I have a lot to catch up on so I’m hoping to write several smaller entries over the next couple of days (it takes so long to write anything!) .

Recently I received five books I’d ordered through the library. They are:

In Fury Born by David Weber
Crystal Soldier by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Crystal Dragon also by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas
It Happened one Autumn by Lisa Kleypas

Secrets of a Summer Night and It Happened One Autumn are both books in the Wallflower series. I also have Devil in Winter which I managed to pick up a used bookstore the same month it was published. Lisa Kleypas is the second modern romance author whose books I’ve bought (Julia Quinn was the first).

I’ve already read Crystal Soldier. It was amusing but I didn’t like it as much as some of their other books (such as Scout’s Progress). However, I think it might be a book that grows on me with further reading. Crystal Dragon is the second book in the series. I haven’t read it yet because I mean to reread Crystal Soldier first.

In Fury Born is an expanded version of Path of the Fury. It includes the story in Path of the Fury but also provides significantly more background about Alicia DeVries, the heroine. I enjoyed it but I think I prefer the shorter version. If you like the later Honor Harrington novels, I suspect you’ll prefer the longer In Fury Born.

One book I meant to buy but haven’t yet is Sunshine by Robin McKinley. It’s a vampire novel but I think I like it better than most. It’s just so different from the Laurell Hamilton type novels that seem to be everywhere (for the record, I enjoyed her first couple Anita Blake novels but eventually all the books started sounding the same to me).

I recently finished reading Tinker by Wen Spencer. The first Spencer book I read was A Brother’s Price. I think I enjoyed A Brother’s Price more, probably because of all the gender stereotype flipping, but Tinker was a very fun novel.

I wandered into young adult fiction with Elske by Cynthia Voigt. It was a very enjoyable book. The protagonist is a very practical girl thrust into fairly unusual circumstances.

I just finished reading Black Ice by Anne Stuart. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the book. In general, I dislike contempory romances (both the general and suspense subsets). Also, I’ve recently been getting about half way through a book before deciding I really don’t care if I finish it. One example is Shadow Touch by Marjorie M. Liu. The first half I was enthralled by the book. However, they had a semi-closure type moment in the middle of the book and after that I felt the story was done. I was no longer interested.

I wish I could quantify what kept me interested in Black Ice. It might make it easier to pick the next book.

Today has been a pretty good day. I managed to clean the house and take care of all money matters before noon. Earlier this morning Jaeger carted Willow off to get spayed. We’ve been planning to get her spayed for a while now. However, I kept forgetting to make the appointment (probably because I was dreading paying for the procedure). In any case, I was suppose to pick up Willow around 4:00 (16:00 according to Jaeger). This left several hours free. I eventually decided to go shopping.

I wandered to a local thrift store and browsed but didn’t find anything intriguing. Then I went next door to the Used Book Emporium. For a while, I’ve been thinking of ordering the Wallflower series by Lisa Kleypas (via my discount at the library). I was shocked to discover the used book store already had a copy of Devil in Winter available. It just came out in March. I snapped it up as soon as I saw it. I continued browsing and was also pleased to find Stardoc by S.L. Viehl. Last night I was browsing my shelves and discovered that I had every book in the Stardoc series except the first one. I’m not quite sure how this happened. I gleefully brought my two new book finds home and opened up Stardoc to remind myself what ocurred in this book. However, nothing I read sounded familar.

I first found Viehl by reading Blade Dancer at the Boulder Public Library. Eventually I found some Stardoc books at the library and enjoyed those so I bought the series. That is, I bought most of the series. Somehow I never bought nor read Stardoc, the first book in the series. I guess the cover became familar enough that when I’d see it in stores I’d think I had already bought and read it.

So, back to my dilemma. I now have 2 brand new books to read, I expect both to be excellent. It’s very rare to have one new book to read that I’m sure will be good. Having two at the same time is a bit overpowering

BTW, Willow survived her procedure fine. However, she is extremely happy to be home. The vet has told us we should keep her inactive. So far that part isn’t going so well. Ever since she’s gotten home she’s been bouncing up and done. How does one keep a kitten inactive?

