Joanna Carl's The Chocolate Jewel Case

I've read a few books I should blog about as soon as I have time, but I will do a quick entry about this one, as it was lent to me by a friend and I will be returning it tomorrow.

The Chocolate Jewel Case is the seventh book in Joanna Carl's mystery series called Chocoholic Mysteries. You can find the author's website at http://www.joannacarl.com.

I really enjoy this series of little mystery books set in a little Lake Michigan resort town somewhere near Holland (I always think of a combination of Saugatuk, Douglas, and Grand Haven). The stories are pretty enjoyable, and they are short enough to read in a couple of days, even when you are busy (I believe they are all under 250 pages).

The main character is Lee, a woman raised in Texas who moves to Michigan to live with her aunt and help her aunt run a gourmet chocolate shop, following Lee's divorce. So Lee is out getting a second chance at life, and tries to make the most of that chance. And - she solves mysteries when they arise at the shop or in the small town.

In this particular book, Lee has been married to her second husband for some three months. They are living in the long time family farm house, about 100 years old, old fashioned, and rather small.

And - most horribly for a pair of newlyweds - they have no privacy, because they have been inundated by long term house guests. There is an older aunt in one spare room, and two teenaged girls in the other. They have a guy staying on their porch. They have another guy staying in the yard in an old camper. Only one bathroom. They are having a bad heat wave, with very high humidity, and no air conditioning. The house has no soundproofing, so if anyone in the house moves or talks, everyone knows it. There is even only one television, and everyone wants to watch different things.

And then the mystery begins with a man who has been dead and buried for decades knocking on the front door. And then it goes on to include murder and jewel thieves! All sorts of crazy stuff happens - and most of it a lot of fun for the reader!

Tags: Joanna Carl, Chocoholic Mysteries, The Chocolate Jewel Case

lost week

Most of the last week is lost in a cloud made up of "tired".

I left work a couple of hours early on Wednesday night, and slept about twelve hours, and slept a lot on Thursday and Friday nights, too, and am finally starting to feel better.

The one thing that sticks out was getting a mammogram on Tuesday morning, and that went well. Thankfully, those are nowhere near as unpleasant as gyn exams.

Oh, and the weather. We had a lot of rain and wild storms this past week. Last night there were a lot of tornados and flooding in the greater Detroit area, but nothing too bad in the immediate vicinity. Most of the tornados were in the counties to the north of us.

Bill seems to be fine down at Ball State. Steven had his first high school soccer game canceled on Wednesday, as the field was too flooded for them to play on it.

Dan and I were both tired most of the week. I am hoping when Dan and Steven get home, we can go out to dinner tonight. I got a lot of house cleaning done today, and as a result am in no mood to cook tonight.

more weirdness from the bizarre world of Laurell K. Hamilton

Darla Cook, rather infamous personal assistant to the best selling writer Laurell K. Hamilton made this

http://www.amazon.com/Genre-gets-no-respect/forum/FxJ7EEGTFB5Y58/Tx3S1GBWGM4AHV8/1/ref=cm_cd_dp_tft_tp/002-3863364-9478430?%5Fencoding=UTF8&cdAnchor=034549590X&asin=034549590X&store=books

 

weird post at Amazon in the Lick of Frost forum, and I am very impressed by some of the responses to it, eloquently ripping what she says to shreds - from the nonsense about Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" being a romance to the reasons why so many people no longer are fans of Hamilton.

Hello! It's not just the sex, though the sex is very boring and overused and the relationships unhealthy and abusive and astonishingly unpleasant. It's the poor writing (bad punctuation, constant misspellings, etc.) together with a huge helping of continuity errors and dropped plotlines along WITH the sex and the constant angsting about the sex replacing ANY sort of plot!

Why can't the people in the Hamilton camp understand these rather simple points?

And why do Hamilton and her entourage keep attacking anyone who questions the unfortunate direction her books have taken????

Don't they realize that every attack loses more of her fans?

Ugh. Just ugh.

Tags: Laurell K. Hamilton, hack writers, bad writers, writers who betray their fans, writers who attack their fans, biting the hands (and wallets) who feed you

Bill back at school

Man, was that a long weekend.

No one took any time off to get Bill packed up, so things were rough.

I worked until midnight, and had to get up until dawn so we could get down to Indiana.

This year Bill took about half as much stuff with him to the dorm, and it all fit into the back to my Jeep.

So on Friday, Bill and I drove down to Muncie in his little truck to stand in the lines. Because I was so tired, Bill did the driving.

We got down to Muncie, and ate lunch at the Applebees. Then we drove to the university and took care of the lines. The worst line was the parking office line - that one was over 1 1/2 hours in waiting time. The bursar's office was an in and out in comparison. I got his text books, and that was nearly $500 in damage to my Visa.

We then checked into the hotel and rested for a bit, followed by a Wal-Mart run. Then dinner, and sleep.

