Homework: A Household Meme current questions. I told myself I wasn’t going to do this one, because I don’t really consider myself a housewife, but the questions are too fun to pass up. And I’m am wife who works from home, so...

I went back and did some of the archived questions also (click Read More below), there are some really interesting ones.

HomeWork: Week 18

The phone rings. You've got unexpected company coming over in an hour! Look around your house. Is it company-ready? What can you do in an hour to get it up to the level that would make you comfortable?

Make the bed, straighten my office a bit (it’s in the living room), swish out the toilet, put new hand towels & toilet paper out, close the shower curtain, stuff anything into the closets that looks junky sitting out... Try and wipe some of the baby powder out of the hall bathroom, the stuff goes everywhere :-( Make sure I have a few cokes in the fridge. Our house isn’t usually dirty, mostly cluttered, working at home I often have a lot of “things” laying around in progress. Hopefully there won’t be any dishes in the sink...

HomeWork: Week 15

What is your favorite thing about your current house/apartment/domicile of other sort? What's your least favorite?

Probably the layout, for both questions. Our house has really good flow between the rooms, but my office has no privacy because it’s the living room. Someday I’ll figure out how to add pocket doors or something...

Also the wood floors are pretty, one of the reasons we bought the house, but they are also hard and get very dusty. We upgraded to storm windows a few years ago and that has been great, it makes the house nice and quiet and temperature controlled :-)

HomeWork: Week 13

Do you own any tried-and-true housework manuals or books? Have you belonged to any housekeeping or organizational groups, such as FlyLady? How have these worked for you?

I have Too Busy to Clean? which has good tips, and Home Comforts - the Art and Science of Keeping House which is a massive reference tome. (Ha! I just saw your mention at the beginning of the archives, I’m no Martha Stewart either ;-) I also have several organizing and closet books (because I’m obsessed with organizing). I have Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing From the Inside Out and get her newsletter, which is fun.

I’m also addicted to the Home & Garden Channel, and always try to catch Mission Organization and TLC’s Clean Sweep. I also have a book called Spiritual Housecleaning, but I haven’t read it yet. The single most useful household book I have is my old Fannie Farmer Cookbook my grandmother gave me when I moved into my first apartment. When you forget how long to boil eggs or bake potatoes, it's nice to have around.

HomeWork: Week 12

When was the last time you moved house? How long did it take you to pack? How long did it take you to get out of the boxes? Does your unpacking method more closely resemble the "get it all done as quickly as possible" style or the "do it slowly, do it right" one?

We just celebrated our sixth anniversary in our house, and we lived in our last house for seven years. Before I met my husband I used to move a lot and it was all very haphazard. My first big move out of town broke me of that, though, when it took me over a week to find my bath towels!

When we bought our house we had to wait an agonizing three months to move, so we packed and labeled everything to death. And it still took us 12 hours with two professional movers to get everything from one house to the other (just a few miles apart). We had a ton of stuff, and actually got rid of a lot of things at a pre-moving garage sale. We unpacked most of the boxes (lots went straight into storage) within a few days of moving, because it drives both of us nuts to be tripping over boxes. The only unfortunate thing is that the people we bought the house from were literally moving out when we were moving in, so we couldn’t bring in anything over in advance or do anything like paint the walls.

HomeWork: Week 8

How often do you grocery shop? Do you have a usual day or time for shopping? What's your budget for a typical grocery run?

I try for just once a week, but I go to the neighborhood supermarket and Sam’s Club. And, when I get a chance, Whole Foods. I don’t have a set day, it’s usually when we start running out of the important things, like my husband’s Mountain Dew, toilet paper, bottled water. I average about $200 bucks for the weekly basic groceries, but we don’t eat out a lot and I do buy some convenience foods, mostly from Sam’s. I like to go in the evenings, but a lot of times the stock is lacking, especially in fresh things like bagged salads.

HomeWork: Week 4

When you were a child, did you keep your room neat, or was it a disaster area? Why do you think that was?

