waning winter
Mar. 28th, 2012 01:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llcoolvadBeen a not-very-busy couple of weeks. Had a long weekend last weekend, so I managed to get a lot of slacking done. Saw "The Artist" last Saturday with Patrick; very fun and lots of laughs. Loved all the movie shout-outs, and the little dog (a la The Thin Man) was adorable. Last Sunday went over to Steve and Val's with Patrick for dinner and Hearts*. Was fun. We don't play often enough for any of us to be great players, but it does come back after a while and gets fun.
*I've been playing a lot of traditional games lately, albeit in mostly non-traditional ways: I play Words with Friends (which is a Scrabble app), Scramble with Friends (a Boggle app), Hearts (both on PC and live), Cribbage (app — I play vs. the computer rather than friends), and a couple of solitaire variations (mostly FreeCell). I don't think I'll ever like MUDs or MMORPGs or anything, but I definitely like short puzzle-y games that I can play on my phone.
Work week was short, which was good. Didn't do much all week, really, except read, watch tv, some light chores. Was good downtime. Friday night P and I saw "Ghost Rider", keeping to my longstanding tradition of seeing really bad movies after seeing really good ones. I enjoyed the hell out of it — nothing beats watching Nicolas Cage twitch and grimace his way through a flick. He's still got too much face, or something (this time I think it is caused directly by his receding hairline), but he's still fun.
Spent this weekend mostly at home. Sunday I ran a couple of errands and watched the Oscars (I could live without seeing Billy Crystal host ever again, I think. His shtick is old, yo. Bring back Chris Rock! Or hell, even James Franco. I'd like to see someone under 100 host, again. Also, I seriously need to see more movies. I only saw a handful of any of the nominated ones — which is true every year. Time to fix that!), and today I did the grocery shopping, saw my doctor, and spent the night surfing the web and reading and playing more games. My doctor was impressed with my overall weight loss (around 68 pounds now since July, which is an average of 8.5 pounds per month, or 1.97 pounds per week. That hasn't been my rate lately, I've slowed a bit, but it's still a nice average!) and advised me to keep doing whatever I'm doing. We'll see when my bloodwork comes back how I'm doing blood-chemistry-wise. My BP was 112/68, which seems pretty good. I've never really had BP issues, though, but it's still good to see.
So glad February is mostly over. I always have a hard time with February. Seems longer than all the other months, and it's so bleak and usually so cold, it just wears on me. Too bad it's a leap year this year, though, but at least it's only two more days til it's over. Yay! I guess now that my work week starts tomorrow I'll have to kick it into high gear and get back into productivity mode. But for the rest of the night tonight I think all I'm going to do is finish my book and go to bed early.
Books Read 2012
JAN
1. The Fifth Witness, Michael Connelly
2. Deception, Jonathan Kellerman (library kindle)
3. Eleven, Patricia Reilly Giff (library kindle)
4. The Silent Girl, Tess Gerritsen (audio)
5. Dead Sleep, Greg Iles (audio)
FEB
6. Alone, Lisa Gardner (audio): I kinda hated the narration here. Can't decide if it was because most of the book was told from male perspectives and the narrator was a woman who didn't do male voices well, or if because the setting was Boston and the narrator just made Bostonians sound dumb. Story was good.
7. Gideon's Sword, Preston/Child: Not bad. So glad they have a new character to play with, but of course they've made things complicated by giving him a limited possible lifespan. He makes a few mistakes, but he's still pretty amazingly gifted, so Preston/Child are not straying too far from their norm (i.e., Pendergast).
8. The Zero Game, Brad Meltzer: This was packaged as a freebie along with the Preston/Child ebook, so I read it. It was fairly good — political thriller with loads of murder and intrigue and a lot of red herrings thrown in, including just who is the narrator here, anyway.
9. Taken, Robert Crais: Felt short and a bit violent and grusome, but I still love these characters. Even though one was taken hostage by bad guys, I felt no tension that he might die. I suppose that's a flaw.
10 Dead Wood, Danin Amore: Is it bad that I'm drawing a complete blank here? Let me open it up. Ah yes, detective story set in crime-ridden Grosse Pointe (that was sarcasm, son); needed some copyediting, as I recall (like a character is drinking a pretty decent wine and then picks up his beer when he leaves a room), but good plotting and decent dialog. Author is going for witty PI banter a la Spenser, but I'll give her another read.
11. L.A. Outlaws, T. Jefferson Parker: Very good. Interesting female outlaw character, conflicted lawman character, even a compound! I have a couple chapters left, but I should finish before the end of tomorrow so it counts for Feb.
