Holy cats, has it ever been bad. The last two days the computer system has crashed for nearly all of day shift. So, working afternoons, we are burdened with two shifts' worth of work with our skeleton staffing.
I am exhausted, my entire body aches, and I think my blood pressure is out of control from the stress (I keep getting dizzy). Throw in a bad cold, and I will be very glad when this week is over!
Long weekend! My Bilbo! Only two more nights to get through!
Most of the day yesterday I was not able to keep anything down other than water. So in the middle of the afternoon, hoping to feel better before heading to the Tigers game, I took a long nap. Normally I would watch the Michigan Wolverines play football, since I did have season tickets there when I was a student, but I figured they had no chance against Joe Pa and Penn State, so just headed to bed (feeling truly rotten and all).
I was really surprised when Steven and Dan got home and woke me up with the news that Michigan was winning!
We headed to Comerica, and got there just after the game started, as there was some bad traffic heading to Detroit.
We followed Detroit Red Wings defenseman Chris Chelios into the ballpark. It was cool seeing him - and Detroiters, cool and classy as we are - just enjoyed seeing him, and no one bothered him or asked for autographs or any such nonsense. Let him enjoy the beautiful night at the ball game, too! (If it was not Chris Chelios, it was his identical twin!)
Perfect fall evening! More like football weather than baseball weather - or bonfire/campfire weather, but I surely will not complain. Crisp and cool and clear as a bell. Great for walking around Detroit and hanging out at Comerica! The moon was breathtaking in its beauty over downtown Detroit.
The Tigers lost the game, which made me sort of sad, since it might be Kenny Roger's last home start as a Tiger (his contract is up, and with his age and health problems, who knows whether or not the Tigers will resign him). But Curtis Granderson was wonderful, and Magglio Ordonez was a baseball god - five times at bat with four hits and a fielder's choice.
And it was just fun to go to the game, and cheer for our beloved team. What team COULD have gone to the playoffs this year with so many key injuries?
With my stomach problems, we did not go out to dinner, but I was able to keep some cotton candy (blandest food known to humanity) and half of a giant pretzel and a bit of lemon aid (first vendor with non-beer beverage to go through our section) down, so all of the sleep must have helped.
Today I made it into work, though it was a trial. made it all the way through, too!
Tonight I orderedconcert tickets for dates with Dan. It is sort of hard, as I have to try to make sure nothing interferes with soccer, wrestling, or school events/breaks. Also avoiding midweek concerts so I will not be tempted to use up my vacation time attending them. So that leaves only Friday and Saturday nights that do not interfere with soccer, wrestling, and school stuff.
So here we go:
October
Dianne Reeves (jazz diva with a glorious voice)
http://www.ums.org/s_current_season/artist.asp?pageid=404
March
Detroit Symphony Orchestra et all performing Bach's St. Mathew's Passion
http://www.ums.org/s_current_season/artist.asp?pageid=436
April
Chick Corea, Bobby McFerrin & Jack DeJohnette
http://www.ums.org/s_current_season/artist.asp?pageid=444
May
Detroit Symphony Orchestra performing Mahler's Ninth Symphony
http://www.detroitsymphony.com/main.taf?erube_fh=dso&dso.submit.getEvent=1&dso.eventId=1899
June
The Mambo Kings
http://www.detroitsymphony.com/main.taf?erube_fh=dso&dso.submit.getEvent=1&dso.eventId=1984
As always, it was difficult just settling on a few! There are so many great musicians coming through Ann Arbor and Detroit, but trying to limit things by only Friday and Saturday nights, as well as nothing during the sports seasons and school events, does help narrow things down quite a bit!
This morning was certainly NOT festive, as I threw up my breakfast before I even finished eating it. Yuck. Thank God Dan and Steven were not home to fuss over me. My stomach feels better now, so I am going to try to go upstairs and eat a very light lunch, and take my medicine.
And then I am going to take a nap. My period started yesterday, and I am very tired and achy and crampy. So I will go to sleep with a good comfort book.
Tonight we will head to Detroit for a good dinner (which will hopefully stay down) and a Tigers game. Kenny Rogers will be the starting pitcher! YAY!!! WOO HOO!!!
Read a book between naps and fits of housekeeping yesterday. It is called Hounding the Moon and is a fantasy debut novel by P. R. Frost. Best selling fantasy novelist and young widow Tess Noncoire has a second secret identity as a warrior for an order that specializes in protecting the Earth from demons. She is life bonded to a sarcastic and farty runty little imp named Scrap. It was more than over the top occasionally, but it was still good enough that I will be glad to read future work from this new author. I especially like how she managed to weave in Native American legends into the story.
