MIA and Whatcha Readin'

My g'babes like to watch "Fineas and Ferb", a strange little animated show where one character walks into a room and queries "WHA-cha DOOO-in?". There's an addictive inflection (the first syllable of each word is drawn out, the second syllable is pitched higher than the first) in her voice—after hearing it a few times, every time I hear someone ask "Whatcha . . .", I hear this character's voice and the inflection.

I've not written much lately. Work is incredibly hard, frustrating, exhausting right now. We have a software update coming out in a month, and a lot of people are throwing political spitballs at each other. When you couple that job stress with my commute stress (I swear someone snuck an extra ten miles into I-76 right around Kent), I'm totally enervated when I get home. I sit on the chair, flip through my TiVo list, and do a little beading before I drop into bed to do it all again the next day. I haven't walked into my sewing room (a sure stress-reliever) since the insulation guys came and moved everything away from the walls into a big clump in the middle of the room. My blog topic ideas are thought of and quickly forgotten.

So if you're still here and still reading, thank you.

Back to Whatcha Readin': I love Meg Ryan movies, especially the romantic comedies, and most especially "You've Got Mail." Her character is a bookie who owns a darling independent bookstore, and loves "Pride and Prejudice." After hearing her, and countless other people and characters, talk about "Pride and Prejudice", I decided to see what it's all about.

To everyone out there who adores this book, I'm sorry. I don't adore it. I don't love it. I'm tolerating it. Well, I'm trying to get through it. If I were reading a hardcopy that I'd borrowed from the bookstore, I'd probably just drop it into the return bin. But I bought the audio—with dollars, not credits—from audible.com, and every chapter listened to is another five or ten miles under my tires.

I don't love the style of writing—the wordiness, the overused words, like "felicity." Last year my friends named their new daughter "Felicity". Great name for a beautiful little girl; lousy word to repeat over and over in a book.

But that's just me and my quirkiness. (In freshman English a thousand years ago, I wrote an essay about how ugly the fall leaves were. I had grown up in Florida where everything was always green. My English professor thought I was neither clever nor funny. Whatever.) I have added the Pride & Prejudice movie to my Netflix queue, as I want to see, if fewer than eleven hours, what it's really all about. I may not like the movie, either, but at least I will have given it a fair try.

PianoLady is off to Florida today to visit her daughter in Tampa. She's reading "Happens Every Day" on the plane. I've added A Bookworm's World to my Google Reader, and love reading her reviews and getting ideas for my next reads. There are about five books on my Audible wishlist, and my membership is renewing in a couple of weeks so I can again use credits instead of money to get my daily driving/reading/listening.

So what are you reading? Oh, excuse me—whatcha readin'?

(By the way, Boston just woke up. He confirmed that "Isabella" is the Fineas and Ferb character who says, "Whatcha doin'?" He wanted to know why I wanted to know. When I told him the title of this post, he said, "Funny." Whattaguy!)