Your Vote Matters!

Today is all about getting you my loyal readers (please exist) to help me out with a decision that weighs on my mind. And knitting (it is What’s on Your Needles Wednesday).  But first, Haiku:

As you may or may not know Wendy is giving away an iPod to the person who writes the best summer themed Haiku.  She decided to do this right after I got out of Creative Writing (i.e. I still know how to write poetry).  The only problem is that I’ve written too many Haiku (we’re limited to one) and I need your help to choose my best Haiku.  There’s a poll at the end of this post and I’ll enter whichever haiku has the most votes on Thursday evening!

Haiku # 1

Humid hours hang

Over oppressed offices

To torture totally.

Haiku#2

Diet coke with lime

tastes better in summer heat

like tropical treat

Haiku # 3

sweat glistened fingers

can’t manage knitting needles

not to mention wool

Haiku #4

I will be a child

as long as I can still jump

splash! Into the pool.

Haiku #5

Sleeping in till noon

through seven hours of sunlight

only in summer.

In Knitting…

Since I do still knit (not often enough, but I’m working on that) I thought I’d have a little WOYNW action today.

These are my Hedera socks, enjoying the sunshine we’re having today (I was outside today, I pulled weeds and then knit for a while).  They are from Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock on Size 0 Knit Picks metal DPNs, and are technically a Mother’s Day gift (they’re late), but I am so close to the toe that I can smell it, so I’m doing ok.

I’ve got my spies on you!

So picking up about my life (from yesterday) I was going to say what I thought would be the most ideal thing in the world, but the truth is that I really don’t know anymore.  I guess it slipped my mind, but my life is kind of unsettled like that right now.

I do feel pretty accomplished, though, because my Twitter bot for the Daily Chum has been a huge success, and the flickr group I also started for the chum is looking like it might take off.  So that’s all well and good, but it will be pretty sad when the bot has more followers than I do, which it’s looking like it will happen pretty soon.  Also! I’ve been twittering haikus I wrote for Wendy’s Haiku contest over the past couple of days and I want people to vote on them here tomorrow, so be sure that you come back then!

On to the business of the day, my first book of the summer!  The book was Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History by Ernest Volkman; I really enjoyed it.  It was kinda panned in both the professional and amateur reviews on Amazon, but I suppose I’m just burnt out and easy to please because it was really fun to read.  The book is made up of very short concise biographies of significant figures in 20th Century espionage and they’re grouped according to what kind of agent they were.  In my experience (and I have some, I tried to create a fantasy-medieval era intelligence ring for a story) it is really hard to get any concise details on anything espionage-related (for good reason I think) but I feel like this book is a good way to become a bit more familiar with the language and terminology.  I generally prefer biography to straight up history because it tends to be more linear and I care more about it because there is a story.  I think this book is good for people with a general interest but no previous knowledge, it’s a little like reading the wikipedia entries on all of these guys, but I have derived hours of entertainment from reading wikipedia entries so I’m ok with that.  Also, because I bought the book at half price books, I think it’s a good way to do a little reading and discover what else I would like to read about in this field, I know now that I should look for stuff more specifically about historical espionage (there’s stuff on American Civil and Revolutionary War espionage) and if I were more interested in anyone in the book, I would then be able to track down longer biographies of them.  As it is I wouldn’t go seeking anything, but if I run across a biography of H.A.R. Philby or someone else at the library or HPB I would probably pick it up.

Summer… at last?

School’s over, finally.  Second semester really kicked my butt this year, everything was pretty brutal but Creative Writing was the worst because I did so much writing for it that it took away all my drive to write elsewhere (like here or the chum) and no matter how badly I wanted to write my chum column or a blog post I just didn’t have it in me.  It was also pretty defeatist because I really am not meant to write fiction that literature snobs will like.  I’ll stick to popular fiction, where my desire to blow things up is seen as indulging my audience’s desire for excitement rather than a precursor to a murderous rampage across campus (imaginary violence is the next tobacco, mark my words).  On the bright side, my other classes were pretty good, my business law class actually has me re-thinking the path of my entire life (I did unexpectedly well).  Between doing well in law, hating creative, and my failure to actually do anything for the Chum being a lawyer seems easy, and more up my alley than publishing.

Speaking of the Chum, man, ch-ch-ch-changes going on over there.  I’m the new Online/Technical editor, which is nice, but I’ve always been wary of being labeled the tech-head and it’s not great for that.  I am the most webbish of the lot of us, so it makes sense, but I’d hate to get pigeonholed into something that isn’t really my strong suit.  Of course, I did build a pretty wicked sweet twitter bot today, entirely from the ground up, so I’m not too bad at the job, it’s just not the most ideal thing in the whole wide world.

I would say “speaking of the most ideal thing in the whole wide world” here, but I think it’s time to cut to the chase.  As you might know from the title of this blog and everything, I kinda like reading, and as it is summer the really god thing is that I have a lot of time to read, nothing else that I have to read (a problem during school) and I usually end up with a pretty good stock of books to read in summer.  So anyway, in order to try and make myself write on this blog/read more in general this summer I’m gonna gush about every book I read here on the blog. Not review outright, because I don’t want it to be a review thing, but more chronicle my feelings about what I’m reading.  I’m going to try and avoid rereading anything I read this summer (which means I read what I want, including stuff I’ve already read, but not gush about anything twice, except for one exception I’ll get to when/if it happens), and I am not going to gush over single issues of the comics that I read, but I will count trades and/or reading whole arcs together (like 5+ issues) but I will try and at least list the comics I buy each week.   Along with knitting and talking comics I think I should be able to have enough gushing to do to update 5 days a week or so, I’ve got a 4 book backlog to get through already and there are so many books that I want to read that content shouldn’t be a problem (and if it is I’ll do a series on every podcast that I listen to). The fun starts tomorrow, see ya then!