Tag: books

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Blogs Pop Culture

Favorites of 2010

I don’t generally do top ten lists or lists of favorites, because let’s face it, I have the attention span of a fire ant, and all my favorites are likely to be from November and December, and maybe October if something in that month was truly spectacular. But I do have some favorites to share from this year (and yes, two of them are from the past two months, sue me), so I may as well lay them out there.

Favorite book(s) of the year: The Hunger Games trilogy
I can safely say this was my absolute favorite book of the year for two reasons: 1) Books are actually the one thing I keep track of, and looking back over the list from 2010, nothing even compares to The Hunger Games; and 2) I loved these books so much that I bought six extra copies of the first one to give away over Christmas, to try to suck other people into them.

Favorite new blog of the year: Mark Reads
OMIGOD I LOVE THIS WEBSITE SO MUCH! And yes, it’s deeply tied to my favorite book of the year, because Mark happened to be reading and reviewing The Hunger Games when I discovered his blog. The kick is that he only reads one chapter per day, then writes his review/recap, and if you’ve read THG, then you know it’s ridiculously hard to put it down at the end of a chapter, ’cause they all end in cliffhangers. Reading Mark’s journey through the book has enhanced my own memories of reading it, and now, reading his recaps of Catching Fire continues to make me chortle with glee. AND! He’s recapping his second reading of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone! (Which I just reread myself before Christmas.) Seriously, I cannot gush about his blog enough. Go read for yourself!

Favorite song of the year: Hey by Lil Jon & 3OH!3
I listened to this song on repeat for every morning for a week when I first found it, and every time it comes up on my ipod, I still listen to it at least twice. It makes me happy.

Favorite new (to me) TV show: The Vampire Diaries
I’d watched the pilot when it first aired, decided it was too Twilight for me, and gave up on it. Then over the summer, many of my friends whose judgments I trust couldn’t stop talking about how great it was, and how much it improved after the sixth episode. So, I gave it a shot. I Netflixed it in September, and OMIGOD! Fell totally in love. Immediately bought the first five episodes of season two from iTunes, and now I watch in real-time like everyone else. Sadly I have yet to pull my sister in, but I intend to keep trying.

Favorite movie of the year: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
I had to look up the movies of 2010* to even remember what I saw this year, but that means I can definitively say that yes, Harry Potter was my favorite of the year. I thought it did a great job of staying as true to the book as it could, and really benefited from the decision to turn the last book into a two-part movie. Red was a close second (so much fun!), with Hot Tub Time Machine and How to Train Your Dragon vying for third.

And that’s all I’ve got. Not a bad list. I’ll try to keep track of my media choices over 2011 so hopefully I do this again next year. 😀

*Beware the many popups on that link.

Categories
Knitting and Crochet Programming

Of Scarves and Drupal Devilry

So I’m knitting again. Woot! I finished a (unfortunately heavy) orange and tag-yarn scarf last week, and now I’m working on two scarves/shawls (stockinette to the end, then drop every third stitch). One is sparkly red yarn (Karabella Stardust) and will be this year’s holiday scarf, and the other is a tweedy Plymouth Encore that I’m going to have to frog and restart, ’cause it’s too wide for only two balls of yarn.

I started up again because work, both my day job and my freelance projects, have been stressing me out, and after several near-meltdowns, I had a “D’oh!” moment and realized that I’d given up more than just something to do with my hands when I stopped knitting–I’d given up an important stress-reliever. I can’t believe I ever forgot how relaxing it is work with my hands and let my mind fly loose. Stupid.

Anyway, in other news, Drupal continues to kick my ass. I spent four hours yesterday trying–and failing–to beat the forums into submission. I still can’t figure out why setting a block exception for “forum” only works for the forum posts and not the other forum pages, and google was no help this time. I picked up another Drupal development book at B&N today, one more advanced and with far more customization examples than my other two books, so hopefully that’ll help, but for today I’m leaving the forums alone and working on some of the other things for the site that I might actually be able to fix. I need to get a few more successes under my belt before I tackle the evil forums again, and not just because my ego needs reinflating. I also need to have something closer to complete by Monday for the client. Yay?

And finally, because posts without pictures are just plain boring, here is a gratuitous photo relating to nothing else in this post. It’s from earlier this week at work, when the sun was setting and the fog was rolling in from two different directions. It was so damned beautiful that night I took about 40 pictures, but IMO this is one of the better ones.

Fog over Brentwood

Categories
Knitting and Crochet Links Pop Culture

My So-Called Frog

I started a My So-Called Scarf a couple of weeks ago with Patons Merino in the Good Earth variegated colors (and honestly, I think those colors look better wrapped in a skein than knitted out) and got about 12 inches into it before I realized I’d made a mistake about 15 rows earlier, reducing the stitches by two, maybe four stitches (I couldn’t remember what I’d started with). I find the pattern too confusing to reverse knit, so I just frogged the whole thing. I have yet to finish an MSCS–the pattern is so pretty when knitted up, but I’m terribly slow at it. The last time I just got bored and never went back (plus it was super-scratchy Red Heart, which didn’t help).

