Making me happy, week of 2-22-15

1) OK, so I promise to stop with the babbling about Sleepy Hollow soon. If nothing else, the season finale airs tonight, at which point I won't have anything left to gush about until (hopefully!) the show is renewed and comes back in the fall.

But really, if you're a former fan who's been put off by the show's sophomore slump, you want to come back. They've got the pacing and the focus on the core characters back. The promo for the finale looks AMAZING:

And those lucky souls who've seen the early screeners are all raving from what I've seen.

Watch it! You want to watch it! Help me get my show renewed!

2) Pitchers and catchers have now reported. Baseball is back!

3) Jo Walton's The Just City isn't a perfect book, but it's one of the more fascinating ones I've read in a while.

4) Want a great comfort-food recipe for the lingering winter? Try this Chili-Cheese Mac from Cooking Light. I up all the spices just a smidge, use regular cheddar cheese instead of reduced-fat, and spicy Ro-Tel diced tomatoes with chiles instead of the mild kind.

Making Me Happy, Week of 2/8

So, at the risk of oversharing, the thing that's making me happiest at the moment I type this is I think I'm FINALLY over this stomach bug I first came down with Thursday night. It's been almost two hours since dinner now, a normal-sized dinner of normal richness and spiciness (a pork and vegetable stew over polenta), and my stomach feels...totally calm. This is AWESOME.

With that out of the way, here are a few things making me happy that have nothing to do with the state of my intestines:

1) Pitchers and catchers report next week, y'all! Baseball is back, the days are getting longer, and life is good. My Mariners missed the playoffs by just one game last year, and they're considered a contender for this season. Mind you, I've been burned so many times by this team that I'll believe it when it happens and not before--meaning if they're up by 10 runs with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th of Game 7 of the World Series, I'll still be holding my breath and not jinxing it by prematurely popping the cork and pouring champagne for my watch party or making plans for where I'll watch the parade or anything.

2) We're making serious plans for our big trip to Europe this summer. We've booked an apartment for our five nights in Paris and a cottage for our week in the Dordogne, and we should have hotels for London and Brussels within the next day or two. I'm starting to believe this is really going to happen.

3) At the risk of being a broken record of a Sleepy Hollow fangirl, if you're a fan of the show, you totally need to check out this four-issue comic series. It's set during the middle of Season 1, with tons of Abbie and Ichabod at their most awesome, and a good dose of Jenny and Frank, my favorite secondary characters, and ones we've seen far too little of in Season 2.

As long as we're on the subject of Sleepy Hollow, if you're a fanfic person at all, please give Shoqed by AmbrosiaJones a read. It was inspired by a Tumblr discussion of how the show has told us next to nothing about Abbie and Jenny's father, and wouldn't it be nice if he turned out to be an awesome demon fighter and not, you know, the stereotypical deadbeat absent black father? And it is now part of my "head canon" until the show tells me otherwise, and maybe even then, if what the show gives us is that stereotype.

To give you a feel for how good the voice is, here's a bit of Jeremiah Mills, forced to watch his beloved daughters from afar for their own safety:

Watching Gracie- no, Abbie. It’s Abbie now. Watching her had been harder. He remembered the first time he heard her ask to be called Abbie. “I hate my first name. I hate it. Grace was my dad’s idea. He called me ‘Gracie.’ He’s an asshole that I haven’t seen since I was like seven, so I use my middle name instead. Simple as that.” He didn’t leave his bed for a week after that.

She had been so sad. So closed off. So angry. So lonely. Even though Jenny had her troubles, she’d carved out a weird little family among the mercenaries and rogue archaeologists and treasure hunters she’d hooked up with. But not Gracie. Dammit. Abbie. Not Abbie. She wanted to go it alone.

Until that gangly white boy showed up in his graveyard time machine.

Then every glimpse of her was peppered with “Leftenant, why this?” and “Leftenant, why that?” He didn’t feel an awful lot of sympathy for this Ichabod Crane, though he knew he should. It probably had something to do with the way he looked at his daughter when he thought she wouldn’t notice. Plus the limey bastard was married to that magical fraud and if you really thought about it, could meet some of the qualifications of a zombie.

So. Now that I've revealed to you all the depths of my fangirling, I wish you an awesome week filled with whatever makes you the happiest.

2014 Reading, Books 61-63

61) The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

A rambling yet absorbing look at the lives of the women--and some of the men--who helped develop the atomic bomb, focused heavily on Oak Ridge, TN, but with occasional side trips elsewhere. I'd never paid much attention to this aspect of WWII. Most of my interest, such as it is, has focused on the war in Europe and the Holocaust.

