Tag Archives: annoyed

Fun Times

Posted in General, Podcasts by

So, over the weekend, I listened to the Pride48 marathon.  And while I didn’t get to listen to every single podcast, I still listened to a lot.  It was so fun listening to all the different podcasts- from the ones I love to the ones I don’t normally listen to.  I’ll definitely miss it, and I can’t wait until next year.  It was so fun to listen to!

Over the weekend, I went shopping for a bedspread.  And I really need to complain about this.

So, my old bedspread had this really big hole in it, so I was in desperate need of a new one.  I kind of, sort of, but not really looked at a few places online, and didn’t really find anything, so I figured it was time to stop at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a bedspread or comforter for a twin bed?

Pretty impossible in the store I was out.  Mind you, they have a great selection of bedding, and I did find one that I really liked.

But I didn’t have much to choose from, because…having a twin bed eliminated most of my choices!  If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that most people who sleep in a twin bed are either 10 year-old girls or in a college dorm.  That also eliminated most of the remaining choices.  Nothing against the  dorm-room bedspreads, but I just didn’t like them, and the 10-year-old girl ones…let’s just say that’s a bit too young for me.  It’s been a while since I’ve been 10.

I did manage to avoid bedskirts, and the more I see my new bedspread, the more I love it, so it’s cool.

I am curious as to whether it’s just this particular store or if it’s just in general.  I get that certain age groups need twin-sized bedding more than others, but a more varied selection would have been nice.

And now I have this need to go to different stores and check their bedding section just to see what they have.

Not much is going on right now…but I am going to an alpaca farm on Saturday! I am so excited, and there will definitely be a post about it!  Although I’m slowly starting to get ready for NaNo- I can’t believe it’s almost that time again. Hopefully it’ll go better than last year…I just need an idea!  Or 5, or something.

I honestly think that’s it for today, so happy Wednesday!

Apparently, The T.V. Is Not Gone

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Remember last week, when I was talking about how t.v. was going to be gone for a few weeks because of the holidays?

I was wrong.  A few shows went on their break last week, but there were a few that fooled me!  Apparently, they were talking a week off so they could air an episode before signing off for the year.  So I will now be trying to catch up on Revenge and Person Of Interest, and try to find something to watch.

I’ve decided to not do Writing Wednesday.  You know, the day I was supposed to talk about writing?  Well, I’m not writing, and rather than talk about how I’m not working on any of my novels once a week, I’ve decided to temporarily drop it.  If/when I start that up again, it’ll make an appearance, but until then, I’ll be talking about other stuff.  I currently have an astounding 8 books that are either being read, will be read, or are finished, so expect quite a few book reviews.  That’s partly why I’m not talking about writing, because I have too many books to get through!  Although once things settle down, I may have to start doing writing prompts or something.  I’ll definitely have to recap my book reading at some point.

I’m done baking my mom’s cookies and now I just need to finish my grandma’s scarf.  Plus, I need to bake some brownies, more cookies, and some gingerbread men for Christmas.  My multi-tasking will definitely be put to the test!

Thoughts on Books

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I’ve read a lot this year- an amazing 98 books.  I’ll definitely hit 100 next month- if I read anyway, which I probably will.  Knowing me, and my obsessively large (495 books and counting) to-read list, I’ll definitely read some number over 100.  I need to start making a dent in that to-read list after all.

A majority of the books I’ve read this year can be classified as either children’s books or young adult books, and there’s something I’ve noticed.

Why does everything seem to have at least a sequel?!  Some books have had a sequel, others are a part of some sort of series.  Some of the “Adult” books I’ve read have been a part of series too, so it’s not just children/young adult arena that’s guilty of this.  But children/young adult being the largest genre I’ve read…that’s probably why I’m noticing it.

*Random, but very important note: From here on out, a series will refer to books that have at least 2 books in it.

