Doing laundry of course, but also ripping some of my CDs. Not all–that’s too overwhelming of a task, but some of them. So I no longer flip through the CDs going, “Oh! Stevie Ray Vaughan!”

So far today:
Cowboy Junkies
Marty Friedman
Soundgarden
Toadies
XTC
Kevin Ford
Michael Penn

We also brushed Kat. He likes to be brushed right up until he hates it and pitches a hissing snarling fit. Fun.

And I want to finish my book today. But I have a feeling I’m more likely to fall asleep than read. I’ve still pretty damned tired, which is why I’m unable to gauge my depression. Ah well.

ADDENDUM the First:
Now I’ve ripped:
Aine Minogue
Leahy
Taliesin Orchestra
The Mediaeval Baebes
Enya
Dead Can Dance
and finally, Stevie Ray Vaughan

Now I’m making pizza. Mmmm!

(more…)

This week I’m jumping back to comics. And not just any comics, but comics for kids. Yes, I love Sandman and Fables, but they are both adult comics and not acceptable for kids. In fact, it seems like many of the really good comics aren’t acceptable reading for younger kids. But Runaways is a series for kids that can be appreciated by adults as well.

A group of kids ranging from a pre-teen to teens old enough to drive discover that their parents are actually a band of supervillains called The Pride. With this discovery, the kids also discover that many of them have powers of their own–powers they must come to terms with even as they attempt to come to terms with the actions of their parents.

Although this is a kids series, it takes the problems of the characters very seriously, and does not hesitate to face complex and often painful issues. In addition to teen angst, there is also the issue of betrayal and death throughout the series, as well as issues of gender identity, and the simple learning who to trust and how to get along with your friends–even your friends who can throw cars at you if you make them mad.

But they get to have fun too–after all, when you find your supervillain parents’ stash of magical and technological artifacts, you get to test things out.

The stories told in Runaways are complex and deep but also fun. Brian K Vaughan does a masterful job with the story for the first seven volumes, and Joss Whedon’s writing for volume eight was wonderful. I’m still unsure how I feel about the newest writer and I’m not enamored with the newest artists, but I’m going to keep reading, at least for awhile, because I like these characters and I like the risks that have been taken with the story.

The story takes place in the Marvel universe, and there are occasional appearances by other characters in the Marvel universe, but as someone who isn’t particularly familiar with the Marvel Universe, this wasn’t a major problem or issue.

The first three volumes of the series are a single story arc. However, most of the rest of the volumes are single story arcs contained within a single book (although there are often teasers at the end of the story.) The latest volume beings a completely new story arc, but there weren’t any major hanging plot threads.

If you know a pre-teen–or would like to read a story that’s quite unlike anything else out there–then hie thee to a comic store (or Amazon) and check out Runaways. The volumes are being republished in a larger format, which is probably better than the teeny format I have for the first seven volumes.

Pride & Joy (2003), Teenage Wasteland (2003), The Good Die Young (2004), True Believers (2005), Escape to New York (2006), Parental Guidance (2006), Live Fast (2007), Civil War: Runaways & New Avengers (2007), Vol 8: Dead End Kids (2008)
Vol 1: Dead Wrong (2009)

Here’s the wide view of my desk:

Here’s a closer view of the desk.

The poster with the ship? Text is: “Mistakes: It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.”

I love Demotivators.

Busy. Tired. Incoherent.

Nope, that’s not your word. Your word is…

exhausted

Today was an early day, and Wednesday is going to be even worse.

Then, to add lemon juice to the paper cut, Michael has to go to North Carolina for work. We’re still trying to figure out how I’m going to get the car tomorrow.

To top it all off, I think the battery is going on my laptop. Boo hiss! Yes, I know I can buy another one, but that’s not the POINT, now is it?

Oh, and I walked 14500 steps today–that’s almost seven miles.

Yes, chocolate pudding again. It’s easy to make, and it’s nice and chocolaty, which is all I really want right now.

Funny thing is a never got excited about chocolate pudding as a child. Possibly because the only pudding I ever got was out of a box, which just isn’t inspiring. And Brian like butterscotch pudding, which is nasty. (Second only to butterscotch ice cream.) The problem with butterscotch is that it never tasted like butter rum.

But homemade chocolate pudding is different. I know what ingredients go in it: cocoa, salt, corn starch, sugar, milk, bittersweet chocolate, and vanilla. (I use Mexican vanilla here, not the Madagascar bourbon vanilla).

Yea, I suppose I could be accused of being a food snob, but my feeling is that if I’m going to eat empty calories, then I should be making it worth my while and eat something that tastes really good, instead of sweets for the sake of eating sweets.

But it’s also comforting, and I need comfort right now. Work has been very busy and very tiring, and most days I don’t want to do anything more than collapse and let my brain zone out. Comfort is what I need, and chocolate pudding hits the spot.

The pudding is the consistency of chocolate milk before it’s heated, but even when I don’t see it boiling (because I’m stirring constantly) there is a noticeable shift when it thickens.

Poured into the bowls and waiting to be cooled and eaten.

Mmm…. chocolate pudding.

And he didn’t even save the receipt!

Brent Benjamin should have stepped down from the Massey case.

…(T)he $3 million Blankenship spent to unseat the incumbent justice who was seeking re-election and replace him with Benjamin “had a significant and disproportionate influence in placing Justice Benjamin on the case.”

