First, I just want to say that I love fall weather. I love sweaters and scarves, the way the cool air feels on your face while you are all bundled up, the way the sun shines on red and golden leaves, the way you want to sip on hot tea and knit a bit,  and the way fall makes you cuddle up with someone you love around a toasty campfire. Yes, I love fall.

On to Glee! Last night I watched the pilot episode of Glee on Youtube. OMG!!! When they sang “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, I got chills. It was so freakin’ awesome. I love when anyone does a great cover of that song, but the Glee version was particularly excellent. You can listed to a pretty good recording of it on Youtube.

Here is my current list:

1. The Shack by William P. Young
2. Omnivor’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
3. Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich
4. Three to Get Deadly by Janet Evanovich
5. Four to Score by Janet Evanovich
6. High Five by Janet Evanovich
7. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
8. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
9. Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer (link)
10. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

I realized this weekend that I had been neglecting my book list updates.

Here is my current list:

1. The Shack by William P. Young
2. Omnivor’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
3. Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich
4. Three to Get Deadly by Janet Evanovich
5. Four to Score by Janet Evanovich
6. High Five by Janet Evanovich
7. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
8. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
9. Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer (link)

# 6 – 9 are the newly added ones.  I hate to admit this but my obsessive reading defect kicked in while reading the Twilight series. I seemed to utterly lack self control while reading those books. It is taking all the self control I have not to run out and buy the third book in the series. Heck, last night I ended up reading the 300 page partial draft of Midnight Sun that Meyer has posted on her website just so that my brain would be satiated with another retreat into Bella & Edward’s world. Why do I get this way when reading fantasy novels?  I wasn’t even looking for escape when I picked up Twilight, I was just curious as to what all my girlfriends were talking about.  It hasn’t helped that I have been home sick that past four days and have used that as an excuse to endulge in my obsessive reading behavior.

(Note: I felt totally guilty reading Midnight Sun because Meyer had this whole explanation about how the draft had been leaked out and in the end she decided to just post it, but that she was so upset about the whole incident that she didn’t know when she would finish it. I felt guilty but the obsession of “I need to know” was full present … I couldn’t stop.  Now that I have read it, I am kind of sad that she may never publish a finished version.  It was so fascinating to essentially reread a story you have already read, but from the other perspective. Absolutely fascinating. So many little side comments that were made in the original story became clear. The stories of so many other side characters became more fleshed out. It made the story more complete and the character of Bella stronger.  Okay … enough of the note. If your a Twilight fan and you haven’t read Midnight Sun yet, follow the link above to Meyer’s page and give it a read.)

Anyhow, I am almost half-way to my goal of 20 books this year. If I keep going at the rate I am going, I think I can exceed 20 books easily.  Especially with they plane flights, long drives and relaxing on the beach time I have coming up next month.

The past few days have been absolutely lovely. Bryan and I have been able to work out in the garden.  I made several beautiful flower arrangements from some of our flowers, herbs and weeds (only the pretty ones, of course).  We went out and bought some additional flower seeds to plant so that I could keep making flower arrangements through the summer. But now, today, it is gloomy and rainy. The temperature is supposed to drop down to 31 tonight! Brrrr! And, there is a possibility of snow showers tomorrow morning! Why, Mother Nature, why? Why do you taunt us with the beauty of Spring?  Last Spring, something similar happened. Just when everything was starting to bloom we had a terrible frost that killed all the lovely flowers and beautiful bloomage.  And then shortly after that it became muggy and hot and crappy!  Spring was too short last year!  I don’t want to get gyped again!

I just realized that “gyped” is probably a racial/cultural slur against gypsies.  Hmmm … will have to reconsider using that word.

Over the past few days I have been increasing my tech savvyness.