How hard is it to come up with an idea that’s contained in one book?  Why is there a need to have so many series?  It’s really overwhelming, especially since a lot of them don’t seem to have some kind of numbering or ordering system.  Like, the Vampire Academy Series or the Pretty Little Liars series.  There doesn’t seem to be any indication on the covers as to which number in the series it is.  At least there’s a “here’s what’s coming next” at the end of each Pretty Little Liars book.  But since I’m requesting a lot of books from other libraries, I’m utterly clueless as to which book is first and second and so on.  I seriously need to have a list of the order right next to me.  Google and Wikipedia help, since I can google the series to figure out the order.  It’s really not that much work, but it’s still frustrating.

But back to why everything I’m reading seems to be part of a series.  Is it because series are just insanely popular, or is it the types of books I’m reading?  I am reading a lot of historical fiction/fantasy/historical fantasy and supernatural/paranormal books.  Do these genres lend themselves to being a part of a series or are young adult authors really unable to wrap up their story in a few hundred pages?  Some of the authors I’ve read or want to read seem to have multiple series.  It’s like their mind works in series, and not in something that stands alone.  A combination of all of these questions seem likely- a mix of reading certain genres, series being popular, storylines that can’t be wrapped up in one book, and quite possibly marketing.  Honestly, I don’t want to think about the role marketing has.

And why is there a lot of title: a novel?  Is adding a novel after the title necessary?  I think not, because I feel like I’m pretty good at figuring what is a novel and isn’t a novel.  Is it a way of distinguishing themselves from all the series out there?  Or is there some other reason?  I just don’t understand!

I think that’s enough ranting and raving for now…I’ll need to save up my ranting and raving energy for November, when I’ll need it the most!

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels To Tractor Wheels

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Book: The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels To Tractor Wheels- A Love Story by Ree Drummond

Pages: 341 (Hardcover)

What I Thought: The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels To Tractor Wheels is the story of how Ree Drummond (also known as The Pioneer Woman) fell in love with her cowboy husband. 

I love her blog and I like her show.  I wanted to like this book, I really did.  I desperately wanted to like it. 

But I couldn’t.  I found myself hating it the more I read it. 

It’s divided into three parts- the first part was fairly decent, the second part okay, and the third part…well, it was slightly more realistic than the rest of the book.  It was readable, but read too much like a blog entry as opposed to an actual story.  Just because you’re a blog writer doesn’t mean that a book you right should sound exactly like your blog. 

I felt Ree was really shallow, and really self-absorbed.  She went on an on about how cute and amazing and thoughtful the Marlboro Man (her husband) was.  But it was really hard to see why he seemed to be so in love with her, the way she went on about clothes, shoes, make-up and how clumsy she was. 

Oh, speaking of her husband…she NEVER mentioned her husband’s real name the entire time.  NOT ONCE IN 341 PAGES DID YOU SEE HIS NAME!  I got referring to him by the Marlboro Man in the first part, since she saw him at a bar and never got his name.  However, once she started dating him, you’d think we’d get his name.  Nope, not going to happen.  Not even during their wedding was his given name mentioned.  It’s cutesy in her blog, and even the first few chapters of the book, but after a couple hundred pages, it’s not so cute anymore.  In fact, the only mention of his name is on the book jacket.  WTF, Pioneer Woman, WTF? 

She was definitely ill-prepared for being a cowboy’s wife.  The way she tells it, her husband and his family never talked to her about what it would be like living on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.  She often worried about what to wear when she was going to the ranch.  It’s like it never occurred to her to ask him what she should wear.  But then again, the clothes she described didn’t seem suitable to living on a ranch.  

