Category: Miscellaneous Ramblings

Merry Christmas! I hope everyone has a wonderful day filled with family and friends!

….2012 is going to be an unbelievable year for my family and I. It’s also going to impact what happens here on the blog. So I thought I would sit down and try to lay out what I want to happen in 2012.

First and foremost, as things continue with my pregnancy, I feel like I should warn my readers that this blog is going to continue to evolve. It will no longer be strictly a book blog. I have already been posting updates about my doctor appointments and what I’m going through. Expect to see a lot more of that. And when June rolls around and our little *boy* bundle of joy is welcomed into our lives, expect to see a lot less of me as I adjust to being a first-time mommy. But I won’t be giving up my blog completely. Just be patient with me 🙂

I am stepping away from accepting books to review from publishers/authors/publicists. I think it’s time to for me to end this completely. In 2011, I took a step back and evaluated where I was and how I felt about accepting books for review. I took a break from accepting books, but I ended up breaking my own vow. This time I’m completely done with it. With the baby coming it’s going to be hard enough to read, the last thing I’m going to need is a responsibility to read something by a certain date. That’s just not going to work out for me. I will end up not reading at all and I don’t want that to happen, ever.

Challenges. I’m torn on my feelings about these. I have already been through the Novel Challenges blog and picked out 6 challenges that sound good to me for 2011. However, I know that this is not going to be in the realm of possibilities for me. So I have decided instead that I’m going to limit myself to only 3 challenges. I will be posting about those in the coming days.

I am determined to make the most of what I can do in 2012. I know that come June my life is going to enter into a whirlwind. I’m ready for it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not scared, nervous, excited, etc. If I read 10 books in 2012, I will be happy. If I read 5 books in 2012, I will be happy. If I read like a mad woman and read 25 books before June (kind of my goal), I will be ecstatic! Because after June, well, who knows.

It also doesn’t help that I have actually not finished a single book in the month of December! Eek! I’ve picked up numerous books and just haven’t been able to finish them. I haven’t posted a DNF post about these books, because they are books that I intend to come back to at some point in the future. It may be weeks, months or years from now. But they are all books I intend on finishing one day.

So reading back over this post it sounds so disorganized. I apologize for that. That’s kind of how my brain is working these days. But I hope I got my point across and to briefly recap in case I didn’t…..

In 2012 you will see:

• More personal posts.
• Less of a presence come June, but I’m not disappearing completely.
• No more review books. I’m getting back to reading what I want to read, when I want to read it.
• Only 3 challenges that I’m participating in. And I feel absolutely no pressure to complete these, either.
• No pressure to read a set amount of books. What I read is what I will read and I will be happy no matter what.

Well after a busy Thanksgiving weekend, I am finally back home.

I have two (TWO!) book reviews to write. But I’m too tired to deal with that tonight.

Buster has an ear infection 😦 I hate it when my little pup is not feeling 100% I can tell it’s bothering him. We went to the vet today for medicine, so hopefully we can get it cleared up quickly.

I entered my 13th week today. I’m still nauseous. When will this go away? (Although I will admit it’s hit or miss now, not constant) I’ve only had it since week 5…..

Two weeks from today is our next doctor appointment. ANNNNNNND! We are having an ultrasound to hopefully determine boy or girl! YAY!!!!

My mom bought Stephen King’s new book (11/22/63) on the Nook; I guess I should get mine charged because I’m dying to read this book and I don’t really want to wait any longer on my library’s wait list.

We put our tree up this year. We actually haven’t put one up since 2007, our first year of marriage. We skipped it in 2008 because we closed on the house right after Christmas and didn’t want to deal with it that year. And then in 2009 and 2010 we were just plain lazy 🙂

I don’t really have much else to update right now. I hope to get those book reviews up in the next couple of days. I sincerely hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Now on to the craziness (and I mean that in a good way) of Christmas 🙂

So today is D-Day for the husband. He’s getting his gallbladder out today. That means that I will be playing nurse for a few days. So it’s doubtful that I will be reading very much or have much time on the internet. It all depends on how big of a baby he turns out to be 🙂 See y’all in a couple of days!!

Okay, so I really don’t hate making decisions. But the truth is that I am a compulsive decision maker. By that I mean that  I can and will make a decision in the blink of an eye. Without really thinking things through. That’s just who I am. I’ve always been that way.

But here lately I’ve really been contemplating a lot of things. And these things have to deal with my blog. One day I’m ready to throw in the towel and close my blog completely. The next day I want to buy a domain. I just don’t know what I want to do anymore.