It was organized but very cluttered. Lots of books, lots of Barbie stuff, many horses... I’ve always been a book fiend, that’s usually the majority of my clutter, books and papers. I hated having to make the bed and little things like that, though. Nothing nasty laying around, though, like old food (we have huge roaches in Houston!). My parents house was fairly spartan, though, so in comparison I was pretty messy.

HomeWork: Week 3

If you live with other people, how do you divide the housework? If you live alone, what chores would you like to give away, and which would you keep?

My husband is obsessed with vacuuming, so I let him. He’s also good at doing the dishes, but I don’t mind putting them up. I HATE dusting, it kills my allergies for days afterwards. I also don’t like cleaning the bathroom, though I’m pretty good about swishing the toilet out regularly. I’m rotten at sweeping too, we have lots of wood floors, hubby usually ends up doing that.

Week One

How often do you...
...clean your bedroom? It’s SOO dusty, very neat, but dusty. We need to have a pro in there to do the curtains so we don’t ruin them (that’s our excuse, at least)
...wash your sheets? Not often enough, every few weeks maybe. I’ll do the pillowcases every week or so, though.
...mop the kitchen floor? Usually when something breaks and we have to pick up bits of glass anyway.
...vacuum? Hubby vacuums several times a week, when we had an indoor dog he would do it almost daily. I think it’s therapeutic to him...
...dust? When it gets so bad we can’t stand it, or when we’re going to have major guests over. We have over 20 bookcases in the house and every one of them is full (sigh).
...clean the toilets? I do mine regularly, whenever anything starts appearing that shouldn’t. My husband does his every few months when it gets downright scary. His bathroom seems to have less air circulation of something, luckily it’s not the guest bathroom.
...scrub the tub? Mine stays pretty clean, except for a bit of mildew around the caulk. His looks like the shroud of turin and is a major undertaking that he only does about 3 or 4 times a year.

Well the port has made my teeth numb and my headache a bit better, which was my goal. I haven't had any alcohol since I re-started the Atkins diet, I feel much happier now :-) I think I may sneak off to bed and read some more on my vampire novel, which is nice and quiet and has no explosions [aahhh]. I want to get her newest Southern vampire installment, but it's in hardback only right now, which really sucks, not so much for just the price, but because I have the first three in paperback.

I found a new vampire/witch novel the other day which looks really great (and has Charlaine Harris's endorsement on the fabulous cover), Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison, which I can't wait to start on. I love browsing at Borders, they don't have the best prices but they have a really eclectic selection of featured books and music.

Well, as usual we didn't do anything of significance over the weekend, we're not church goers and don't have kids. It rained from Saturday afternoon on through Sunday and actually got pretty chilly. so I didn't even want to get out of bed today when I woke up.

My dad called last night to let me know they had spent five hours in the emergency room because my mother had fallen the day before and they wanted to make sure her hip wasn't broken. I wish they'd let me know when things happen instead of after, we only live like a mile away. Her stupid doctor changed her blood pressure medicine (again) and she said when she woke up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom she blacked out when she sent to stand up and fell. Which is exactly what my dad was going through about a month ago and the reason was exactly the same. I hate doctors. But she was smart enough to switch back to her old medicine right after that happened and is, at least, not feeling faint anymore.

Her x-ray didn't show anything and they wanted her to wait around another few hours for an MRI, but after five hours in an ER full of screaming children she decided to just go to her regular doctor to get one done later this week. I hope she hasn't damaged anything, she bruises really easily, I told her that Sunday would be the worse day, being three days after, and she called me today to tell my I was right. Luckily, my parents are like me and stockpile pharmaceuticals for emergencies, so they already had some Vicodin for her to take.

Being flat footed, hyperactive and then having coordination problems due to MS, I've injured myself so many times it's not funny. I also worked under hazardous conditions working security for most of my twenties, it's amazing I never broke anything (knock on wood). Just last night I had to go out to run an errand in the rain and a huge wind came up out of nowhere and slammed my umbrella into my forehead, but things like that happen to me. I was at a Pagan fest with some friends a few years ago and had opened a bottle of essential oil to smell it and when I put the stopper back on a drop of it flew up and hit me right in the eyeball. I seriously think I'm cursed sometimes, I used to blame it on my ex-husband (who really was cursed with having serious freak accidents) but I think it's probably just me, because I've been tripping and falling since I was a kid.

