Laurabelle’s Blog

I recently finished Juliet Marillier's latest novel, Wolfskin, which had been languishing on my holds list for months after I read her fabulous Sevenwaters Trilogy. I loved the Sevenwaters books and liked Wolfskin also but not quite as much, probably because her first trilogy is very much a woman's story as well as inspired by [...]

Today I went neither to class nor to work but to the PLA National Conference, which was in downtown Seattle. I picked up lots of free books, spent money on three others, and went to three fairly interesting sessions. I won't say that I was as excited about the whole thing as I was at [...]

Today I checked my niceperson.org email (I only do that every few days since I generally don't get anything but spam to those addresses) and found a couple of emails from a mysterious, anonymous individual. This isn't the Moron (for one thing, this guy has a bigger vocabulary), but he is quite secretive. I won't [...]

Today I looked at my UW student site and saw that it was the wrong color. It was supposed to turn red and green on Christmas day, but I'd made a typo, so the change happened in the second month of the year, rather than the twelfth. Oops. This is especially embarrassing because there is a [...]

Ursula LeGuin's website features a rejection letter for one of her first books. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce that my blog has acquired its first critic. According to this enlightened individual, I am a F***ING MORON!!, Jeff is a FAT F***IN PIG AND HE IS ALSO A MORON!!!, and my rotten Mondays are all my fault because (you guessed it) I am a f***in moron!!!! [...]

On Friday Jeff and I didn’t want to cook, so we went to a splendid little restaurant in Wallingford called Au Bouchon. Jeff stopped there on his way home from UW, and I met him from the other direction. That way we arrived just before 6:30 in the evening, and that was a good thing, [...]

Meg is arriving in Hamburg today. I am quite jealous! I still have very fond feelings towards Hamburg. A couple of weeks ago Meg told me they had found an apartment and asked where it was in the city. It's in a part of town that I've almost never seen (I think I took a [...]

I don't know what it is, but lately I've had a string of absolutely rotten Mondays. Generally it's just stupid things like a tendency to forget email attachments (even more than usual) and to say exactly the opposite of what I mean, but last Monday takes the cake. Today wasn't bad. Yeah, I was kind of [...]

As I was procrastinating this evening, I looked over my application for my current job and realized two things. First of all, I'm not surprised that I got the job, because that was a really fantastic application. (All those failed applications were great for forcing me to learn self-promotion.) Secondly, I've done and learned the [...]