Laurell K Hamilton’s Latest Post
On the Eve of the Jewish new year…
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155149622052632&id=136225597631
Security You Need But Don’t Know About
As many of you know, I am an Irma survivor. Irma was projected to hit the county where I lived straight on and that was where it was going to make landfall and if that had happened I don’t know that I would be here to make this post but we were saved by our neighbors to the near South and Marco Island. My heart goes out to them as they took the hit that could have been ours. My sympathy goes to everybody else who has been effected by Irma. We have also been effected although we were not as badly affected as we had feared there’s a lot of damage and it’s not just physical damage to buildings– it’s mental damage on a massive scale. Having to evacuate and decide what you would take and what you would leave which pictures would go with you and how much clothes what could you carry what were your limits which shelters were pet-friendly versus those that were not does your next door neighbor have a generator or can you take shelter in the local church or what’s the best thing to do all of those questions were decided in a matter of days and sometimes in a matter of minutes. My main hard drive which has pretty much everything I use in my daily life was damaged due to my hectic flight from my home to a friend’s business that had a generator and was more sturdily built than my house. It had so much of my digital life on it… And so much i cannot imagine losing forever. I wish this offer had come along 3 weeks ago, before Irma. But let my loss be a lesson to you… Take action today
OMG this deal is insane! And you can use coupon code lbmwxar which gives an extra 10% off 3TB of data for life for $60 forget about Dropbox or any other services that’s about their monthly charge and this is for LIFE
https://deals.androidauthority.com/?rid=4768501
[Top]So, what happened…
Well Irma came and went and boy did she make an impression on all of us. Central Florida is a complete mess. Insurance companies are already citing deductibles and act of God loopholes. Fema says they will help but that is not all that easy. They haven’t set the amount they will give us yet. A little like the world has ended and your check is in the mail. Everything is still a little nuts… And they are saying power will be restored by the 22nd… But we have survived and rebuilding is what we do. We Floridians rebuilt after Andrew, Charlie, and we will rebuild from Irma. Today my kids went back to school and that is a sign of the fact that life goes on here, despite flooding and downed trees… Shortages will eventually be resolved and waters will recede
[Top]Seanan Mcguire talks about writing and life, a great sweepstakes opportunity and a mea culpa!
So, I may be quiet for a bit…I am in Florida and may lose (well that’s a big question) my home, my life, my books, or just my power and internet…Hopefully I will escape this storm with minor damage, although given the insanity going on around me I may need therapy for PTSD, just kidding kind of…
But back to the important part…There is a giveaway for all of the October Daye series and a bunch of wisdom
http://www.unboundworlds.com/2017/09/seanan-mcguire-learned-october-plus-sweeps/
On a Night filled with Fear and Anxiety About So Much This Hit Me A Little Bit More Than Usual
I live in Florida and as I said in previous posts, every time a hurricane passes us by is a miracle and as I watched Harvey decimate Texas and Louisiana I was in equal parts inspired and appalled by the men and women who joined together to help, taking any bit they had, be it boats or water, time or money, clothing or food… And appalled by those who made excuses for why they could not help, citing the water unsafe as there was no way to know what might be in them or difficulty in securing transportation or any other thing they could pull out of thin air…
Now we face another hurricane and it is poised to hit Florida and I find myself praying that this one passes us by, although that looks less and less likely as time passes. I am watching my neighbors go insane, making runs on drugstores and supermarkets and discount clubs and I don’t know what to say or do about the insanity I am seeing but it is insanity on a grandiose scale or done large…
And I am binge watching some TV shows as I look around my home wondering how I can take all the irreplaceable things in my home in hours if necessary, finding myself overwhelmed by the prospect of even trying to pack that bag. The wedding albums, my ketubah (the Jewish contract of marriage, of which there is literally one in all of the world as those who have signed in, most noticibly my husband and one of the witnesses, have died in the intervening years), the hours of videotapes from when the girls were born and of course the dog and all of his stuff… Do I take my high-school and college diplomas or the… The list goes on and on into perpetuity. Luckily, as much as it might kill me to lose the physical copies of my books, they exist somewhere on the cloud, so though I will lose their physical copies, I can enjoy them again with the digital versions. And so when a cover of this song played on the TV show that is the background upon which I ponder these questions it hit me harder than it usually would… Forever Young
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.
May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
May you stay forever young
And now I have to see if I can put my money where my mouth is. Can I believe that as long as my family and I are alive and together the rest of it, no matter how treasured, is irrelevant… I will pray that this storm passes us by and I don’t have to make those choices, but come what may all I can do is my best and hope that somehow it will be enough this time… Although all too often these days it is not…
[Top]And A Very Happy Book Birthday to…
Seanan Mcguire
JD Robb
Christine Feehan
A Little Late, but better late than never
Laura Griffin
Shannon Mayer
I am so excited and cannot wait!
