I’m here.

That’s about as good as it’s going to get today.

How patiently the cats wait for the Treat Lady to dole out the goodies!

Kat likes to relax in rather strange positions. Thursday night he decided my knees would be an awesome place to hang out.

Last week I talked about one of the mystery series I’ve been reading, this week I want to talk about a supernatural fantasy series. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been reading a lot of supernatural fantasy recently. Some just so-so, but much of it has been very good.

One series I am especially enjoying is Ilona Andrews‘ Kate Daniels series.

Kate lives in a world that used to be ours, but at some point magic surged and now magic and technology battle for predominance, so sometimes phones work while sometimes hexes work, and you never know from one day to the next what will work at any given time.

Kate is a mercenary who is both trained a trained fighter and a born magic user–however her skills as a fighter usually serve her in better stead than her quirky magic skills. And as this is a world in which both vampires and shape shifters are fighting for predominance, her physical skills are used quite frequently.

What I like most about this series is we learn now just about Kate as the series continues, but also about the world in which she lives, and how it came to be the way it is. It’s a fascinating idea that Ilona Andrews does a very good job of slowly unfolding. She also does a very good job with Kate. Sometimes in supernatural fantasy series, the heroines are a little too good, and things come a little too easy to them. Kate is very good at what she does, but it is made quite clear that she has gotten where she is through very hard work (this is further emphasized in the third book where she describes her childhood and her training).

There is a romance that is slowly developing over the course of the series, however this is in no way the focus of the series, which I believe some people find off putting about supernatural / urban / paranormal fantasy, so if you’re not certain about this type of fantasy, this may be a good series to put your toe in the water and see how it feels.

The nice thing about supernatural is it takes our world and twists it in some manner–supernatural creatures have come out of the closet and the world has changed because if it; supernatural creatures exist but are still in hiding; something changed the world and after that change magic and supernatural creatures became common. So the world is familiar, and yet very strange at the same time.

Although the story arc is complete within each individual book, Kate’s character develops further in each book, and in each book we learn a little more about her past and why she has been hiding. So although you could start the book at any point in time, the world is somewhat complex and takes a bit of getting used to, and you learn new things about Kate in each book, so I think one might prefer to start at the beginning and work their way forward.

Magic Bites (2007), Magic Burns (2008), Magic Strikes (2009)

Two quotes from Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, which I finished reading last week. (The link is to my review.)

Today the word ‘myth’ is often used to describe something that is not true… Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened. But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what the event had meant.
…
A myth does not impart factual information, but is primarily a guide to behavior. It’s truth will be revealed only if it is put into practice–ritually or ethically. If it is pursued as if it were a purely intellectual hypothesis, it becomes remote and incredible.

If you wish, discuss.

I finally broke down and redid the main page of my site.

It works in IE, but you’re missing out on the menus if you aren’t using a standards compliant browser.

Look what we found when we got home!
(more…)

I made nothing new this week, although Monday I made a batch of brownies, and so had warm brownies and vanilla ice cream for dessert.

However, on Saturday I was craving strawberries, so I picked up organic strawberries. As expected, they weren’t very good, because they came all the way from California, but they had the promise of berries to come.

And really, once I added whipped cream, who could notice overly tart berries.

But I have to say, the warm brownies with vanilla ice cream was better.

And I’ve still got more left.

Today is world health day.

This year’s focus is emergency preparedness for hospitals and medical facilities.

If there’s a disaster, you want your hospital to be ready.

I was going to whine that I haven’t accomplished anything this evening.

Then I remembered I made brownies. So, yay me!

It was in some ways a painfully long weekend, and in other ways the weekend was entirely too short.

I’m still having issues with my depression. Destroying my cell phone on Saturday didn’t help matters, not did having to plunk down $400 to replace it. But. That’s why we have savings–so when things break (for whatever reason) they can be replaced. So it’s just no new computer for me anytime soon.

The depression was incredibly frustrating. Just one of those days where I can’t stand being inside my own skin, and nothing I did really allowed me to escape myself, although I did managed to distract myself.

I kept busy by doing a fair amount of web design over the weekend, rebuilding the WordPress template for my book blog and then recreating the same style for the book pages of my website. I’m overdue a rebuild of my main page, but I don’t have a clue what I want to do with it, and abandoning the color scheme means having to create a new set of images. Since I’ve got probably 30 or so images that randomly appear, that idea is rather unappealing right now.

Speaking of images, I test drove Adobe Elements over the weekend. I have Photoshop at work, but there is no way I am going to pay that much money for a software package, and I’m one of those weirdos that refuses to pirate software or music, to Elements seemed the logical choice.

Having played with it, it seems precisely what I need, so at some point I’m going to have to cough up the money for that. But it’ll be worth it, because it’ll be nice to do image work at home (and goodbye to Corel Photopaint 10).

The predicted storms never came, so Saturday afternoon was sunny, as was today, so I got to get out and enjoy the flowers, just a little bit. And posted the requisite Sunday Flower Pr0n.

I also finally finished my review for A Short History of Myth.

Here’s to hoping this week goes smoothly.

Daffodil edition.

I’m not a huge fan of the shade of yellow of most daffodils. But I do like the lighter yellow ones, and the multi colored ones. We have a variety blooming in my yard right now.

I’ve been working on the graphics for my book blog, and also added the new design to the rest of the books portion of my site (which is not WordPress).

So there should be a mostly seamless transition between the WordPress portion of the site and the pages I created. The only issue is that there is a small margin/padding issue I cannot for the life of me work out, so the side border is just a teeny bit off. Humph.

ADDENDUM the First:
I also changed the color schemes to match the images.

ADDENDUM the Second:
And IE 6 or lower doens’t render png images correctly, so the header image will look wonky. Too bad. It works fine in all my other browsers, so you’ll just have to live with it.

Humph.