In a final frenzied effort and with Stephen manning the ladder to get to the books up high in the living room, we are finished!

• 1028 total books scanned.
• 196 books scanned this evening.
• Stephen’s Count: 689 total.
• My Count: 186 total.
• Eli’s Count: 166 total.
• Discards: 10. Including 4 Terry Pratchett duplicates!
• Discard Total: 59.
• Two Highest Resale Values: Perdido Street Station Retail: unknown. Current Resale Value: $235.00. Agent to the Stars Retail: $30. Current Resale Value: $93.16.
• Most books by one author: 29 Terry Pratchetts and that’s after discards! Runner Up: 19 Lois McMaster Bujolds.

Nick Mamatas is a fantasist has written a number of short stories and three novels. He’s taken one of those novels, Move Under Ground, and released it for free under a Creative Commons license.

I decided to release it under a Creative Commons license for a number of reasons. The first is simply that I wish my novel to be more widely read. The second is that I am currently a student at Western Connecticut University’s MFA program in Professional Writing, and this site is a project for its class on publishing technologies. The third is a bit more mercenary: if you like this book, perhaps you’d like to buy either the hardcover or the trade paperback.

The novel is a mash-up of Kerouac and H. P. Lovecraft, and got great reviews when it came out in 2004. Why not give it a read and see if you like it?

And while I’m pimping SF/fantasy/horror stuff that’s free, John Scalzi enlisted a number of people to make an audio recording of his just-released novelette, The Sagan Diaries, and released that audio book for free. The novelette is set in his Old Man’s War universe and stars one of the major characters from those books.

A random thought about the TV show Heroes for your Wednesday: I hope Niki never has to take prescription medication. I can only imagine what would happen when Jessica forgets to take it at the right time or, worse yet, doesn’t know that Niki already took the medicine and so takes an extra dose.

Woot! I’m on a roll today! I decided to do the movies and games while Eli napped today as well.

• 78 total movies scanned.
• 14 total Play Station 2 games scanned. All Stephen’s. Although I’ve been known to Guitar Hero occasionally.
• I’m not breaking the movies up into who owns what because we pretty much own jointly and like them all.
• Discards: 8. 4 VHSs that we have bought DVD replacements for and not removed the VHS copies out of the cabinet. 1 VHS with severe water damage. There was mold growing INSIDE the plastic case on the tape itself. And 2 instructional videos for random junk.
• Discard Total: 57.

So this morning, since I finally don’t feel like the giant head-cold monster any more, I decided to do some cleaning. I started in Eli’s room. He and I decided to store some things in the attic. He did really well with it and only asked to keep a couple of the items I had intended to go up there. I get the feeling we are going to have to start doing this after birthday and Christmas every year or the masses of toys are going to push us right out of our home.

I was feeling pretty mighty after that so I decided to catalog some books since I haven’t done that in a while now.

• 832 total books scanned.
• 46 books scanned today.
• Stephen’s Count: 517 total.
• My Count: 146 total.
• Eli’s Count: 165 total.
• Discards: 1.
• Discard Total: 49. I am determined to take these books to The Booklegger this week or next!
• These 46 books scanned were from our end tables. We will never be able to have non-shelf end tables because gee, where would we put those 50 books? Also, I dusted said end tables. That, in and of itself, was quite the accomplishment.

Eli turns three tomorrow. We got him cupcakes to take to school tomorrow. But we got started on the sugar high tonight!

This is a post I’ve been wrestling with for a while now. Whether or not to talk about it. Whether or not to link to the site I am going to be talking about. How to address the topic and say what I want to say in the most compassionate way. I don’t know if I’ll do it well or not. Before I post this, I’m going to ask Jessica and Rick to read it and they can say whether or not I can use their names or even post it all. (They said ok by the way.)

Jessica and Rick are struggling with infertility. It’s a pretty harsh reality and I have trouble with it on several levels.

One, of course, is the unfairness of it all. Here are two people who would love a child and rear it with great thoughtfulness and care. They have a strong bond with one another and have good ties to their families and their community. They know what they are getting into with having kids (well, as much as any of us do before we actually have them) and are ready and willing to take on the responsibility. Am I lobbying for them to get to have kids? Yeah, in a way I guess I am. If there’s an organization that I could submit an application to, I would.

