Lady Sheherazahde's Journal

That's easy! Amazon.com. Books! Books! Books! I might buy some for my friends but probably not. My current Amazon Wishlist is over 17 pages long.

I am exhausted. My dad cam up and we took the plates off the old car, put them on the new car and filed all the paperwork at the DMV. I am no longer the owner of a broken down white 1996 Olds Cutlass. I am the owner of a working white 1996 Olds Cutlass.

Dad bought me lunch at Wegmans too so that was nice.

In other news I have started sewing the first of my Necktie skirts. I have sorted all the colors. If I use 12 ties for each skirt I will have enough for 5 skirts. My initial estimate of 20 ties per skirt was based on only using the big ends of the ties. I have decide to alternate big ends and small ends so that very little is wasted. (There is some waste because the ties are different lengths but I am sort enough to use both ends in the same skirt.) The first skirt I'm making out of the ties with unusual weighted fabrics, mostly yellows and browns. I have sorted the rest of the ties by color. One brown skirt. One blue and black skirt. One red and blue with stripes and spots. The last one is all odd the colors, I think I worked out a good order for them.

I've been reading Jeeves novels by P.G. Wodehouse, and watching the Masterpiece Theater production staring Fry and Laurie. In the books Bertie is always eating marmalade on his toast for breakfast. So I bought some marmalade. But I don't have much bread for toast so made some biscuits. I heard a pastry chef on NPR say that he always makes his pastry dough in the food processor so I tried that. It works very well, very fast way to make pastry dough. Although I still think pancakes are the fastest homemade bread product.

I have been reading "A Series of Unfortunate Events".

Has anyone on the internets been annotating these books? They could really use it.

I still don't have book 12, and I have been reading them out of order, so I read the end already.

The last word in the story makes me want to go back and read the whole thing over.

I just started reading "Silent Interviews", a collection of interviews Samuel Delany has given over the years.

If I ever tried speaking the way Delany writes I would have a lot more people looking at me blankly and saying "Wow, you are really smart." (Because they have no idea what I'm talking about and have given up trying to understand me.)
i.e.

"Feminists and feminist sympathizers read alert to precisely the sort of gendered skewing on which the nostalgia of our epigraph is grounded, ready to point out the split, gently here, powerfully there, in the classical world, in the unified subject, and the assumption of transparent language on which any such self-satisfied vision of "man" (and the boy that fathers him, in our filiarchal society) must be grounded, always prepared for by (and constituted of) the shock that "you" are not "she" and (thus) "he" is not "you." (That split is not very far from the strange double marking that separates our two orders of interrogation--each signed with the question mark earlier.)" Silent Inteviews, p2

On the other hand I find him wonderfully informative:

"Frank Lentricia characterizes a radical as one who wants society to grow out of our education, while a conservative is someone who wants education to model itself on the society that exists--so that reading is (and what is education without it?) profoundly implicated in the very polarities of our politics." Silent Inteviews, p2

For me, reading Delany is like riding a roller-coaster of layered meaning. I always come away breathless with the excitement of revelation, which I can't seem to explain to anyone else.

For instance: Alex has a bad habit of trying to talk to me when I'm on the computer. When I'm sitting quietly, staring at the computer screen, he assumes that is a good time to talk to me. J had the same problem. For a long time when J lived here he would say "Morning" to me if he saw me sitting at the computer as he stumbled from his room to the bathroom in the morning.

Unfortunately even the effort to exchange a simple greeting massively disrupts my concentration and totally derails my train of thought in a way that is difficult for me to recover from. When I'm reading, or more importantly writing I can not afford any interruption.

There is a passage in Delany's novel "Tales of Neveryon" that I feel perfectly explains the problem. But when I went to read it to Alex I realized that it only seems perfect to me. It is probably impenetrable to anyone else.
( Here let me show you: )
Can you believe a book with a passage like that is marketed as "Sword and Sorcery Fantasy"? No one who likes "Dragon Lance" books would enjoy this.

I have been interested in self defense lately. So one of the books I bought with the gift certificate from my sister Gaby was The SAS Self-Defense Handbook: A Complete Guide to Unarmed Combat Techniques by John "Lofty" Wiseman

Alex tells me his grandfather, John "Lofty" Wiseman, was an ex military man who died on Christmas day in 1997. But apparently his grandfather is not the same John "Lofty" Wiseman as the author of the survival books.

