Friday, March 28, 2008

"I just hallucinated that the pump truck was a really big skateboard..."

After three days of getting up at 5:30 in the morning for the early shift at work, I think we can safely say that I am not a morning person. The experiment has produced a result: tired. I had lunch with Adam--always good, because the Wondertwin powers operate even when I am stupid with exhaustion--and then came home and went to bed with my cats and my laptop and my Galactica season 3 DVDs. spook will be home soon--is home now, judging by the door sounds and the response of the cats. And since my wacky schedule means I've only spent an hour with him since Tuesday morning, I'm going to go hang out. But I still love you, internets.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

another post about stuff.

An amazing thing has happened. Our mattress arrived yesterday, and so we set up the bed (which is now hilariously tall, by the way--when did mattresses become so excessive?), and slept on it. I woke up this morning not sore.

I don't even remember the last time I woke up without feeling like dreamkill, run down in my sleep by the 18-wheelers of my subconscious. Wow. Life is a beautiful place of restful sleep and internet surfing and coffee. I may even survive my series of 5:30 a.m. starts this week. Rejoice!

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

the country where we sleep, hopefully better

We bought a mattress! We kind of didn't intend to--we just went in to Sleep Country "to look." But realistically, who "looks" at mattresses? We lay down on a lot of them at the behest of our very enthusiastic salesperson. And, eerie moment, after the first one she said "I love the communication, the way you're looking at each other right there, but I want to know what each of you think. It's important that you're both comfortable." Uh, dude, that's totally what our marriage counsellor said. She was some kind of Mattress Jedi. And then she found us the model we liked which had been ordered for a floor model for another store, but was too big. So it was brand new, but being sold at the floor model price, which was four hundred dollars cheaper.

So yeah, we're gonna have a real bed. Woohoo!

Sunday, March 09, 2008

I bought another dress today. I think this makes it official: unless I figure out some way to wear nothing but dresses when I'm not at work, I have a dress problem. It's impractical. But it was so pretty! This is how they get me.

It's not as ridiculous as spook's jeans problem, though. Perspective is everything.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Time Traveller's Wife: the gateway drug

It is possible that I have not had my genre-fiction bitch here at the blog. There are all kinds of erudite things I could say about genre snobbery, but at the moment I'm stuck at my first point of reference, which is: if you say to me "Oh, I don't read fantasy," in a voice dripping with contempt, right after you've finished telling me how much you loved Gregory Maguire's Wicked, a novel based on the freaking Wizard of Oz, you richly deserve the dressing-down you'll be getting in the staff room later on.

Luckily, I've been following not one but several spirited discussions about how genre fiction is denigrated by folks who don't read the genre in a variety of sexist, class-based ways. So if you're interested in losing a whole afternoon learning the intracacies of these arguments: what they said.
*

I've been thinking about whether there is a non-snarky way to address this in my job, say, with a clever display. There's got to be some way for me to say "Look, I'm not saying that if you loved the Time Traveller's Wife you're going to love a book with dragons in it. But you might enjoy some other well-written time travel fiction. What do you say you give it a whirl?" Um, in fifty words or less, on a placard.

Any ideas for books I should be linking up? I'll take suggestions in mystery, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, and pretty much anything else you can think of. The thing I'm the weakest on is what literary fiction works I could be using as examples. It just--more things to like in the world, you know? That's got to be a good thing.

*I freely admit that only a tiny bit of the Robin McKinley discussion is about genre, but it ranges freely into people's book prejudices, and I adore Robin McKinley, so any chance to direct people to her is a chance I'll take.