Ree seems to be living in a fantasy world the whole book.  She portrays her relationship with Ladd as a fairy tale, and he’s her Prince Charming.  For someone who wants to be independent, she really seems to be dependent on other people.  There’s no mention of her having a job, she spends her time at home or at Ladd’s ranch, and seems to depend on her parents for everything.  Her parents marriage falls apart, and they get a divorce, but she seems to be in denial about what’s going on.  When she isn’t, she really doesn’t seem to care that her parents are getting a divorce.  She doesn’t seem to care about Mike, her developmentally disabled brother, and often tells him to leave her alone.  She seems to gloss over a lot of really bad things, exaggerates things that really aren’t a big deal, and doesn’t ask her parents if there’s anything she can do to make things easier for them.

And as for the relationship between Ree and Ladd, I could see why she liked him and why she was attracted to him.  But nowhere did I see why he might love her.  I felt like their relationship was based more on passion and chemistry, but it seems rather surprising that it seems to be happy and successful.  Maybe I’m a cynic, but while I like a certain amount of fluff…this was way too fluffy for my tastes. 

Rating: 1 out of 5.  I didn’t like it, and while it was meant to be a sappy fairy tale, I felt a dose of realism was needed.

The Joy Of Cooking (The 75th Anniversary One)

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Book And Author: The Joy Of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, Marion rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker

Pages/Format: 1132/Hardcover

What I Thought: There were things I liked and didn’t like about this cookbook.

What didn’t I like?  For one, the length.  I get it’s meant to be the guide to cooking, but goodness!  It’s a long book, complete with a nutrition guide, a section for entertaining, a section of different menus, plus a bunch more at the end.  Examples of those include  keeping and storing food, canning, freezing, and knowing your ingredients.  Scattered throughout the book are little sections about stuff, like a section about tea, different kinds of pie, and different kinds of cakes.

The format of the recipes was odd, but something I could get used to.  Here’s the general idea of the format: ingredients, recipe, ingredients, recipe.  That’s how I tend to cook, so that’s why I could get used to it.  But at the same time, I’m slightly worried about skipping over something.  Another annoying (and very distracting) aspect of the format is the references to other pages.  Example: Pie.  The pie crusts have their own section, so you refer to that, and then proceed as normal for the rest of the recipe.  The cakes are a good example too, because the glazes and icings are in a different chapter.  Also, some recipes direct you to read different guides.  Example: some of the pie recipes direct you to read about fruit pies and rolling pastry dough.

Again, I get it’s supposed to be the ultimate guide to cooking or whatever, but found that going back and forth between two different pages distracting.  As for directing people to different things to read before making whatever recipe, it’s probably good for beginners, but for me, I found it distracting.  Had I moved away from the dessert section, and gone to make, say, pasta or soup, my opinion might be different.

So what did I actually like then?  There really are a lot of recipes- according to the front cover, 4500 of them!  This accounts for a good chunk of the length, and I do like that they’re thorough, and try to be somewhat definitive.  The few recipes I tried were really good, and I really did like how the recipes themselves were formatted.  Generally speaking, I liked how it was organized, but I felt like it could’ve been slightly better.  With multiple recipes on a page, I felt like they could have found a better way to make each recipe stand out.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  The recipes were good, but I found certain things to be really distracting, which downgraded the rating.

Vampire Academy

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Book: Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead

Pages: 332/Paperback

My Thoughts: It was really lackluster.  I loved the storyline itself, but didn’t like a lot of the characters, especially the 2 main characters, Rose and Lissa.

Lissa is a Morai princess, and is a mortal vampire with a very strong bond to the earth’s magic.  She needs to be protected from the Strigoi, who are your stereotypical vampire.  This is where Rose steps in.  She has both human and vampire blood, which makes her a Dhampir.

The Morai seemed more like glorified witches than actual vampires, because heaven forbid they become like the all-evil Strigoi.  I felt like Mead didn’t think through the Morai/Strigoi/Dhampir very well at all.  For a book set in a vampire school, you forget about the students being vampires (or the Dhampir, who protect the Morai).  I like the idea of different kinds of vampires, and one group being more powerful.  I also like the idea of the Strigoi hunting the Morai.  However, the execution of it fell flat for me- almost like Mead didn’t think it all the way through. 

