julieland

Delivers more smiles per hour than any human can!!

Apparently only the hetero fifties-style couples have been banned from kissing at Warrington Bank Quay Station, because it holds up commuters.

But doesn’t he look smooth, like a good smoker should?

Car trouble is no fun, especially when your regular friendly independent mechanic cannot fix the problem, and it has to be taken to the dealer. Ugh. Being a one-car family, it’s quite a hassle to be car-free. But I got lucky today and Flow VW gave me a loaner!! So this is what I’m driving for Christmas 

Shopping for a cell phone is getting really scary - there are SO many features and apps to keep spending money on, it’s gotta be a large chunk of business. The latest feature from Verizon is an electronic leash! “Chaperone” uses the GPS capabilities of newer phones to maintain a locator system that the parent can manage from a web browser, and receive notifications when the child enters or leaves a designated area. $9.99 a month seems reasonable, but it’s unclear whether that’s one charge for each phone or the whole family. “Chaperone only works as intended for your family when the phone is powered on” - what teenager wouldn’t accidentally turn it off when leaving the designated area?!

A couple of years ago I decided that I’d give any novel 50 pages to grab me, and if I’m not hooked by then I can give it up. For audio, I suppose the equivalent is one hour of listening. One of the reasons I’m switching from LibraryThing to GoodReads is that GR let me create a new shelf - Can’t Finish. I want to keep track of those books that I have abandoned, and why.

Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

My review
rating: 1 of 5 stars
I have read several Jodi Picoult books, and each one gives me the increasing sense of emotional manipulation. I listened to the first hour of this one, and can’t go any farther, because I haven’t seen any redeeming qualities in the two main characters, and she’s laid the foreshadowing on so heavily that we know they do terrible things. I don’t want to be jerked around for another fifteen hours of listening!!

View all my reviews.

It was late, I was tired, and I couldn’t stop looking at the thumb. He kept gesturing with it, and it reminded me of the pen that Dole keeps in his deformed hand.

Isn’t it a little strange-looking? It seems as long as any of his fingers, and when he turns it, it seems to have several knuckles. The more I stared at it, the weirder it looked. He did waggle it a lot. I could find only one other mention of it on the interweb today.

Most people didn’t notice it, because if you were watching a major network like NBC, their ribbon covered the bottom fifth of the screen. But on PBS and CSPAN, it was thumb city.

Is it disrespectful to wonder if he was hung up by his thumbs in ‘Nam? Or is that what an old arthritic thumb usually looks like?

I just realized I haven’t posted here in a month - probably because it’s become way too easy to post to Facebook from my usual sources. There I can repost a news item, and I don’t even have to come up with my own words to accompany it! Most of the time there is even a picture already attached. Now if I can only figure out how to feed one to the other . . .

Most recently, I pointed people toward Stephen Colbert’s Red Lending Menace - “It is our patriotic duty to go to the local libraries, check out all the books we can, and never return them.”