New Moon

Due to my mixed feelings regarding Twilight, I wasn't sure if I wanted to forge ahead and read the second book in the series, New Moon. But I started reading, kept reading, and finished it last night. Yes, this after I stated that too much could rot your brain. All in all, I preferred this second book to the first one. Less swooning/obsession/fawning, more pain of love lost, and finally more action and backstory. The werewolves vs. vampires thing is an interesting layer to the story. I actually found myself tearing up, which made me feel a bit silly -- guess it was an emotional day.

Twilight = candy = tasty, but too much will probably rot your brain

Yesterday I read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. It's the first book in a series of books named, coincidentally, The Twilight Saga. I first learned about the book via YouTube vloggers, fiveawesomegirls, who seemed to be fans -- so much so that they traveled to the middle of nowhere, where most of the book takes place. Then a week or so ago, one of the Culver-Palms Youth mentioned having just read the first book and also liking it a lot. It's a Young Adult book, but I happily read through all the Harry Potter books last summer, and the Twilight books have really good review ratings on Amazon.com, so I figured I'd give Twilight a try.

I have to say that I was disappointed.

I suppose it's not a bad book, but a mediocre one. When I actually browsed through the reviews and read what readers had to say, a pattern seemed to emerge. A number of the reviews indicated disappointment with the book for its shallow characters and dialogue, melodramatic plot, and rather inane lessons for adolescent girls. In this first category, this one's my favorite. A number of comments leapt to the author's defense, mentioning how much they loved the book, how well they could relate to the characters, how it was the best book of all time. On the whole, it seems like this first group of reviews is written by adults. The second group of reviews, by teenagers (who often mentioned the fact that they are teenagers and could totally relate).

There are about 1500 reviews right now, a lot of them which seemed to convey disappointment but the vast majority of which gave the book 5 stars. I'll give the book some credit for knowing its audience, and recognize that even I like to eat candy sometimes. I mean, for all of my complaining to Alex throughout, I did keep reading.

I always wondered who gets the non-fruit toppings.

pinkberry with fruity pebbles
Originally uploaded by eraine.

I saw these being constructed as I waited for my own, and was intrigued by the combination of fruit + fruity pebbles + granola, so I asked the designers if I could perhaps photograph their yogurt cups.

Being rather boring, my own yogurt just had toppings of fruit.

coupons and other costs

I am trying to blog regularly, so I decided to make this comment a trackback instead of a comment to the post.

Jerome was highlighting some of his recent triumphs with coupons.

Coupons can be pretty great, although the one time my 'no purchase necessary' coupon was rejected at Ralph's has left me with slight fear of coupon rejection. I had gotten this 'Free box of any Kashi product under $4.50' for filling out an online questionnaire and sharing my very valuable opinions about whether I thought 'cheese and pimento' crackers sounded more appealing that 'sun-dried tomato and pepper' (these flavors just now made up on the spot). Anyway, my checkout guy refused to take the coupon, perhaps because it looked as though I had printed it out from my computer, despite the fact that the coupon was supposed to have some sort of code thing to verify its value. Oh well.

Alex and I went bowling last night at AMF Mar Vista and for 2 - $4 games we got 2 buy-one-game-get-one-free coupons. This is awesome because I think it will help our goal to bowl more frequently. We also bought bowling shoes to help with the process. Neither of us have ever owned bowling shoes. At $50 each (Zappos.com, price includes shipping) it will take us slightly over 11x bowling to recoup the cost. Barring traumatic injury or early death, I think it's doable. If we expect to live 60 more years, that would mean bowling at least once every 5.4 years. Although this is assuming that we'll both be able to bowl in our 80s. Maybe by then we'll break 100 regularly.

Finally, the other thing that is coupon-like but not exactly a coupon -- rebates. Rebates can seem like a good deal, but these days I'll only buy something w/a rebate if I would be willing to buy it anyway (w/o rebate), since the money often doesn't come back. I've never tried to hunt unreturned rebates down, but I've been burned too many times.

Wheeeeee! / I did it again

things that sound more exciting than they are

Next up in this category... LASER SCISSORS.

Yes, I am browsing the Internet for holiday gift-giving ideas. No, I am not likely to purchase laser scissors, since they don't actually cut things with lasers.

20 dates for under 20 dollars

20 dates for under 20 dollars. In case anyone was wondering, I came across these via Digg, not browsing Yahoo Personals. I was pretty excited when I saw the title because I thought all 20 dates would come out to a total of under $20, or an average of $1 each! Alas, I think they mean each date is under $20.

In any case, we have done the following in the Los Angeles area:

2. Go to a museum -- The Getty, where we actually joined up one night that they had a free lesson in figure drawing and we practiced on sculptures

4. Go on a romantic hike -- Well, we may not have been on a romantic hike, per se, but we have been hiking and we go for evening walks around the neighborhood.

6. Beat the heat with an ice cream date -- Yes, we do eat ice cream.

11. Stroll through the botanical garden -- Huntington Library has beautiful gardens, and Alex particularly likes succulents. (Free to visitors the first Thursday of every month.)

13. Build a bonfire -- We used to do fires in the fireplace when Alex lived with one, but I expect it would be nice to do an evening bonfire at the beach. It probably wouldn't be worth it unless we had a bigger group though.

We could but haven't really:

12. been bowling -- Since there's a bowling alley down the street from where we live, there's not really a good excuse (besides Wii Sports bowling).

15. paint pottery together -- This is pretty specific, but I think the idea of making stuff together more generally would be nice.