Notes From My Desk: Holy Blogger Batman!

I just spent all of Saturday night attempting to make my blog pretty.

...mmm okay, that's a lie.  I spent all of Saturday attempting to make my blog pretty -- not just the night portion of it.  ALL.  OF.  SATURDAY.  From the Save a Word Saturday post till now.  But I'm finally happy with how the blog looks and I learned a lot about how to do this kind of stuff, so when I want to change it again (in another two months), I won't have as much difficulty.

...okay, that's another lie.  I won't make it two months without wanting to change something.

A big thanks to Shabby Blogs, who provide lots of free backgrounds and headers and post dividers and all kinds of cool make-my-blog-pretty stuff!  They also provided tutorials that I desperately needed because I'm kind of internet stupid.  Thanks to said tutorials, Where the Mome Raths Outgrabe has a button!  Yay!  It's down on the right, so take a look and if you're feeling especially nice and wonderful, grab it!

Happy Saturday,

Save a Word Saturday (#4)

 

Welcome to Save-a-Word Saturday, a new blog hop hosted by The Feather and the Rose.
The aim is to spread love of old and unusual words by sharing them with other bloggers and thereby saving these precious, wonderful, whirling words from the dusty, lonely corners of the oldest, least visited vaults of the Word Bank.

The rules run thusly:

1. Create a lovely blog post that links back to this one. The easiest way to do that would be to grab the code under our pretty Save-a-Word Saturday button. Just copy and paste it into the HTML part of your blog. 

2.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice).

3. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

4. Add a link to your blog in the linky list below (it's down there somewhere). Then hop to as many other blogs as you can in search of as many wonderful words as possible!

5. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

This week's theme is:

Cast Iron Skillets

And the word I have chosen is:

labrose
adj. - thick-lipped.

And my wondrous Cast Iron Skillet related sentences:

And as I whipped my cast iron skillet across his labrose face, I was filled with a satisfaction like none other.

Feature and Follow Friday (#8)

Feature & Follow is hosted by Parajunkee of Parajunkee's View and Alison of Alison Can Read.  Each host will have their own Feature Blog and this way it’ll allow us to show off more new blogs!

Question of the Week:  Activity!  Who do you want to be?  If you could be any character from a book.  What do you think that character looks like and what do you have in common?

A:  This is tough question!  I think I have to go with Meghan Chase from the Iron King series by Julie Kagawa.  She gets to go on adventures through the Nevernever; how cool is that?  And her side-kicks include Puck and a snark talking cat.  Wahhh!!  Meghan Chase, I want your life!  As for what she looks like, in the book she is described with long blonde hair and green eyes, but I always imagined her with strawberry blonde hair and a heart shaped face.  I think my version was a bit more faerie-like than what Julie Kagawa intended.  She's loyal and stubborn, which I can see in myself.  She's also brave, but I don't think I've ever had a time where I had to be brave... so maybe we have that in common too and I'll never know for sure?

Review: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story...

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, but now stained red and dripping blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

And she, for whatever reason, spares his life.

Hardcover, 316 pages

Published August 30th 2011 by Tor Teen 

(summary grabbed from GoodReads)

Anna Dressed in Blood had a different feel than most (if not all) YA books I’ve read.  A lot of the “different” of this book probably stems from it having a male protagonist.  The YA sea is an estrogen ocean, so the main character being a boy was rather refreshing.  Even more so, I love that he sounded like a boy-boy.  Gruff, practical, driven… not typical girl traits.  Cas was a pleasure to read.

Other than that, I don’t have much to say about Anna Dressed in Blood.  I liked it, but I didn’t love it.  I really don’t understand the hype; it was good, but not quite brilliant for me.  I was hoping for more in a lot of categories: the love element, the horror element, and oh-ma-gawd element… I think it just got over-hyped for me with all the stellar reviews.  It makes me wonder if I should stop reading reviews for books before I read them, what with the possible spoilers and over zealousness that sometimes happen.  Reading reviews are a double edged sword, aren’t they?  You can find a book more accurately that will be a good fit, but it could also taint the reading experience.  Hmm… poof balls.

Final Thought: Anna gets 2.5 out of 3 toadstools

                          This lack of an actual review gets 2.5 out of 15 toadstools.  Bad Momo.

                          Reading reviews get 2.5 out of 5 toadstools.

Also posted on GoodReads

Notes From My Desk: 100 Days of Outgrabing

Red Panda = Lesser Panda = Greater Cuteness

A big thank you to anyone who's followed, commented, read a post, or just glanced at my little home on the web!  And this wouldn't be a good anniversary post without an irrelevant cute animal photo!