I did well yesterday with my eating, but dinner tonight was ravioli, which we'd already bought and is one of my favorites. I looked at the back of the package and almost fainted myself when I saw how many servings there were in each package (we buy it at Sam's Club). I had four Pepperidge Farm cookies left that I'd bought, I made Sparky split them with me to get rid of them. I've been trying to ignore two packages of the "two bite scones" that I've been addicted to for about six months now, hoping they'll just go bad on their own. I've been trying to add some yoghurt into my diet the past few months, I like the little tiny Dannon Light & Fit Smoothies the best, they're just the right size but I had a coupon for the bigger Yoplait Nouriche smoothies and bought three last time I went shopping. I started off Saturday by drinking one for breakfast and then ended up burping up iron all day, it had added vitamins, which sounds like a good thing, but doesn't taste good (bleecch). And I have two more in different flavors, I think I'll stick with the Dannon from now on, coupon or not.

I felt all shaky after eating the pasta tonight, even though I only ate half of what I usually eat. I've noticed carbs tend to make me either nervous & irritable or sleepy. We're trying to figure out what to eat nightly that's not made of pasta, if I had a chef or we could eat out every night it would be easier, I don't mind eating meat every night, I just don't like having to cook it. We have a George Foreman grill, but there's only so many ways to make chicken and steak before I get really bored. And most of the vegetables I like I'm either allergic to or they have lots of carbs. Sam's Club has some wonderful tropical chicken salad right now that I've been buying, it tastes good and seems healthy, if I could figure out a way to freeze it I'd stock up on it because I know they won't have it too long (sigh). I like meat with fruit, which completely grosses Sparky out.

2 am, I've spent the entire night listing eBay stuff (you want a tan? check my auctions!), hope it sells well. I think I'm going to take the rest of the night off to work on my website and then pack everything to mail tomorrow, I'm pooped! I'm in between novels, just finshed Charlaine Harris's Living Dead in Dallas (fun Southern vampire romance mystery) and haven't gotten the third novel in the series Club Dead yet, so I'm still debating between vampires and werewolves to start as my next before bed book. I've pulled Dr. Phil's weight loss book out (that I bought like six months ago, also at Sam's), I probably ought to start on it too ;-)

I had the weirdest dream about vampires and Angel last night. I wish I could remember more of this, it was one of those very emotional dreams where I felt both severely depressed and incredibly happy, and it seemed to go on forever. It started off with Sparky taking me out to breakfast, but the places we went to weren't serving breakfast any longer, which really upset me but didn't bother him, which made me even more upset. I think I really wanted French Toast and all of the syrup bottles were empty. At some point in the dream I also had no clothes on, which freaked me out even more.

So I set out on my own, apparently with some clothing now, and had to walk back to our hotel, which was in New Orleans but the landscape didn't look at all like New Orleans for some reason. We were staying at a big fancy Holiday Inn right by a freeway overpass. After walking for some time, I managed to get on a bus that was going that way, though I only had a handful of change with me to pay. I saw the hotel approaching and someone reached up to pull the bell for the stop, but it didn't make any noise, so I pulled it too, and again it was silent. I asked the bus driver, Mel Gibson, if we could stop there and he said 'Oh no, that would be much too expensive' and so the bus kept going and went way past the hotel before I could finally get off, in an area that actually did resemble old New Orleans.

I made it back to the hotel eventually, and was upset to find that my husband, who was now Angel, was not there. I found out he had become obsessed with playing a really involved arcade game and was spending hundreds of dollars on it, but he couldn't stop playing for some reason. At this point I realized I was a vampire also, and went back to the vampire lair to look for him, where all sorts of young people, poseurs and real vampires were hanging out (sort of ala Underworld), and one of the young poseurs kept acting like he knew Angel but he didn't have any clue who I was, and kept holding out his fist, which was covered with small cuts across the knuckles and saying 'These are Angel's rings' and I kept thinking, no, Angel's rings were silver, and finally confronted him on it. But he kept bragging and I finally blew him off as nuts. I went through Angel's desk and found a receipt for like $800 for this arcade game, which he had apparently also won a bunch of things by playing, and I tried to figure out some reason he was doing this.

