change of scenery

Some friends came by to save my sanity. We took advantage of this break in the weather to take a little run up to Books by the Lake in Bradford NH and Old Number Six Book Depot in Henniker. Something about being nestled between deep tall shelves of books that is both relaxing and exciting at the same time. for myself i picked up an old bike repair book with lovely exploded views and a book on the bicycle in Literature..see a pattern here? well I also bought 2 or 3 books for reselling, or rather listing and hoping to sell or basically selling them off to another seller in hopes to make back the money I spent.

1001 uses for a book #150 planters

i don't make this stuff up, i swear.

much to be said for misanthropy

My router has died. So I am not logging as much online time as I am accustomed, it has taken me 20 minutes to upload this. Sometimes i don't think it's a good idea for me to blog when i have nothing much good to say about humans. Sales of books or anything else have basically dried up for the summer. I manage to sell a refurbed bicycle now and then to keep the lights on, but with all this bloody rain (even the Boston Globe has provided Ark building instructions) the enthusiasm for cycling has waned. My mother is bouncing back and forth between ICU and her room, seems she got an infection from all the needle pokes. And apparently my truck's alternator has decided to wait out the deluge, so unless i want to ride a bike in the rain, I don't get to spend much time force feeding her hospital jello. The entire universe is wet. I spent most of the last sunny day sitting in a parking lot by the river throwing bits of McDonald's Cheeseburgers to a miniature pinscher someone had discarded. It had been robbing our cat feeding stations. After about 3 hours in the sun it finally relaxed long enough to let me scoop it up but it looks like the Animal Control Officer's kids have taken a shine to it. Today's exciting email was from a 'customer' who thought I should have pulled the entire run of my book on book repair because one of the links in the addendum was now no longer valid. I offered a full refund, but and she continued to complain about couple of typos she found as well. I finally just asked her if she was stupid. I hope she did a spit take and spewed chunks over her keyboard. One takes the little joys in life where one finds them.

wasn't this blog about books?

worth reading • from BBC NEWs - a feature on Dr Who novels worth reading • from Salon - Laura Miller muses on books that suck..vampire fantasy worth reading • and the Cozy Mystery List homepage has some summer reading recommendations...i hate lists like this..i end up getting yummy books and if i am lucky I finish reading ONE.

rock, paper, electrons v.1

1001 reasons a paper book is better than electronic book aerodynamics • You can throw paper books at a yowling cat and not have to worry about violating the warranty. NO limit on downloads • There is a limit on the number of times you can download a book you bought for or from Amazon's Kindle....and there is no way to tell how many times before you buy the book, only after you have hit the download ceiling. (from Consumerist) unlimited notetaking • Kindle Clipping Limits- small percentage of Kindle text can be copied to notes, whereas I can copy and entire book into my notes if I need to. you can share them • Amazon Kindle: Books You Can Never Share "You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content." so there.

rain rain go away

I dunno about anyone else in New England but I started building an ark. My mom is doing good thanks for asking, she'll be in ICU for a while. I have the urge to ask them to let me pull up an empty bed and some sedation for myself. It seems everything tends to crash and burn at the same time...my dvd player died, my laptop took ill and still hasn't recovered - no one has bought anything from sicpress in a week and I can't even remember the last time I sold a book. The torrents of raining turning my basement into a damp cave is just over the top. Did I mention that the apt above me leaks into my kitchen and I have been blaming my poor dog? In the meantime, I am listing books I haven't listed before, delisting items I am tired of seeing. Trading in DVDs for actual cashy money. Taking stuff off Craigslist and Bonanzle and throwing it out on Freecycle: extra printers, tools, bicycles, even a bloody great dollhouse. The only frustrating part of selling to locals is getting them to show up, you are always afraid to say, "sorry I'm offering it to the next person". Because then you get the old "i don't have a car, i need to get a ride from my ex" yatta yatta yatta...way too much information. If you want something come get it, otherwise I have a nice big blue dumpster that takes away all my sins. worth hearing • I spent many decades listening to comedy albums of some very observent people...and instead of experiencing deja vu, I experience moments when I hear voices in my head - Either it's Bill Cosby trying to get the definition of a cubit to build an ark, or George Carlin - talking about 'stuff', the acquisition and the storing of same. But I can't remember any funny rifts about divesting. worth reading • Luckily the barter system is alive and well in the US Barter Economy: 14 Great Places to Trade Stuff Online worth reading • from Small Living Journal, Radical Downsizing Techniques

groggy and confused

I checked in on Herself this morning and as always, she asks to come live with me and promises to leave me 'all her money'. This is like the 90th time I have had to tell her, my brother has all her money and I live in 3 rooms, so she'd have to sleep in the bath tub. Her sister with the 10 room house can't find enough room for my mom's clothes never mind her entire body. She really doesn't want the surgery, but Himself makes her medical decisions and he doesn't listen to anyone but the voices in his head. All I can do is sit and watch Rachel Ray and the View with her. No, I didn't actually WATCH, it is daytime TV after all, I brought a fat book...always bring a book to the hospital, otherwise you find yourself reading the name plates on the very expensive machines that goes ping. I told her I had to nip off to rotate the laundry and I would be back later.....her surgery is moved to 6pm....6 PM? what's that all about? I suppose there is no winning on this..either you worry about it entire night before for a 7AM tee-off time (but they have pills for that) or you hang around all day watching bad tv waiting for the nip/tuck. I suppose this way 'family' members can pop in and out all day expressing best wishes. Personally I find that way more stressful. The last time they assembled only for the entire time she was sedated, but the moment she was wheeled into recovery, they vanished. I predict this evening to go the same, with virtuous relations sitting vigil, with no time for her groggy and confused, luckily I am fluent in groggy and confused. At some point today I have to ship backorders. Most of my vendors for book repair and cleaning products have raised their prices, almost all unexpectedly. So it takes longer for me to scrape up enough to buy the same amount of stock albiet at higher prices. Can't blame them, like everyone else in this economy (we say that like there is ANOTHER alternate reality economy out there) we are all treading water. Continually rising shipping fees and material costs while the products we sell devaluate. I can feel the water lap my nose. Meethinks it's these little pirahna's nibbling at away our extremeties that will probably do us in.

