well? Ageless hostess? It's like a southern Mr. Roarke for the 21st century! (Here I pause to pull up Ricardo Montalban's wiki page. Purrrrr. And I'm sure it's a total coincidence that Mike just decided to go to bed.)

I'm about halfway done and, eek, yes, it really is, um, erotic. Um. But it also has a story and characters of substance. So far, I'd file it under "a high quality beach read, and by "beach" I mean one of those white-sand private beaches where you languish in your cabana with Fabio peeling grapes at your feet." Which is a compliment. Let's just say I'm reading this one in measured sections. And sometimes out loud. Also a compliment.

By the way, have you ever had peeled grapes? Really overrated. Why would you want to get rid of the bouncy part?

So, thanks to a contest, I ended up with a new book and at least two new authors to check out further. (I haven't even begun exploring the rest of Garey's goodie bag to see what other good stories all these bookmarks and postcards may point to. I guess the moral of the story is this: marketing works. But not always the way you expect.)

Then, yesterday I checked my "contests, newsletters, and casino stuff" email address for the first time in a couple of days, having been too busy with school to peek at it. Plus, it's usually empty. (Wah.) And hey, I won an autographed copy of this book!

I'm really excited about this, as I mentioned when I entered the contest. And-and-and, it turns out that the person who did the giveaway just came out with her own book - Sucks to Be Me. To celebrate, she's doing all kinds of book giveaways for the next few days. See her website for more information.

And no, I'm not mentioning this because she gives away extra entries if you promote the contest. In fact, I'm not even going to tell her I'm saying anything. Lots of blog-based contests give away extra entries if you promote the contest on your own site, but since I can never just SAY something, but instead have to bury it under a thousand other words of minimal relation, I feel too sheepish to ever let people know I'm talking about them. It's like, "Hey, I gave your Win A Pair of Alpaca-Lined Jeans contest a mention... after discussing what's wrong with Roma tomatoes, linking to a Loreena McKennitt video, wondering aloud whether I should have the kids do a group project tomorrow or if I'm just being lazy, and talking about how cute Terry looks in his pink hamster bedding. It's in there somewhere, I swear. Use CTRL-F!"

And now I've spent too many minutes trying to decide if alpaca-lined jeans would be the nicest things in the world, or sweaty as gumballs in a toddler's claw.

Bonus. This will now be the Google result for "alpaca-lined jeans."

Google! I installed their Chrome browser when it came out on Tuesday. Early verdict? Fast and friendly. And yet, I completely forgot about it and only just remembered that, hey, a new browser is out. Oh yeah. I don't know what that means. Firefox treats me pretty well, I guess. However, I can't switch to the latest FF until the "Orbit Grey" skin and "Kodak Companion" plugin is compatible. (I like to get my photos printed with Kodak because they know better than to resize the photo to fit the paper size. HEED THIS, FLICKR!)

Still, I think the only thing keeping me from switching to Chrome for a longer trial is the lack of mouse gestures. Then again, maybe I should read this post. I don't need fancy Opera browser gestures, I just need to be able to make images larger or small with a swift mouse stroke. How this has become a critical part of my browsing, I don't know, but there you have it. (I'm going to subscribe to that blog, though. Looks promising.)

Speaking of my tendency to just jumble all kinds of topics into one post... I've been a little introspective about this website lately. As I've said a billion-and-four times, it's just here because I like to write. Anyone who likes to write will get that. And everyone else will say, "This is crap! Why is this on my internet?! Change the channel!"

And, obviously, I like to share. Some friends and family like to know what I'm up to. Some people come via somewhere else then hang out because they're like-minded. That's cool.

And it's enough. More than. But still, I had to laugh when, despite knowing better, I checked myself out on this Technorati widget. Ah, Technorati. Doesn't Bossy say it best? I can't be crabby about lacking a presence on Technorati, myself, because year after year I never seem to get around to adding their code to my site.

The widget says I'm a D-list blogger, and they only say that because their categories don't go any lower. No worries - completely true. I don't blogroll, I barely comment, and the only reason I get traffic these days is because so many people want to make French memo boards, to try to cheat on astronomy quizzes, to reminisce about discontinued Bath and Body Works products, to share the FrEasy Kool-Aid, and to make the best cake in the world.

Like Kathy Griffin, it's an honor to even be in the alphabet. But if anything does chafe, even if it's just a tiny prickle that makes your skin spell out "stop being such a dork" in shiny pink before fading away, it's that the definition of "D-list blogger" is someone who, on average, has been blogging for 228 days, "which shows a real commitment to blogging."

228 days. Times ten, baby. Plus 800 more. There are, like, thirteen D-list bloggers inside of me! I'm a bloggin' coven!

To be fair, D-list bloggers - per the widget's definition - get linklove three to nine times per month. I doubt I get that in a year. I can only think of six blogs that link to me. One is tres-popular (but the deep link they use to get to me is incredibly dead, and I'm too D-list to bother fixing that). Three are dead. One is run by an asshat who, last I checked, is no longer online and thus can no longer offer a whole post mocking my existence. (Yes, some stranger found this site and thought it was overly self-promoting because just my first name is the URL and because I use this space talk about my life.)

One is a friend who probably thinks I'd be miffed if he didn't, even though I would hesitate to link to me because, getting back to one of this post's many points, you never know what's going to be here. Some days it's a diary, some days it's Partridge Family videos, some days it's boorish peeving over the state of the world, and some days it's a solid beginning-middle-end on one subject. The last are especially cruel. People wander by, think it's a cooking/photo/teaching/craft/hamster/travel/whatever blog, decide to read further, then HA! I don't mention the chosen subject again for a year. ha-HA!

So, I started wondering what other unknown blogs are out there that have been going steadily for more than eight years, averaging a post every two days or so in recent times. Who else is just pounding the publish button for the fun of it? Year after year? No breaks, no URL changes, no dramas, no theme changes, no "friends only," no effort to cultivate an audience? Keeping abreast of the related technology (feeds, embedding, podcasting, platforms, etc.)? Using punctuation and capitalization? But mostly just gabbing?

Someone stop me before I hitch up my prairie dress and yammer about back in the day, when Blogger made you use third-party software to get comments, and if you wanted a fancy title for each post, you had to pay for Blogger Pro.

Unfortunately, I don't have any way to find the unknown, long-term blogs because, hello?, they're unknown. Every once in awhile I find some backwater gem that ran for a few years, but note the past tense. What other ponderous coots in the country towns of the web have been blogging since the gaslights first arrived, content to stay in dusky drawing rooms and enjoy from afar the splashes made by city folk?

Basking in shadows... Yum.

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