I have to go through my amazon digital collection again and figure out what I've paid for and not read, yet. That's one thing going digital has NOT solved for me — I still manage to buy more books than I get read, so I still have a huge To Be Read pile. It just lives in cloudville instead of on my nightstand. Tidier! But still.
ETA: was reviewing my feed for the year and this had the wrong date. Weird! Changed.
*I've been playing a lot of traditional games lately, albeit in mostly non-traditional ways: I play Words with Friends (which is a Scrabble app), Scramble with Friends (a Boggle app), Hearts (both on PC and live), Cribbage (app — I play vs. the computer rather than friends), and a couple of solitaire variations (mostly FreeCell). I don't think I'll ever like MUDs or MMORPGs or anything, but I definitely like short puzzle-y games that I can play on my phone.
Work week was short, which was good. Didn't do much all week, really, except read, watch tv, some light chores. Was good downtime. Friday night P and I saw "Ghost Rider", keeping to my longstanding tradition of seeing really bad movies after seeing really good ones. I enjoyed the hell out of it — nothing beats watching Nicolas Cage twitch and grimace his way through a flick. He's still got too much face, or something (this time I think it is caused directly by his receding hairline), but he's still fun.
Spent this weekend mostly at home. Sunday I ran a couple of errands and watched the Oscars (I could live without seeing Billy Crystal host ever again, I think. His shtick is old, yo. Bring back Chris Rock! Or hell, even James Franco. I'd like to see someone under 100 host, again. Also, I seriously need to see more movies. I only saw a handful of any of the nominated ones — which is true every year. Time to fix that!), and today I did the grocery shopping, saw my doctor, and spent the night surfing the web and reading and playing more games. My doctor was impressed with my overall weight loss (around 68 pounds now since July, which is an average of 8.5 pounds per month, or 1.97 pounds per week. That hasn't been my rate lately, I've slowed a bit, but it's still a nice average!) and advised me to keep doing whatever I'm doing. We'll see when my bloodwork comes back how I'm doing blood-chemistry-wise. My BP was 112/68, which seems pretty good. I've never really had BP issues, though, but it's still good to see.
So glad February is mostly over. I always have a hard time with February. Seems longer than all the other months, and it's so bleak and usually so cold, it just wears on me. Too bad it's a leap year this year, though, but at least it's only two more days til it's over. Yay! I guess now that my work week starts tomorrow I'll have to kick it into high gear and get back into productivity mode. But for the rest of the night tonight I think all I'm going to do is finish my book and go to bed early.
Books Read 2012
JAN
1. The Fifth Witness, Michael Connelly
2. Deception, Jonathan Kellerman (library kindle)
3. Eleven, Patricia Reilly Giff (library kindle)
4. The Silent Girl, Tess Gerritsen (audio)
5. Dead Sleep, Greg Iles (audio)
FEB
6. Alone, Lisa Gardner (audio): I kinda hated the narration here. Can't decide if it was because most of the book was told from male perspectives and the narrator was a woman who didn't do male voices well, or if because the setting was Boston and the narrator just made Bostonians sound dumb. Story was good.
7. Gideon's Sword, Preston/Child: Not bad. So glad they have a new character to play with, but of course they've made things complicated by giving him a limited possible lifespan. He makes a few mistakes, but he's still pretty amazingly gifted, so Preston/Child are not straying too far from their norm (i.e., Pendergast).
8. The Zero Game, Brad Meltzer: This was packaged as a freebie along with the Preston/Child ebook, so I read it. It was fairly good — political thriller with loads of murder and intrigue and a lot of red herrings thrown in, including just who is the narrator here, anyway.
9. Taken, Robert Crais: Felt short and a bit violent and grusome, but I still love these characters. Even though one was taken hostage by bad guys, I felt no tension that he might die. I suppose that's a flaw.
10 Dead Wood, Danin Amore: Is it bad that I'm drawing a complete blank here? Let me open it up. Ah yes, detective story set in crime-ridden Grosse Pointe (that was sarcasm, son); needed some copyediting, as I recall (like a character is drinking a pretty decent wine and then picks up his beer when he leaves a room), but good plotting and decent dialog. Author is going for witty PI banter a la Spenser, but I'll give her another read.
11. L.A. Outlaws, T. Jefferson Parker: Very good. Interesting female outlaw character, conflicted lawman character, even a compound! I have a couple chapters left, but I should finish before the end of tomorrow so it counts for Feb.
I have to go through my amazon digital collection again and figure out what I've paid for and not read, yet. That's one thing going digital has NOT solved for me — I still manage to buy more books than I get read, so I still have a huge To Be Read pile. It just lives in cloudville instead of on my nightstand. Tidier! But still.
ETA: was reviewing my feed for the year and this had the wrong date. Weird! Changed.
