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Roomy finished the last section of the fence this week. It doesn’t look great, but it is functional, which was the main concern. Also, he went nuts looking for a drill he needed to work on the fence. He said he thought it was in the laundry/storage room, but it wasn’t so he looked everywhere else. Roomy says he thinks he just misplaced it. I really hope he’s right, but I don’t think he is. I think the old drill was stolen. He had told me locking the laundry/storage room wasn’t important, so I hadn’t been locking it. Since the room has one door to it that can only be accessed from the back yard, and the fence hadn’t been fixed before then, someone could have just walked in and taken the drill. He didn’t find the drill and ended up having to buy another one because he couldn’t finish the fence without a drill. It sucks, and if someone did walk in and take his drill, it kind of makes my skin crawl. If I accidentally left a door to the main section of the house unlocked, would a person walk in and just start taking things? I lock the front and back doors when I go through them without thinking about it a lot of the time, so I don’t think there is a good chance of that happening, but just thinking about that as a possibility bothers me. Then again, if I catch someone in the house who isn’t supposed to be here, there are a lot of knives in the house, and I’d be happy to use an intruder as target practice.

Anyway, with the fence done, we made sure other hazards were cleaned up and then we let the dog run around off the leash for the first time in a very long time. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but even before the fence was damaged to the point of having big gaps the dog could get through, I wouldn’t let her off the leash much if at all. The reason being because of the neighbors on the other side of the back fence who would throw their garbage over the fence, which we of course didn’t want our dog getting into. I’m sure the neighbors that are there now are different ones because they behave differently. They sometimes have late night get-togethers with friends, and we haven’t found new garbage being thrown over the fence in a long time. So, yeah, the yard is safer for the dog to be in, and she’s oh-so-happy about it. When we first let her run around she went everywhere and smelled everything. We kicked a ball around and got her to play with it, threw some sticks, and basically just let her spend all that pent up energy she’s had for a long time. It was fun to see her so happy. There is a downside though: I still can’t leave her out there alone. There are two former pets buried back there, and I don’t want the dog to dig them up. There is also a gap or two still around, that aren’t quite big enough for her to get though, she could probably stick her head through and get stuck or just push on them enough to make them widen enough for her to actually get through. It’s fine though. I need to spend some time outside with her and get exercise myself, so going out and playing with the dog is good for me and her. I plan to take her out twice a day to let her run around until she doesn’t want to anymore. If she needs to go out more than that, I can adjust things.

Second thing involving pets for this entry: the kitten has taken to curling up on me. I remember complaining a few times that she wouldn’t curl up with me like Meek would. Seems like the cold weather helped her change her mind, because now she’s almost obsessive about it. If she hears me get into bed, she comes running so she can use me as a pillow. If I roll over in the night and she has to move, or she falls off, she gets right back on. And if I take too long to go to bed, she demands to sit in my lap. And every time she sits on me, she kneeds me and purrs like crazy. Reminds me a lot of Meek. She’d behave similarly. neutral I made myself sad... Meek didn’t squeak so much as the kitten does. The kitten squeaks she she’s excited, when we pet her, when we pick her up, and sometimes when greeting us or when we call for her. It’s adorable and makes her sound like she never hit adult hood. Meek did have a similar small voice to the kitten, she just didn’t use it nearly as much.

I want to move on before I make myself more sad... Another thing that happened was that I got the coloring page done on time. I had some issues getting it changed into another type of file, so it wasn’t done by the time I said I’d have it done, but it was still finished on Monday. I’m tempted to make another, but I think I’ll hold off for a while. Just the one was a lot of work. I needed a break from the computer after that, so I have been playing some Fable 2. I just wanted something easy that I didn’t have to think much about while playing.

I’ve also been neglecting to reply to my email friend again. I got wrapped up in the coloring page project, things around the house, and seeing what unfolded after the election, that replying to him slipped my mind. He’s usually fairly forgiving, so I don’t think he’ll be too mad. Now I just need to break down and go through that big a** email. We’ve both been rather long winded in our replies to one another, so it just keeps getting longer and longer. We really need to find another way to communicate. I was thinking of a headset and something over the internet to let us talk to one another. There are cheap versions of everything, so it shouldn’t be all that hard to find something I could use. Not sure about him though. He suggested we talk by phone, but I have one of those pay for minutes phones, so I wouldn’t be able to do that often if at all. We’ll figure out something to do.

