Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

WANT!

Ordered.

Now I’m done geeking out, and will calmly go to bed.

SQUEE! SQUEE! SQUEE!

(ahem)

Calm.

I’m a LIBRARIAN! OOK!

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Sorry you all have been getting mostly single paragraph updates recently. There have been happenings around here. Nothing good, but nothing that really affected me directly. Just things that suck up huge amounts of time. On a positive note, my mood has been good enough right now that I was able to handle the issues that came up without stressing out or getting extremely upset. This is excellent news, because it means I may have my depression under control–at least for not.

Still not ready to go off my meds though. My mood hasn’t been stable long enough.

Additionally, I’ve been writing every weekday morning. I’m up to chapter 18 (page 49 of 85) so I’m at about the halfway point till I can start writing new material. (It’s been long enough that I desperately needed this editing fest because I’ve forgotten many details. Bonus: coherency is good.)

I’ve also been reading. Once my grandmother comes back, we’ll be watching DVDs most nights, so I’m enjoying the last of my quiet evenings. Of course I also can’t wait to get back to the first season of Heroes. We told her we wouldn’t watch anymore till she came back, and I’m more than ready to find out what happened.

As far as books, if you like mysteries, I highly recommend C.S. Harris‘ Sebastian St Cyr series. And if you like fantasy with your mysteries, I also am enjoying Tamara Siler Jones‘ Dubric series.

And I’m getting ready for Grandmom’s party this weekend. So far: apple pie in the freezer and the cookie part of the oreos are done. Tomorrow: carrot cake cupcakes. Friday: Bake pie, fill cookies, frost cupcakes. And somehow resist eating any of these baked delights.

But mostly, I’m happy and content, and just haven’t wanted to spend time outside of work on the computer.

So sorry bout the lack of updates. But not really.

If you sometimes read the book portion of my website, you may remember that in July I read and recommend Elizabeth Bear’s book New Amsterdam.

Did you go pick it up and read it then? No? Too bad. I just looked on Amazon, and copies are selling for $75.

After hearing this, Michael suggested that I sell my copy.

I may have to hide my copy from him, until he forgets this, because New Amsterdam was definitely a keeper. (And here I was waiting for a sequel. Lets hope that outrageous price means the book will go into reprint–and a new book about Abagail Irene is in the works.

I had two packages waiting for me when I got home. A mystery I’ve been waiting months for, and Alice Medrich’s newest book, Chocolate Holidays: Unforgettable Desserts for Every Season

After a few seconds of indecision, I grabbed Chocolate Holidays and curled up on the sofa.

Yum!

(via Neil Gaiman)

So I have achieved all my primary goals for my database.

There are plenty of other tweaks I’d like to make, but I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the fact that I did everything I initially set out to do.

YIPPEE!

(happy dance)

Any Steven Brust fans out there will want to check out this rendition of The Cycle.

I think I’d be either a Tsalmoth or a Lyron. But I want to be an Issola. Too bad I can’t achieve the grace required for the courtliness.

Let’s see… here’s a tentative classification of people I know (I’m not going only by the chart, but also from characters in the books):

erin: Tiassa
My brother: Orca
S: Hawk
Michael: Vallista
C at War on Folly: Hawk or Chreotha
jedijawa: Iorich
Andy: Dzur or Dragon
Daniel: Yendi or Jhereg Lyorn (I think he has a good bit of Jhereg though)

Hmm… maybe I’ll play some more with this later….

So work on the database is going well. Today I got the database to insert new books (this is harder than it sounds, because it involves three tables, and inserting multiple records into the same field of one of those tables.

If anyone wants to see, lemme know and I’ll send you the link.

Next step, creating a registration page, so I don’t have someone dump crap into my database or delete everything, thus ruining my hard work. (Not a problem right now, because once I’m done designing I’m going to purge the database and re-import my data before I, like, actually start using it.)

The search function for my database is done for now. Yay me!

Next up: how to add more books to the database, which means updating multiple records from a single form. Then I want to start linking the database to the book portion of my website. Unless I can figure something out, that may be a whole lot of drudge work.

We’ll see.

But for now, it is totally past my bedtime. If I want to keep my depression under control, I need at least 7 hours of sleep a night. I often feel like a toddler, going to bed so early, but it’s better than the alternative.

I may have mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been trying to learn php & mysql.

I decided that my project would be a book database, to go with my book website. Because I’m learning this on my own, all I’ve managed so far is to create the database, and create two different searches. Doesn’t seem like much for two weeks of work, but trust me, it was plenty of work!

I’m working on figuring out how to display multiple authors and genres, as opposed to what I’ve got right now, and I’ve got some ideas, but it looks like this is going to be a long term project.

My ultimate goal is to create better searches and have links to pages and reviews. But as I’ve got almost 2000 books in the database right now, it could be slow going.

On the other hand, I’m pretty excited about what I was able to do, and figure out on my own, with only four massive tomes, and brief assistance from one coworker and one husband.

It’s Banned Book Week.

Go read something subversive.

Here are the most frequently challenged books for 2006:

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. Gossip Girls series by Cecily Von Ziegesar
3, Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
4. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler
5. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
6. Scary Stories  series by Alvin Schwartz
7. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison
10. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Here are the most challenged books for the first half of this decade:

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
“The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier
Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
“Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
“Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers
“It’s Perfectly Normal” by Robie Harris
Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz
Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
“Forever” by Judy Blume

Me? I just finished catching up on an excellent comic series, and am now reading some supernatural fiction and trying to figure out what else I want to be reading (aside from everything listed in the sidebar.)

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2 episodes of Heroes Season 1 + Agatha Heterodyne Girl Genius = Really screwed up dreams