Number two, is the indignities they are dealing with in an effort to have kids. I’m not sure that, if I were to face the same rounds of doctor visits, blood work, invasive medical procedures and tortuous waiting of tries and retries, Stephen and I would have managed to reproduce. There’s also just something spectacularly crappy about everyone else being that involved with your sex life. Before I was pregnant myself, I was sort of mystified and a bit horrified that everyone seemed so happy for a pregnant couple. “Congratulations on successful sex!” was the response that I always felt someone would say. How much more agonizing to know that everyone else knows that something in that department isn’t working quite the way it should.

Another problem I have is the amount of loss they have already suffered. Yes, it’s a fairly well established statistic that between 30 and 40% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. I’ve had one, my mother-in-law had one, my aunt had one, several girlfriends have had them. Chances are good that, if you’ve been pregnant, you’ve also had a miscarriage. It took me a long time to deal with my miscarriage. It challenged Stephen’s and my relationship in a way that is hard to describe, so to repeat the process multiple times seems nearly unendurable in my mind. And to keep repeating the process without becoming numb to it seems nearly impossible.

This next one is a bit more personal for me because it has to do with my own issues. I’m a bit embarrassed by how easy it is for me to get pregnant. I feel as if in some way I should apologize for being effortlessly fertile. If there were some way that I could share this trait, I would scrape it off and pass it over without a moment’s hesitation. Especially since once this baby comes, Stephen and I are finished reproducing. So sometimes I wonder if in some way I’ve wasted all this easy fertility. If I were Jessica, I would have a hard time not resenting people like me. Lucky for me, she’s a bigger person than that.

All of that brings me around to the brighter side of things. They are dealing with this process in an amazing way. I’m usually not given to words like inspirational, but that’s the only word that I can think of that applies. Are they depressed about it sometimes? Sure they are. Are they mad at the injustice of it all? I’m sure that comes up for them as well. But overall, they are dealing with their situation in a miraculous way. They are positive in the face of repeated defeat. Not positive that they will achieve the results that they want, but that they will be able to face the outcome and deal with it no matter what that outcome may be. They seem realistic in their ability to deal with some of the monetary hurdles that infertility sets up. They seem to have set some limits as to what they are willing to do in order to achieve their goal. And lastly, and I think most importantly, they are truly seeking what God would have them do in this situation and they seem open to something different if that’s what He offers up.

I have been deeply affected by watching what they are dealing with. I feel closer to Jessica now than I did before she started talking about her difficulties. She’s been very candid and open about the medical procedures she’s dealt with and the emotional struggle she’s been through. She’s set up a website to chronicle her quest and while this is probably personally helpful to her, I can tell by reading what she writes that other women are eased by her words as well. I’ve been buoyed by their perseverance and their faith.

So even amidst this struggle there are bright spots. Maybe they know the example they set; maybe they don’t. Maybe they don’t think what they are doing is that big of a deal. Sometimes you can’t see the example that you are setting during the struggle. Maybe my words here will remind them of that.

It’s that time of year again. We’ve rotated pictures in the masthead, the better to bring you more rocking. If you aren’t seeing the new pictures, press the “reload page” button on your browser, and if that doesn’t work, clear your cache.

When I was between six and ten, I went to the roller skating rink all the time. One particular Friday or Saturday night I remember going with my family and my parents’ best friends and their kids. I was busily trying to skate among the masses of people when I came upon two women skating together. They were going kinda slow so in my little kid brain I decided it would be a good idea for me to zip around them. Well, I’m not sure if I was a good zipper or a bad zipper because I made one of the women fall right onto her butt. After I passed her and looked back I realized she was very pregnant. I skated on to my mom and told her what happened and she encouraged me to go and apologize to the woman.

To this day when I think of that moment when I looked over my shoulder and saw her belly I am filled with anxiety that I caused her or her baby harm. As an adult I’ve often wondered why she was ever there in the first place. It seems an unnecessary risk to take in my mind, but maybe she was so far along she was actually trying to induce labor.

