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Pointy Ears Is Right, They’re Needed

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It was brought to my attention by Gene this week that some internet ladies had made an Elfquest teaser for their “movie”. I got desperately excited. I watched the mini teaser twice. I told people about it. I jumped up and down a little. I went and pulled out all my old Elfquest comics just to stare at them.

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CRAZY EXCITED.

Then I found out the movie was 4 minutes and 34 seconds long and I deflated. Long and high-pitched like a balloon, I sank to the floor a dried out husk of an Elfquest-less human being.

It’s still pretty. And full of hot hot elf girls (but NO Skywise, WTF?).

And anyway: WHERE IS MY REAL ELFQUEST MOVIE?

WHERE?!

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March 2011

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Last month I made some big claims about how I was going to read a book a day this month. Was I successful? Oh yes. Yes, I was. I read 24 books in the first 13 days. Then I slacked for about a week. And then I read some more. I also went to the eye doctor this month and he was all, “Do you read without contacts or glasses?” in a semi-disapproving tone. I didn’t know what to make of it. Because I do that thing. Meh-*izzle*.

Books Read: 38 (ha! Suck on that, March!)

Books Partially Read: 3

Books Bought: 2

Money Spent (approximately): $25

Books Borrowed: 19

Books Given: 17 (my mommy loves me. and there was a library book sale)

Books Re-read: 15 (feeling nostalgic again but none of them were graphic novels. I totally didn’t read those to up my numbers. This was legitimate book reading! Though admittedly a lot of it was YA. But when it is NOT?)

Money made (from selling books): None. But I’m creating a pile to sell

Books on To-Be-Read Shelf: 31. Guh.

Favorite Books this month: Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund and Call Me Irresistible by Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I’m trying to keep it short and sweet this month for you. =)

Ascendant is, of course, the sequel to Peterfruend’s Rampant, which I believe I wrote about before. Yup. It’s about an ancient order of nuns who are unicorn slayers. Unicorns come in many different forms–more than the one that’s on all those tapestries. Some are huge. One hung out with Alexander the Great. The unicorn history bits are actually pretty fascinating. I mean they are fictional, but it’s an intriguing conceit. Primarily the books follow one girl who is a descendant of 2 great unicorn hunting lines. In the first book she finds out unicorns exist and learns to fight them. In this one she’s still fighting but there’s a lot more about endangered species and finding better solutions than outright slaughter. It’s kind of better than the first one. I’ll read the third one (wink) that’s all I’m saying.

Call Me Irresistible is the culmination of several different books set in the same town for Phillips. It’s a small town in Texas with a lot of wacky characters. The main female lead comes from LA (and cameo’d in a previous book). The guy is from a couple different books. He was in one about his parents and another one about his best friend. There’s also some characters in this one who come from a fourth book of Phillips (about a female POTUS. Yeah. She gets to be President AND have a romance novel.) I LOVED this book. The other ones that have led up to this were good but this one is great. Excellent writing, characters, plot momentum. Just all around fabulous romance novel. I want to read it again already and the last book I did that with was Agnes and the Hitman so that should give you some idea of this one stacks up. Also, I think if you liked Agnes you’ll like this one.

Honorable Mentions: Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves (it was maybe not AS GOOD as Bleeding Violet which I wrote about here.), Lost Laysen by Margaret Mitchell (I mostly loved the intro/biography part but the novella was good too), The Rules According to JWOWW by Jenny Farley (I blame Katy W. for this one. Ha! But I did find parts of it amusing), and When Harry Met Molly by Kieran Kramer (which was HI-larious. It’s a romance novel but one of the most non-stereotypical I’ve ever read. So much of it was NOT what would have happened in that time period. Totally ridiculous. I want to read her second book–Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right–pretty bad now.)

Least Favorite Books: The Iron Witch by Karen Mahoney (didn’t like the main girl, didn’t like the love interest. Did like the male best friend and was sad he wouldn’t get the girl. Didn’t like it’s a series, didn’t like the writing–written down to teenager. Way, way down.) and Jekel Loves Hyde

by Beth Fantaskey (should have known better since I didn’t like Fantaskey’s Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side much either. This one seemed worse though.)

Fave Quote of the Month (from a gorgeous art book which really should have been included in the Honorable Mentions. Super pretty):

“[speaking of the Eiffel Tower] For it will be told in no uncertain terms that it is simply a pretext, a mere excuse to depict everything admirable that is to be found in its vicinity, and it ought not forget those occasions when it has been allowed, by special favor, to figure prettily in the landscape…So be quiet, abstraction! Shut up, theorem!”

–From Arsene Alexandre’s ‘Prologue’ in Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower: A Turn-of-the-Century Tribute to the City of Light.

Ta-Ta Till Next Month!

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Spring

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Two days late on books and I don’t care!

I just planted a backyard bounty. I forced my mother to accompany me to Navalet’s where I proceeded to load up a cart she was pushing with 5 kinds of tomatoes, Walla Walla onions, leeks, basil, sage, 2 kinds of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Also much dirt. And one hanging garden planter to test on 1 tomato variety.

Hanging tomato garden! More pictures of planting here.

I very carefully consulted my Plants of the Bible book by Allen A. Swenson when I got home–from the library. Because I was curious. Out of everything I bought, the only 2 from the Bible are leeks and sage.

“The Roman emperor Nero was said to have held leeks in great esteem, eating them every month. Behind his back he was called by his detractors ‘eater of leeks’.”

