I hate Dell

I forgot my anger at dell briefly, until I read this blog by momma such, and remembered I've told everyone in person about why they should never buy a dell computer, but I haven't fulfilled my threat to the dell company after my horrific experience with them two years ago by spreading the word online. Yes, I hold a grudge, mostly because my dell computer is broken, has always been broken, and they refused to take it back, fix it, or even answer the phone for hours at a time, keeping me in an infinite phone loop until I sent my mobile phone bill to them in response to a customer satisfaction survey.

Yes I hold a grudge, but I swore to them I would tell every person I knew and every person I would ever meet that they should never get a dell computer. I don't go back on my word.

I HATE dell. We used to love dell, my mom got a new dell every year for work for like five years in a row, and it was fantastic, but between 2005 and 2006 something changed (outsourcing?) and our last dell computer came to us with a broken fan, which resulted in a three hour long phone call before they finally sent somenone to fix it, the fan broke four more times that week! a bad harddrive, a non-working monitor, keyboard, and a faulty graphics card. Each problem meant hours of hold time and having people who couldn't understand me mad because I couldn't understand them. They tried to tell me they couldn't help because I didn't pay extra for help, and I told them the computer is brand new and has NEVER worked, send me a new one. They didn't, they just kept sending replacement parts, and the darn thing is still broken, but we waited past thirty days so tough luck.
I am NEVER getting another Dell again, and it has become my mission to warn every person I've ever met not to buy a dell. In fact that reminds me I haven't blogged about this yet, so I'll copy this response to my blog.
I'm an apple girl now :) They have stores, with people, that I can visit

Spring Break!

Alright! The hubby is on spring break (me to incidentally), but my classes are fun book club like classes and writing workshops. His classes are a little more intense. I was hoping we could go somewhere beach like for the vacation, as was Bella, but the hubby really just wants some time at home relaxing and doing nothing. I figure a few days of that and he may be bored enough to head to Florida with me :). I've got plans this week anyhow. Tommorow is baby story time at the Library, and Wednesday is mommy-baby yoga. I'd rather go out of town at the beginning of the week but the end, but what can you do. The hubby needs a break. My idea of a break is sipping Pina Coladas on a beach somewhere, while the baby plays with sand in her cute cute swim suite and ordering room service for two to three days, his is sitting at home and sleeping in. Poor guy, Pharmacy School must suck really bad for you to be exhausted enough to skip the beach.

So I've been home hanging out on the couch with the hubby. I watched a few movies over the weekend because we had free blockbuster rentals. I watched Bride Wars, which was actually pretty terrible, Speak, which was good, but sad, and Where the Wild Things Are, which should have been called where the sad things are. Seriously, the movie was a sad sad depressing movie. The English Major in me loved it, full of symbolism and artistic stuff, and pretty music and visuals, but the people were sad. I know Max was dealing with anger in the book, but such depression?

I also read another amazon freebie called Primitive, which was about crazy hippies who kidnap a model and make her live in their green cult place and use the publicity to tell the people of the earth about the danger of methane.

It was exciting, but gruesomely descriptive, and personally I'm tired of hearing about the environment. I do my part to be green, but seriously, stop shoving it down my throat you know? Use all the money that's been poured into preaching about how we're the worst things that have happened to the earth and go save a rainforest somewhere. Just dial it down a notch is all.

So hopefully later this week I will be on a beach somewhere enjoying the ocean. Wish me luck.

Free Kindle Books

A quick update: Bella had a doctors appointment and got two shots :( she is not very happy with me. However she forgave me after we went to story time at Barns and Noble this morning, and then went to get her bows and tights from Target (along with any bright starts pink toy I didn't already have for her) why bows? Because in the last three days, fifteen different people informed me that HE is a beautiful baby. WTH? He? She wears girl clothes, with pretty flowers on it. One woman looked right past her playing with her pink bright starts car seat bar and said how beautiful he is. If you don't know, say "You have a beautiful baby." Baby is a gender neutral word. Unlike HE.

Seriously, have you ever seen a more feminine looking baby?

I rest my case. Bows

Also I have spent an ungodly amount of time reading kindle books lately. (Take that BarnsnNoble! j/k I loved story time, even though I pretty much missed it thanks to the twenty minute wait for a bagel at the B&N cafe)

Kindle has a lot of freebies, they change week to week, so I'm doing a review on the ones I've read that are still free.