Me and some others went looking for Angel, in the daytime, in an RV driven by Wilfred Brimley. Somehow we were immune enough to sunlight that we could tolerate little bits of it. He drove us all over town and through an alley way so narrow he had to fold in the mirrors on the RV, and we finally found Angel, who seemed very confused and embarrassed by what he had been doing, so I figured he'd been under some sort of spell and could not find it in my heart to be angry with him, though he didn't apologize exactly. I had to drive us back to the hotel in the RV, which I managed very well. When we arrived we were going to take the stairway up to our room, when I realized I could fly as a spirit up the stairs so we did that. For some reason I've never been good at flying in my dreams, so it felt really clunky.

Angel was very humble and loving when we got back to our room and I didn't bring up the subject of why he'd been missing or what he'd been doing, we just made up without speaking about it.

Meanwhile, back at the vampire lair, the young braggart was also going through Angel's desk and found a note about his 'great secret' which turned out to be the demonic arcade game, which was waiting for another victim to find it...

I think we then checked out of the hotel and everything was cool, though again it was daytime which concerned me, though I think we had a big black limo waiting for us just outside and could make it that far safely.

Dream Sources - I was reading Charlaine Harris's Living Dead in Dallas before bed (her heroine stalked off down a dark road after a fight with her vampire boyfriend); Sparky just taped another episode of 'Angel' last night, we're like the whole season behind in watching them (very sad this may be the last season); On Conan O'Brien last night Dubya made a joke about his mom looking like Wilfred Brimley; I saw a guy on The Daily Show driving an RV; the Mel Gibson reference is easy; I've been feeling very poor lately because I had to shell out my half of $800 for a new version of Adobe Creative Suite (whoa, that's wshere the $800 amount came from also I guess); and day before yesterday was Mardi Gras and I was thinking about my friend who lives in NOLA. The ring thing might have been because of a recent episode of the Osbourne's I just watched where Ozzy lost a quarter million dollar ring.

Well, today was a whirlwind, I'm still hyper, so what am I listening to? Jane's Addiction, sort of matching my heartbeat and typing rate which is interesting... Got to get their new album, saw them on TV last night, they still sound great. Convinced my husband to get rid of his 10 year old recliner, I know it's killing his back and neck, I looked up one on LaZBoy's website, we went in and bought the thing outright tonight, very cool, easy commission for the salesgirl. I called in advance to see if they had any in stock in the showroom, we bought some furniture from them about 5 years ago and it had to be special ordered and took like a month, and they had the chair he wanted and in the maroon color he wanted (no more beige, yea!). He got the only red one in stock in the city, it will be delivered next week (we don't own a gas guzzler big enough to tote furniture). AND it was on sale with a trade-in discount, so he'll get something for his old chair when the Salvation Army comes to retrieve it.

I can't believe how easy it all went, and that we're not stuck with another piece of earth toned furniture (one sofa and chair still to ge replaced). His favorite color is red, the chair fit him perfect (it's their Atlas chair, it's the biggest, comfiest one they make, too big for me). I love LaZBoy's stuff, we bought a dual recliner couch and a big overstuffed non-rocking chair for me (I'm not a rocker) when we moved and they're so well made and comfy, well worth the investment. Got one of those pop-up coffee tables too, eat dinner on it every night. Their stuff is so gorgeous, I could wander around in their showroom sitting on furniture for hours [sigh]. They have a cool website, you can test out colors, test decorate rooms, etc. I've always wanted a chaise for myself, for the bedroom, probably end up with a smaller recliner eventually, though. We have an old semi-broken chair in there now to basically hold pillows and provide a kitty window perch, but it would be nice to have a real reading chair in there also.