On the one hand I love my blog. Obviously I love to read and share my thoughts about the books that I read. I love interacting with the people who read my blog and the other bloggers out there. I enjoy tweaking my blog and making changes and making things look better and more creative. But then it’s also a lot of work. And I’m not all that well-known in the book blog-o-sphere. In a recent post to one of my Yahoo reading groups, I likened myself to someone being lost in the middle of New York City. And that’s honestly how I feel sometimes. I have been blogging since 2008 when the book blog world was still relatively small. Now it’s booming and I just feel like I’m lost with no place to go. I feel torn about this.

I have made some great connections with different publishers/publicists. I enjoy receiving ARCs for books that I would never have found on my own. But at the same time, I don’t have all the connections that a lot of people have. I don’t get pitched some of the really good books that I would die to get.

I have some really great loyal followers who I love interacting with. They are usually the smaller bloggers like myself and I know immediately who they are when I get the notification email that I have a new comment waiting for me.

I like hosting giveaways but I tend not to because I have such low participation. I have tried to publicize myself in every way that I can possibly think of, but I am starting to run out of ideas. I don’t necessarily want to have so many readers/commenters that I can’t keep up, but I would like to be able to host a giveaway and have more than a handful of people sign up.

I would like to think that I have found my niche. I have always been completely, 100% true to who I am on this blog. I have not tried to represent myself as someone who I’m not. For the longest time I never really tried to bump up my readership to the massive amounts that some people get. Why? Because that’s not who I am. But this year I have been participating in more memes and commenting more. But I’m still kind of unknown. Heck, I don’t even have a completely original blog title anymore for there’s actually a few others out there that are so close to mine it’s kind of scary.

Do you want to know how the book blogger world sometimes feels to me? It feels like a popularity contest. And that’s not what I’m here for. That’s not what I want out of this.

I wish I knew what I wanted to do. But I just don’t. I keep wondering to myself how long the book blogs are going to last. When are they going to run their course? I know it’s going to happen someday, it’s just a matter of when.

Because here’s the deal: I don’t see myself still doing this in a few years. Next year, definitely. But after that? Who knows. One thing that I have contemplated is to start a new blog that encompasses everything about me, not just the book reviews, and transferring all of my old content. Because I also have a life outside my blog … I enjoy cooking and sharing recipes. I have the cutest dog in the world (okay, that’s my biased opinion!) that I could share funny stories about. I hope that I will eventually be embarking on a pregnancy journey.

But the down side to changing blogs is that I will lose a lot of the connections that I have already made. I will alienate a lot of people who are just here for book reviews. Can you see why I’m so torn about this?? I have considered just starting to implement all those things here on the blog, but as I said earlier: I’m worried about alienating the few readers that I already have. I have also considered just changing the title of my blog to be more all-encompassing, but keeping my current site address, although I have thought that doing so would make things confusing.

So my question to you, dear readers, is this: have you contemplated where you see your blog going? In a year? Two years? Five? What about registering a domain if you haven’t already? And what do you think about me saying that the book blogger world feels like a popularity contest? Do you agree or disagree? Let’s start a discussion!!

So I made a blog button this morning. It’s probably something that I should have done AGES ago. I got it posted on the right sidebar. Everyone should see it now. But my question is, how do I get a grab button box? Am I not able to do this because I’m not self-hosted? It’s the only thing I can think of as to why it’s not working for me. I mean, I have tried a gazillion different ways this morning. I googled how to do it and came up with LOTS of different blogs that offered step by step instructions, but nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

Okay, let’s face it. Most of us book bloggers are *crazy* about books. Anyone who sees my Mailbox Monday posts can attest that I’m really book crazy. This year I implemented something new on the blog … a “Books Acquired in 2011” page. I’ve kept it up-to-date over the past 8 months and I have to admit that I am ashamed at the state of it. There are wayyyyy too many books on there that have the designation “Traded without reading”. That means that I took in wayyyyyyy too many books that I actually didn’t need or want. Pitiful, if you ask me. Of course it balances out a little bit because as I was trading away those books I didn’t want I was able to bring more in 🙂 See that vicious cycle that I’m stuck in? So I wanted to sit down and take stock of just how many books came into my house the first 8 months of the year, how many I have read and reviewed here, and how many were traded without reading. So here goes:

• Total amount of books brought in January – August, 2011: 153
• Number of books that I have read out of the 153 books brought in: 20
• Number of books that I have traded without reading of the 153 books brought in: 23
• Number of books that I DNF’ed of the 153 books brought in: 2

Wow. Now tell me that’s not pitiful! 153 books brought into my house in the first 8 months of 2011. If I keep going like that (which I know I will …. I’m not likely to stop!) it’s going to become a problem. Haha. I mean, I have a big house …. but eventually this will catch up with me 🙂

