Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

For this random post about random things, I shall use a random icon. *closes eyes, picks one* Ah ha! ani_mama drew this one a while ago, one of those "five random people get free sketches!" things. I love it, I should use it more often. :D

The current book I'm reading is taking forever to get through, which is what's holding up my next post (seeing how I mostly post book reviews nowadays...). It's not a bad book, it has some issues (some of them serious), but all in all I'm enjoying it, which means I can't explain why I'm reading it so slowly.

I have three kids' books lined up to read and post about all in one day/post. Maybe tomorrow.

I'm off all this week, which is really nice! It's hotter than heck here, but I can happily hide inside with the AC blasting.

Ellie New Cat, on the other hand... I'm worried about her. While I'm home, she sleeps at the door, her nose nearly at the crack where it would first open if I opened it. I have no idea why she's doing it, other than she wants to get outside? I hope that's not the case, but I have no idea why else she'd spend so much time there.

I'm thinking of changing my default icon. I've used COR Thistle for so many years, and I still love it, but it keeps throwing me off now that I'm playing WoW Thistle so much. I'll probably change to this one, I think, because it makes me all happy to see it.

I've been trying to remember a (book? short story?) all day. I know I read it not too too long ago, so it must have been in ebook format, but I looked through all my read books and can't find it. If it was a physical book I'm doomed, since almost all of them have long since been donated.

Scifi book. The aliens were dog-like, but the interesting thing was that one "person" was made up of a group of the aliens. A lone member would be insane because it would only be part of a brain without the rest of the "pack". Since they were dog-like they had no hands, but two members could work together using their mouths to function like hands. The pack size could vary from three to (eight?) members, and different members were good at different things.

The main alien character was somehow special, with the switching in and out of members he somehow kept a memory back to the earliest members, even though the physical bodies were all now different.

Some humans (crash landed?) on the planet, the parents were killed. A boy was taken by the evil alien and put in with a pack of "puppies" (so the puppies would learn the human language, I think). They bonded together.

I don't recall what happened to the girl, other than she wasn't with the boy. I think she was somehow with the good aliens, and they got to the ship and set off the emergency signal and drew other humans to the planet.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? It's been killing me all day!

Edit: Found it. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I remembered I read that book, saw it on my 'read' ebook shelf, but apparently I forgot the plot! Irony of ironies, I'm reading a short story collection by Vinge and the story I'm currently on reminded me of that book, that's why I was searching for it. And wiki tells me why! "Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella, "The Blabber", which occurs after Fire."

I have so many books I want to reread, but I have a ton of new ones I haven't gotten through yet (and a bad habit of buying more on a regular basis!).

Also Google impresses me. Searching for "alien dog-like group boy" gave me the right thing as the first result. ...and damned scares me. I just googled again after making the edit, to make sure the results were the same. This post now shows up on the first page of results! Minutes after I posted it!

I love my iPad. It's a great e-reader and it's an awful one. One of the reasons it's great is that if you run into a word you don't know, you can just tap it and you'll get a little popup box at the bottom containing the definition as well as a link to wiki and an online dictionary in case you want more info.

I'm at work, reading a book for work, and came across an unfamiliar word. Stochastic ("stochastic design"). I actually moved my hand, nearly tapped the word, before I caught myself. So inefficient to have to come back to my computer to look it up!

On the other hand, there are darned fewer distractions while reading from a real book. I'm currently reading a really enjoyable book at home (The Curse of Chalion), but I never get more than a couple pages read before something distracts me -- at the moment it's Angry Birds. I liked that game enough that it became only the second app I've ever paid money for. It's fun, it's entertaining, it's so distracting! If it's not Angry Birds it's another game. Or the pad's net connection. Or the graphic TV guide. Or just puttering around looking for new entertaining apps.

Oh, and stochastic means random, if you're like me and hadn't run into the word before.

Sometimes it feels like I'm buying books nonstop. With an ebook reader, it's so easy! And you don't have to deal with packages arriving, empty boxes, storing the books, all that.