I whimped out on taking my last steroid today, slept really heavy and fitful and couldn't face another 24 hours of steroid withdrawal. Restarted on my bc pills tonight, too, they don't play well together and I don't feel well when I'm off them, too many hot flashes and such. We went to the Adobe Cafe in Sugarland after we bought the chair, dinner was great but I have had a metallic taste in my mouth all night and now I'm getting a swollen lip on one side, more withdrawal I'm assuming. Took some Lysine, hope that stops the swelling. Went to Half Price Books after that, I bought four cat books (Cats in the Sun, Asleep in the Sun, The Mediterranean Cat and The Silent Miaow) and a new werewolf romance that I didn't even know was out (read the prequel as part of a supernatural trilogy). Couldn't really afford it all, but the photo books were like 75% off retail so I couldn't pass them up.

My nose has been cold for two days, very annoying since it's like 100 degrees outside. Been super dehydrated today, I expected that on the steroids, not afterwards. Uggh, my head's pounding, here we go kids... I've got my music stepped down to Bowie's Heathen now, finishing with Tori Amos Scarlet's Walk, which even relaxes the cat. Yep, she's jumped up in my lap and is grooming the both of us now...

1. What is your favorite type of literature to read (magazine, newspaper, novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)? I just love to read. Mostly fiction novels, magazines and non-fiction books. I have WAY too many piles of magazines to read and I could go broke buying non-fiction books, I love how-to and computer reference books. My first job was in a library, I could never get anything done, I couldn't stop looking at the books :-)

2. What is your favorite novel? Iíd have to say Shirley Jacksonís We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I originally picked it up at a garage sale when I was a kid because of the fabulous gothic cover, but it really stunned me when I read it. Shirley Jackson wrote like no one else.

3. Do you have a favorite poem? (Share it!)I have never had an affinity for poetry, I canít remember it, and I donít really enjoy reading it. I think the closest thing that I really appreciate are music lyrics, they touch me much more deeply than poetry. I canít rhyme either. One of my favorite lyrics that comes to mind is from Rushís Dreamline:

While we are young
Wandering the face of the earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that weíre only immortal for a limited time

4. What is one thing you've always wanted to read, or wish you had more time to read?I suppose more self-help and psychology books. I donít believe they are all meaningful, but I really like to explore different ideas and philosophies.

5. What are you currently reading?A really trashy vampire romance by Christine Feehan called Dark Challenge. Iíve been in a really weird mood since the holidays and have been plowing through the series each night before bed.

Finished work early again this evening (yea me!) and jave been doing some major blog surfing tonight. Found lots of worthy sites and relevant rings to add. I'm not a ring collector, but remember, though morticia is 5 years old, wednesday is still in her internet infancy and needs lots of care and upkeep.

I've been wanting to add more about me type stuff, though the whole thing is as about me as you can get, so I've added a new Q & A category and I've joined the Friday Five to stimulate my brain a bit. I know it might sound a bit silly but I kept seeing it on other people's blogs and I thought it would be fun. It's Monday night, Tuesday am now, so now all I have to do is remember to check it each week for new questions. I'm still working on a real about me area also, but here's a start:

1. What is one thing you don't like about your body?

I'm too short-waisted, clothing never fits me correctly :-(

2. What are two things you love about your body?

My pale white skin and my green eyes

3. What are three things you want to change about your home?

Paint the walls! It's all white but we had no time between the last people moving out and us moving in. I want a blue bedroom.

I want to replace the half-dead ugly dining room chandelier over my desk to something nicer (and brighter!)

I want to put bloody shelves in my hall closets, I have way too much stuff and it drives me nuts to pile everything on top of itself.

4. What are four books you want to read this year?

I've got shelves full of "to read" books... let me grab some of the more promising ones...

Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Incubus by Ann Arensberg
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight by Sharon Heller

I've got three or four vampire romance series that I'm working on completing also in between the heavy stuff

5. What are five promises you have kept to yourself?

OK, first hard question...

