Happy Birthday

It's hard to believe, but . . . I'm married to a forty-year-old! Happy Birthday, dear Steve!

He's not finding this a big deal at all. In fact, he mistakenly thought he was turning forty last year. I, however, am thinking about it a lot. I'm turning forty this year, too, though not until December. How on earth did this happen? Just yesterday I was ten!

So, do you think it's wrong for me to let a 2yo lick the bowl when the birthday cake batter contains not only four raw eggs but also an eighth of a cup of Meyer's Dark Rum? Personally, I think I'd be derelict in my duty if I didn't let him. After all, he should get some recompense for the five seconds he spent stirring.

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I had a couple of days earlier this week where I was really afraid that I wouldn't be able to deliver what I'd rashly promised my client: a website that she would be able to update herself, almost as easily as posting to Blogger. But I stubbornly persisted like a true INTJ, and after a couple of days I figured out the content management system. I think I'm going to be able to make good on my promise after all. Phew! Now I've got most of the structure down and it's just a question of inserting the content from the old site into the new one. The process is tedious, yet so satisfying. Tedious because the only way I know of to get rid of all the old <font> tags and other unnecessary crap is to do it by hand. Yet so satisfying! I love nothing better than pruning. And when I'm done the site will be clean, crisp, and simple. Yesssss!!

But surely, you ask, you're not spending every minute of the day pruning old <font> tags? Yes, that's true. I could've been blogging . . . except that I was reading. Finally I managed to get with the Slaves of Golconda program, and I've been reading The Virginian. We're not supposed to post about it until April 30, so I will just say for now that I. Couldn't. Put. It. Down.

Now I'm in the process of whipping through two Orson Scott Card novels before getting into my next book club book, Bittersweet. So Orson Scott Card, in case you don't know, is a once-great science fiction writer who now just seems to write the same one novel over and over again. Literally! Ender's Game was one of the best sci-fi books of all time. A great read, satisfying on many levels. Likewise great is its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, which takes place hundreds of years after the events in the first novel and has almost no relation to it. A striking, original story. But Card is one of those writers who just can't leave well enough alone. No, he continued the series with a couple more books after Speaker that are just cheesy and formulaic. And if that's not enough, he then went back to Ender's Game and rewrote it from the point of view of another character, calling it a "parallel" novel. Okay, that's a cool idea -- in fact, I'm a sucker for stories that tell the same event through the eyes of different characters -- and that book, Ender's Shadow, turned out all right. But now he's written three more books that come after Shadow, again, cheesy and formulaic. Why do I helplessly keep reading them? I do not know.