A while back I heard of a website called LibraryThing. It’s kind of a personal library catalog with a bit of social networking thrown in for fun. I looked at it briefly and then ignored it. Tonight I decided to look at it again and for some reason this time it entranced me. So, now if you’re curious you can see my “library” here. Now I must go back to playing

Tonight I watched Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. It’s the silliest movie I’ve seen in a long time, possibly ever. To recover I had to watch a bit of English drama, The Forsyte Saga.

In other news, I’m absolutely obsessed with listening to digital audio books on Ce’Nedra (my iPod). I started listening to audio books driving to Greeley for work. However, the library is still transitioning from cassettes to CDs so I didn’t always have a terribly good selection to choose from. The downloadable audio books at Boulder and Denver have a much better variety. Also, if I want to continue listening to the book once I get home, I just carry my iPod into the house and keep listening instead of transferring the CD to another player and trying to find my place again. I can’t wait until Weld finalizes their subscription for digital audio books. I’m getting a little giddy with so many choices

Currently I’m listening to an excellent rendition of the book Deathstalker by Simon R. Green. The audio version was published by Defiance Audio and appears to have split the first book in the series into five “episodes.” Deathstalker is space opera set in the distant future. There’s very little tech but quite a bit of action and imperial intrigue. Occasionally the story gets a bit too gory and machiavellian for me but overall I’ve enjoyed listening to it immensely.

Two years after Jaeger acquired an iPod, I have finally broken down and also gotten one. However, mine is a new 2 GB Nano. I really don’t listen to music very much. However, my library will soon be providing downloadable audio books to patrons and I thought it would be interesting to try the downloadable audio book experience (I currently check out CD audio books for my drive to and from work but am starting to run out of interesting books to try).

I wasn’t convinced I should get an iPod. However, nothing else really caught my eye. All the other players I found looked like cheap knockoffs of the ipod. I’m not saying they are cheap knockoffs, they just looked that way. Before deciding for sure on an iPod, I did some research to make sure I’d be able to use it the way I wanted. Everything seemed to work out so Thursday Jaeger stopped by Best Buy and picked it up for me.

I didn’t actually have time to play around with it much until Friday night. As I started setting it up, one of the screens asked me for its name and I realized much to my shock that I hadn’t considered a name for it. I was pretty sure it was female (my last male electronic was replaced around 5 years ago). Jaeger offered to help by setting out our various DVDs hoping for inspiration. However, I felt we had too many TV/Movie characters floating around at the moment. So, I wandered over to our bookshelf of favorite books and started browsing. I got to The Belgariad and realized my iPod’s name was Ce’Nedra (Wikipedia’s article seems to ignore her more adorable aspects).

So, now I’m the proud owner of an ipod named Ce’Nedra. Now I just have to figure out how to pronounce that name . . .

I just finished reading Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read. I think it very likely I’ll end up buying the book.

Several months ago I had attempted to read the second in the series The Grand Tour : Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality but for whatever reason was not able to get into it. I’m not sure if it was a matter of unfortunate timing or if it was because I hadn’t read the first book. In any case, now that I’ve finished the first I’ll have to give the second book another shot.

I meant to pick up the second book after work today. However, I stayed at work later than I normally do and was so hungry that I completely forgot everything else in my rush to get home. Unfortunately, Longmont doesn’t seem to have the book so I’ll have to wait till Wednesday to get the book from Weld.

Last Thursday I watched Robots. It’s a movie Ted had netflixed and then studiously ignored for several weeks due to a blurb dubbing it “heartwarming.” Thursday Ted had gone to BLUG and I was in between books and a wee bit bored so I decided to watch the movie. It was mildly entertaining. In the movie, the older “outmode” robots are in danger of being shipped to a metal chop shop and destroyed.

For the past month, I’ve been looking for a new pair of jeans that fit me. I have grown use to never finding jeans that are short enough for me. However, within the last year I’ve also had trouble finding jeans that are tight enough in the waist and loose enough in the hip area. Today I decided to wander up to the Loveland outlets and see if perhaps something up there would work. My first stop was at a Levi’s outlet store. I wandered over to the misses area and started browsing. A store employee found me and asked if there was anything in particular I wished to buy. I told her that I wanted jeans that fit me. She glanced over me and replied that I wouldn’t be able to find anything that fit me because I had the “classic” shape. I just needed to resign myself to buying jeans too big in the waist and wearing a belt. I felt like I had just entered the Robot world and was being told by the evil Mr. Ratchet that I was beeing outmoded.