Here goes

My Soul To Lose: By Rachel Vincent

This is more of a novella, but it was awesome. It's a prequel to her Soul Screamers Series. Technically a young adult book (those are my favorite) this story stars Kaylee Cavanaugh, a sixteen year old who suffers panic attacks. The source of her panic attacks, creepy shadows that surround a person and give her the impression they are going to die. No one but her can see the shadows, and the shadows frighten her so badly that she can do nothing but scream and scream and scream. A shadow surrounding a young boy at the mall launch one of her screaming panic attacks, and consequently she ends up in an insane asylum. She spends the rest of the story trying to convince everyone to let her go home. She receives help from an unexpected ally who knows more about the shadows than she does.

The story was well written, and creepy. I, being the advertisers dream, purchased the next two books in the series after this. I can't say anything about them without giving away vital plot details, so just download the book. You don't have to have a kindle. You can download the books to desktop software, or to your i-phone or blackberry.

Serial by Jack Killborn and Blake Crouch

Another short story about two serial killers who meet up with each other and try to kill each other. I didn't care for it. Not much in the way of a plot, just gruesome descriptions. Also hard to care about either one being in danger when they both need to die... which was kind of the point, but it doesn't make relating to the characters any easier

Daring Chloe by Laura Jensen Walker

This one isn't free anymore, and man did you miss out. Awesome book about a bookclub that does adventures from every book they read, ending with them visiting Paris after readers "French Women Don't Get Fat." You have to read it

Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison

I've actually been wanting to read this series for awhile, so when I saw it free I jumped on it. The first in Kim Harrison's Hollows Series, features a world where vampires and shapeshifters, and fairies are common place, and not kept secret (yes, like true blood, but ever so much better)

anyhow, Rachel Morgan, a charms witch quits her job and ends up with a hit on her. She teams up with a vampire and a super buff pixie and starts a detective agency. First case: Find out who wants her dead.

Good story, good characters, will buy the next one when my bank account recovers from my bow, toy, and baby book buying today.

Hide in Plain Sight by Marta Perry

Andrea Hampton is a young business woman whose impractical grandmother and sister decide to open a bed and breakfast out of her childhood home. When her sister is injured in an accident, Andrea must journey back to her hometown and help her grandmother open the bed and breakfast. Someone is trying to stop them from opening the B&B, and vandalizing and threatening them at every turn. Can Andrea and her cute neighbor solve the mystery and save her grandmothers business and get her back to her business world?

An intriguing mystery, and written well enough to keep me reading despite my many problems with this book. So the main character is this fiscally responsible business woman who wants nothing more than to not get fired from her job. She is willing to help with the family business (new family business) and telecommute, but that doesn't stop judgmental neighbor boy from guilt tripping her every step of the way about how she puts her job before her family. Really? She visits often, talks on the phone often, and came when there was a crisis? What more do you want? Apparently for her to quit her stable job and help her grandmother on this risky business venture, cause thats what families do. Its like the opposite of all of those stories about the family that wanted their son to go into the family business but he really wanted to be a doctor, and everyone grows and learns that he should be able to follow his dream too. This wasn't just one characters opinion, it was the morale of the story. WTH?

Saving Sailor by Renee Riva

A very sweet and funny coming of age novel about an italian ten year old girl who wants nothing more than a southern accent, and her dog. For once a coming of age novel doesn't have to be sad. Read it, it'll put a smile on your face.