It's been 100 days since Where the Mome Raths Outgrabe was born!  YAY!  I started blogging back in August and didn't really know if I could handle blogging on top of school (which was about to start up again) and work (I have a full time job at a hospital) and life (I don't have much of one, but I thought I'd just add that for good measure).

Thank you,

 Momo the Mome Rath

P.S. (I like parentheses!)

Review: Awaken by Katie Kacvinsky

Maddie lives in a world where everything is done on the computer. Whether it’s to go to school or on a date, people don’t venture out of their home. There’s really no need. For the most part, Maddie’s okay with the solitary, digital life—until she meets Justin. Justin likes being with people. He enjoys the physical closeness of face-to-face interactions. People aren’t meant to be alone, he tells her.

Suddenly, Maddie feels something awakening inside her—a feeling that maybe there is a different, better way to live. But with society and her parents telling her otherwise, Maddie is going to have to learn to stand up for herself if she wants to change the path her life is taking.

In this not-so-brave new world, two young people struggle to carve out their own space.

Hardcover, 309 pages

Published May 23rd 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children

(summary grabbed from GoodReads)

I originally started reading Awaken during the summer, but put it down to try and read later.  I thought that maybe I missed something while reading it the first time because the characters seemed inconsistent.  Then I realized, no -- the characters were simply that: inconsistent.  Here are a few more adjectives for them: unlikable, boring, and confusing.  This book had such great promise, which is the main reason I was going to try and read it again eventually.  I thought the book presented a logical possible future: one where people don't leave the house unless necessary and where they are attached to their computers not out of want, but requirement (at least that is what I got from the blurb).  It's not much of a stretch and I can see our world going in that direction.

One problem was that Maddie's world wasn't a stretch at all.  The world is supposedly 50 years in the future, but the technology hasn't really advanced.  The only innovation that is addressed is that there is online schooling, but it hasn't completely gotten rid of person-to-person instruction as there as group in-person study sessions.  I felt like it should have been more extreme; that people did not come into contact normally -- that would have been more interesting to me.  There also were not any new cool gizmos and gadgets of the future and instead, she describes an iPad.  I seriously hope we've advanced past the iPad at least a little in 50 years. 

But my real issue was the fact that Maddie was a hot mess of a character.  I was really intrigued by the idea that the main character was the daughter of a big shot.  In other dystopian novels like Delirium, Matched, and Uglies, our heroine is a mostly normal girl living her life in her society.  Maddie was connected to power, and that could have been really cool depending on how it was explored.  Maddie could have been the dutiful daughter, following the rules, trusting her parents judgment only to have the floor ripped out from under her when she discovers the awful truths of her world.  Or she could have been rebellious, trying to tear down the walls by destroying the school system her dad is the head of and ultimately unravel the society.  This Maddie would have to be a strong character to have the balls to try and pull off that kind of stunt.  But the Maddie we get is a bit of both the Maddie's I describe.  And if you're thinking, "How could that work?"  The answer is that it doesn't.

A lot of Awaken came off as wishy-washy, like the author did not really attempt to think of a new world.  It felt more like an extension of our own current one.  One of the big things of dystopian literature is that these societies are made of absolutes, but Awaken didn't seem to have any.  For example, kids go to school online at home, but they can still meet up and go to in person study sessions or be a sports team together.  Without any kind of absolute like that, it just didn't seem feasible that people would be that outraged about online schooling.  Granted, I did not get very far (maybe 100 pages) and maybe Maddie's split personality would make more sense or the schooling system would seem more sinister if I had kept reading.  I completely lost interest though, and a book should be able to hold my attention up until the twist (if a twist exists).

Final Thought: 1 out of 8 toadstools.

This review is also posted on GoodReads

Save a Word Saturday (#3)

Welcome to Save-a-Word Saturday, a new blog hop hosted by The Feather and the Rose.
The aim is to spread love of old and unusual words by sharing them with other bloggers and thereby saving these precious, wonderful, whirling words from the dusty, lonely corners of the oldest, least visited vaults of the Word Bank.

The rules run thusly:

1. Create a lovely blog post that links back to this one. The easiest way to do that would be to grab the code under our pretty Save-a-Word Saturday button. Just copy and paste it into the HTML part of your blog. 

2.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice).

3. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

4. Add a link to your blog in the linky list below (it's down there somewhere). Then hop to as many other blogs as you can in search of as many wonderful words as possible!

5. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

This week's theme is:

Dark Places

 

And the word I have chosen is:

 quadrimum
n. - best or oldest wine. quadrimum merum, four- year-old wine.

And my wondrous Dark Place related sentences:

It was cool and dark in the cellar as I made my way through.  I smacked my head on a beam hanging too low and fell onto my bottom.  But from my new vantage point is where I found it, the holy grail of my quest: the quadrimum.