Fortunately, the sales lady was wrong. I tried a couple other stores and finally ended up at the new Foleys in Loveland. Imagine my surprise when I tried on a pair of size 10 Levi jeans that fit me perfectly including the legnth. So, after about a month of looking, I finally found a pair of jeans that fit me. Somehow it doesn’t seem like it should have been this hard.

While there are many, many recipes on the web, sometimes I just like to stick with my favorite cookbooks. Almost all of these books are for vegetarians.

Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book

The best all purpose cookbook I’ve ever encountered. Every recipe seems to turn out the way it should (even when one doesn’t follow the directions precisely). I tend to use the bread and dessert sections the most. It also has lovely cheat sheets for ingredient substitutions and cooking times for various grains and beans.

Better Homes and Gardens Best Bread Machine Recipes

This came bundled with my Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. The recipes are good but I usually have to tinker quite a bit to make them come out right in the bread machine. It probably doesn’t help that I’m at a fairly high altitude.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

Don’t like this quite as much as the Moosewood Cookbook but still quite good.

Favorite Brand Name vegetarian Cooking

In general I distrust recipe books with pretty pictures. It seems like they spend too much time on the pictures and not enough on the recipes. However, this book is an exception. It has pretty pictures and usually ends up tasting good too.

Laurel’s Kitchen

This is the book I pull out whenever I’m feeling extra healthy.

Lean and Lucious and Meatless

This book tends to be a bit healthier than many of my other recipe books. Plus they provide nutritional information for each recipe.

Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

Probably my favorite cookbook. It might take a while to make but it always turns out good.

New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant

My original Moosewood cookbook.

As most of you probably know, we went to Oklahoma for Christmas this year. For an away-from-home vacation, it was fairly relaxing. We had a good time but it was nice to get back and sleep in my own bed again. Often when I return from a trip I feel like I need another vacation to actually relax. So, it was extremely convenient I received time off for the New Years holiday.

While I enjoy vacation, it’s also nice to get back to the normal routine. Ever since Thanksgiving I haven’t been exercising as much as I should. There just seemed to be too many interruptions. However, now that the holidays are over, I’m hoping to be a bit more consistent.

The two cats are doing well. Willow finished her last batch of vaccinations last week so hopefully I can stop visiting the vet on a monthly (and sometimes weekly) basis. I really had no idea that kittens were so expensive. Willow and Five aren’t best buddies but seem to be cohabiting in relative peace. However, some of Willow’s bad habits are rubbing off on Five. Willow recently introduced Five to the mysterious world of kitchen counters. I am less than thrilled by this discovery. Squirting them with water seems fairly effective but this means one must be able to find the squirt bottle . . .

This last month I went through a reading phase. I don’t remember everything but I’ll list the ones I remember:

• Poison Study by Maria Snyder – pretty intertaining book
• The Merry Gentry series by Laurell Hamilton – I find her writing engrossing but really felt that about half of the sex scenes could have been left out and thus the series could have been condensed to two books instead of four.
• Where’s My Hero contained novellas by Lisa Kleypas, Kinley MacGregor and Julia Quinn – a nice fluffy book, perfect for vacation
• The Final Key by Catherine Asaro – Interesting writer. She writes a weird combination of romance interspersed with hard SF. I like her books but am starting to get a tad confused with how everyone is related in the Skolian Empire universe. I believe Primary Inversion is the first in the series and is also my favorite.

Hmmm . . . I’m pretty sure I read more than that but I can’t remember any of the others. I’m planning to read Rebel Ice by S.L. Viehl (one of my current favorite authors). However, I need to remember to order it. I’m debating whether or not I should ask the library to buy this. However, they don’t have any of the previous books in the series and I think they’re only available in paperback. Have I ever mentioned that I’m annoyed most libraries discriminate against fiction that is only available in mass market paperbacks? I suppose I should go ahead and ask the library to buy it. However, I always feel a little guilty if a book I requested doesn’t checkout often enough.

Well, I think that’s enough babbling for one night. Good night.