As for the actual characters, Rose isn’t likeable at all, and seems to be more interested in getting drunk and making out with random guys.  Plus, she has a tendency to get into fights, and seems to be very petty.  I wasn’t impressed with the other characters either.

The writing was horrible!  The transitions were horrible, and Mead kept alluding to some event that led Lissa and Rose leaving school, which we didn’t find out about until the last third of the book.  The book was more telling then showing.  An accurate description would be that it’s like a teen telling you a story, which, in a way, is true. 

Then there’s the fact that it was really boring…there really wasn’t enough action to keep me interested, and sadly, the last 30 to 40 pages were the most interesting of the whole book.  It’s too bad that it took nearly 300 pages to get so interesting…only for it to end.

Rating: 2 out of 5.  It seriously sounds like a teen wrote it, and it definitely could have used a lot of work before being published.

More Thoughts About Seeing Deathly Hallows

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I have more thoughts about Harry Potter- some stuff I thought was weird, some stuff I wish were included, some stuff I wish were done differently, and some other stuff that I liked about the movie.

  • Why did George have 2 ears?  He should only have one, because the ear that got cursed off wasn’t able to be fixed.  Did he magically get a prosthetic ear or something?
  • Cho Chang: First, she was hiding in the room of requirement, and then she was a student in the Great Hall.  There are two things wrong with this.  One, she should have graduated from Hogwarts, so why is still a student?  Two, if she’s a student, then why would she need to hide in the room of requirement?  It makes no sense.
  • I wished that Harry killed Voldemort in front of an audience.  There was also no celebration either, which was sad.  Harry takes down one of the most evil wizards of all time, and no one seems to care?  How did Harry explain that to everyone?  “Oh, hey guys, I killed Voldemort.  I’m pretty sure he’s dead because he just vaporized.”  The movie was just over two hours, I’m pretty sure they could’ve worked a celebration in there.
  • As much as I loved the duel between Mrs. Weasley and Bellatrix, I expected it to be a lot more epic.  It was still really cool, and I loved how Mrs. Weasley got all don’t-mess-with-Mama-Weasley-or-else. 
  • I loved the soundtrack: it didn’t overpower the movie at all.  In fact, it added a lot to the movie.  I loved hearing Hedwig’s Theme and Harry’s Wondrous World a lot.  And the music definitely added a sense of urgency to all of the battle scenes. 
  • Breaking into Gringott’s and then riding away on the dragon was a fun scene to watch.
  • One thing I thought was really cool was showing how destroying the horcruxes affected both Voldemort and Harry.  And when Harry went to the forest- the scene with him, Ron and Hermione was really touching. 
  • More thoughts on the epilogue (aka, the 19 years later bit): I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I thought it was really well-done.  And honestly, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the epilogue when I read the book…but now I don’t mind as much.  Seeing Harry just be a normal guy, and passing the torch to the next generation was pretty touching.
  • Why didn’t Harry fix his wand with the elder wand?  I suppose they could have filmed it and then it didn’t make the final cut, but again, it is something they could have added without worrying about the length of the movie.
  • Another scene I wished they included was Harry going into Dumbledore’s office.  Would’ve been nice to see Harry talking to Dumbledore’s portrait.
  • I loved Neville’s speech to Voldemort, but I kinda wished that it was a little more like the one in the book.  I definitely expected it to be more in line with the book, but it still made me cry! 
  • Speaking of the chaos of the battle, what was going on with the Slytherins being banished to the dungeons, but none of the younger students being escorted to safety?  Yeah, Voldemort doesn’t care if he kills an 11 or 12 year old (he did try to kill a 1 year old, after all), but really?  Was there no one to escort them to safety? 

Seeing it a second time was amazing!  I still loved it, and I still laughed and cried.  I think it’s one of my top favorite movies in the entire series.

