Selenay's Ramblings

A day late again, but at least I'm doing it this week...

What are you currently reading?

My digital read is Revelation by C. J. Sansom, because it and the next book in the Matthew Shardlake series were both on a good price on Kindle. I'm a big fan of these books, lovely meaty Tudor mysteries featuring a hunchbacked lawyer, so they'll probably keep me occupied for the next couple of weeks.

My physical read is The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith/J K Rowling and I've eaten the first five chapters in two days despite my terrible cold.. I appear to be in a mystery phase. I nearly picked up Wolf Hall, but then I realised that two Tudor mysteries at the same time would just be confusing.

What did you recently finish?

Symbiont by Mira Grant, which was exactly as amazing as I'd hoped it would be. As I always say, zombie lit isn't my thing but Grant writes fascinating near future sci fi with zombies, and that's a totally different thing. Still horrific and terrifying, but also thought provoking.

And Slightly Wicked by Mary Balogh was my last digital read, but I've already babbled about in my post on historical romance so I won't rebabble. It was fantastic, though :-)

What do you think you'll read next?

I still have Waistcoats and Weaponry by Gail Carriger on my to be read shelf, so that will probably be next. Or a reread of The Dark is Rising because it's so delightfully Christmassy. And by the time I've finished the Shardlake books, the new Tessa Dare book should be on my Kindle, so I'll be hitting that hard.

Today has been One Of Those Days. Ugh.

To start, there was the news that my sister doesn't have tonsilitis after all. She has glandular fever (mono to North Americans) and it's pretty severe. She's feeling utterly miserable, reportedly worse than when I left on Saturday and she was looking fairly awful then. The doctor thinks it will be a few days more before she starts feeling better and a at least a couple of weeks before she's able to think about resuming normal activities. For my permenantly busy sister who is in the middle of a theatre MA and probably has half a dozen theatre tickets booked for the next two weeks, this is rather a blow. I'm trying to dig out some books or DVDs she might enjoy to entertain her while she's sick, as she went to my parents' place for two days and may be trapped there until she's better.

For me, this is rather worrying. The prednisone has kicked my immune system into touch and I've been exposed to glandular fever. Ugh. So in addition to reporting that tapering the prednisone resulted in a return of symptoms, I also have to discuss with my specialist what may happen and whether it's possible to test for glandular fever in me. If I'm infected, then I need to know how bad it will get and what the plan will be. Thursday is going to be So Much Fun.

Also, I'm getting lightheaded when straightening or standing quickly and my heart is racing inappropriately when I move around, plus I'm getting rather tired and wanting to sleep a lot. This feels suspciously similar to the anemia of a few weeks ago, so I suspect that my heamoglobin is what my GP wants to discuss on Thursday. As I hadn't had any bleeding for three weeks at the time the blood was taken and I've only had some incredibly light bleeding for the last couple of days, I'm not quite sure where my red blood cells are going.

On top of that, I'm battling fairly major system issues at work and Project Snowball (my new project) grows every time my colleague and I discuss it. They've now assigned a project manager to us. Uh-oh.

In all that, it's a good thing that I've got comforting books to retreat to. I'm about a third of the way through "To Say Nothing of the Dog" by Connie Willis and it's possibly one of the funniest things that I've read in ages. I was snickering and giggling all the way through my lunch break. Run out to read this one, folks, if you enjoy time-travel farces about disasterous boating trips down the Thames and hunts for bird stumps. I suspect that I need to read "Three Men in a Boat" next, because it will probably make the Willis even funnier.

I'm waiting impatiently for the next two Gail Carriger books, which should be arriving any day now (eee!). I'm not reading any paper books until I get those, so that I can start them immediately. Yes, I now have a Kindle book and a paper book on the go at all times normally and thus do not want to be in the middle of a different paper book when the Carrigers arrive. It's not obssessive at all. Really.

I <3 books.

It's been raining on and off all day. The sky is solid gray and there's a faint haze on the horizon. For some reason, this is making me feel happy, though. Maybe it's the cup of tea sitting next to me and the fact that I'm sitting indoors looking at the icky weather. I think that I'm strange in that way. The only way that I'd feel better is if I were curled up on a sofa with a novel and my cup of tea.

Work is going OK still. We've excitingly managed to get a task scheduler set up on the new PCs which means that all those big spreadsheets I usually have to wait for on a Monday can be run automatically before I even get in. I'll have all my data ready for me to use rather than having panics and insane moments, not getting stuff until lunch and then ending up in the office until 6pm. I won't even have to get up unusually early on a Monday anymore. As terrybirch commented a couple of days ago, this is starting to turn into a normal job again! I feel more relaxed and happier than I have in months right now, probably a combination of having my job suddenly become sane again and not spending my evenings looking for jobs. I'm not giving up on the job hunt, but I'm backing off and trying to only spend an hour or two a week on it rather than an hour or two a day.

My back hurts, my hips hurt and that's rather crappy, but overall I'm feeling pretty happy right now.

Hmm, I'm feeling a definite wish to read fic when I get home tonight. Time to hunt through the unread folder, methinks, unless someone would like to point me towards any really, really great stuff that I absolutely must read :-)

So, the review database is pretty much done and guinea pigs beta testers are now attempting to break it having a play with it. Got one minor bug to work out, which I'll be looking at after the weekend and won't take much work to fix, but otherwise it's looking good.

Yay!

And today is the beginning of my lovely holiday from work. Have DVDs and books to read and have no intention of touching the review database again until next week. Instead I'm being completely lazy today, I'll be going up to Manchester for an FDAS meet tomorrow and will be recovering from the FDAS meet on Sunday, possibly by the application of more books and DVDs. I may even indulge in actually, gasp, reading some fanfiction seeing as I haven't had time for weeks to do so.

I've got half a dozen fics bookmarked to read, copperbadge has got lots of chapters of Cartographer's Craft up that I haven't had time to read and it's been months since I had time to just trawl around the archives and see what I can find. Ah, the joy of indulgence :-)

Plus, there is this stack of Chalet School books calling my name. Oh, the choices of what to read :-)