Growing up I was taught that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the war because Japan just wasn't going to surrender, that the only other alternative was invading Japan at the loss of maybe 100,000 American lives. Now...well, I don't suppose I should be surprised to learn that this history wasn't as simple as I was taught in school and at my very patriotic mother's knee when nothing else is, either. Those weren't the only two alternatives--to name just one simple possibility, there was at least some talk of having Japanese envoys see a test of a nuclear weapon so they'd know what we could do. I suppose once the science was out there, development of atomic bombs was inevitable, and I'm pragmatist enough to accept that meant America had to have its own arsenal. For all the madness of it, Mutually Assured Destruction did keep the Cold War from going hot. But we could've won WWII without unleashing it.

That's not what this book is really about, though. It's a story about young women coming of age and building a community in a time of crisis, and I admired them and their spirit. Still, I set the book down sputtering about how there was a better way, not to mention my indignation at the account of testing the effects of radioactive materials on a patient who neither knew nor consented to such a test (NATURALLY a black construction worker at the site who'd come into the Oak Ridge hospital with broken legs but otherwise healthy), along with disbelief that the general in charge of the project recommended that the bomb's first target be Kyoto.

What a brilliant and appalling species we are.

62) The Lucky Charm by Beth Bolden

I tend to be wary of both self-published books by authors without a traditional publishing background and sports romances. Too many of the former don't even have a nodding acquaintance with grammar, and too many of the latter don't seem driven by the love of the game itself. I've read baseball books where the author apparently didn't grasp how a pitching rotation works, and I've read reviews of football books where I'm not sure the author had ever watched an entire football game, much less one featuring the extremely famous team she was writing about.

But this book was talked up a few weeks ago on the Dear Bitches Smart Author podcast, and since I trust Jane and Sarah, I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did. It's a sweet, engaging romantic comedy about a reluctant sideline reporter and a second baseman desperate to get the (obviously fictional) Portland Pioneers to a playoff spot for the first time. As a fan desperate to see the Seattle Mariners make it to the World Series for the first time, I found the premise entirely relatable, and the baseball felt real enough that I was never thrown out of the story as a serious fan.

63) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

I live in an entire household of introverts. I'm not the most extreme introvert in the world--and am arguably the most extroverted member of my immediate family--but I still come home every night exhausted from all the social engagement in my very pleasant job with fun coworkers that happens to be in a noisy, open-plan office. This book is a lovely affirmation of who introverts are and how challenging it can be to function in extroverted Western culture.

Summer reading, continued

I'm now up to 58 books read on the year, 10 of which count toward my library's summer reading program.  Miss Fraser is kicking my butt in that regard--she's up to 24. Even allowing for the fact a lot of hers are manga and graphic novels, she's turning into one bookish kid, I'm proud to say.  Her chapter books are from the Warriors and Wolves of the Beyond series, neither of which is short or easy for a rising third grader.

Anyway, my latest reads:

55) Lessons After Dark, by Isabel Cooper. This is Cooper's second book, a sequel to No Proper Lady. Unlike many fantasy romance authors, Cooper gets the balance of romance and fantasy just right, with solid world-building. This book isn't as fast-paced and high-stakes as her debut, but it's still well worth reading, IMHO.


56) Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Properly speaking, the book doesn't release till November, but Baen is selling eARCs directly from their website, and I couldn't resist.

It's a fun, lovely book, and I enjoyed seeing Ivan in an adventure of his own, revealing himself when out of Miles's orbit to be capable and intelligent in his own more deliberate and level-headed style. It's something of a romantic comedy of manners meets crime caper story, and while I'd rank it below my all-time favorites, Memory and A Civil Campaign, I'll definitely be re-reading it.


57) Watching Baseball Smarter, by Zack Hample. For the most part, this book just confirmed that I'm already a fairly savvy fan, but I learned some new things. I'd never noticed that all catchers are right-handed, for example, and I'm surprised singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh inning stretch only dates to 1971, since the song itself is so much older.

58) Hearts and Harbingers, by Olivia Waite, is an erotic historical romance novella, one that, frankly, is more explicit than I'd feel comfortable reading as a steady diet. That said, the writing is polished and the heroine in particular an engaging character, so if you like super-hot reads, I recommend it.

Age is relative

I'm a huge baseball fan, so the big news events in my world today were Armando Galarraga's missing a perfect game on an ump's botched call and Ken Griffey Jr's retirement.

Griffey is 13 months older than me. He's retiring from baseball at 40, having become a shell of his former self. I, at 39, am about to see my first book published. Barring tragic injury or illness, I can do this for up to 40 more years. Or, heck, even longer, though family history argues against my making it much past 80.

I'm glad I'm an author and not a baseball player. Now, Griffey in all probability has far more money than I'll ever see, and I'm sure he'll do just fine. He's got a great family, he's involved in several worthy causes, and I bet we'll see him managing in a few years. Nonetheless, I'm happy to think of my glory days as being in front of me rather than behind me.

As for the Galarraga incident, to paraphrase Bull Durham (one of my all-time favorite movies), sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains, and sometimes you get royally screwed over by forces beyond your control. Purists would disagree, but I think the game needs instant replay to prevent mistakes like that.