Last night at work was bad. The work itself was not bad, even though they took down the computer system for a couple of hours. It was bad because this coworker who has anger management issues cornered me yet again to scream at me for a long time. Always makes me sick when she does that, and she does that at least every few months, and sometimes a lot more often than that. And whenever she does it, it is always because of something that has nothing whatsoever to do with me and that I have no control over. It is always something (usually no more than annoying, certainly nothing to fuel such rage) that someone else did or said that she feels the need to vent about. But her venting is usually pretty close to insane ranting. And she always picks a time when I am isolated away from witnesses - and she always places herself between me and the door so I cannot get away without physically moving her. And she will not let me out, no matter what I say, until her ravings are over. I honestly wish I could call the police (yes - it can be that bad) - or other coworkers to help me. But it is usually not near a telephone, either. And how can I make a formal complaint when she is so careful to do this when no one else is around? No witnesses, no case.
God help me, this has gone on for years now. And Dan wonders why I have high blood pressure and am sick all of the time from stress. If it is not male coworkers stealing clothing from my locker in the women's room and taking it home for weeks, it is other people cramming their emotional problems and unwarranted rage down my throat in a loud and ugly way.
God help me.
I have been reading a lot of short novels this week. A nice break from ten volumes of a thousand pages each that fantasy works have started to become in this day and age!
The Mournful Teddy by John J. Lamb was a great deal of fun! A medically retired San Francisco homicide detective and his wife have moved to rural Virginia, where she grew up. There she has started to design and make artisan teddy bears. He takes a keen interest in the soft little things ,and who can blame him, after the horrible things he has seen in his career as police officer in a major urban area? The mystery in the book revolves around crooked cops, a murder, and the theft of one of the most valuable teddy bears in the world. If this is one of a series, I would be very happy to read the other books.
On What Grounds by Cleo Coyle is the first book in Coffeehouse Mysteries series. It was set in an historic coffee house in my favorite area of New York City, Greenwich Village. Clare Cosi is the former and future manager of Village Blend. It was run to the ground in the meantime, and the owner is bringing her back in an effort to rescue the business. Unfortunately, it means that she must share the duplex apartment that comes with the job with her ex-husband, son of the owner...and even more unfortunately, first thing in the morning, she finds the assistant manager, a hard working girl named Anabelle, horribly hurt at the foot of the stairs. Did this talented dancer slip and fall - or was she pushed? Promising start to a mystery series, and while I have never developed a taste for coffee, I do love the Greenwich Village setting.
A Secret Rage by Charlaine Harris was a very difficult book to read. It was well written - I have yet to run into a bad novel or story written by Harris - but the content was difficult. It tells the story of a woman who decides to move home to small town Tennessee and go back to school, after a modeling career in New York City. But the peace of the small town is being interrupted by a brutal serial rapist. Very likable women are being attacked through no fault of their own. Some of the victims decide to team up to figure out who the criminal might be. Searing descriptions of rape and other violence. I believe that this is a stand alone novel, and not part of any series.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury just failed to grip me, and I have been trying to read it for over a week before finally finishing it this morning. The last time I fell asleep so many times while reading a book was for Steven Erikson's Midnight Tides, and since I thought that book was not very good, that is certainly not a good sign. I usually love Bradbury, so maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for this particular book. Anyway, a carnival from hell comes to small town Illinois in a story set many decades ago in a much more innocent time. Two boys become involved, and are hunted down by the freaks and demons...
I am kind of down. Since having even that little bit of contact with Mr. Grinch, I have been sick, as usual when I have any sort of contact with that creep. So I have been having stress diarrhea and have been throwing up. Yuck. This is a bad time of year for allergies, too, so for the last week or so, my head has been feeling as if it has been stuffed with cotton or perhaps old newspapers.
And the Detroit Tigers probably blew any hope they had of making the playoffs in the last two nights against the Cleveland Indians. And the losses coming from our two greatly talented and beloved young pitchers, Joel Zumaya and Justin Verlander, it hurts even more. (Yes, I know that Zumaya technically did not get the loss in Monday's game - but he blew a big lead in the late innings, and set up things for the loss to occur).
I knew that it would take a miracle for the Tigers to get to the playoffs this year, given how the team has been decimated by injuries - but it is still depressing. Man, they came so close!
I am still looking forward to going to the game on Saturday at Comerica, and plan to cheer my head off for my team.
At least work has been quiet this week. Less stress is always good! Even managed to finish up another book on my breaks and lunches:
Holy Guacamole by Nancy Fairbanks is the sixth book in her Culinary Mysteries series. In the previous books in this series, Carolyn Blue and her professor husband Jason Blue, have traveled to exotic locations in the US and Europe - he on business, her to get ideas for her food/travel column. In this book they stay home in El Paso - a large city on the border with Mexico. A music teacher at the university who has just gotten done directing a very controversial opera with the local opera guild dies after the post-production party. Has he died from food poisoning or has he been murdered? Or was the food poisoning murder? What are his connections with the Mexican drug lord and with the white slavers? The more Carolyn tries to get to the bottom of the death, the more complications and confusion arises.
Last night I stayed up really late, and thought I had gotten caught up. Then this morning I realized that I had lent something I had read to a coworker, so should type that one up, too, even though it sucked. Oh well. I would have probably had trouble getting to sleep last night anyway, after the Tigers relief pitchers blew a key game to Cleveland...