1. I had been hearing about this thing called Twitter but just thought it was another social networking site like Facebook and MySpace, and so I wasn’t that interested. However, on Friday, listening to Talk of the Nation’s Science Friday show, I heard a bit more about it and was interested enough to go check it out. It is a neat little service that essentially allows you to mini blog. I can update my Twitter account through out the day as to what I am doing, and my family and friends can subscribe to my Twitter feed and see what I am up to.  I don’t think anyoen other than my family would really be interested, but you can also subscribe to news feeds and stuff like that.
2. I use Outlook quite a lot. It provides an environment for reading my email, keeps all my appointments and contacts, and most importantly, it syncs with my phone. Recently, I found a neat little add on for Outlook called OutSync. It updates the photos of contacts in your Outlook address book with their current Facebook photo. Very nice.
3. The growing breath of Google’s services never cease to amaze me. A couple months ago I found out about Google Flu Trends which attempts to predict when flu epidemics will break out. So far they have a good track record and can make good predictions before the CDC. A few days ago, I found out about another cool service that Google has called Google Analytics. This service allows you to track traffic on your website in a much cooler way than my server host provides. Google is very smart. They offer free services so that they can collect data and then make something even cooler with the collected data. A couple years ago they started GOOG-411, which was a free 411 service that people could call and use. They used the free service to collect millions of voice samples which were then used to develop superior voice recognition software. Very savvy. So, it makes me wonder what they will do with all the data being collected from Google Analytics.

Okay … it is late and I feel like I am rambling.

The website for LeafyT’s is finally up and running. LeafyT’s is the business at which my husband works. They hand make shirts (and other stuff) like the one you see below. Each shirt if one of a kind.

They do custom work as well. If you have something you want leafied up, they will do it. I’ve seen some skirts and dresses that they have leafied up before. They come out quite nice. And my favorite, my husband leafied up some onesies as baby shower presents for a couple of friends last year. They were definitely one of a kind, always to be remembered, gifts.

Anyhow, if you have a second, check out their new website: www.leafyt.com

Lys had her VIA Signature Strengths up on her blog, and I was curious as to what it was. So, I followed the links to the Authentic Happiness webpage and took the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire. It was pretty interesting. Here are my signature strengths:

I think it is pretty accurate. The first and fifth strength seem very much related to me, as do the second and fourth. The third kind of goes with the first and fifth, but only tangentially.

I just had the most delightful dental experience. I actually walked out of the dentist’s office beaming! I have not had my teeth cleaned since I’ve been in grad school (that translates into about 3.5 years of no deep teeth cleaning). So, there was a lot of tartar build up. However, the hygienist was great. She was quick, didn’t cause much pain or discomfort and distracted me with tons of compliments. She complimented my wedding ring, my eye brows, my teeth, my dedication to wearing my retainer every night. Seriously, that is probably the best form of distraction I have ever encountered.

After such a long time of not having a professional cleaning, I was surprised to find out that I only had one tiny little occlusion in a back moral, and the dentist thought it best to wait until my next cleaning to take care of it. Sweet!!!

There was this series of books that I started reading when I was in high school called the Sword of Truth Series. It was a great series, at least the first five books were; it got a little weird after that. It was a great saga about standing up and fighting for what is good and right in the world.

Sam Raimi, (executive producer of TV shows Hercules and Xena, director and producer of Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness, and director of the recent Spider Man movies) is producing a TV series based on the Sword of Truth Series called Legend of the Seeker.

All I can say, is that I am so freakin’ excited. I get giddy every time I think about it. Raimi has set out to produce a weekly fantasy TV series that is movie production quality. Not only is this great for the show itself, but Raimi is raising the bar for other network television shows, especially those in the Fantasy & SciFi genre. I hope that this show is sucessful and sparks a wave of other quality, fantasy/scifi tv dramas.

The show will be broadcast on CW (at least in my area) which is a channel that we get in HD on our sexy HDTV. Hurray for high quality digital media!

If you want to see some trailers for the show, go to http://www.legendoftheseeker.com/index.html.

Has anyone else out there experienced blog spam? Email spam is bad enough, but now I am getting spam comments on my blog! These spam comments always have a link in the comment, so my guess is that they want to increase their page ranking on Google (more links from other sites to their site increases their ranking which means they move up the list of results Google returns on a search). Fortunately, all comment posts (which aren’t that many) are filtered thru me before they appear on my site. So, all such spam comments are deleted before they can cause an increase in page ranking. Muahahaha! But seriously, we are soon going to need spam filters on our blogs the way we need spam filters on our emails.