[  Mood: Cool ]
[ Currently: Breasfeeding my son ]
Dharma and I have come to blows on this site more than once about the whole US/Canada thing. In that sick, we still love each other sibling kind of way.

A reoccuring theme is that Dharma thinks it’s ridiculous that I pay high income taxes. And like many Canadians, I simply grin and point to universal health care. Not having to figure out if I could afford an epidural during delivery was very nice.

So imagine my surprise when Todd Maffin linked to this page. US personal income tax is 37.7%. Canada’s is 35%.

Wow. That argument will be interesting next time it pops up.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Breasfeeding my son ]
A.K.A. Good Gouhls Do – A Quick Review – Going back to the birthing room pt. 2

Elizabeth Frasier’s big plan at the end of book 1, Good Ghouls Guide to Getting Even, has failed miserably. Oh sure, the football player who turned her is dead, but he wasn’t her sire and this means that she is still a vampire. So now she has got to figure out who her sire is, try and find the daywalking formula so the other vamps don’t kill her, keep up her GPA and deal with a love triangle.

This second book, while fun, lacks the freshness of the first installment. Still worth reading. Grade 7 and up.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
A.K.A. Undead and Unemployed – A Quick Review – Going back to the birthing room

Betsy Taylor has problems.

1. She`s dead.
2. She`s risen as a vampire
3. She is apparently the proficised vampire queen.
4. No one told her before she slept with Eric the Vampire that doing so would make him her consort for the next 1000 years.
5. Her house has termites.
6. Some vampires still don`t want her as their queen.
7. A group of vampire hunters is targetting her people.
8. Her stepmother is pregnant.
9. Not all the vampires are happy she`s the queen.
10.The new season of shoes are out and she has no job and no money.

This book is basically supernatural chicklit. It has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. Betsy is a vain, self-centered heroine who just wants to be left alone. Instead she has been thrust into greatness and is stumbling along, trying to find her way.

A fun read. Not going to change your life, but fun.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Breastfeeding my son. ]
A.K.A. Visions of Sugar Plums – A Not So Quick Review

Janet Evanovich has made herself richer than most of us by authoring the Stephanie Plum series. In it Stephanie is a mildly competant bounty hunter who tracks down the lower level FTAs for her cousin Vinnie’s bail bond service. Usually this involves some ridiculous, over the top capture scenes, like when one of the FTAs stripped naked and covered himself in vegetable oil to make it difficult to capture him.

These books are famous for several things: the number in the title (having done Ms. Grafton one better, she can keep writing these forever!!!); Stephanie’s ongoing love triangle with Morelli, the cop with commitment problems and Ranger, the bounty hunter who exudes sex; Stepanie’s car being destroyed (usually by an explosion); and the colourful cast of secondary characters, most notibly Stephanie’s Grandma Mazur.

This novella (the publisher is trying to pass it off as a novel – but I know a novella when I see it!) has Stephanie being startled by a man who suddenly appears in her kitchen. This man is tall, blonde and good looking. We should all be so lucky! His name is Diesel and he wants to help her find her new FTA Sandy Claws.

Where your mind went is where Evanovich wanted it to go. This story takes place at Christmas. There are elves, toyshops, cookies. There is even a scene where the elves use cookies to assault Stephanie in the toy factory. And you thought that stuff only happened in your dreams.

This story also differs from other Stephanie Plum novels in that there is a strong supernatural element to the story. This book, unlike the ones with numbers, is an urban fantasy. But this genre is not Evanovich’s strength. Rather, the suspension of disbelief required is a little much. The novella didn’t work for me. Evanovich should stick with her Keystone Cop inspired romance/mysteries.

Give this one a pass. Unless you are a huge, obsessive fan.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Eating Breakfast ]
A.K.A. A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton – A Quick Review.

My desire to reread this book has nothing to do with the clever reference from Reaper this past week. Rather, I have felt the need to go back and reread all of the mystery series that I love.

A is for Alibi is the first of the series that has come to be known as the Alphabet Mysteries. It finds heroine, Kinsey Millhone investigating the murder of a prominent divorce lawyer, whose been dead 8 years. Her client? The wife of the lawyer who was convicted for his murder and has just been released having served her time.

Kinsey is another one of those hardboiled female detectives that came out in the 1980s. Unlike V.I., she has not been bought by Hollywood and made into a bad movie, because Sue Grafton was a screenwriter and knows exactly what that big bad town does to books it buys. Grafton has stated that she will not let that happen to Kinsey.

This book is well written and moves along quite quickly. This book, despite having been published in 1983 has aged very well. It could have been written today, except for the lack of cellphones and email.

Overall a great read.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Eating Breakfast ]
A.K.A. Indemnity Only – A Quick Review

Ah V.I. Warshawski! One of the first of the "new breed" of tough female detectives. Forget the bad movie with Kathleen Turner, the novels show us a woman who is prepared to walk on the dark side to find the truth.

This first novel finds V.I. (or Vic as her friends call her) hired to track down a missing girl. Only when she starts investigating does she realize that she’s been had and that there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

This Sarah Paretsky novel is slightly dated at this point, especially with its use of dame and broad. Mind you, it is set in 1979. It is still nice to revisit and see where the series, and a lot of today’s female detective fiction started. And some of the modern urban fantasy comes from too. It would be easy to make an argument that people like Kim Harrison and her character Rachel Morgan owe a lot to V.I. and the other hardboiled female detectives who came out in the early 1980s.

Over all, good read.

In addition to my Iron Man review, there are two additional Klaw pieces to mention.

The latest edition of “Graphica Nexus” appears at SF Site.

Steampunk with my original essay “The Steam-Driven Time Machine” should either be on the stands or out any day now.

Shameless plugs was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
So P&G got back to me and this is what they said.

My response? I find it fascinating that it is somehow my or my child’s fault that we had repeated leaks.

We had no leaks with the Huggies newborn product that were given to us as baby shower gifts by other parents. Clearly these people already knew what we have discovered; which product is superior.

I am also baffled by the reference to the gel in their response. I mentioned nothing about a gel in my letter. This leads me to think that they have had many complaints about this product and have simply developed a generic response to deal with them.

That tells me all I need to know.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
These diapers are, quite frankly, crap. (If you want to look upon that as pun, go ahead.)

Yesterday I put my newborn son in Pampers Swaddlers for the first time. Since the he has managed to pee the bed four times. We have had to change the sheets twice. We are now out of sheets. We are also out of sleepers as he has managed to soil those.

Pampers did nothing to stop or slow down the process.

I get to do even more laundry, despite the fact that I did laundry yesterday and should have had a day’s grace. I also have the joy of working on less sleep, because my son kept waking up soaked! And don’t think that I can catch up today. Remember that laundry? Yeah, that will cut into my rest time. Not to mention dealing with a cranky two week-old, who didn’t get enough sleep either.

This is the last time I will buy a Pampers product. The advertised quality is just not there. And believe me, I plan to share this info with my fellow new mothers. Back to Huggies for this family.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
A.K.A. Three Martini Play Date – A Quick Review

This book is a refreshing look at the art of raising children. Author Mellor’s tongue in cheek look at parenting is refreshing. She advocates not spoiling children, rather giving them chores to do. She also thinks that children should have some unstructured time, that mommy’s job is not to chauffeur the little mites to every lesson/club/meeting/event known to man.

Her sarcastic sense of humour makes this book move along quickly. My fave? The reference to the turtle as a piece of sculpture. She calls it the "Japanese performance artist of the pet world".

Very funny. Pick this up!