To try and separate work and play, since I work at home

To stop working at a set time each night, I used to work all night till the sun came up and my poor husband forced me to finally go to bed

To go to bed earlier and get up earlier

To try and eat at least a little better and on some sort of schedule

To read some every night before I go to bed :-)

It's the full moon in a few hours, this one is the Wolf Moon. also known as the Cold Moon or Old Moon. I was looking up moon phases to record in my non-pagan planner (I wish Llewellyn would make one that fits my Dayrunner binder, their Witch's Datebook is the right size but it's not hole-punched), and found a really cool site where you can look up the moon phase for pretty much any day and year, and I looked up my birthday. Not only was I born on a Wednesday, at four-something in the morning, but I was also born during the dark phase of the moon. Destined to be Goth or what? And a Capricorn to boot. My brother was born during the same phase, but my husband (the prosperous, lucky one) was born in the period just before the full moon, waxing, of course. Found a page with info on what it means for the moon phase you were born under, didn't really learn anything new about myself, but it says I'll enjoy the latter part of my life more than the early part, which is encouraging.

We're dripping pipes tonight for the hard freeze. I guess people up north don't have to do that, wrap and drip pipes for the cold. Your houses seem to be built with the water pipes safely in the ground where they belong. Ours down south run through our attics, where they tend to freeze and burst pipes because it's not supposed to get cold down here. So we have to run water in all of our indoor and outdoor faucets to keep it from freezing. One burst at my parents house when I was a teenager in an add-on wing of the house. It's no fun to watch water pouring from your ceiling, even less to try and find a plumber during severe weather...

We went to IHOP tonight, my husband took up the "All You Can Eat" pancake challenge. He only made it to nine. There was a table full of teenage boys in the next section who were seriously competing to get their polaroids on the bulletin board. One of them made it to 17, good grief. They walked past us as they were leaving, and my husband asked them "who won" and got a rousing chorus of "I ate 15, etc.!" and brags about who had to go throw up to continue. They were very proud of the guy who ate 17. They shook my husband's hand and gave him words of encouragement and advice. "When you get to 11 you'll hit the wall!" I had my normal blueberry pancakes and some of the nastiest hot tea I've ever had, I never drink hot tea out (with the exception of some first class Chinese restaurants), but I hadn't eaten earlier and I was freezing. I had to jump on our teenage waitress because it took her like ten minutes to bring it, my husband had already finished an entire cup of coffee (have you ladies always noticed they serve the men first?).

What other exciting things did we do tonight... we went to Hobby Lobby because my husband needed some Bestine, and I looked through their wall of little Johnny Lightning cars. I'm a classic car freak, if I can't have the real thing right now, I at least want a little mini version. Picked up a black 1967 Olds Cutlass 442, my dad had a blue Olds Cutlass convertible when I was a kid, I think it was a 1971, I remember it had a Rocket engine. My mom made him get rid of it much to my brother's dismay ;-)

Then we ran by Border's to pick up a book I'd seen the other night and couldn't wait to order through the mail, Too Loud Too Bright Too Fast Too Tight by Sharon Heller. "What to do if you are sensory defensive in an overstimulating world". Came out in November last year, so I figured I won't be seeing it on the used book shelves for awhile. Seemed like a good follow-up to The Highly Sensitive Person - How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, which I found a few years ago. Excellent book, I'll let you know how this new one is. Oh, and I finally got Avril Lavigne's album, I hope she wins best new artist but it will probably go to Norah Jones, that's on my "to buy list" also.

Holy crap, just looked at the thermometer, it's 34! I'd better go check all the faucets again, just in case.

I'm two-thirds of the way through the holiday celebrations and I need a nap. I've been feeling so run down this year and my health has been suffering as a result. One more family get-together to go and that's it for awhile.

