Reading – At the end of January my sister loaned me 19 books. Eight of those were the rest of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I’ve only read two of them because I’ve had enough of Richard and Kahlan, thank you very much. Those who have read the books know what I mean. Those who haven’t… let’s say that if Romeo and Juliet were starcrossed lovers then these two are walking disasters. I don’t want to spoil anything but there is always something that happens to them that separates them for months at a time. This usually happens in the first couple of chapters of the book. The rest of the 600 pages are devoted to them trying to get back together. Instead of continuing after I read the sixth book I started reading The Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb. I read these long enough ago to forget a large part of the story but recently enough to be able to remember bits and pieces. I’ve almost finished the final book so I’ll need to move on to something else.

Photography – I’ve been keeping busy with my new camera. I started a new 365 project with it to help myself learn how to use it. The week after I got the camera I bought a 50mm lens for it. I’m loving it so far. It could only be better if I could use autofocus but I don’t have the right camera body. Manual focus is OK though it has made me wonder if I need to have my eyes checked. Lately I’ve been forgetting to check my ISO setting until after I’m done shooting which has resulted in some grainy photos that shouldn’t be grainy. That’s what practice is for, right?

Gaming – Once again I’m playing Ragnarok Online. It gives me something to do while hubby is busy playing Call of Duty of Halo 3. It can be a time sink like most MMOs but no worse than watching TV. While we were in for my dad’s 50^th birthday party my sister mentioned that she had started playing Super Mario Galaxy again. I never finished that game; I got to the toy planet and hated being Spring Mario. I think I’d like to pick that up again as well as my replay of Twilight Princess. I’ll just have to wrest the TV away from hubby sometime.

Twittering – Most of what I’ve had to say lately has been short, random thoughts or sharing a random link. I’m glad that I placed my twitter updates on this site where they are because that at least gets updated almost daily.

Suffering – A bit dramatic but that’s what it is. I’ve decided (again) that I need to stop drinking as much soda as I have been. Last year I started out saying “I’ll only drink one or two a week.” Having that stuff in the house, though, was a bad idea. Sometime last fall it became a “I’ll only drink one a day.” That didn’t last for long either so some days I was drinking two a day. While I don’t plan to cut soda out entirely I don’t want to be dependent upon it to keep a caffeine headache a way. I should be over the headaches in a day or so, which is the worst of it. The other downside of not drinking soda is that the water bottle I bring with me to work runs out much faster.

During my first trip to the library I walked into the first floor and found myself in the children’s section. Since I was looking for The Hero of Ages a librarian directed me upstairs. She looked the book up for me and told me that it would be in the science fiction section upstairs. I was a little confused but continued upstairs. Once there I saw that all of the fiction books were not sorted by author, but rather into categories such as Large Print, Romance, Mystery, Western, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. I started my search in the Science Fiction section but couldn’t find the book. Since I think that the book is more fantasy than sci-fi I moved to the Fantasy section and noticed that there was a lot of similarity between the two. On later visits I think I’ve even found a copy of the same book in each section. Either way, I wasn’t able to find the book; it was actually located on the New Books shelf.

Before my last trip to the library I looked up a few books in their online catalog. I was intrigued when I saw that one of the books was listed in the “Oprah” section. I thought to myself surely that’s not right. Do they really have an Oprah section? The answer: yes, they do.

That’s not the whole section, of course, but it isn’t a large section. I’m supposing books that were chosen as part of Oprah’s Book Club are placed here. To me it doesn’t make any sense, mostly because it’s not always easy to define what category a book should be in. The confusion between sci-fi and fantasy should be enough reason to not sort books in this manner. I would think that being able to go straight to an author’s name would be a much faster way of finding a book rather than trying to figure out if the library decided if it was fantasy or sci-fi. To make matters worse, they have a section of books that is simply labeled Fiction.

This whole mess won’t stop me from visiting the library. I mean, who can argue about getting to read books for free? However, I’m sure I’ll have plenty more experiences of trying to deduce where they might have put a book when I only know the author’s name, like when I tried to find The Other Boleyn Girl. It’s in the general Fiction section.

Time? You’re telling me it’s time I’ve been running short on instead? Well, that could be true. I’ve not had a weekend to myself in a while and with moving and everything I have a ton of housework piling up on me. Not to mention I’ve had several very busy weeks at work. You say if I just take the time to sit down and work on something it will come to me? I’ll take your word on that.

By the way I just found out that if your left hand is shifted left from the home keys on a keyboard when you try to type ‘please’ it will come out ‘ok…’ That’s when I noticed something was wrong.