Strange. Would have been cool if he was.

I got lots of cookies and candy but a few unusual things: an alabaster pendent from my Mom's trip to Italy, a pair of fingerless glove/mittens ( fingerless gloves with little pull over mitten tops. Hard to describe, but very practical. Even the thumb has it's own little pull over hood, that feature is hard to find.)

And then there are the books!
I already mentioned that my Cousin Christina gave me "The True Meaning of Smekday" by Adam Rex (which was a pleasant read.)
My mom & dad got me a selection of books off my Amazon wish list
"Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry" by Ian Stewart
"Nonplussed!: Mathematical Proof of Implausible Ideas" by Julian Havil
"Why We Read What We Read: A Delightfully Opinionated Journey Through Bestselling Books" by Lisa Adams and John Heath

So I just received "Deviance in Everyday Life: Personal Accounts of Unconventional Lives" by Erich Goode.

It is not exactly what I expected. The deviants are not very deviant. The big surprize for me was not *that* I am represented in this book (that should surprize no one who knows me) but *what* deviance of mine I found represented here. According to this book I'm a deviant because I'm fat.

I had never really thought of it that way before. I know I am stigmatized minority. But I had never thought of fatness as "deviance".

[Edit: Some quotes from the book]

"In contemporary America, obesity is stigmatized. Fat people are considered less worthy human beings than thin people are. Goffman tells us that stigmatized persons are regarded as "not quite human" (1963, p. 5) and, quite clearly, the obese are stigmatized." p91

"Men and women of average weight tend to feel superior to the obese, reward them less, punish them more, make fun of them; indeed, that it is something of a humanitarian gesture; since such humiliation will supposedly inspire them to loses weight." p 92

"A substantial proportion of the obese accept the denigration thin society dishes out to them because they feel, for the most part, that they deserve it. And few defend other fat people who are being criticized because they are a mirror of the very defects that are so repugnant to them. Unlike the members of most other minorities, they rarely fight back." p 92

"In one study of the public's rejection of persons with certain traits and characteristics, it was found that the stigma of obesity fell more or less squarely in between that of physical handicaps, such as blindness, and behavioral deviance, such as homosexuality (Hiller, 1981, 1982)." p93

Ah well.

In other news. The Honey Crisp apples are in. If you haven't tried them, they are great! And there is a limited supply. They are a new variety.

Through LibraryThing I recently realized that Amazon.com will accept suggestions for correcting book information.

I don't know how long the little link has been there under the book information on the Amazon.com pages. But it never occurred to me to submit a correction until I realized that it was the best way to stem the tide of bad information on LibraryThing.

If I want my books to look right on LibraryThing sometimes I have to go to Amazon.com and ask them to fix their entries so that the people who don't bother to proof read the imported data don't swamp the system with bad data.

So far all 4 of the corrections I have submitted have been accepted.

:-)

OK so I finished the book and I have some questions.
( spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows )

I got no sleep last night.
They are very engaging books.

ANd now I'm finding the idea of Secretive Marsh Bird Surveys unaccountably amusing.

I finally picked up "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
Wegmans has it on sale for $18.99 till midnight tonight.

While I was there I picked up The Gaia Girls

Gaia Girls: Enter The Earth

Gaia Girls Way of Water

I used the Amazon.com certificate from my cousin Christina to buy
New
"PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives" by Frank Warren
"Schoolhouse Rock! (Special 30th Anniversary Edition)" DVD
Used
"The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest" by Terri Windling
"The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection" by Ellen Datlow
"The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Eighth Annual Collection" by Ellen Daltow & Terri Windling
"Black Heart, Ivory Bones" by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
(The last two arrived today!!!)

I used the Powells Books certificate from my sister Maria to buy:
"Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World" by Davy Rothbart (trade paper,NEW)
"Found II: More of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World" by Davy Rothbart (trade paper,USED)
"Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window: The Best Confessions from Grouphug.Us" by Gabriel Jeffrey (trade paper,NEW)
"Too Much Coffee Man's Guide for the Perplexed" by Shannon Wheeler (trade paper,USED)
"Too Much Coffee Man's Parade of Tirade" by Shannon Wheeler (trade paper,USED)
"Stellaluna: A Pop-Up Book and Mobile" by Janell Cannon (hardcover,USED)
(That last one was tricky. The gift certificate was for $50 but you got free shipping on orders $50 or over. My book total was 49.24, The stellaluna pop-up book was 1.95 so I only had to pay 1.19 in my money and no shipping.)

soulspirals got me involved in Library Thing. I didn't see the point at first but I love books so I've been looking at it.