I frogged it almost a week ago, and haven’t started anything else yet. Nothing’s inspiring me to make me want to pick up the needles. On the other hand, I’ve finished three books this week, two of them just this weekend. My passions really do seem to have cycled back to books, as I’d rather be reading than just about anything else (which is so very welcome, as that’s how I grew up, loving books more than anything else). I’ve purchased 11 new books this week and picked up another two at the library. Instead of trying to get through my TBR list, I just keep adding more titles to it.

My favorite new series, which sadly only has three books so far, is the Vampire Academy series. Despite its ridiculous name and covers ripped off from Buffy Season Two stock photos, the writing is pretty good, the plots are a fun ride, and the characters are so real they practically jump off the page. Sure, there’s the hint of a Buffy influence throughout that swells up and practically conks you on the head like a Quellar demon falling from the sky in book three, but as a fan of the Buffster, I don’t see this as a bad thing. Seriously, so many books use Buffy to try to pull you in–“It’s Buffy in St. Louis!” or “It’s Buffy if she grew up, got married, had kids and became a soccer mom!”–but these books capture more than the kick-ass-ness of Buffy, or the smartass wisecracks. These books are about friendship and relationships, and how they change and grow while the characters deal with their reality. I really love these books.

Categories
Blogs Knitting and Crochet Pop Culture

Ravelry? Oh yeah, I remember Ravelry!

MandrillI just added my first project to Ravelry since forever–the lime green and tangerine Fun Fur scarf that I should be finishing sometime tonight. (No pics yet.) It’s my first knitted project since I don’t even know when; I’ve been mainlining the crochet lately (although not nearly as obsessively as before the tendonitis incident, sadly).

I still haven’t finished Hailey’s Comet blanket–I paused for too long and can’t remember how I was doing the join, and so far have been too lazy to reverse engineer it–so instead I’ve been working on slouchy puffy hats. I did one in red (too bright!), and one in red and pink variegated with white puffs (my sis didn’t like the way the white puffs looked), and my current wip is subtly variegated purple. (None have been blocked yet, so they’re not DONE done.) But I was missing the needles, and I hadn’t made a scarf in about a year, so, when I got a JoAnn gift card for Christmas, I used it for four balls of Fun Fur specifically for this scarf (turns out it only needs two), plus two balls of Cha Cha? Moda Dea? I can’t remember, a vaguely feathery eyelash yarn in pink and orange; plus two balls of the Patons I’ve been using for the slouchy hats (my friend Suzy coveted my pink cammo hat when I was in NYC, so I plan to make a matching one for her).

ION, I’ve also been reading a lot more, in my attempt to read more books before April 1, 2009 than I did between April 1, 2007 and March 31, 2008 (see my LibraryThing for the lists). I’ve been on a supernatural kick (big surprise) and practically inhaled the Twilight books over Christmas (please don’t judge me), then moved on to Sherrilyn Kenyon (no judging!) and the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris (judge me all you want here, I love these). Unfortunately I’ve been buying too many new books and not reading enough from my TBR shelf, so my current rule is that I can’t read two books in a row from the same series. It’s not working perfectly yet–in fact, I don’t see a single book that I’ve read in the last three quarters that came from the TBR shelf–but hopefully it’ll slow me down before I gobble up the rest of the Sookie books (I’ve only read two so far).

For some reason I’ve been very uninterested in DVDs lately. This is most unlike me and I’m not sure what that’s about, but I really need to put my Netflix on hold until it passes–I’ve been holding onto the same two dvds for about three months now, while still paying the monthly fees. Very bad.

Finally, I have to share this website I found, which I’m probably the last person to learn about: ZenHabits.net. I *heart* it so. It has all kinds of good advice on all kinds of different topics. Check it out!

Oh, and finally finally, here’s a video I took at the L.A. Zoo a couple of weeks ago, of a Koala and her baby. Enjoy!

Categories
Knitting and Crochet Shopping

Wonder Twin Willpower, Activate!

Photo by bluemorphos (Pixabay)
Photo by bluemorphos (Pixabay)

One of the LYSs here, Knit Cafe (and omigod how much do I love the colors of its website! THIS much!), is closing (temporarily until they find new digs that don’t charge actual body parts for rent), and from what I’ve heard, the sale is impressive and not to be missed.  And yet! Here I sit, resisting! And oh my, does it burn. Burn! I can hear the yarn and the books and the needles calling out to me from a mere two miles away! *sob*

But alas, I am on a Budget now. The Budget isn’t so bad, actually, and I sometimes have money left over at the end of a week, but this week that money went to two skeins of Wildwood ’cause the shawl I’m working on is going to be way too short without them*. So, no clearance sale for me. *sigh*

But you should go without me. Seriously, I won’t mind. Much. 🙂

*Ok, in the interests of full disclosure, I did also purchase two books from Amazon: the new Kelley Armstrong and the new Dresden book. Two of my favorite authors came out with new tales within a week of each other–there’s no amount of willpower that can withstand that!