Awesome things!

"Zero at the Bone" has been nominated for the yearly DABWAHA tournament. That stands for Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors. It's a March Madness style book competition, 64 books start and at the end one is standing. It's run by two of the biggest book blogs out there, Dear Author and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. There are actual prizes to be won plus bragging rights and a metric shit-ton of publicity for me if I get far in the competition.

Now, this is kind of a big deal, since this is not a GLBT contest. It's a contest in all genres including mainstream romance. The lovely sarahtales has a book in the tournament, too. Only six GLBT titles made the cut and Zero is one of them.

I don't normally do this, in fact I swore I never would, but it'd be totally awesome if anybody wanted to go vote for me. I feel kinda bad because the book Zero is pitted against in the first round, "Tigers and Devils" by Sean Kennedy, is also a totally awesome book and I wish we could both go forward if either of us do. So far (a mere ten minutes into voting) Zero is winning. But you never know.

So go here to vote. Click "vote here" to take you to Set 4 of Round 1, where Zero is seeded. It'd be cool to vote in all the matches, just to make things kinda fairish.

Voting expires at noon tomorrow. It just opened up at noon today. So go vote! And if you'd rather vote for Tigers and Devils, please do. Sean totally deserves it and his book rules. You should all read it.

Tags: books: zero at the bone

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Tags: au/au, camillar, lithium

Owowowowow. I went to to doctor this morning and the nurse did a blood draw and I don't know what she did, she hit something deep in my elbow but it hurt like hell and it still hurts. Owowowow.

So as I think I've mentioned I've had a changeup in my movie-preview freelance job which basically requires me to watch as many movies as possible that are out on DVD. I've been trying to do at least one every two nights. So you might be getting more movie reviews from me than usual these days. After loving both "Avatar" and "Sherlock Holmes" and really liking both "Brothers Bloom" and "Sunshine Cleaning" I suppose I was due for some movies that didn't thrill me so much.

( The Blind Side -- 2.5/5 )

( Ninja Assassin - 1/5 )

I have "Stardust" and "The Pursuit of Happyness" coming from Netflix tonight. Onwards and upwards. Looking forward to both of those, actually, as have heard good things.

Tags: movies: reviews, movies: thumbs down, movies: thumbs meh

So there's this website called eShakti and they make some of the most gorgeous clothes I've ever seen, in sizes 0-26W. These clothes are praised to the skies by the ladies over on fatshionista because they're good quality and kinda customized (you tell the site your height and bra size as well as indicating what overall size you want and they fit the dress). And they are all sooooo my style, like whoa. I've decided I will buy myself a dress from there to wear at my college reunion. The dresses aren't super expensive, in the $50-80 range, but it's more than I usually spend (eBay and thrift clothes buyer that I am). And I'm having trouble deciding which one to buy. Not that I'm going to buy it now, I"ll buy it closer to the event when I know what size I am then. And hey, maybe one of them will be on sale by then!

Help me decide, Oracle of El Jay!

( Pretty pretty dresses beneath the cut )

Tags: lifestyle: clothes

OMG MY AWESOME THING LET ME SHOW YOU IT.



Yes. It is a Gashlycrumb Tinies lunchbox. I lurves it.

I have FOUND the inbox. It's under the profile tab at the top of the page (when you are on your home page or when you are posting - i don't think it's available when you are looking at entries). If you don't have the bar of tabs at the top of your page, click on HOME and you will go to a page that has the tabs... Home, Profile, Journal, Friends, .... etc. Scroll over Profile and it's the first option on the left.

Also, i made an icon from this pic, which i thought was cool and had never seen before. It's under my userpics if anyone wants to steal it. :)

Tags: s!stuff
Current Mood: tired

Happy St. Patrick's Day. Honestly, I didn't remember until I got to work, so no green on me. I am being daring and optimistic today...I'm wearing sandals. I was a little chilly this morning but it'll be 60 by afternoon.

I started the day rather dubiously. I sat down on the end of my bed to rebuckle said sandals, but I sat down a little toooo close to the edge, the mattress gave way beneath me and kind of tipped me ass over teakettle over onto the hopechest at the end of my bed. Managed to recover my composure before I hit the floor, though. Go me.

Awesome link of the morning, courtesy of chromodynamics: Periodic Table of Science Fiction.

Last night I was talking to April (lifelong BFF) and mentioned I'd be going to my 15 year college reunion this May. She was all "OH MY GOD" and woe betide about the passage of time, and we commiserated that we'll both be 37 soon, her in April and myself in May. I said "I think soon we might legitimately be called 'pushing forty.'"