Those Romans–SO insulting!

The sage is less rude biblically:

“When pressed flat, sage is likened by Biblical scholars to the seven-branched candlestick which is the traditional Jewish symbol, the menorah.”

Because it has 3 leaves on each side of a central stalk apparently. There’s a whole passage about it in Exodus (37:17-18).

So that is my gardening news.

In related home-making news I also cleaned the bathroom (be impressed) and added a 5th “bookcase” (2 small bookcases stacked on top of one another) to my bedroom and rearranged all the furniture in there. It’s kind of crowded now–big surprise–and the 5th bookcase only marginally helps with the ridiculous amount of books. Still, I’m pretty pleased. Especially since the entire undertaking was mostly done because the fan broke and it was plugged in behind a bookcase and I couldn’t remove it without moving said bookcase. It was a stupid place to plug it in. The new one is not plugged in behind a bookcase. I learn.

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PostCrossing 2, Quelf, and Ending on a Cat

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I’m a day late for my monthly book review already but screw that. I’ve got other things to talk about first. I am so delinquent on blogging; things have been piling up.

First of all, PostCrossing.com continues to be awesome. I’ve now sent out 10 postcards, and so I made another album of the new 5 on Flickr. Check them out! This time I sent to the Netherlands (2), Taiwan, China, and Latvia. Latvia was pretty exciting, I thought to myself. I’ve never sent anything there before, after all. I’ve also started going back on the original 5 and adding information in the extended caption space. This includes, for example, a link to the PostCrossing site so you can see the journey of the postcard. From there you can also click on the link to the recipient and go see more information about them. In general they write about who they are, what kind of postcards they like, and–sometimes–ask you to provide trivia about yourself for them. I always dutifully try to follow their requests. I am also including the notes they write back to me via the site. So far my absolute favorite is from Dead in Canada. She wrote:

“Hello Michele, thanks SO much for this Edward Gorey card, it brought back childhood memories for me! When I was very little, my brother and I had a huge poster of “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” on our playroom door. The only part I remember is “V is for Victor who was hit by a train” because we had a cousin Victor who we hated, and we always wished that was him. I didn’t know who the artist was and I didn’t even remember that poster until today, so thanks for bringing back a flood of childhood memories!

Also, my brother and I sound like jerks for wishing our cousin Victor was hit by a train, but he was awful. He was always beating us up and stealing our stuff!”

You can see information about that postcard here and here. Hm, and also here.

Seriously, how awesome does she sound? This is why PostCrossing is brilliant. Or at least it’s one reason. I’ve only received one postcard so far and I’m going to wait till I have 5 to write about them. Batches of 5 just work better for me. In the meantime you can also see more PostCrossing participation over on my cousin Katherine’s blog.

Secondly, I played Quelf again with the peeps at Kris’s house last weekend. It was awesome. I took some pictures which can be see here. Kris also took a picture and blogged about it over on Carthage. In my Flickr album of it there are also two videos of Jason leading everyone in song. Genius.

And lastly, my cat is fricking adorable. But his fangs are enormous.

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Pictures!

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I’ve been kind of lazy and not uploading or writing about my pictures lately. Whoops, slacker.

A couple weekends ago, I went to Esparto, CA with my mom, brother, Erin, and Evan to the Almond Festival. There were rides, ponies, the Fire Department was selling tri-tip sandwiches (sooooo good), and there were many many free samples of things to eat and read. I had a lot of almonds. Flavored and covered in chocolate. Also snipped off pieces of the most gigantic licorice I’ve ever seen in my life. I wish I had bought some but it was expensive. There was even a library book sale. Basically it was a massive success.

And after Fest’ing it up, we went over to Creekside Ranch to see all the baby sheeps. Baby sheeps! Evan and I were in heaven. We got to bottle feed a bummer lamb!

So adorable. There are more pictures of the day here.

Last night I had a Sushi Sunday party here at my house-sitting location. It’s been a long time since I gorged on home-made sushi. It was just as delicious as I remembered it being. I also made crab meat/cream cheese puffs which were incredible. Sadly we ate all of them before I remembered I had a camera. After dinner we played this gorgeous (but kind of vicious) pirate board game.

More pictures of last night here.

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Post Crossing

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Kristen sent me a link to Post Crossing last week and though my initial response was terror about what I would write and what they would write and what would happen (fear of the unknown is strong in me); I did of course immediately sign up and demand 5 addresses.

What Post Crossing is, see, is a postcard exchange. You can have up to 5 postcards out at any given time. You cannot request another address until one of your postcards has arrived at its destination and the recipient has entered your ID number on their end. As soon as one of yours has arrived, your address will go in the queue for someone else to request. And then you will get mail. Glorious mail! You know how I feel about mail, people.

So I sent out my first five missives last Friday and am now eagerly awaiting arrival and subsequent post being sent back to me. Because this entire process is so fascinating to me and because I have a lot of time on my hands, I decided to photo-document it on Flickr. So I took pictures of the fronts and backs of each of my postcards so far and will do the same for all future ones as well as those that I receive. I will be sending and receiving at least 20 in this experiment because that is how many international stamps I bought. Considering that they cost $0.98 each, 20 might be my limit.

So far I’ve sent postcards to Canada, Russia, Germany, Japan, and China.

That’s Japanese for “Happy Birthday”.

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