Then fritterfae mentioned that he had purchased a CueCat barcode scanner and was using it to catalog his book collection. I have been cataloging my collection for years! It is my fond hope that a CueCat barcode scanner will help speed up the process for me.

blaisepascal has graciously ordered one for me. And this afternoon he gifted me with a lifetime membership to LibraryThing. So I exported my collection from my Filemaker database and imported it into LibraryThing. It needed a little bit of cleaning up but...

I now have 1200 books in my Catalog

I managed 2 miles on the stepper again today. It was a particularly difficult hill profile and I only had to run the last .1 of a mile. So I'm doing well.

Afterward I went to Barnes & Noble to use the gift card my parents gave me for Valentines day. It is really hard to decide what to do with $25. After 2.5 hours I finally decided on The Element Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells: The Ultimate Reference Book for the Magical Arts by Judika Illes (it was in the bargain section for $19.98, slightly damaged) and The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots & Ropework by Geoffrey Budworth (on sale for $7.98)

Some books I looked at but didn't buy are Naughty Needles: Sexy, Saucy Knits for the Bedroom and Beyond by Nikol Lohr, Domiknitrix: Whip Your Knitting into Shape by Jennifer Stafford (the prices look much better on Amazon.com)

I was having so much trouble deciding I asked a clerk to recommend a book that was an unusual and interesting object something that attracted attention when they opened the box. She didn't seem to understand what I was asking but she recommended PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives by Frank Warren which is indeed an unusual book. Makes me want to try scrapbooking. (They didn't have the scrapbooking kit I saw at Borders.)

See some of the actual post cards at
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

J thinks he is allergic to my new Balsam Fir inscence. A bit of a bummer for me.

I had lunch with B. Then hung out with The Beast and Ben, went to my Aqua Aerobics, hung out with The Beast again, then spent two hours in Borders trying to decide how to spend my gift certificate.

I eventually choose A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman (I had heard Dave Freedman on Talk of the Nation) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies by Rob Willson, Rhena Branch

Sister Fran sent wild harvested, homemade, Huckleberry jam and chocolate covered candies. As well as a sheaf of wheat. *shrug* (She lives in a wheat field. It's pretty.)

Sister Gina and her husband Dave gave me Silver Needle tea and a Salt Died Silk Scarf from China.

The country of Germany gave me a laser cut wooden ornament in the image of a bird house. (I'm not kidding. The tag says "To: Eva, From: Germany". But I suspect it was my parents. It's my mom's handwriting.) Mom and Dad also gave me a nice new shirt, Amphigorey Again by Edward Gorey, and The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. Both books from my Wish List. :-D (I was about to use the gift certificate Sister Gaby gave me to buy "Amphigorey Again" myself.)

We had wonderful steamed muscles and homemade bread for dinner Sunday night. And Waffles for breakfast Monday morning (I have been craving waffles So I was very happy about that). Then roast leg of lamb for dinner Monday night. I was too tired to drive home after dinner. The new shirt came in handy when I ended up spending an extra night down there. I had left over lamb for breakfast this morning and came home. Where I finally got some sleep. I will take my BiPAP machine with me next weekend when I go down for New Years.

I just had dinner with B and K at The Smart Monkey. Chief Yeppi sat down and talked with us! (I had ordered the Yepwich)

And then B gave me my Balsom Fir incence and bulk needles, that had arrrived in the mail! Yay! That was fast. The bulk needles came with a bonus packet of lavender. Mmmmm

And I got a package from my Cousin Christina. She sent me a copy of Terry Jones' Barbarians , renewed my subscription to The Funny Times, and sent me a gift card for Borders Books (I don't know how much is on it).

My sister Gaby sent me a gift certificate for Amazon.com for $25.

I love buying books, but it is so hard to decide.

Via aylinn
It's a fair cop.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
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I created a book blog (What I'm Reading Now) on My Yahoo! 360°
And now I have syndicated it so all my fans can add it to their friends pages. :-)
zahdes_books

Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein

A friend of mine just recommended this book. And it seemed like a good recommendation to pass on.