My Defense for Blog Fail...and some Book Reviews

It has been a week and a half since I last blogged. There were extenuating circumstances. Really. My darling, dear 3-yr-old son placed a magnet on my laptop! Needless to say, the hard drive was completely wiped/scrambled/fried. Like an egg. Or your brain on drugs.

I hired a 'geek' to attempt to retrieve anything from the hard drive. But the geek failed. Geek Fail, nothing worse than being defeated by a 3-yr-old wielding a magnet. So, precious digital photos, goodbye. Luckily I had much of my stuff backed up. But still. It took a while to get my laptop back, get a new hard drive installed, get all of my programs and drivers and etc. etc. back. 

Then, of course, we celebrated my favorite pagan holiday of the year. Being the pagan I am, I was so busy making candy apples, carving pumpkins, and throwing together Noah's costume, that the blog was neglected once again.

King Noah of the Jack-o-Lanterns

My kid has a GUN! Good Lord. What kind of politically-correct liberal am I?!

Finally, the Co-op has been calling and requesting my assistance. Oh boy. We had a 3 and a half hour board meeting on Tuesday night! Lots of work remains to be done, typing up the minutes.

And then there's our little secret. Michael is teaching 6 classes this semester...driving to 3 different campus's... and he is doing online tutoring...and tutoring on campus. Sheeeesh. So to help in some small way, I have offered my skills to Michael for his online tutoring. For 3 hours on Wed nights, I rap the knuckles of college freshmen, and help them get in line and clean up their grammar and punctuation. College freshmen are pretty much just like my high school seniors. Oh my goodness, why oh why do people have so much trouble getting their subjects and verbs to agree!?

I have such high hopes for this blog. I would love more folks to follow and interact with the blog, leave comments, join the discussion. I can't wait to get back and do the Meatless Monday posts. In fact, I had pictures and a recipe for a gorgeous/delicious quiche...and I was all set to post them...but then the Magnet Wielding 3-yr-old came along, and those pics are history. Ok, I will wipe away my tears and move forward.
Stay tuned!

One last thing. I finished 2 books.
Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood" is awesome and prophetic. And I don't give a darn what the New York Times Review of Books says... But then, I'm biased. I'm a maniac fangirl when it comes to Atwood. "The Year of the Flood" takes place in a consumer-based/corporate-run society. The main characters are on the fringes of this society gone awry. The tale is told from the perspectives of 2 women in the God's Gardeners cult. Religion. Science. Non-consumerism. Hippies. Who could ask for more? Not me, I tell you, not me!
Also, I read Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." Jackson's wrote "The Haunting of Hill House," horror/spooky fans.

I must say, Castle was disturbing...but the narrator, Merricat, was the quirkiest character I've met in a long while. If you are agorophobic, and you handle most of your social interactions through your computer, you may find yourself relating to this strange girl. It was a perfectly creepy read for Halloween.