So in case you’re curious, my OCD compelled me to make an even further breakdown of the books that I brought into the house. Here’s that information:

• January: 9 books brought in; 1 read; 2 traded without reading
• February: 17 books brought in; 5 read; 0 traded without reading
• March: 39 books brought in; 1 read; 16 traded without reading; 1 DNF’ed
• April: 7 books brought in; 1 read; 2 traded without reading
• May: 8 books brought in; 3 read; 0 traded without reading
• June: 14 books brought in; 4 read; 0 traded without reading; 1 DNF’ed
• July: 34 books brought in; 3 read; 3 traded without reading
• August: 25 books brough in; 2 read; 0 traded without reading

Now, as you can see … March, July and August were bad months in terms of how many books I brought into this house. I’m going to excuse July because that is my birthday month 🙂 … but the other two, well I really don’t have an excuse. Oh what the heck, I really don’t have any excuse … other than obsession.

And you know my OCD wouldn’t let me stop there. I had to find out where I was getting all these books:

• Purchased new: 5
• PBS Point: 17
• Bookmooch Point: 11
• Grandmother: 17
• Library Book Sale: 13
• MysteryBookSwap Yahoo group: 7
• Big Box trade with Carol: 10
• Won from a blogger: 1
• Review Book: 7
• PBS Box-of-Books: 65

Well, it doesn’t take a genius to find out where the problem is. That terrible little thing called Paperbackswap’s Box-of-Books program. But I’m definitely not going to be cancelling my subscription to that. Hehe. Now I am pleased to see that I have only purchased 5 new books this year. That’s great in my opinion!

I will definitely be posting another post like this at the end of the year to take a final count of how many books came into the house. Now I’m off to read … a book that has been sitting on my shelf for quite some time, I need to move some of those out of here so I can have more space 🙂

Ughhhhh…. so after reading up a storm the first few weeks in August (8 books by the 22nd) I haven’t wanted to read any more. At all. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know why all of a sudden I had that spurt and now it’s gone again. But it stinks. Majorly. And of course I have a few books that *have* to get read due to my obligations to them. That’s partly why I’ve been kind of quiet here and you haven’t seen a review since (you guessed it, the 22nd). That’s all I’ve got for today …. I am going to go read. I hope.

I don’t normally do this, but I’m really irritated.

Once again I was spending too much time on Paperbackswap and Bookmooch. I *know* I should avoid those sites at all cost, but I’m addicted. So yesterday I submitted one BOB offer on PBS and a few requests on Bookmooch. Yesterday evening the BOB offer was declined without so much as an explanation. Maybe I’m asking too much, but when the system sends you to a PM page immediately after declining an offer, wouldn’t send a short message be the polite thing to do? I have declined many offers in the past, and I always send a short “sorry, there’s just nothing that interests me right now” or “sorry, but you’ve got a lot of romance and that’s just not my cup of tea.” I understand that people are busy, but seriously, is it really too much to ask for? It made me truly wonder if she even looked at my shelf, or if she just denied it out right. I guess I’m really irritated because it was for books I *really* want, but I don’t want to spend a PBS credit and they aren’t available at Bookmooch.

Then today one of the three Bookmooch requests I put in for yesterday was rejected because she “no longer had that book”. Okay, I understand that. I know it is hard to keep track of your books if you’re swapping in multiple places. But in my four years of swapping books online, I have only had to cancel two times due to me no longer having the book in question. TWO TIMES. The one thing I like about Bookmooch is that you can see how many times they’ve cancelled, how many times they’ve rejected, etc. Well, trust me, this lady had a high rejection rate. When I received the rejection e-mail, it said that Bookmooch doesn’t consider “no longer have the book” as an acceptable reason for rejection. I was surprised by this, but I was glad to see that. Because it’s really not acceptable. I know it happens, and like I said, I’ve done it myself before, but when I looked at this person’s profile there was, as I said, an unusually high amount of rejections. Bookmooch is right … it’s not acceptable.

Maybe I just expect too much out of people. I’m kind of a perfectionist when it comes to certain things and trading books tends to be one of them. And I know that I have a high expectation. I want my books to be in better than average shape. I don’t expect them to be new, but I don’t want them to be falling apart either. But I think what really irritates me is that people are just plain rude sometimes. Personally, I have met some really great people here on my blog and on the various swap sites and Yahoo reading groups. For the most part everyone I have come into contact with have been really nice, good people. But when someone can’t even keep track of their bookshelf or send me a short message as to why they’ve cancelled a BOB offer, I get really friggin’ irritated.