What's with today, today?

I feel that after ranting it is good to add some balance to the blog by posting about cheerful things. What the world needs is more colour and cuteness and kindness. These things make me smile: Definitely check it out at Colour Me Katie And Bakerella always appeals to my sweet tooth. Hope all is well with you, readers!

I had an assignment yesterday, and all I wanted to do was write a blog post. Now it's handed in, and my motivation is flagging. Still! I did have all that time to think about what I wanted to say, so here goes... I remember first reading Harry Potter. I believe it was 1999, my parents were in the UK and when I went to visit they had Harry Potter, which was being reviewed at the time in the papers. But I hadn't really heard of it before. To my family, children's and young adult fantasy is pretty standard reading, and it was pretty natural for us to all read any book that came into the house. So, enough of setting the scene, I read Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone and I really enjoyed it. It had a great world, and it was a lot of fun, the language was so bubbly, it had a great humour to it and the story was a great adventure. But then the trouble started- I read the first review. And here follows the account of my continuing encounter with People's Reactions to ...

Tuesday Teaser :  "Everyone looked up. Swooping down in a shadowy cloud of broken umbrellas, Mr Brokkenboll was dropping towards them out of the sky." China Mieville, Un Lun Dun , p. 259

On Monday it was Andrew's and my second wedding anniversary. It was also the Easter long weekend. In celebration, we left town and headed for the mountains, staying in a place just outside Lithgow. It was a really awesome weekend. We got to relax, see some sights, sleep, and eat nice food. So, some highlights... Instead of going to Jenolan Caves, which turned out to be packed, we went for a walk elsewhere, and found this spectacular view. Also a lot of very steep stairs. I read a lot in the leaflets in our cabin about a walk to the 'glow worm tunnel', accessible only after a 37 km drive down a dirt road. Lured by the promise of glow worms, but wary of disappointment, we made the trek and behold! There were glow worms. Unfortunately it's a bit tricky to get a photo of the things, so you will have to make do with these photos of the end of the tunnel, one from the inside and one from the outside. Apparently it is an old mine shaft which the glow worms took a fancy to ...

I came across this meme at The Captive Reader (my exploration of the world of book blogging continues!) which apparently originated with MizB at Should Be Reading , it goes like this:          Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page.  Share with us two (2) “teaser”             sentences from that page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! So here goes:     There was another thing she said, my wife, sympathetically, referring to the way I regarded life on the one hand and film on the other. "Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?" Don DeLillo, Point Omega p. 55

Finding a new blog is usually a fairly haphazard process- it occurs through one of the three following ways: someone I know starts a blog and I find out about it, someone I know recommends a blog/blog post OR I stumble upon it through a trail of links. For that reason the blogs I read represent a fairly diverse (and unrepresentative of me) range of interests, here are some I probably haven't mentioned before: Ronni's blog from Cambridge, which I have just added a link to in my sidebar. Style Bubble - A fashion blog from the UK Pioneer Woman - A blog about life in rural America + cooking + homeschooling Smart Bitches Trashy Books - A blog about Romance novels I enjoy these blogs, I really do, different as they are. Though they don't have much in common, I guess I could say that a good blog has personality, and these do. But I feel there is something missing in my life, and that something is book reviews. I can't seem to find them on online newspaper sites (or even i...