This afternoon Eli and I were playing in the hall. We both had our socks on. He was chasing me and I had my hands held out behind me for him to grab. He grabbed and pulled and I attempted to pull back. However, between the hardwood floor and my socks I had zero leverage. As I was falling backwards and yelling for help and trying desperately not to land completely on top of Eli, I remembered that women at the roller rink. As my head smacked against the floor, I looked up at the ceiling and thought that maybe sometimes you just can’t see the risk.

Don’t panic. I’m fine — obviously, or I wouldn’t be posting this now. I have a headache but am having difficulty deciding if it was caused by the cold I have or by my trip to the floor. My right hip is sore, but then it was sore all week from the plane ride on Monday. I had a few moments of panic about an hour after it happened, so I called the doctor and he assured me that falling on my butt and my head was the best possible place to land for the baby. Not so good for me, but the best case scenario for the kid.

I’m going to sit on the heating pad now. I think I might try non-skid slippers tomorrow when we are playing. And you can bet I won’t be going roller skating anytime soon…

It now appears that Boston will be dropping charges against the two people who hung the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite signs around the city. It’s about time. [UPDATE: As Vika points out in the comments, MSNBC jumped the gun. At this point charges against Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens are still pending. Sigh.]

Look, here’s the thing. The initial Boston response makes sense: you find something suspicious, so you shut things down until you have a chance to assess. It’s the follow-on response that was farcical. The police blew up one of the lite-bright-like signs yet couldn’t tell from the debris that it wasn’t a bomb. They couldn’t tell from looking at an intact sign that it wasn’t a bomb.

I’m not sure exactly where they thought the C4 was, or where the detonation electronics were. IEDs just don’t look like these signs.

Breathless news speculation on the part of Fox News and other news organizations fueled hysteria. Turner Broadcasting, the people ultimately responsible for the marketing ploy, didn’t contact the Boston PD for some four hours, likely because their lawyers needed time to stare wide-eyed at the TV and say, “Holy crap, no other city went bat-shit insane over this — what do we do?” But even after Turner did fax in the location of all the signs, Boston officials didn’t respond like they should have. Instead of dismissing the over-reaction with a statement like, “This was a threat we took seriously and we’re glad that the devices turned out merely to be harmless signs,” politicians and police chiefs ratcheted up the rhetoric.

• “This is outrageous activity to get publicity for a failing show.” — Boston Mayor Thomas Menino
• “It’s a foolish prank on the part of Turner Broadcasting. In the environment nowadays … we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened.” — Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis
• “It’s clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location.” — Assistant Attorney General John Grossman

They found the two people responsible for placing the signs, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, and charged them with one count of placing a hoax device and one count of disorderly conduct. It’s the “hoax” part that drives me crazy. It’s clear to anyone with a lick of sense that these do not look like bombs, they were not intended to look like bombs, and they were not deployed in a manner to indicate that they were bombs. That hasn’t stopped dumber members of the press from saying things like, “Hey [defendant Peter Berdovsky] Borat, you’re not a citizen? That’s too bad. How does five years at Cedar Junction sound, followed by a steerage-class flight back to the Third World hellhole from which you came, to annoy the taxpaying citizens?” Never mind that the case against Berdovsky and Stevens was obviously going to go nowhere from the start. Even the judge wasn’t buying the state’s case. I can’t blame the two for talking about 1970s hairstyles in their post-arraignment press conference, as bad a PR move as it was.

This isn’t the first time Boston has over-reacted to the sight of wires. As the Nielsen Haydens point out, Boston PD arrested a non-violent protester named Joe Previtera for dressing up like the prisoner in the infamous Abu Ghraib picture, complete with wires. Boston PD tried to charge him with making a false bomb threat.

You know, other cities like Seattle and New York City (New York City!) didn’t over-react to the Mooninite signs. Perhaps Boston can use the $1M that Turner Broadcasting is reportedly in negotiation to pay to buy several pallets of common sense. We’ll just need to make sure the pallets don’t have batteries or wires on them.