In the morning we walked to the IHOP for breakfast. Remind me to never eat funnel cakes (even ones slathered with strawberries and whipped cream) again. While funnel cakes are wonderful at food booths at fairs, they sink to the bottom of your stomach like little grease covered lead balls for breakfast (shudder).

Then we moved what few things we had into Bill's dorm room. He has the same room with the same roommate in the same dorm this year as last year.

About noon, Dan and Steven came in the Jeep with most of Bill's stuff. We helped Bill put all of his stuff away, then went to lunch at that great Italian restaurant we all love, and did a quick Target run for a couple more things for the room.

Then we three came home.

I was (and am)exhausted. My two days off were spent being pretty busy. Dan is exhausted from eight hours of driving on Saturday. We are no spring chickens anymore.

Anyway, I think this week will be bad. I did manage to make it into work last night, but was really out of it. I felt as if it were my eighth work day in a row. I am sure at the end of the week, I will feel as if I have worked twelve days in a row. And, of course, I will miss my older son!

It is autumn weather now - cold and gloomy and steadily raining. So the weather is making me want to crawl into bed and not get out. That is not helping with the tiredness issue!

Bill's classes start today. Steven's first day of high school is coming fast - the day after Labor Day. His high school soccer season will be starting on Wednesday...

Tags: back to college

busy week to be

This is going to be a very busy week...

 

Besides working, as always, Steven will be registering for high school on Thursday. Bill will be going back to university down in Indiana on Friday.

We are frantically trying to get ready to move him back down there...

 

Tags: life is busy

is life getting better?

I am still at work, but Dan called to tell me that the power is back on! YAY!!!!!!!

When I get home, I intend on taking the longest and hottest shower in the history of the world!

Tags: the blessings of hot showers and working electricity

yet another power outage

OK, I am on a computer at work (and its busy so I am snatching a few seconds) to tell everyone that we are having issues at home with the electrical power, and I do not know how much I will be able to be around until the power is back on.

The kids and I heard an explosion off in the distance yesterday morning, and the power died a second or so later. We think a transformer blew up.

The whole neighborhood is out again.

We have called Detroit Edison a bunch of times, and they are not even giving estimates on how long the repair will take.

Since we have a well, that means we have no running water. No showers or baths. No washing anything - people, pets, or things. No flushing the toilets.

Since our little portable generator died in the middle of the night last night, we cannot even run a lamp and the fridge.

So, obviously, no computer at home until we get power back...

The record for an outage at our house is 4+ days...

If it is out that long, you might not hear much from me until next weekend, when I will be in Indiana with my son and his laptop...

Tags: Detroit Edison sucks, bad electrical infrastructure, life's major annoyances

Peter Watts's Blindsight (spoilers)

I guess I will start with the jacket blurb, as for once it actually describes what is in the book pretty well:

Quote:

Two months since the stars fell... Two months since the sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heaves as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you want to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire", recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist - an informational topologist with half his mind gone - as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

This was a sort of frustrating read for me.

There was so much that was just so well done in it.  And parts that just aggravated and vexed me.

Anyway, Watts (who started out as a biologist) has really done his research for this book - especially with neuroscience and evolution. I really enjoyed the exploration he makes of sentience vs. consciousness. And when the crew reaches the alien vessel, the Rorschach, the strong electromagnetic fields do very weird things to the brains of the crew members, and the resulting hallucinations are fascinating. And the aliens are alien - two races (them and us) that probably cannot ever really understand each other.

Time spent on the alien ship is so weird and dangerous, it is more like reading about a haunted house in a horror book than reading about a space ship in a science fiction novel. He did that very well!

And the Darwinian tone of the book, while I can see some people having trouble with it, did work in he context of the book.

What I had trouble with was  (to see the spoilers run your cursor over them)

[spoiler] the vampires. I can see why, given the strong Darwinian theme, that he wanted to use a commander of a different (and stronger and predatory) species than the crew.

But the whole thing with vampires being a separate hominid race, somehow resurrected from prehistory- that just didn't do it for me. 700,000 year old hominid fossils are not that common to begin with. As a carnivore, a vampire fossil would be even more rare than that of the regular hominids. And with the same basic body type, how would you even know it was a vampire rather than a regular hominid of that region's population? Or just a human with unusual teeth? And that the vampires are a result of a genetic mutation that turns them into predators that can only eat hominid protein, that also makes them get seizures from right angles (like crosses)? Um. Yeah. Right.[/spoiler]

And the ending was just meh.

[spoiler]

I would have been perfectly able to accept it if the aliens had come to Earth and taken over, killing off all humans. It would have been depressing, but would have gone right along with the contents of the book The book did have a very strong Darwinian theme, and it was made clear that the aliens were probably a lot more advanced and fit than we are in a lot of ways. BUT to make it so that the vampires, the weakest part of the book for me already, are the ones who take over and kill off the humans was just...wrong.
Major major major suckage in what was otherwise a pretty good book![/spoiler]

Tags: Peter Watts, Blindsight

worst five reads of the last five years

What are the five worst books you have read in the past five years? Note: they do not have to be published in the past five years, you only have had read them in that time frame. And please give a brief reason of why you did not like them.