Puss 'n Cahoots by Rita Mae Brown is one of her Mrs. Murphy Mysteries. The previous two (maybe even three) books in this old favorite series have been really bad. I was getting ready to give up on this series, and this is the book that pushed me over the edge.
Why?
I think that the author's heart just isn't in it anymore. She has changed the personalities of the characters. The main character is a woman who has always prided herself on her independence. Suddenly she quits her job over something ridiculously stupid (she cannot take her pets to work with her anymore - I mean, give me a break - how many people would be allowed to take their pets to work with them in the first place?). So she quit her job for sheer stupidity, and immediately hooks up with her ex husband, whom she broke up with because he was cheating on her with a friend. And of course, now that she needs to be supported, she goes around telling everyone that the ex was male and did what came naturally to men (huh?????) and that she had been immature to react like that to his adultery. Let me puke now.
But it gets even worse. The friend the ex cheated with is a middle aged woman and widow, and is something of a town bicycle. All of the men got a ride. And then she suddenly realizes that she is a lesbian. Give me a freakin' break. She had no clue for forty years of life that she was attracted to other women? Not even as a horny teenager? This is not a highly religious woman who stayed in the closet so deeply that not even she had a clue. This is the most sexually active and adventurous character in the series. Spare me.
And the books themselves became stale. Rather than having cool little mysteries in a charming little small town in Virginia, they became...just plain bad. They did not build on each other anymore. In one book, suddenly everyone in town had season tickets to the local university's women's basketball team and everyone was a basketball fanatic. This was made to look as if it has been the case all along - but no one had ever cared in the slightest about basketball (women's or men's) previously. And do not even get me started on every character in the book suddenly plowing up prime farm land on their horse farms to plant wine grapes.
Since the setting was a small town in Virginia, within the first few books you knew that all of the crime victims and criminals were all from the new characters...so why bother getting attached to any of them?
And the preaching. The last few books have been filled with the author preaching about politics and current affairs and controversies.
God, I hate preachy writers.
So what made this particular book so bad that I am giving up on the series, even though the last few have been bad?
It was the honeymoon for the main character and the husband she has just remarried.
They bring along the pets.
They seem more like brother and sister than newlyweds. Why did these two even get married again, other than the woman needing to be supported after her own stupidity about her former job?
They go to a big horse show in Kentucky, and the book is filled with a bunch of horse trainers who have so little development as characters that you have to go back to the character list to even attempt to keep them straight.
These are supposed to be animal lovers, yet they take their two cats and dog to another state (on their honeymoon!!!) and then let them roam freely around the horse show grounds, with all sorts of strangers and high strung horses milling around.
There is no attempt to solve the mystery. At all.
Tons of more preaching from the author, on everything from drug usage in sports to illegal immigration.
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
Just plain bad book - and the third (or fourth, I might have blocked some badness there) in a row in this series. Time to move on...
Both of these books are part of the Culinary Mysteries by Nancy Fairbanks.
In the three earlier books in the series we meet Carolyn Blue - the wife of a university chemistry professor. Jason Blue likes having a traditional wife, and Carolyn has been one for all of these years as the children have been growing up. Now that they are both college aged, she feels free to become a little less traditional. While she is an accomplished cook, she would rather cook than eat. So with her love of both food and history, a new career involving a regular syndicated newspaper column about food and travel seems like a natural choice.
Now then, Carolyn and Jason Blue are both WASPs to the most stereotyped degree you can imagine. He is a stuffed shirt, a very conservative snob and self centered workaholic. She is prissy and sheltered and opinionated. The author likes to have fun with the stereotypes and it is very funny to me to see Carolyn's eyes being opened up to a bigger world with more diverse people than she runs into at meetings for college faculty wives.
The three previous books took place in New Orleans, New York City, and France. Filled with not only mysteries, but with delightful descriptions of food, these books always make me hungry. Normandy was especially tempting, with its apple liquor and apple pastries...
Chocolate Quake is the fourth book in the series. Jason has a conference in San Francisco, so Carolyn tags along to visit some good restaurants, and get material for her column. The last thing she expects is to find her mother-in-law in jail for murder. Jason just sort of dumps the problem on her while he is busy at the conference. With the help of a gay former professional football player turned private detective, Carolyn tries to find the real murderer, to get her awful witch of a MIL out of jail. She also manages to eat some pretty fine sounding meals. Amusing like the first three novels, but Jason was sort of irritating and self centered...
The Perils of Paella is the fifth book in the series. Jason has yet another conference in Spain, so Carolyn travels to Barcelona to meet with an old friend while Jason is giving his paper in another Spanish city. The last thingshe is expecting is to find the corpse of a murder victim in the museum where her friend works. Throw in a missing runaway teen, a couple of snooty nobles, and a group of weird artists, and you have the recipe for a fun mystery in an exotic setting.
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