Family Tree!

Posted in General, Other Projects by

Well, yesterday I managed to get a basic family tree done.  There aren’t any names attached to it, so it’s just a basic idea of what I want the family to look like.  The tree definitely needs a lot of work because the structure of it right now is kind of…annoying.  But it’s a really good start, and it’ll definitely evolve over the coming months.  Plus, I want to give those consanguinity charts another look, so hopefully a family tree written out will help me better understand how everyone’s related. 

I think today’s project is going to be naming everyone, and I’ll try to format the family tree a little bit better, just to make it a little easier to understand.  While I don’t mind naming people, this is going to be a little different than what I’m used to, just because of the number of people!  I think it’s around 50 or so people (if I counted correctly, and it’s likely I may have missed 1 or 2 people).  I definitely need to figure out who I want to feature- but that’s something that can wait until I actually know who everyone is.  I have some ideas for a few of the people, so I might work on that sometime this week. 

I’m feeling pretty excited about this, and it’s one of my favorite ideas so far.  It’s been really nice writing again- and it’s also really cool working on different ideas.  It keeps me busy, for at least a few hours every week, and it gives me a chance to see different projects in different stages of completion. 

I should start writing!  Have a great day!

6 Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII

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Book: Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey

Pages: 765/hardcover

My Thoughts: It’s taken me quite a while to get through this book for a couple reasons.  1- the length was an obvious factor, and if you add in the index and bibliography, the book is an astounding 852 pages.  2- it was really tedious, and there was an overwhelming amount of detail in certain parts of the book.  Those two reasons combined made it slightly difficult to read more than a few pages at a time.

I found the introduction to be slightly off-putting because I felt Starkey came across as arrogrant.  I felt like he thought his biography was the best one because he managed to access all these different documents that no one else was able to access and translate some documents that no one else has been able to translate.  In addition to that, he seems to not like any other Tudor historian because they weren’t digging deep enough, and all stuck to the same formula.

Starkey decided to structure the book according to the time each woman was married to Henry as well as the number of materials about each one.  This means most of the book is devoted to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, with a few chapters on Catherine Parr, and one chapter each for Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard.  Theoretically, it makes sense.  We know more about Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr than we do about the other three, so a good chunk of the book is going to be devoted to them.  In practice, it didn’t work out that well.

For one thing, most of the Anne Boleyn section was devoted to the divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  I’m not kidding when I say that Henry didn’t marry Anne until 500 or so pages in, and had her executed a mere 85 pages after that!  Furthermore, he talked about Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon twice- once in Catherine’s section, and once again in Anne Boleyn’s section.

Some of the details were repeated, making it boring.  I get that it’s a very important event in British history, because that was a major factor in the break from the Catholic Church.  But if he’s going to devote several hundreds of pages to the “Great Matter,” he should just write a book on that.

There was so much detail on Henry’s divorce from Catherine- it was all “such-and-such a person went to this place to deliver a letter” and “this group of people went to this one place to figure out how Henry can divorce Catherine.”  It did get better once he married Anne…kind of.

There was barely any overlap between any of the queens, which I thought was slightly odd, considering that there was a considerable overlap between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, some overlap between Anne and Jane Seymour, and then some overlap between Anne Of Cleves and Katherine Howard.  I got the definite sense that he was more interested in Catherine of Aragon and her subsequent divorce from Henry, and that everything else was just an afterthought.  I also didn’t notice anything groundbreaking or special about it, despite his “access to special documents.”

Rating: It gets a 2.5 out of 5.  It was more about Catherine of Aragon and The Great Matter than anything else.  For a book about Henry’s wives, it was more about the politcal aspects of his marriages and the important men around his wives as opposed to his actual wives.  I also felt like his marriage to Anne Boleyn and his subsequent wives were an afterthought.  Overall, it was a disappointing book.  I was definitely glad I checked it out from the library.