Despite the lack of boring blog posts for the past month or so, I am not, in fact, dead; just boring.

The past month has been too meh to lead to anything of any interest to post about, so I haven’t. I’ve still been tweeting, Facebooking/Google+-ing, and posting random things to NerdMonster.org, though, same as always.

All that said: blog post! I can think of no coherent way to tie the following things together, so, have a list of stuff.

• Speaking of Nerd Monster, I’m pretty surprised I haven’t abandoned it (yet). I usually have a hard time maintaining interest in one site, let alone two. Thing is, I love the idea of it: random things that I find amusing, infuriating, fascinating, awesome, or otherwise interesting. Things too small to warrant a blog post, but which can’t really be shared effectively via Twitter or Facebook. Tumblr’s pretty great for that, actually. Though I still get the side-eye whenever someone I know to be a fellow Redditor finds out I have a Tumblr blog. One can be both a Redditor and a Tumblr(er?), I swear!

• With just over a month left in 2011¹, I think I’m actually going to complete/satisfy one of my 2011 New Year’s resolutions: reading 75 books over the course of the year. I posted about it back in July, at which point I was twenty-one books (26%) ahead of schedule. Over the months between then and now, my reading ferver slowed a bit, but I’m still ahead of schedule — six books (8%) ahead, to be exact. I have a long list of books I want to read, so I should definitely finish successfully, and might even surpass the goal by year’s end. If I do finish all 75, I’m definitely going to roll the resolution over — but this time, I’m going to aim for a level one-hundred. Should be do-able, right?

• Speaking of reading, I’m still incredibly bummed that Borders finally closed its doors. There was a lovely location just ~one mile from me that served as my go-to bookshop. Often I’d just ramble around the shelves, no specific titles in mind, to see what jumped out at me. Now that it’s gone, the closest decent bookstore is Barnes & Noble at Fairlane Green in Allen Park. It’s only five miles away, but it’s in an area (Allen Park) I’m rarely in, so I actually have to go out of my way to go there. Besides, I just do not like Barnes & Noble. I can’t put my finger on why exactly: the stores are more aesthetically pleasing than Borders (Borders was great, but B&N has always had an, oh, more up-scale feel to it), true, but it’s just… there’s an air about the stores, its employees, and its customers I have just never cottoned to. As a result, I don’t go often, which makes for less book-buying. Oh, sure, I buy the occasional book online, but it’s not my preferred method of book-buying for two reasons: Often I have no idea what I want, and wandering a bookstore to find a book is more appealing than wandering the electronic aisles of Amazon. It just is. Second, when I decide I want a book, I want it now. I like my gratification instant, and I loathe waiting for books to arrive. As a result, I’ve actually been patronising the local library more. I’ve always been a heavy library user — I can’t stand buying a book to find I dislike it, so often I’ll borrow a copy, read a bit, and then go buy it if I like it — but once I discovered how awesome the local library system is, I’ve been using it more often. And it is awesome. Southeastern Michigan has a lovely library problem, the aptly-titled Library Network. It’s basically a reciprocal-borrowing program: if you have a library card for one of the sixty-five libraries in the network, you can borrow books from any of the other libraries. If you have a Taylor library card, for example, you can grab a book from the Wixom library. I’ve known about it for a while, but until recently, I hadn’t paid much attention: why would I drive out to Wixom to borrow a book rather than go to Allen Park and buy it? Then I discovered that holds applied not only to local books, but any. Want Book X, but only Waterford has it? Put a hold on it and it gets delivered to your local library, ready to be picked up. Since the Taylor library is even closer to me than Borders, you can see where this is going, right? If one of the libraries has it, I put a hold on it, wait a day, and pick it up at my local library. Of course, if it turns out I adore the book, I’ll still buy it — usually on Amazon. Or, if I’m feeling in need of RIGHTNOWRIGHTNOW gratification, if it’s available, I download a digital edition for my iPhone.²

• The only other things of note, really, can be summed up in one sentence: SKYRIM AND MINECRAFT ZOMG. Skyrim was released 11/11/11, of course, and Minecraft was finally released/taken out of beta yesterday. The former is beautiful and vast and lovely, but a bit disappointing in some ways. I could go on and on about the lackluster NPCs and glitches and gaps in logic — and I may in a future post — but it’s otherwise a great game. Not the soul-sucking, time-sinking epic game I was expecting, but close. And then there’s Minecraft. I’ve been playing it for a few months now, including the most recent pre-releases, so there’s nothing terribly surprising in the final release³: new sounds, ending, new achievements, etc etc etc. The multiplayer server I play on, Blynkyland, is currently down until its owner can find another host, so I’ve been playing single-player again. I’d forgotten just how boring single-player is. Before, I’d have found another server when this one went down, but it’s full of such amazingly awesome people (Best. Server. Ever.) that I’m pretty content to wait it out and spend its downtime learning the ins and outs of enchanting and breeding and working on redstone ideas.

Aaaand that’s all I gots for now.

1. Seriously, it’s November already? Didn’t 2010 just end? Feels that way, anyway. [↩]
2. I am still strongly anti-Nook/Kindle… for now. I may be buying myself one for Yule, though, for just those I NEED DIS I NEED DIS OH GOD I NEED DIS moments. [↩]
3. Which, personally, feels to me like a mistake on Mojang’s part. So much of the playing fanbase kept up with the bleeding-edge pre-releases it can’t help but be a bit of a disappointment for them. It would’ve benefited them a great deal in terms of word-of-mouth and player squee-ness to have kept a feature or two held back for final release. The end poem, maybe? [↩]

I’m feeling too blah-y to tie this all together, so have a list.

• My sinuses ache like hell. I’ve been taking my Vicodin as needed, but even so, they just… ache, especially under my eye (maxillary sinus, where the tumour lurked) and above it (frontal sinus, where the doctor did some digging just to make sure nothing had escaped his sight). I made the mistake of going outside today. It’s 11° F today, -13° F with the wind-chill (that’s -11° and -25° C, respectively), so the cold air was like bloody needles in my nose. Now I’m back inside, bundled up in a big blanket on my sofa, and I am not going outside again. Nope. Not gonna happen. Hell no.
• I’m tired of shaking all the damn time, dangit. I’m been taking my iron supplements and drinking a lot of water like a good girl, but my blood levels are still, apparently, low enough that everything I does leaves me out of breath and shaky. This is getting old.
• I gave Fans & Robots a new layout last night. I couldn’t sleep — insomnia’s back, yay? — so I thought I’d do something semi-productive. Not bad for being half-asleep and fairly drugged up, eh?
• I just started reading Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall. I’m about one hundred pages in, and it’s a good read so far. I must admit, however, that as a Big Love fan, I’m having a hard time not picturing Warren Jeffs as Alby Grant/Matt Ross in my head. It’s books like these that make me (at least temporarily) grateful for my own dysfunctional-yet-not-that-dysfunctional family. (And no, I’m not calling plyg families inherently dysfunctional (more power to you if you can make it work); just the likes of Walls’, whose family was definitely dysfunctional.)

Aaaand that’s all I got. Back to watching “People’s Court” and drinking Candy Cane Lane tea. I think it’s also time for a nap. Zzzzzzzzzzz….