Looks like almost everyone is closing down their LJ accounts, and I'm increasingly less comfortable cross-posting. I'm "batwrangler" on Dreamwidth and will try to catch up with everyone who is migrating on the flip side. (I may keep checking on the few hearty souls who remain, but you know where good intentions often end up...).

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Puccini is fifteen years old today. He had his annual well-pet check-up and senior-dog blood-work done last week and according to the vet, "His blood-work is so good, he'll probably live forever."

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Everyone else was probably already aware of this particular piece of technological progress: I'm getting a lot of calls that are clearly completely automated and playing recordings based on voice prompts (rather than auto-diallers connected to a live-person call center). Makes it easier to just hang up on them, despite the breezy "personal" style of the pre-recorded scripts. 

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InCryptid, book 6
by Seanan McGuire

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 by Gareth Nix

This is a stand-alone story which I hope will be the first in a series. It's a fun book and physically beautiful, too.

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Penric & Desdemona Book 4
by Lois McMaster Bujold

This picks up immediately after Penric's Mission and so doesn't really stand alone. It appears to be the second episode in a multi-novella arc. I rather enjoyed Penric's continuing (mis)adventures. You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth ( comments)

Retold and read by Neil Gaiman.

I was surprised to learn from the introduction (though it makes complete sense) that some people encountered Marvel's Thor before finding about his legendary/mythological antecedents. The D'Aulaire books were a formative part of my childhood, followed quickly by the Lang Fairy Books, other collections of myths and folklore, and the sagas/eddas all by the time I got to high school.

Meanwhile, I am barely joking when I say that comic books didn't make it past the NH border while I was growing up — I didn't really find out about them until I was in high school, and only discovered SF fandom well after college. (We didn't even have phones in our rooms, let alone access to the nascent internet until my senior year in college. My town didn't even get cable tv until a couple of years after I graduated. Also, our tvs tended to be black-and-white, when we had a tv set, which wasn't all the time...)

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The Diviners, book 2
by Libba Bray
Read by January LaVoy

This is the second book in a projected four-volume series. Book three is due out in the fall. The "monster of the week" mystery wrapped a bit slowly for me, but I'm still interested in the overarching story.
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A Family Skeleton Mystery, Book 2
by Leigh Perry

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A Family Skeleton Mystery, Book 1
by Leigh Perry

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