Something to note here:

“It is an old cliche, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease,” Roberts said. He wrote that it is not clear that Blankenship’s money even affected the outcome of the election.

“I would give the voters of West Virginia more credit than that,” he said.

In fact, once WV voters realized what Blankenship was up to, we did soundly reject the candidates he supported. Unfortunately, when Benjamin was elected, it wasn’t clear what was happening. The next election, however, it was clear what Blankenship was doing, and his efforts to buy WV politicians was soundly rejected.

Lets hope that state law remains so that when Blankenship and his ilk attempt to buy WV politicians, we can see where the money is coming from, instead of hiding that money behind fake groups such as, “For the Sake of the Kids.”

There’s been some discussion–elsewhere–about the fact that Google doesn’t change its icons to celebrate or memorialize American holidays, such as Memorial Day or D-Day.

I mostly ignored this, but one discussion got me thinking: Yes, Google is an American company, but it has an international audience, and as such I don’t see why it is expected to memorialize all American holidays–especially when those holidays may be viewed quite differently in other countries. In fact, a Russian friend commented that in Russia D-Day is viewed as the day the Americans finally got off their butts and joined the fight.

If you think about WWII, one of the pictures that may come to mind is of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta summit. Sometimes Americans–especially those who lived through the Cold War, try to forget that the Russians were our allies in WWII. German, Japan, and Italy were the three Axis countries during WWII, and those were the three countries we were fighting. So of the six top powers of WWII were Britain, the USSR, the US, Germany, Italy and Japan.

It seems to me that celebrating D-Day on an international scale is akin to taunting those who lost, as well as the many Soviet citizens who had been battling the Axis long before the Americans joined in.

Please note, I do believe that D-Day and VE Day etc are important and should be memorialized by Americans; we lost many many soldiers on that day who gave their lives to the cause of freedom.

However, just because the US celebrates or memorializes a day does not make it an international holiday.

Yes, that’s right. The world does not revolve around the US. Sorry neocons, that’s just the way it is. Hollering and acting like screechy monkeys isn’t going to change this fact, and just makes the US look bad.

I’m reminded of what may be an apocryphal story about a professor who had a giant world map in his dining room, and whose foreign guests would point out that on their maps, their country was in the center of the map, not the US.

Even if I do say so myself, I’ve done a good job of finding a variety of perennials so that I have something blooming from spring to fall. Stella D’Oros are going now–even the ones that were transplanted are blooming, though I don’t know if I’ll get more blooms out of the transplanted ones any time soon.

Stella D’Oro day lily. These are the ones I thinned and transplanted and gave away. They’ll bloom at least once, if not twice more this summer.
(more…)

Farmer’s Market (fresh eggs, Rustic Italian bread, and a tomato)
Grocery shopping
Recycling center (We filled the trunk and the entire back seat, mostly with cardboard and #1 plastic)
Fish market (wild sockeye salmon is in season!)
Lunch

Now off to take Grandmom to the grocery store.

Then, if I’m lucky, reading and a nap later (still re-reading Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series).

I love mysteries almost as much as I love fantasy (fantasy and mystery together is perfect, but not always well done) and I’m willing to take more of a chance on an unknown mystery than an unknown fantasy. (The fact my grandmother loves to read mysteries probably encourages this habit.)

About a year ago I picked up Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. I’ve always been fond of British mysteries, and I’ve branched out to Spanish and Italian mysteries in recent years, so a mystery set in Bangkok (by a Western author) seemed interesting, so I picked it up.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep is a detective on the Bangkok police force. He’s half Thai, half white, and his mother worked as a prostitute to make sure Sonchai received a good education and future. His boss is corrupt, but pretty much all the police in Bangkok are corrupt, except Sonchai. Not that he wouldn’t be judged as corrupt by Western standards, but by Bangkok standards he’s a clean.

And Bangkok standards are very very different from American standards: prostitutes work openly, drugs of all kinds are common, and corruption is as common as the pollution.

These books are different from my usual reading, first and foremost because of the sex. Prostitution is common and the Thai in Bangkok have very different ideas about sex than Westerners (even if many of the customers are Westerners). But although there is sex, it’s simply part of the landscape: people have sex. That’s life, get on with it. I like that attitude towards sex; it doesn’t bother me the way heaving bosoms tend to annoy me.

And Sonchai himself is fascinating. He’s a bundle of contradictions and foreign to the Western mind. He lives in a corrupt city and accepts that corruption as a way of life, yet lives by his own beliefs.

The other thing that is different about Bangkok is that the Thai are quite open in their belief of spirits. It’s the way things are, and in these books everyone accepts this as fact. In reading some reviews, this apparently bothers some people, this open acceptance of the supernatural. Me? I like it. But then I also love urban and supernatural fantasy, so this should hardly come as a surprise.

If you like mysteries, and enjoy stories set in foreign settings, and aren’t squeaminsh, then you should check out John Burdett’s Bangkok series. It’s complex and fascinating and well worth reading. In theory, you should be able to pick up any book in the series and start there, but although each book is self contained, there is character development in each story, so you may prefer to read the books in order. And as all the books are easily available, it’s probably worth doing so.

Bangkok 8 (2003), Bangkok Tattoo (2005), Bangkok Haunts (2007)