Sez she: "Oh, no. I am not going to be pushing forty until I'm pushing from the other side."

BWA HA HA HA HA HA. That April. What a riot. I'm really hoping she can come visit again this summer. That would be AWESOME.

Rachel and I are going to see Pearl Jam in May and relive the early 90s. Tix go on sale Friday morning.

Oh, recipes. Both recipes I made on Sunday were successes. I wouldn't say either one was a MONSTER SMASH HIT but both were tasty and I'd make them again. Here we go.

( Ham & Chickpea Stew, Peanut Coleslaw )

Tags: daily life: weather, events: holidays, lifestyle: recipes, personal: home friends

We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.

We've updated the global navigation menu:

Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:

• Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
• You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
• Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
• Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
• Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
• Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.

LiveJournal Mobile update:

We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.

Other important changes:

• You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
• We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
• We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
• You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
• You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
• We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.

We've got your fix:

• UPDATE: Rolling several updates into one listing here -- 1) Scrapbook should be back and working again. 2) The problem with the Update Journal page in IE6 and IE7 should be fixed now. 3) The problem with the userpic add-on package pricing has been fixed and refunds issued to anyone who was overcharged while the erroneous prices were in place.
• Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
• Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
• We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
• We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.

Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week!

Tags: custom mood themes, global navigation, mobile app, tags, vgifts

I didn't blog yesterday. Woe betide. It was a pretty normal day. Went to work, came home, watched "The Blind Side" for my freelance work, posted a couple of things on eBay, watched Drag Race, wrote for awhile, went to bed. The end.

Remember how I was talking about the organ in the big Catholic church I saw on Sunday? I found fotoz.

 
 

That is one impressive-looking organ (and someone's already made the "that's what SHE said" joke, so don't feel obligated, ha). It was installed in 2006 after the cathedral finally decided to replace their old one, which had been consistently screwed up since a botched refurbishment in the 1970s.

I've become a bit fascinated with the whole process of building organs like this. I looked up the website of the organ maker, Paul Fritts & Co of Tacoma, WA. They've been in business since 1979 and this was only the 25th organ they'd ever built. The one before this went in at Notre Dame (the university, not the Paris cathedral, ha ha). I took a glance through the photos of previous organs and this one is by FAR the biggest and fanciest one they've ever built, although some of the other ones are gorgeous too. By their list of organs built, they built about one a year, sometimes one every two to three years (I'm assuming they do some smaller work plus repair and refurbishment that they don't list). I can't imagine how long this one took to build. And how much they COST. I found a figure online that says the average church pipe organ costs $700,000. Well, this one at Saint Joseph's is definitely well above average. I saw a picture of an organ (not made by this company) that cost $500,000 and it was like, one tenth the size of Saint Joseph's. This organ must have cost them several million dollar at least.

Incidentally, someone asked what the cathedral looks like. It's not a HUGE cathedral but pretty.



They have a cool collection of photos on their website. Some are from the workshop while the organ was being built. Then there are some of the organ being delivered in a jillion pieces. It's kind of adorable, it looks like they had the whole congregation come and carry pieces inside. They had to lay them all around on tops of the pews and there are a couple of photos taken from the choir loft looking down at the sanctuary with all the pieces of the organ laid out.



(If you're interested, here is the page about the cathedral's new organ)

I'm just wondering how they got all that stuff up to the choir loft. Did they have to hire in a crane or something? A block and tackle? Obviously it fit into the building but there's no way all those pieces could fit up the stairs into the choir loft. And how long did it take to assemble? Yikes. It's quite an undertaking. Then it has to be tuned and be all perfect...musical instruments aren't slapdash pieces of construction, especially ones this complicated.

That got me thinking about the people who play these instruments. Piano and organ are pretty much the only soloist instruments were the musician does not play their own instrument, they play the one belonging to the venue. And even then, a concert pianist surely OWNS a piano, they just don't take it with them to perform. An organist? Can't own a pipe organ like this. A little one, maybe. But how do you practice? Do you get in good with the local church that has a big enough organ for your purposes? These are the things I wonder about.

April's husband is an organist. I ought to ask him these things.

Tags: music: concerts

Title: WHAT IF? Epilogue (part 2)
Rating: NC-17
Genre: au
Summary: Ennis received the red inked postcard, but it isn’t true.
Disclaimer: I borrowed these characters and I make no money from this.
Feedback: Yes, be honest- just be nice about it.

( Read more... )

Tags: au, bbm, nosunlight, what if?