C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 58

2016 so far

Apparently my resolution is to sleep through 2016. Of the as-of-this-moment 41 hours available in 2016, I have slept, napped, or rested through 23 of them. The somewhat alarming thing is that I feel I could quite probably go back to sleep.

It is just barely possible I’ve surpassed my ability to cope.

We’ve dismantled the Christmas tree, which is quite an accomplishment. I even managed to more or less clean the kitchen. I’m…attempting…to make some headway on cleaning the office; half an hour’s...

push-ups

My extremely fit sister has a push-ups challenge she does. 1 set to exhaustion, followed by two more sets of HALF the exhaustion number, done on 30 second intervals. Repeat the 3 half sets every other day for 7-10 days, then repeat the entire sequence.

I challenge you to do this with me. Whatever kind of pushups you can do is cool: wall, knee, full, whatever, just give it a go. Report back to me if you do it, and I’ll try to post every other day when I do them so we can all suffer together.

(...

Kitsnaps: River Barrow

This was taken just about exactly ten years ago, which flat-out does my head in. I guess we’re really officially in Ireland 10 years; this has been our 10th New Year here. Wow.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s take some names and kick some ass this year. A lot of people I know need that, after the last year. I love you all, and I’ve got your backs.

The post Kitsnaps: River Barrow appeared first on The Essential Kit.

Technological Triumph!

When we moved into this house we bought a new Samsung stereo, one which we could theoretically dock our Samsung phones right into and play music on them from. It has backup CD/DVD/USB/JPG/whatthefuckall options as well, but in theory one could download an app and stick the phone on and voila.

Apparently it works really well if you have an iPhone or iPod, but it works for shit with an actual Samsung, which makes no freaking sense at all, but there you have it. I’ve tried in a desultuory fashio...

To Be Read 2016

I’ve just moved most of our TBR shelf into the living room, where it can be seen and therefore perhaps take on greater urgency than being in the library (which seems like the sensible place for it, but we, y’know, *live* in the living room…). 90% of the books on it are more than 6 months old; 75% are more than a year old. Anything LEFT on it at the end of 2016 is going to the used bookstore unread, because enough is enough. I personally have about 40 books on the shelf, excluding graphic nove...

2015 Reading Stats

My major goal for 2015, as far as reading was concerned, was to try to clear out the TBR shelf. I started the year, AFAICT, with 79 books on it; it now has 46. I bought 17 new books, 15 of which I read, and I bounced off five books entirely.

According to Goodreads I read a total of 59 books. According to my own recent reads page I read 66; the latter is more accurate although not necessarily spot on. I read most of them, by a considerable margin (30+), in the 8 weeks we HAD NO INTERNET this s...

heading in for the holidays

School’s over for the season. The house is full of empty boxes and not enough, relatively speaking, wrapped gifts. I’ve made several batches of fudge but gone totally AWOL on actual holiday baking, and I’m astonishingly full of not caring. One of my jars of homemade applesauce (from the batch I think I forgot to put lemon juice into) has gone moldy and now I’m slightly frantic to get the rest of it to other people so they can eat it before it goes bad. We’re having chicken soup for dinner bec...

so dinner. much friends.

A couple of girlfriends are back in town for the holidays, so our little Lady Writers Group went out to dinner last night. I’d put on one of my 1950s style dresses (at home, obviously) and was looking at myself dubiously in the mirror when Young Indiana came in and says, “You look BEAUTIFUL, Mommy! Wear that! Wear that!” So I wore that. :) We went into town, and Indy entertained a 9 month old baby girl on the train for the entire trip in, and I dropped him off at his grandparents’ and went...

holiday prep

Yesterday we went to Dublin to do any shopping that could be done in the real world. I was moderately successful; Ted was not. He was, however, very, very tired after tromping all over hell and breakfast without finding anything. Poor guy.

I had some kind of story I was going to tell about the shopping, but I seem to have forgotten it. Unless it was the fact that when I stood to get off the bus, coming home, the bottom fell out of one of the bags I had, and everything in it fell to the floor....

Recent Reads: Little House books

I bought the Little House series (the proper edition, illustrated by Garth Williams) for Young Indiana last year for Christmas, thinking that sometime in the next year or so he might be about ready to start having them read to him. A few months ago he got LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, brought it to me, and said, “Maybe we could read this book! It has a FEW pictures!”

I told him we had to start with LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS, but that I would love to read them to him. So he went and got BIG...