PJ Trader

  A great place for free knitting patterns is the online knitting magazine Knitty.com.  Most of their patterns are a little ambitious for me (read: requires too much paying attention to the pattern), but their summer edition has a cute knitted crab that looks so friendly that I just might need to make one or a dozen.

The pattern is just complicated enough to be interesting – the fun looks to be in the clever shaping techniques.  Although you have to knit all six legs, this crab is only about 14” long, so they won’t take too much time.

Click on the pic to go check out and download the pattern for yourself!

Now, I have a craving for some crab legs and  melted butter!

You know how it goes when you get older?  Parts don’t move as well, it takes a few minutes every morning to get everything moving in the same direction.  Some days it takes more than one shot of caffeine to wake up.  Some days you wish you’d never gotten out of bed at all.

Computers are like that.  No matter how nicely you treat them, kept them safely away from viruses and malware, in a nice cool room with plenty of non-spiking power, eventually they start acting old.  They creak more, and you wonder if the hard drive is going bad.  A USB port stops working.  Booting up and shutting down become long processes you coax the machine through, promising that if they’ll just do it one more time, things will be alright.

Can you tell I’m going through the throes of elderly computer care?  My laptop is begging to be rebuilt (next week, if I can find the backup software, I promise) as it crashes regularly.  Ancient at almost three years old, I’m not quite ready to give it up since I transplanted a new hard drive, fixed the Alzheimer’s with some new memory, and gave it some fresh juice.

And it’s still cranky. 

The even more ancient desktop – a relic at nearly five years old – is limping along as well.  It won’t boot unless I unplug one of the external hard drives, one of the DVD drives gave up the ghost a year ago, and shutting it down is like trying to get a cranky old lady to go to the doctor’s office.  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” she’d snarl even though she can’t see Vanna White flipping those letters on TV anymore.

So I’m going to rebuild the laptop and hope it survives a few more months.  The desktop is slated for replacement as soon as Windows 7 is released, which means I’m comparison shopping now.  And WOW, that’s hard.  All the computers are so much alike, it takes some serious research to understand how one chipset is different from another, whether you need integrated or discrete graphics capability, if an all-in-one will be happy in your home, or how to squeeze enough money from the checkbook to afford a beautiful HD monitor to accompany your new computer.

It’s time to head back to the requirements process:  What do I need the computer to do for me?  What kinds of software will I be running on it?  Will I need a gaming computer, or just something to email, browse, and do office applications with?  Webcam or no?  What’s the budget?  Bluetooth?  Hard drive space?  Upgradeable or not? Define the difference between WANT and NEED so I can figure out what the minimum requirements are.  Prioritize them, in case a good deal comes along.

It’s going to be fun, but I sure could use advice on what to buy – any one have brands they love, or horror purchases to tell me about?

I don’t like writing about books I don’t like.  I know that not every book is going to appeal to every reader.  I know that although I’m a huge fan of Nora Roberts, there are some people who just can’t stand her stories. I know that someday, when I have a book published, not everyone is going to find it “fun, fresh, and totally engaging.”  (That’s the author quote I expect to get…someday!)

So I haven’t had a book to tell you about in a couple of weeks.  The one I’m currently slogging through is, if nothing else, teaching me what not to do in my own story.  Want to know what that is?  Don’t drag the story out by having scene after scene where nothing major happens.  Oh, I can see exactly what each bit of the story is trying to do, but it’s just doing it so slowly – especially for a paranormal where things are blowing up and people are being targeted to be killed.  (Sounds action-adventurous, to me so I expect things to move along faster.)

If you’re wondering which book I’m whining about, I’m not going to tell you.  Because these gripes are simply my own personal reading preferences.  I admit I’ve probably read at least a half dozen or more of this best-selling author’s books and have whined about each and every one of them, for one reason or another.  I simply do not understand why reviewers praise the books so highly when there are plot holes a mile wide, the characters are not particularly likeable, and so on.  But you may not even see those issues, and I don’t think I should pre-dispose you to not liking a book just because I don’t like it.  So no titles, no author names.

But on a more general note, I have to tell the publishing world that I’m well and truly sick of vampires, were-creature shape shifters, and dark, angsty demon hunters.  Really, I am.  I am rejecting all such books on principle at this point.  (Although I do highly recommend Vicki Pettersson’s Zodiac series, especially as an awesome lesson in how to write in first person.) Sick and tired of them.  So let’s go find something else on the bookshelves, shall we?

This week I’m going to push Jess Granger’s Beyond the Rain which I had the great honor of reading early drafts as Jess was writing this.  A futuristic-outer space novel, Jess has infused Beyond the Rain with some of the best world-building you’ll read and a delightful cast of characters. (As usual, click on the pic to head over to B&N.com to check it out.)

In a universe torn apart by civil war, a warrior and a slave must fight for their lives and a love that may destroy them both.

After five years behind enemy lines, Captain Cyani has to complete one final mission before she can return to Azra—a planet ruled by a sisterhood of celibate warriors. Along the way she finds a prisoner, chained and beaten—but radiating feral power and an unbroken spirit.

For years Soren has endured torture as his captors leeched his very essence, a unique hormone then sold as a sexual narcotic in the shadow trade. Now he has been freed from slavery by a beautiful warrior woman with radiant blue eyes.

After years in bondage, Soren’s hormones are so unbalanced that he will die if he does not mate with a woman. Can Cyani be the woman he needs to survive, or will this forbidden bond destroy them?

Lately I’ve been trying to do a little recycling of my plastics, glass, and that sort of thing.  I’ve been neglectful in that area previously, partly because it wasn’t integrated into my upbringing the way that today’s kids are bombarded with it, and partly (I think) because no one made it convenient to recycle.

My garbage company doesn’t participate in picking up recyclables, for example.  There’s no recycling station within a decent distance to the house.  And then there’s the whole storage of the stuff, cleaning out the cans and so on.  But I’ve started to make the effort – ironically using those huge PLASTIC ziplock bags to store the stuff in.  And then I found some plastic garbage bags that purport to be greener than the regular ones – they’ll break down in the landfill in one year, supposedly, as opposed to the 15 years or whatever of regular trash bags.  It’s not up to me to prove their claims, IMHO, and as long as they hold the trash without tearing and dumping it on the kitchen floor, I’m willing to use them.

Since I’ve never been much of a water drinker, I never really paid attention to what those plastic water bottles cost the environment, but when you also realize that all the soda bottles fall into that same category, then reading that more than 17 million barrels of oil – enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year – are needed to produce the containers for the 8.7 billion gallons of bottled water that we Americans drank last year?  Well, I figure I can make a few changes to reduce the plastic I use.

And, have you heard about the huge plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean?  Yup, something about the currents and pressure systems, but basically the ocean has pushed the trash into a floating dump.  I may not be convinced global warming is all our fault, but an island sized dump of plastic floating in the ocean certainly is!

Don’t worry, I’m not going all Rambo Recycling on you.  But I can make small changes, like drinking the perfectly good tap water we have in our part of the country out of reusable containers (like a glass!).  And I can manage to haul my old newspapers to the recycling center once a month or so.

Do you recycle?  Why – or why not?