So, when Groupon offered a $20 of books for $10 at Barnes & Noble (online or in store), I figured what the hey. I usually buy from Amazon, but it couldn't be that different, right?

Wrong. I had to download the Nook app, and could only view the books through there. Slightly annoying, but not horrible.

What was horrible was that unsurprisingly the two apps (Kindle and Nook) don't check with each other to see if you already own a book, so by mistake I bought a book that I already had for the Kindle. A $10 book. So my $20 coupon for $10 became $10 of books for $10 on an app I'd rather not use.

Blah. Nook is actually the third ebook app on my iPad. There's the native one (which has a handful of books in it), the Kindle (which has most of them), and now Nook has a few. It'd be nice to have one app that covers all the various formats/sellers.

It's so depressing when you finish a really good book and the next one in the series isn't out yet. I've been reading the Gone series (Gone, Hunger, Lies so far), and I just finished Lies this afternoon. It was one of those books so good that I carried my iPad around everywhere with me so I could sneak a bit of reading in every chance I could get. Luckily the next book is coming out in April, but after that it will be a whole year wait for the next... I know I'll like other books this much, but right now there's that old "No book will ever be this good again! D: " feeling.

And on to fruit! I went to the farmer's market this morning, and this time really, really looked at the fruit before I bought it. I was going to get to the bottom of this fruit going moldy issue! And I think I did. I stopped by the orange stand (a booth that sells only citrus, not a little of everything including oranges -- the same booth I went to last week) and I looked them over. Oddly there was white in the indents of the oranges. Not all over them, but in patches. Mold that had been washed off? Last week I overheard the workers talking, and they do wash/wipe down each orange before putting it out to be sold... I looked at the apples, and saw similar stuff. Grapes? Even more clear (cobweb-like stuff between some of the clumps). Maybe the white stuff was something else, like leftover hard water stuff, but maybe not.

I'm going to get some fruit wash next time I see it, and wash everything as soon as I get it home.

1) Without spoilers, those of you who have followed Lost and have seen the last ep tonight, do you feel the series is worth watching? The ending was worth it? I stopped watching maybe two seasons ago, with the horrible love triangle. If I were to go back to Lost, I'd start at the beginning again. Should I? Did the ending wrap things up nicely? Or leave things not-settled but in a satisfying way?

2) When I buy a new book, it gets tossed into my to-read pile. Books can sometimes stay in that pile a long, long time. The latest book I'm reading was purchased two years ago, so it's understandable that I didn't realize I was reading the prequel to an earlier published book.

If you were holding two books in your hand, which one would you read first? The book that was published first or the one which came first time-wise but was published later? It's been bugging me, I keep feeling I'm reading them in the wrong order, even though the one I'm reading is the one that came first in the timeline.


[Poll #1568720]

3) I'm really kicking myself about not ordering the iPad sooner. I'm on call for jury duty the week it's due to arrive. It should arrive on a Wednesday, being on call starts on a Monday. Plus I need to call them to have them hold it the day it arrives... whoever "them" is, the confirmation email didn't say. It'd be the perfect thing to entertain myself with if I do have to go in to court, if only I get it in time.

Every time I finish a good book, I always feel like I can't start another. Hunger Games, in this case. "How could I read another book? There'll never be another one like Hunger Games! It'll never be the same!"

As soon as I started the book, I knew I'd want the next one, so I two-day shipped it from Amazon. Unfortunately that was on Friday and two-day shipping doesn't count the weekend, so the second isn't coming until Tuesday but I finished the first last night. Boo!

"I could never read another book! It'll never be perfect like X was!".

My to-read pile is actually shrinking. I still have 20-something books waiting to be read (including King's latest 475895747825420 page one), but I can probably go back to being freer with buying new ones!

I sure did love Hunger Games. It's just too bad reviews on the second one are mixed.

Hunger Games on Amazon, where it got 585 five star and 152 four star reviews out of 795 reviews!