Friday, July 10, 2009

Vulpes Libris review, golf and a CoolerReader nightmare

I'm pleased to say that my review of John Wray's novel, Lowboy is now up at Vulpes Libris reviews. Something of a mixed bag, to my mind - but I appreciate that even saying that, and making the suggestion I do, is going against every other single reviewer in the known universe. Ah well, I never did follow the crowd ...

And here's this morning's meditation (I think I may have got the numbers muddled in the past, but this is now right. Possibly ...):

Meditation 168

A bitter root, a
barren waste:
salt, sulphur, emptiness.

The pain has always
been written.
Travel secretly

to the desert
and feel the sand
sting your feet

while the light
beckons you on.


And Marian and I managed to have a good golf game - well, compared to last week anyway - so that was something of a surprise. I didn't even go in any bunkers (well, gosh!) though I did manage to hit a tree dead centre which brought the ball right back to where it had been lying only a couple of seconds earlier. Trick shots, eh - how I love 'em.

I've also managed - at last! - to start the actual editing of Hallsfoot's Battle. Having the notes from The Gifting is proving very useful already. I feel it might well change rather more than anticipated by the time I reach the end again. But that's probably a good thing. Talking of books, I am really, seriously struggling with the CoolerReader machine. I did manage to download and read a short story onto it this morning, which was fine. But since then I've bought two more books at different venues which I can't seem to see at all on the reader. Though they appear to exist on the computer and I can even see them in the machine's menu when I plug it in, but I can't get them on the machine itself. I suspect that my reading options might be limited to PDFs, and it doesn't seem to take any notice of Adobe Digital editions (which I thought was a PDF by any other name, but apparently isn't, sigh ...) even though I've downloaded the software and tried to get it to talk to the CoolerReader twice. It's very very frustrating. So it looks like I can't read any of the books on the CoolerBooks site as they all seem to be Adobe Digital and that's no good to man nor beast. They're supposed to offer books in a special CoolerReader format, but for the life of me I have no idea how to find them - it's not very well organised at all. On top of that, I sent a help message to them yesterday, but no-one's replied. I am rapidly becoming extremely disenchanted with the whole thing, really. It surely can't be that hard for them to make it easier for the customer!! But obviously not, deep deep sigh ...

Thank goodness for this afternoon's Alexander Technique lesson - just what I needed to straighten out and just chill a little. And I definitely needed that after discovering that the garage have at last got the aircon unit delivered today - but sadly it's not the right one. So nothing will happen now until at least Monday. Head - meets desk - stays there. Mind you, while the garage was on, I remembered to ask them how to open the courtesy car windows and there's a button under the radio at the front which does it. Not very intuitive then ... Lordy, but really it's astonishing I'm not climbing the walls and chewing at the curtains already. Maybe I would be but I'm just too damn tired, to be honest. Haven't been sleeping well and have been waking too early in a state of extreme tension (Lord knows why) every day for a week - am desperately hoping for a lie-in tomorrow. Now that would be nice.

Today's nice things:

1. The Vulpes Libris review
2. Poetry
3. Golf
4. Starting the Hallsfoot edits
5. Alexander Technique
6. Finding the car's window buttons.

Anne Brooke - wondering if there might still be time for a nap, oh please God yes ...

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