Odds and Ends

No big news to report today, just lots of little things.

Yesterday on Twitter I learned that Toni Blake has written a romance novel featuring a heroine who has Crohn's disease.  The book comes out at the end of December.  I'm hoping if things really settle in with Books and Bacon in the next 6 to 8 weeks that the author will agree to do a guest blog or an interview or something.  I think it's so cool that someone has written a main character with Crohn's.  Usually we're the weird, hard to solve problem on medical dramas.  At worst, we're portrayed as drug seekers.  It will be nice to see a positive, and hopefully realistic, depiction of what it's like to live with this disease.

In other book news, the latest Vorkosigan novel comes out today.  And I just found out last night that all the first editions come with a CD that has all of the books in the series (well, all but one, which appears to have been left off for some reason) in ebook format.  I wanted it before, and I've been checking Amazon pretty much daily to figure out when it would be available for Kindle.  Now I'm foaming at the mouth for it!  I don't particularly want the hardback, although I'm not totally opposed to the idea.  But I really, really want those ebooks!  I've been thinking about buying the whole series in ebook, since I got them all from the library and don't have my own copies.  (Some of my favorite books, and I don't have copies!)  This will save me big bucks.  Amazon has it for a good price, and I've been trying to figure out what else I want to get to bring the total cost up to $25 for the free shipping.  I'm thinking Wii game, since I'll hopefully be able to hook that up again soon, but I'm not seeing anything I really want that won't cost me $40.  Maybe I'll just suck it up and pay the $3.99 for shipping.

The moving isn't going so well.  There are problems with someone's mortgage up the chain.  We're four days from closing, and we still don't have a written commitment to purchase the house.  We're not putting all our stuff on a moving truck unless we're sure that the sale is going through.  So as you can imagine, this is causing a lot of stress.

The cat went to "summer camp" this afternoon in preparation for the packers coming in tomorrow.  (We're still packing, because we'll be up shit creek if we don't and the sale goes through.  We're just not putting all the boxes on a truck.)  I miss the little booger already.  Although I won't miss him screaming in my ear at 6am because he wants his breakfast.  I didn't have the heart to tell her, but Mom didn't make it any easier when she insisted on helping stuff him in his carrier.  He loves his grandmom, but sometimes she freaks him out, too.  She's not used to handling him.  There was much scrambling around in my room for a little while this afternoon.  And not the good kind.

Well, I guess that's everything for the moment.  I should probably go stick something in a box, just in case we do end up moving to Indiana after all.  I swear I haven't been sticking pins in a voo doo doll of the realtor, or hiring Witchy to cast a spell against the sale or anything.  Really.  I promise.

Update: My brother called tonight.  He had a stomach bug yesterday that kicked off a round of seizures so bad that he doesn't remember the ride in the ambulance to the hospital.  He's at home now, and he worked part of a day today.  I love my brother, but he can be so FRUSTRATING with this stuff.  One, his doctor is clueless as to why this is happening, but he won't switch doctors or get a second opinion.  So his condition is only ever on the edge of being controlled.  Any emotional or physical upset kicks them off again.  Two, he's not always good about taking his medication, which only exacerbates the problem.  Indiana leaves driving restriction to the doctors (Texas required a full 12 months without a seizure before you could get your license back), and his doctor is doing nothing.  Which means my brother, who hasn't managed to be seizure free for more than a few months at a time since this started two years ago, is still driving himself whenever he wants.  The "You could kill someone!" argument gets nowhere, because he claims he can feel them coming on and can just pull over to the side of the road.  I don't know what's going to have to happen to make him take this seriously.  The last time I talked to him about all this he said he didn't feel like it was something he had to worry about all that much about because they were only happening every couple of months.  A seizure every couple of months is NOT acceptable.  Not when your entire attempt to deal with the problem consists of one doctor shrugging his shoulders and saying, "I don't know."  Grrr.