hell is other people

i guess i finally said something amusing, and i wasn't even trying. too much pressure to be lucid 24/7. i do have 3 or 4 draft posts of this post in my inbox, just some uncompleted thoughts. like everyone else who does their work out of the house, i can't seem to convince people that 'yes' i am busy. I always end up finishing other people's errands....i'm just a girl who can't say no. and run out of time at the end of the day, just enough energy to sweep up the wreck of the day. Herself is back in the hospital getting a bit of her insides trimmed off....and himself had the gall to call me after only two days. I really prefer people with tails - at least you know where you stand with them. People ask me what's with the 'cat thing'...it's not really a cat thing, i just don't like the way people treat them like disposables. I guess i'm just prone to cleaning up messes of all stripes. worth seeing • The latest performance by Royale De Luxe, the French mechanical marionette street theater company. This time with Jules Verne characters in Nantes. Jules Verne

the diminishing description

anyone besides me notice that no one tries to 'sell' their books anymore? they just describe them. I like to cruise the flickr images of books...hey it's my porn so what? and quite often i see an image of a book that looks interesting, so I slap the title into a database and see if there are any out there. Sure what I find is usually adequate to BUY a copy if I absolutely know i want it...but fewer and fewer sellers describe the CONTENT of the books anymore. Just entering part of the blurb on the back of the book would suffice. Granted they are plenty of NEAR FINE MAY HAVE UNDERLINING OR HIGHLIGHTING and such like and so forth, but no one tries to make me WANT The book. WE are all just assuming that only a person who knows the book already would bother looking it up. I remember when the internet was all new and sparkly and just waiting to have one poke around all the corners and edges to see what turns up, one could browse for weeks on end just through the hundreds of uploaded text databases on Compuserve alone. Sellers were just uploading their mail order catalogs and internal databases which contained lots of descriptive text, making each book sound better than it actually was. Now I am lucky if ONE seller for every title enters any commentary at all about the book contents. Too bad to, cause these days I am only looking to buy books I don't know i want.

lost time and email

i would have sworn i was just here....but then here isn't were i left it. the laptop is playing footsie with death by download and the desktop is starting to eat itself...how come things start breaking down the moment you can ill afford to replace them? This morning ever faithless piece of shit Comcast modem took six resets before it would stay on for good...and that's when i found that old faithful Mozilla Thunderbird had lost its mind and eaten my entire profile. For anyone who has ever tried to recover your Thunderbird profile i.e. your folders and emails ...and you know who you are....the good thing is that Mozilla's website is chockablock filled with helpful step by step instructions....the bad thing is that is all presented as utter gibberish. I have been using Mozilla's Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird for a number of years now and can fully recommend them, however when Thunderbird goes awry which isn't often, it is usually a long tedious process to recover from. And no matter what the problem, i ALWAYS end up appealing to someone on the Mozzine Support Board. Odd that a terrific piece of software has unterrific help database. Sure the answer is in there but you better be ready to spend the day spelunking to find it. In the end someone pointed me towards a lovely ADD-ON which should have been part of the damn build to begin with. ImportExportTools, which lets you go find the folder filled with your emails and bring it back into Thunderbird. Granted I had to set up all over again and clean up a lot of duplications, but I got everything back that I needed.....i stopped weeping all over the keyboard and put away the vodka and redbull. welll there's put away and theres 'put away'.

things you find when you really try

i'm good at finding things . . . no really i am. if it's out there i can find it . . . years of practice from folks sending me on a lot of what they thought were snipe hunts. sometimes it takes me a wicked long time, but in the end i have that pelt on my cave wall. like most of the book-ish persuasion i used to carry a little back book with the titles of all the books i was looking for. with the coming of the internet, the book was replaced with a database, which slowly dwindled into a spreadsheet and then a small text file - which i eventually misplaced. now if i want something i only have to reach out and type something. (hey, finding it and affording it are 2 different things) since i am no longer acquiring thing, i try NOT to look in the first place; thus avoiding the urge to buy and squirrel junk away needlessly. But i caught a glimpse of the postcard depicting my house 100 years ago . . . and you know i just HAD TO HAVE IT.

Herself was back in and out of the hospital this weekend....no surprise there...well not for me. But 'himself' has a new trick, he's now becoming unreachable - not that I would try to call him, but instead the home and hospital are calling me. Which in itself is surprising. Since he put his name on everything within easy reach, I have been cut out of my mother's medical circle, can only provide a lot of blank looks and speculation. which I hate...medical personnel marks your careless and indifferent when you aren't 'in the loop' on your parent's medical status. Folks should realize that HIPA allows certain family members to keep others out in the cold, regardless of their level of concern. So you end up in the middle of the night with a confused patient and no answers because some sonuvabitch doesn't feel like answering his phone and leaving his nice cozy mcmansion. If I start the week like this..i will never last.