My List (no particular order):
Terry Goodkind's Pillars of Creation:
All of the books in the SOT series was pretty bad, but this one took the cake. I am someone cursed with not giving up on a series once I have started it, but this book was so bad I dropped the series like a steaming hot squishy dog turd that somehow made it into my hand. From an evil character blowing up a poor living chicken like a balloon to kill it for kicks (what is it with Goodkind and fowl anyway?) to the nobility of goats, and the adventures of a sociopathic rapist/murderer, I just could not take it anymore.

Laurell K. Hamilton's Danse Macabre:
Another series killer, though at least (unlike Goodkind) the first several books of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series were fun little supernatural mysteries. Literally no plot, though there were a couple of strands of something that might have become a plot if the author had bothered to develop them. Mostly very boring and badly written sex scenes, very boring and badly written scenes of vampire politics (all revolving around whose servants could enter into sexual service to Anita Blake next), and endless emo angsting about sex. Yuck. This is what happens when writers go bad. And the how the hell can sex be so boring????

Christopher Paolini's Eragon:
Not an original thought in a rather lengthy book. I wonder if George Lucas can sue for a plot that so closely follows Star Wars Episode Four?

Nights With Sasquatch
I do not think I could say anymore about this awful little book - the title says it all.

Rita Mae Brown's Cat's Eyewitness:
I have recently given up on this long lasting mystery series. While the last two books, Sour Puss and Puss 'n Cahoots were truly craptactular, in restrospect, this is the book where the author jumped the shark on her Mrs. Murphy Mysteries. She took long developed characters and abruptly changed their personalities, and even, in one case, sexual orientation. But the worst thing was turning all of the characters into mouthpieces for her political and social views. Sorry, I do not need to hear the author's political beliefs through the mouths of cats. God, I hate preachy writers. If you want to wax on endlessly about your views on politics and society, please write an editorial for your local paper - do not pervert a long standing best selling mystery series with that crap.


So which books have completely turned you off?

Tags: craptactular books, bad books, Terry Goodkind, Sword of Truth, Pillars of Creation, Laurell K. Hamilton, Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, Danse Macabre, Christopher Paolini, Eragon, Nights with Sasquatch, Rita Mae Brown, Cat's Eyewitness, Sour Puss, Puss 'n Cahoots, Mrs. Murphy Mysteries

messy week

So on Sunday they "upgraded" the phone system at work. They mixed up all of the extensions, and the old extension number for the housekeeping supervisor now rings into our IV room. God only knows where the Old IV room extension rings. And the old pharmacy portable phone extension number now rings into elevator #2 in the old building. Joy.

On Monday night the omnicell machines were not working correctly - but it turned out to be because of the new phone lines, not because of the machines themselves.

On Tuesday near record highs and high humidity hit the area. There are usually only a few days of the year when everyone uses their air conditioners in this part of the country. When they do, the electrical grid cannot handle the grossly increased demand. So we started getting blackouts in Ann Arbor. When the lights went out at work, the emergency generators kicked in (lovely Big Bertha! How we adore you when the power goes out! You give us lights! You give us working medical equipment!) but some of the high tech stuff got sort of confused for awhile.

Tonight nothing weird happened with the phones or machinery, though roving blackouts reportedly continued hitting various Ann Arbor neighborhoods during the day. But one of the pharmacists I work with has a daughter doing a summer internship in the Twin Cities, and crosses that freeway bridge that collapsed tonight on a daily basis - right about the time of the catastrophic structural failure. And the lady could not reach her daughter via cell phone. The cell phone system must have gotten overloaded and crashed, because she could not even reach her daughter's voice mail. Thankfully, the daughter did eventually call to let her mother know that she was fine. She had stayed late at work, so was not on the bridge when it went down - though if she had left work at her normal time she would have probably been in the tragedy.

What a horrible thing - those poor people on the bridge. It must have been the most terrifying moment of their lives. So many hurt, so many dead - and so many cars down in the water, which still might contain bodies.

We crossed the Mississippi on that bridge a few years ago, when we drove out to Dassel for Dan's nephew's high school graduation party. Dan said the kids were all freaked out all night over the bridge collapse, with the freak out compounded by having once been on the bridge in question, and during rush hour in bumper to bumper traffic at that.

God, please open your arms and welcome the dead into your presence. Please heal the injured. Let the lost be found, alive and well. Please bring emotional healing and well being to the rescue workers, volunteers, and medical personnel who are fighting to rescue/save those precious lives and who, in coming days, will bring the remains of  the deceased back to their families so their loved ones can say goodbye and have closure. Thank you for giving us so many brave and good people who rush in to help others in the face of great personal danger.

Tags: omnicell, new phone system, power outages, blackouts, record heat, Twin Cities bridge collapse