My Two Blessings

  It's week 26 in our 52 Book Quest and we are halfway through the year. My year thus far has turned into 'what are you in the mood for' which means lots of romance and dragons, librarians, and villains.  Can you just hear lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Just me? Oh well! I'm also enjoying rereading Nora Roberts back list which has been comforting as well as feeding my muse and inspiring me to be creative. I'm still reading Patricia Brigg's Wild Sign and going to dive back into Night Huntress series by Jeanine Frost with Halfway to the Grave for our halfway challenge. I finally added Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor to my stacks and look forward to reading it. Eventually, when I get a roundtuit. LOL! Today I watch hubby mixing chemicals and paint together to try and screen print for the very first time,  the back of his amplifier. Saving money don't you know. He's been watching videos, but is asking me how and the why and what. As usual a 30...

  Welp, it was sooner than later. My boy, my fur baby, my cat cuddling buddy, crossed the Rainbow Bridge this afternoon.  From birth to death, Melvin has blessed our life with so much joy and unconditional love. Will really miss him.

I've finished my reread of Nora Roberts McGregor series and diving back into Charles and Anna in the Alpha and Omega series with Wild Signs. Enjoying finding out more about Bran and Leah's history.  For our writers onboard I discovered Natural Readers, a great text to speech online program which is helping me edit my current wip. Between Grammarly and Natural Readers, spending a lot of time revising and editing.   Poor Melvin, we're taking it one day at a time. The compounded medication is working well ,although we're having good days and bad days and he's still feisty . He's very persnickety about his food and what works one day doesn't work the next.  But he is getting weaker and I have a feeling he won't be sticking around for much longer. 

  Aloha, Sonic Fans. It is I, CVGWJames, and we're back. Today's a special day, folks. Why? IT'S SONIC'S 30TH BIRTHDAY, TRA LA LAAAAAAAAAH! That's right, everybody. It's been thirty years since our favorite blue hedgehog was born into the media universe and made his way into our hearts. Since his first game, Sonic has become very popular and, after so much trial and error, he's still as popular as ever. Thanks to the success of the Sonic movie, the hedgehog's popularity has grown higher than it has since it started to decline in the late 1990s. I will never forget when I learned about Sonic's existance, around that time, I was only into Mario and LEGO. But eventually, I got my hands on a Sonic game i.e. Sonic Colors and the rest is history. I've played several Sonic games, watched almost all of the cartoons, read the comics and wrote numerous Sonic fanfics as well as done a boatload of Sonic fan art. The gosh darn beloved blue hedgehog has made s...

  It's week 25 in our 52 Books Quest and Summer is officially here.  Happy Father's day to all our dads! It's officially Summer in our neck of the woods and we are a hot 105 degrees at the moment.  Thank goodness for air conditioning! We are free at last, at last, and can ditch our masks if we choose. I felt slightly naked as I went grocery shopping Saturday as if I were forgetting something. Little did I realize the mask had also been effective at masking odors as well. Perfume, chicken cooking in the deli, something slightly burnt at the hot wok, disinfectant. Hmm? Although it’s nice to see all the smiles as well as grumpy faces, I still felt the need to check my pocket for my mask. It’s become a security blanket. I may need it a bit longer.  Melvin is a bit thinner but feisty as ever, and it's been a battle of wits deciding who is going to give first every time I drop a pill down his throat.  I really need to trim his nails. Ouch. He faked me out this morning...

  Welp! Well The Sworn Virgin was a completely depressing read, full of angst and family feuds and honor killings.  Not a necessarily happy ending, just a moving on and hope things get better.   Clearing my palate with a reread of Nora Robert's McGregor family series - Playing the Odds.   Today I'm trying to reinvent the wheel and creating a graphic file for the screen print on hubby's latest amplifier  We lost our screen printer person and can't find another locally at the moment.  Once I've got this thing recreated, can email the file off to a printer who can create the chassis labels.  They want a vector graphic file (a what?) and oh by the way, they say to use Corel draw or adobe, neither one of which I'm familiar.  So working it up first in Microsoft Publisher to get all the measurements correct, then maybe I'll be able to export it into something usable for them.  So much fun. 

  It's book week 24 in our 52 Books quest and our next 52 books bingo category is all about different cultures.  According to livescience.com: "Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. The Center for Advance Research on Language Acquisition goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization. Thus, it can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group." From historical fiction to contemporary fiction to non fiction, there is a wide variety from which to choose to read and learn. As we all know, literature opens our eyes and minds to different places and times, cultures and ideals. ***** For our 52 books bingo read, I'm currently reading  The Sworn Virgin  which is based off the  true life s...

I   started a new to me series Krewe of Hunters by Heather Graham Phantom Evil about a paranormal investigation team.   Don't know how much of the series I'll read since there are 35 books. I'm enjoying Phantom Evil right now.  "Though haunted by the recent deaths of two teammates, Jackson Crow knows that it’s the living who commit the most heinous crimes. As a police officer using her sometimes-otherworldly intuition, Angela Hawkins already has her hands full of mystery and bloodshed. Under the oversight of Adam Harrison, Jackson and Angela will join a newly formed unit of the FBI, with the extraordinary opportunity to use their psychic talents. And the first assignment calls to them too strongly to resist. In a historic mansion in the French Quarter, a senator’s wife falls to her death. Most think she jumped; some say she was pushed. Yet others believe she was beckoned by the ghostly spirits inhabiting the house—once the site of a serial killer’s grisly w...

  Courtesy of World Wide Media It's Book week 23 in our 52 Books Quest and today is the 77th Anniversary of the D Day invasion when allied forces launched operation Overlord to free northwest Europe from Nazi occupation. 156,000 United States, British, and Canadian troops stormed five beaches that day in a large amphibious assault.   One historical tidbit is the French Resistance had been told the invasion would begin shortly after the first three lines in  Paul Verlaine's Chanson d’Automne  was read on BBC's Radio Londres in a  real time radio broadcast    Chanson d'Automne Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur D’une langueur Monotone.  Tout suffocant Et blême, quand Sonne l’heure, Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je pleure;  Et je m’en vais Au vent mauvais Qui m’emporte Deçà, delà, Pareil à la Feuille morte.   Autumn Song translated by Arthur Symons  When a sighing begins In the violins Of the autu...

I finished The Eyre Affair. Fun and intriguing story with book hopping and bad guys trying to rewrite stories or killing characters off which really affected the books. Had to keep reminding myself it was alternative  history fiction so stop trying to make sense of the historical aspects.  All the way through the book I was trying to figure out what she sees in Landen and if things will ever work out for them.  Made me want to read Jane Eyre again since that story took center stage for a while.  Also finished Roxanne St Claire's latest in her Dogmother series with  Faux Paws . Cute romance involving a runaway bride who is a animal communicator which is a fancy way of saying pet psychic and an nuclear engineer who is a linear factual thinker and sparks fly when they try to help a rescue dog.  Silly love story cleared my palate for the next intense Black Dagger Brotherhood read, J.R. Wards  Lover Unveiled  "Sahvage has been living under the radar fo...