mmm mmm snarky.

I'm feeling antagonistic today. So I'm not writing reviews of stuff, just to make sure I'm not being deliberately unfair just because it's fun.

Still on the review list:

• whatever "Castle of Dark Dreams" series book I finally finished by Nina Bangs. [obligatory snarky comment (osc): Nina obviously doesn't since her male characters only have "his sex" and that implies the Ken doll physique.]
• Jeaniene Frost's First Drop of Crimson [osc: Oooh someone bought the advanced fantasy-foo dice for title words!]
• Angela Knight's Master of Fire [osc: title foo word score is negative since the evil villain uses a gun and the hero isn't master of shit]
• Push, the movie, which is called that for no reason and managed to keep a famous book of the same name from getting that movie title. [osc: Dakota Fanning really lost her mojo getting stuck with this part.]

What I've resisted being snarky about so far, there was a link to a posting on poetry which contains an entire poem, by someone purportedly not the OP, sans copyright. That can't be fair use and undermines a poet's intellectual property. Unless it was written by the OP or in the public domain, then it's not right to post a poem in its entirety. Yes, I suck at resisting snarking. I'm sure taking it to my own space still counts against me in terms of being bitchy about it.  

Too late, already snarky: Yesterday some jerk pasted in a plagiarized (because there was no citation or even any quotation indicators) wiki content into a LJ comment; it was vilely religious spew. I inadvertently started a flame war by protesting that the spew implied the OP agreed with it. Seriously, it started with "Jesus Our Lord"... I know it's not fair of me to be really offended for someone else, but I hate the way it's okay to assume someone is a Christian. [Anti-Christian diatribe excised because it's rude to pile on them during their holiday. Even though they deserve it for the way they do nothing to prevent assholishness done in their apparently common interest. I am a better person than that.]  

Snark recovery plan: Today I am making beef stew and fresh bread. I am going out to lunch because without bread and hours before the stew will be ready there isn't a lot of accessible. Plus, better today than tomorrow, since the few restaurants that are open on Sunday will likely be closed or prix fixe brunch for Easter. 

Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

I totally suck at buying stuff.

Purchases for today:
♦ 2 pair jeans for SO, both heavily discounted and theoretically what he likes. Making this a thoroughly endorsed purchase on his part (despite the impending whinge fest when he's expected to try them on after the box arrives.) He wears jeans to work and his current selection looks like they've come from years of taunting the garbage disposal.
♦ selection of used and new books averaging just over $4 per but a dozen of them.

I spent just over $100. And have spent the last 45 minutes trying to convince my stomach that food stays inside.

I'm going to get a lot of enjoyment out of the books. I will be a lot less ashamed of my SO going out in public if his pants don't look like he has chewed the hems. I will be happier if I don't have to listen to the bitching about how all the pants have giant baggy arses that would fit three of him in each leg. (Especially since I'm rather glad that the style of my jeans changed to have extra room in the thighs. So it feels like a personal slam against me whenever he says that.)

These are good purchases. Well considered. High value. Currently discounted. Well within the discretional spending budget. We are not running short of money such that my buying books will mean I have to juggle the power bill and the car insurance. It's not a problem. And I have made myself so upset over it that I might literally vomit from buying things. It's ridiculous. I know I'm being ridiculous.

Remember when being grounded was a punishment?

I figured I should think about where I might like to go on vacation. This is a good year to travel. Many things are on special. There is the woe of flying anywhere due to the Touch Someone Again staff and the inevitable public molestation.

I want to go to Maui. I want to take the sunrise bike tour that goes down the volcano and stops for breakfast afterward (bikes are taken up by truck). I want to see the lava flows from a helicopter and snorkle with sea turtles. I want my hotel to include breakfast and have a view of something other than the parking lot. I want to be able to find lovely dinner places that the locals eat at. What stops me from doing this, all the hotels look exactly the same from here and they all are on these giant plantation-sized resort grounds so you just know there will be miles and miles of walking between your room and anything. Plus they charge for parking and hide the "because you're staying here" resort fees and energy fees, so your room is going to cost probably $100 more per night than they say it does. All the stuff I want to do costs extra and a lot of extra.

I want to go and see Machu Picchu, but it's hard to get there and the amount of hiking requires a level of foot health I don't think I have. Plus people visiting it are destroying it so there is this massive guilt for even wanting to see it. It can be very expensive if you go with a tour, though supposedly most of those things can be bought locally for a fraction of the cost. My Spanish is not up to that.

I would love to visit the Galapagos and see the giant tortoises in person. That was the most disappointing thing about the San Diego Zoo... the way they painted numbers on their tortoises like they weren't important enough to actually care about their individuality or appearance. Most of the Galapagos trips are ludicrously expensive. Supposedly it's because there were increased fees for accessing the delicate islands, but it doesn't appear that the fare increases were really passed along.

National parks are having a free week in late April. Including the Grand Canyon. I think that might be neat to see... a lot of these things are much more impressive in person than one would suspect. Like Mount Rushmore, which seems kind of stupid, it's astonishing when you're actually there and it's actually not fogged in and you can actually get up close to the rail and have an unimpeded view. But some of the big deal things weren't all that impressive in person; Yosemite rather sucks. We went on the lowest gate day they had had in 10 years and there were people everywhere. Three mile hikes had people moving in a queue like lines for the good rides at Disneyland. I liked Yellowstone, but Old Faithful was kind of a disappointment compared to the mud cauldrons which had no one else watching them.

It's a good time for us to travel. We're old enough that something unexpected might happen and we might die before we do any of this stuff, so we should start now. But it's a lot of work to pick a where and find enough places to eat that it won't seem like a wasted trip even if the destined attraction is disappointing. Often by the time I have sufficiently researched potential locations I'm mentally exhausted and have no interest in actually going.

We had 3 months in which to book a weekend trip 2 hours from here and the deal expired before we went. It didn't sell out, it expired, we could have called them the morning of the last day and gone but did not.