Jaymin Eve just announced the release of the third book in her Curse of the Gods collaboration with Jane Washington! I have just recently started reading her books again with the release of the Broken Compass book which returned to the world of the supernatural prison series…
Some links to the series…
And Some of the previous works…
Supernatural Prison
The Walker Saga
Individual books
[Top]A few thoughts
So, for the last few days, while the rain was falling I am a little ashamed to admit that rather than curling up with my favorite books and the new ones, too, I have been binge watching TV shows through Amazon Prime and Netflix.
And it started me thinking a little bit about how much things have changed even as they have stayed the same. We hardly ever think about the constant access we have to one another these days or how much information is shared constantly between us.
Another concept occurred to me as well. I have a little bit of an obsession that I’ve had since my early teens. That obsession is a comic book series called elfquest and the way that I got involved with that comic book series was kind of a fluke. I was on a road trip with my best friend’s family to Hilton Head and once we got there I took my book that I was reading in the car and had brought with me to read it the beach and read it at the beach while we were sunbathing. This had an unintended consequence, since I was reading I was laying on my stomach all day while we were at the beach and by the time that we left my back had passed the color red and it’s sunburn on the way to the color purple. I took an ice bath once we got back to where we were staying but that wasn’t enough for this particular burn and aloe and laying on my stomach was not cutting it either So eventually the decision was made that I was going to return home and so I had to ride from where we were staying to the airport I had finished my book that I had brought with me for the trip and it was a pretty long drive to the airport so I looked everywhere in the car and found the first graphic novel for elfquest that my best friend’s little brother had brought along to read on the trip. I didn’t really like comic books and I couldn’t imagine that anything could possibly dull the amount of pain that I was in but it was a long ride and I decided to give this graphic novel a chance. I got to page 87 in the book and as soon as my parents picked me up at the airport I demanded that we stopped at a bookstore and pick up the book so that I could finish it. As I convalesced from my own stupidity in getting burned so badly I entered the world of Two Moons and voraciously ate all eight of the graphic novels that has been released at that point. this started my love of elfQuest and through the years I’ve enjoyed every single comic book manga book poster figurine t-shirt and anything else that you can think of that is involved with elfquest. Were that trip to happen today I do not know that I would have ever discovered elfquest because I would have been able to download a different book to entertain me on that drive to the airport and I would have missed out on one of the few things that have been consistent in my life my love of Elf Quest
But I started thinking about TV shows. These days there are a few different ways we get our TV. There are the network (public, cable, and premium) shoes that we still watch as they are released weekly. There are the entertainment providers like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu that release an entire season at once. Add in that the way we have watched TV has drastically changed and the younger me would have been shocked at all if it.
When I was a kid, we had family dinners that had to be over in time for my dad to watch a business show. And then depending on the night, we would either all go our seperately ways, sometimes watching TV sometimes not and then we would come together to watch certain shows as a family. Sometimes we watched Dallas although that was not one of my families staples. We watched Dynasty and LA Law religiously. It did not matter what else was happening in the world outside our living room. This was family time and we would discuss these shows in between episodes too. They were a part of our lives, one without a pause or rewind function and if you missed an episode you missed it.
Today you can watch any episodes of any show on any device. If there is a show we all watch, like Game of Thrones, we discuss it on social media almost immediately… Some of us talk during the episode.
Even if there is a show we all watch, the experience is of our choosing. We choose whether to watch it live on the tv or later on a dvr–we choose whether to binge watch over a weekend or closer to each series shows broadcast. We choose who to watch with or even how we will watch together.
I remember when the Disney Channel was first to be added into the world and Nickelodeon and HBO. I remember when it was questioned what these Channels could possibly offer that wasn’t already out there. Now the most basic of television packages comes with more channels than we know what to do with.
The question is are we better off? And my answers are as esoteric as they are necessary. I love being able to communicate with my family and friends 24/7 and yet we are far less connected to each other. We don’t have much anticipation or time for speculation these days until we get to the end of the season and our waits for answers are much longer.
As I watch my kids with their headphones and tablets. I think of how much things have changed and I wonder if our interconnectedness is a gift or a burden…
And then I turn on the read to me function in Google play books, put my headphones on and travel to whichever world I have chosen.
But in the back of my hand I wonder how many of those unexpected Treasures my children have missed simply because they have a hub of entertainment in their hands and thus no reason to read a friend’s little brothers comic book. And then I wonder how many I’ve missed in The Last 5 Years since I too carry my library of thousands of books around with me.
[Top]A Few Products that I Happily Endorse Without Incentive
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In addition to being a book nerd, I am something of a more traditional nerd too. In that aspect I find myself trying a lot of new products things like Bluetooth speakers and headphones and external Chargers and other things that make my phone / tablet easier to use both at home and on the go. In that vein I recently purchased a device that is hands down the most useful of these products I have tried and it is not all that expensive!
As an unrelated issue, I have stumbled upon another product that is clearly above any other products in that industry and I wanted to share that as well. I am talking about the products produced by the company the Coldest water. Their ice packs are impressive retaining flexibility when frozen and staying cold longer than other reusable ice/heat delivery systems. I use them for my migraines and am a huge fan
That’s all for now. Stay safe and dry out there…
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