Last bit I’ll mention is about a book I’ve been trying to get though for a while now. I’d given up for a short time, then started again recently, and I’m thinking I might give up entirely now. The book is called “The Lovely Bones” and after the first couple of chapters, almost nothing happens. Well, things do happen, but this book has no plot as far as I can see, so all I’m reading about is some people’s lives after someone they knew died. I’m sure it’s rough when something like that happens in real life, but as far as that being all that happens in a book, it’s boring as f*ck. It doesn’t help that there are constant flashbacks that interrupt scenes, or when the author starts a new paragraph it sometimes doesn’t meld well with the previous one which gives me a bit of reader whiplash, or the fact that the author uses strange analogies. Not a good way to say this, but some of the analogies for sex make it sound like the author’s a virgin. The narrator of this story is a girl who was raped and murdered, so perhaps the bad analogies were supposed to be characterization of the narrator, but it’s distractingly bad. For example, the younger sister at some point sleeps with a boy she likes at summer camp. Okay, fine, whatever. The ghost girl describes what happens as follows: “In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.” The first part I get because the narrator was raped and murdered, but windows? What the hell does that mean? Is she open to possibilities? If so, possibilities of what? Babies? Other partners? Tell me, damn you! burning_eyes Personally, I would have gone with “fear” and “horror” for the first section and maybe “joy” and “excitement” for the second. Maybe it isn’t as artsy, but it doesn’t leave me wondering what the hell the author was trying to say. Oh and that’s not even the worst analogy. I went online to find out what others had to say about this book, hoping to get some insight into why people liked it. Turns out there are other people who dislike it too. At least one mentioned the book having no plot and two mentioned the book saying someone butters their toast with tears, or something along those lines. I don’t remember that line or where I could find it but good grief that is an awful line. Another review mentions everything happening at the end of the book and that it just gets nuts, so I kind of want to get to that point, but it’s so boring. The book spent an entire chapter having the sister character go to summer camp just so we could learn the sister slept with someone and that the narrator would use an ice-sickle as a murder weapon. There was another chapter spent milling about all to find out the cops hit a dead end and told the father character to stop annoying them. Oh and that the dad gave the sister a hint to go break into the neighbor’s house to look for clues. Father of the year! stare

In the book “The lovely Bones”, there are no mysteries, no suspense, and annoying writing. We know who the killer is, we know how he killed the victim, we know where the body is. The family, or at least some of the members sense or know who the murderer is, even if they can’t prove it. It’s a shame because it could have been interesting. The narrator could have had to deal with having been killed, or trying to find a way to direct the living to the murderer, instead of people just squaring in on the guilty guy. Have the bad guy go after someone else and the dead girl try to save the next victim. Anything! Just have something happen! But no, all we get is a chapter on heaven to show how it works and then snippets peppered through the rest of the book between flashbacks and the dead girl narrating what her family is doing to the reader. It’s boring. Tugging at my heart strings only goes so far, and it doesn’t work over the entirety of a book that has nothing else happening in it other than people dealing with the death of a friend/family member.

*deep breath* You know, venting about how frustratingly boring this book is has made me feel better. Maybe I’ll try to get to the end of the book now. If anyone is reading this and looking forward to such a thing, temper your hopes. I’m not all that motivated to finish this thing, and boring reads take me longer. I’m starting to look back on “No Such Thing As Dragons” with fondness now. It wasn’t written well, but at least something happened in it.

Finding out how boring this book has been reading about people’s lives has also made me realize how dull one of my own projects might be. It is/was meant to be a sort of slice-of-life thing with aliens, it has/had no plot beyond that. I don’t want to scrap it because I’m so attached, and I don’t think I can modify it much to force in plots. In some cases it might even ruin the world I made. Then again, it could just be “The Lovely Bones” that put a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak, and not actually the type of story. There are some types of comics that get away with not having a plot, after all, and some television series that have episodes that are self-contained and don’t touch on much if anything at all outside the one episode. So, maybe if I have something going on in the various “episodes” (or whatever I should call them), and I do them well, perhaps going forward with such a project would be okay? confused I don’t know... I think I need other people’s thoughts on this... To the forums!

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