contest entry

This is the prompt and story I entered to win my Reckoning Arc

Contest time! Is there a “haunted house” in your neighborhood? In your town? Tell me a bit about it in the comments!The house next store to mine doesn't like people. It would go through a new set of owners every 3-5 years. It's a beautiful house, all brick, nice porch, at the very end of a culdesac. It's lake front, with the woods off to one side and a field off to the other. We were on our third set of new neighbors when the incident happened. My friend was spending the night and we were watching the craft and gossiping. We were only about 10, so my chief complaint was my neighbors. The youngest boy had been chasing my dog up and down the fence the other day trying to spray it with wd40. The oldest threw rocks at me while I jumped on the trampoline and tried to shoot the side of the house with a bbgun, and the parents were always drinking and yelling. Knowing the houses creepy history of getting rid of neighbors ( the last set had moved after their toddler crawled under his parents bed and found a rattle snake, the couple before that moved because they swore up and down ab aligator lived in the lake and sunned in the yard (man made lake, actually just there to collect rain water, doesn't even have fishies) ) we decided to help it along. We went outside under the plum trees and performed a little craft ritual asking to get rid of the neighbors. Moments later we heard them arguing, then screaming, a shot was fired and my friend and I ran inside and hid under the bed vowing never to play witches again, and promising to go to church the next morning. For months no one saw the neighbors, they're lawn grew so high the neighborhood council worried about wildfires and snakes that may be living in the grass. My friend and I told no one what we heard so no one thought anything was amiss. A few months later when my dog got out it ran to their backyard. We followed. It pushed open their back door (evidently unlocked and ajar) and ran inside. We were scared but I loved my dog an couldn't just abandon it. We went inside. There were toys on the floor, shoes by the door, everything in place except a shattered glass figure by the wall. The kitchen window was broken from the inside, the glass spilled onto the porch. The bedrooms were a wreck, clothes thrown everywhere. We fully expected to find bodies but the house was empty. Grabbing my dog we ran home and never did find out what happened to those neighbors. A cranky old couple lives there now. Thus far the house has made no move against them, I figure it's because they're so close to joining the spirit world on their own, but you never know.

baby update

resting and feeling better (I hope) still the cutest baby ever

The Reckoning

Yesterday I received my advanced readers copy of Kelley Armstrong's, The Reckoning. It could not have come at a better time. The husband and I are both sick with a cold that we caught from the baby (go figure, no clue where she got it), who is of course miserable and also teething. Bella is taking her illness like a champ though, we get the occasional tears, but for the most part she just doesn't want to sleep. Her dad and I have been taking turns sitting up with her in the rocking chair, and reading this book made my shift so much better! I needed a treat, and man did this provide it.

So how did I, a lowly blogger in Georgia get ahold of one of the New York Times best selling authors latest installment to her young adult series? I won a contest in which I told the story of my neighbors creepy house. (I'll be posting that later, all true, I swear). Kelley Armstrong is exactly the type of writer I hope to be should I ever get published. She has a great website a myspace page, a face book page (why does blogger acknowledge myspace and not face book in spell check?) a twitter page, and a page for her young adult series here. Technically the myspace page is Chloe's. Anyhow, she interacts with her readers, and has contests, and proofs their work if they request it, and has a message board where you can ask her questions, and actually responds to her emails. She's amazing, and her books are great... and now I'm sounding like a creepy stalker fan, so onto the review.

THE RECKONING

is technically the third book in her young adult series, "The Darkest Powers." Young adult books are different in degree not kind, so grownups like myself are not too good for this series :), its just like her adult books (Bitten, Stolen, and other women of the other world books) only with no sex, which to me isn't a drawback. My husband even likes her books, I read them out loud to him on our many trips to Atlanta (sans the sex scenes cause MAN, would that be awkward to read out loud to my husband as the baby plays with her toys in the backseat). Anyhow, the series stars a young necromancer named Chloe Saunders who is just coming into her powers and gets shipped off to a group home for troubled teens. At this home she discovers other supernaturals like herself, and discover that she is part of an experiment to produce better supernaturals, only problem is it worked too well and the children of the experiment are more powerful than they can handle. You can read the entire first book online for free here along with fairly large excerpts of her next two books. Plot wise, this is pretty much all I can tell you without giving away any details, and that just wouldn't be nice to do when Kelley Armstrong included such a nice note asking me not to divulge any plot details online. So what you see above is less detail than is written on the back of the first two books.

What I thought

Most trilogies follow a formula. The first book is generally the best, it can stand alone, but it does leave you wanting for more, traditionally on an upbeat note as the heroes venture off on their adventure. The second book typically has all the action with a tragic death and ends on a note of hopelessness, and the third book wraps everything up nice a neatly, but typically can't live up to the hype (note that star wars did a reverse of this in episodes 1-3) This doesn't exactly follow that formula. In a good way. The protagonist wants to write screenplays when she grows up, so she's fast to point out how their situation would play out if it was a movie, then explains the more realistic approach they took. I love that, its funny, tongue and cheek, and very accurate.

A striking contrast between this book and its prequels was the steady scenery. The characters stay in one place for awhile, and its a change. The characters suffer cabin fever, and we get to see different sides of them then we have in the past.