I had always thought I was overly talkative most of my life, but in recent years I find myself becoming almost too quiet. I think it's for several reasons, partly because of my increasingly severe tinnitus (my ears hum and buzz with little provocation, the sound of my own voice is often painful to me), partly because my voice seems to give out after too much talking (too many allergies and a persistant dry cough), and partly because my husband and his family are too hard to keep up with in conversation. They are louder and much more animated than I am, and talk endlessly about subjects I can just smile and nod at, relatives and places I don't know, movies I haven't seen... Not that there's anything wrong with that. My family does talk, but we're a much quieter, more soft-spoken lot, except my brother, who is fairly animated and can match my husband in volume. I'm also a classic example of a highly sensitive person, I like to describe myself as an empath of sorts, and can sometimes just be overwhelmed by parties in general. (My husband does not understand this, he just thinks I'm weird or anti-social)

This weekend my husband's sister and her family are in town, which means more smiling and nodding for me. Which is fine, they are a fun group of very enthusiastic and talkative females. We're doing the in-law family Christmas with them, and then we should be pretty much done for awhile with the exception of a few birthdays in January and February.

The trashy vampire romance has turned out to be much better than it started, I think I'll read the second in the series next. Once you get past all the gratuitous sex and heaving bosoms, there's actually a fairly interesting, original vampire story going on. Yea, a new vampire series to follow!

Banned Books Week begins this morning, it runs September 21st-28th. I saw a nice display for it at our local Half Price Books the other day and even a small display at Barnes & Noble this evening. Since my first job was as a library assistant, this subject is close to my heart. I still can't believe we have a need to even argue the whole point of free speech, but then I don't understand why middle-aged white men stand in picket lines in front of abortion clinics... Actually I do, it's because they're afraid the white race is dying out because of women like me who don't want to accidentally get pregnant and just "have to have it", we actually want to plan life altering events like pregnancy. I've been one of those people who has always known I'm not mother material, I'm finally at the age now where people have pretty much stopped bothering me. The anti-choice people will argue that they want to save lives, but there a million other truly humane things they could do other than harrass (and kill) doctors and patients, like maybe adopt some of the thousands of children who are already in the world and need homes. My brother and I were both adopted, it worked nicely for us.

OK, off the soapbox (for now ;-). I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 a few months ago after seeing part of the film on TV. Somehow I was never required to read it in school, and had never seen the movie, but it seems appropriate reading material for this week. Let's see, what other thought provoking selections can I pull from my bookshelves... I have a preference for female writers, so here are some of my favorites:

Shirley Jackson is my all-time favorite author, good ones for this week would be The Road Through the Wall, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Bird's Nest, and of course, The Haunting of Hill House. Also worth reading is her hilarious novel about raising her own children, Life Among the Savages.

Alice Hoffman is incredible, try Practical Magic (in an entirely different league than the movie "based" on the book), or the disturbing Here On Earth.

Another female writer with a very unique style is Valerie Martin. Mary Reilly, Alexandra, The Great Divorce (look for used or check the link, it's apparently being reprinted in February 2003), and Set In Motion are all excellent (the last two are set in New Orleans, which always adds points to a book for me, it's my favorite city ;-)

Ann Arensberg's Sister Wolf has happily been reprinted because of the release of Incubus (which I own but haven't read yet). Sister Wolf is a terrific book, really hard to describe.

Carol O'Connell has one of the smartest, toughest female detective in literature in her character Kathy Mallory. I've read about half of the series, I discovered it four novels into it and was hooked. Chronologically it's: Mallory's Oracle, The Man Who Cast Two Shadows, Killing Critics, Stone Angel (my favorite), Shell Game and Crime School. She also has another novel that's not part of the series (in my "to read" stack) that's gotten great reviews, Judas Child.

There are many more novels I'm not mentioning (don't flame me for leaving your favorite out!), but I'm just going by what I've read in recent years and what has personally touched me. Most of my reading is actually vampire & horror novels, and lots of non-fiction, but that's for another day.

Current bedtime reading is Karen E. Taylor's The Vampire Vivienne, part of a very cool series of vampire books with mostly female vamp heroines. Most of her books have recently been reissued because of the release of Vivienne and a new book, Resurrection: The Vampire Legacy, so snatch them up before they're gone. Now I've got to get the newest one too, it just came out this month, I'm excited!