I was a little worried about the pacing, it wasn't moving slow, but I shouldn't have, the book read perfectly, it wasn't moving too fast or too slow, and while the grand finale was action packed (as grand finales should be) that wasn't every bit of action for the book.

Three things happened in this book that I cannot disclose.

One I guessed would occur, but thought would be a much bigger deal plot wise. I appreciated that it wasn't, it was one of those "In real life as opposed to movie," moments.

One I knew would occur, and made me smile

And one thing I really really hoped would work out but can completely understand why it didn't but hope to see more of in the future (vague enough for you, lol, sorry, I'll clarify after the release date)

The ending was typical for Kelley Armstrong, and well done. Things wrap up but it has that moment of "well in fiction things would have ended up like a, b, and c. Have I mentioned how much I like that aspect of her books?

A character I'm surprised I like, Tori. I hated her in the first book, she was mean, but she grew on me, and one thing that helped is that no one has forgotten how mean she was. Armstrong doesn't pull a lost and go, "No, Ben has never hurt a fly. Why don't we trust him?" No one has forgotten how Tori acted in book one, and they won't let her forget. The characters inability to move past it helps me move past it because I don't feel like I'm being manipulated into liking this character. There's an element of poor little rich girl there, but it doesn't excuse what she did.

A character I would like to see more of?

Simon. Don't get me wrong, he was in every scene, but with so many strong personalities its kind of easy to forget he's there. Every now and then he'll speak up to agree with Chloe, but mostly it was just supposed to remind the reader he was there. It's not a flaw in the writing, his character is a well developed, easy going, easy to get along with guy in a room full of opinionated people. He's just going to put his two cents in and then remain silent. My husband does the same thing when my brother, cousin, and I argue politics at Thanksgiving dinner. (Maybe that's why I want to see more of Simon, lol, his personality is a lot like my husbands.) He has a large number of solo scenes with chloe, in fact the solo scenes with Chloe were very well balanced between the three main characters, but I wanted more interaction between him and everyone else.

My favorite character?

chloe, I'm jealous, if I had been that level headed and intelligent as a teen... well I wasn't really ever in a situation where it would have made much of a difference, but still, she's smart, and resourceful, and exactly the sort of book protagonist young girls should be reading about. This is not a girl who is going to fall into a deep depression if her vampire lover leaves her randomly in the forest. (I like the twilight books, I just hate Bella Swan, my Bella and I are going to have a long talk about healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships when she's old enough to read them) this is not a girl who would be ok with being stalked, threatened, and belittled. She has her own mind, thoughts and opinions, and they will be heard. It's well balanced though, because she's wrong for every time she's right.

I haven't said much about Derrick. He reminds me of Clay from the Men of the Otherworld stories. He's not a carbon copy by any means, the similarities have a fairly strong reason behind them. He's a great character. He's the sort of guy that I would have thought was amazing when I was actually the target audience for this novel. Back when I thought that if two people argued enough it meant they had strong feelings for each other (well watch any chick flick, tv show, read any book, or heck, watch children's cartoon and tell me there's anything other than a love hate relationship out there) He's protective, and sweet while fierce and smart, and all of that good stuff. Also he has the ability to admit when he's wrong (take notes hubby). I have no complaints or insights regarding his character, just a well done.

Overall a very strong plot, strong characters, and great pacing. I could only hope to write this well.

You know what job I want? I can't find it anywhere, I don't know if it's actually out there. I would love to just read arcs. Reviewers do it, presumably someone in the publishing industry reads the books to see if they are worth publishing. How do you get that job? Heck, I'd do it free. I'd pay to do it. Especially for Kelley Armstrong books, if I could be one of her advanced readers for all of her books... well that would rock.

Couponing

So I went to a mommy meetup yesterday and learned all about couponing from one of our moms who saves like a hundred bucks every time she goes grocery shopping. See, I suck at coupons, I'm an advertisers dream, when I get a coupon I buy an item I wouldn't normally buy, or buy a brand thats more expensive than my norm. But I think I may do better now thanks to this website. I can use a manufacturers coupon, a store coupon, and a competitors coupon for the same item! Also publix buy one get one free items are actually just half off both item, so if you have a buy one get one free coupon its like 1/4th of the price. My head is spinning with all this information, lol, so I'm going to work on my grocery list, and let you know how it goes.