mellicious | Entries tagged with amazon

I realized yesterday that I hadn't gotten my sister anything for Christmas! We do what we call "token" gifts, which mostly just means small gifts, but still I didn't want to just be running to the dollar store at the last minute! ("Small" or "token" gifts still shouldn't just be random junk, either, right?) It's weird nowadays because none of the four of us (including our respective husbands, that is) are really religious or does a lot for Christmas - and we don't have parents or kids to drag us in anyway - but still, it would also be weird not to have gifts at all. We were all raised celebrating Christmas, after all. Rob and I buy each other stuff, but we do that exchange at home - we usually go and eat at their house but we don't haul all of our gifts for each other over there. (I might take something especially cute over there to show off, but a lot of our gifts are usually books and stuff so they're not all that interested.)

But as far as a gift for P, I was poking around on Amazon and they had a lot of things that still said could be delivered by Christmas, so I got her some L'Occitane hand cream, because I know that's something she'd like, and it was reasonably priced. I know a lot of people hate Amazon but I am just addicted to having everything show up at my door, no fuss.* (The BIL likes dark chocolate so his gift is always super-easy - Rob had already taken care of that part.)

*OK, mostly no fuss. I had some trouble lately with a defective Owala bottle that had a loose piece that kept shooting across the room! But we got that taken care of.

Oh, we watched Red One this afternoon. The reviews were terrible, but people who'd seen it seemed to like it ok, and so did we. Hardly a masterpiece, but it had some clever stuff in it. (I said, boy, between this and Deadpool & Wolverine, Chris Evans has been having a ball destroying his "Captain America" image lately!)

I bought a book while I was at work tonight - a book about the history of bookstores in the U.S. Like I don't have enough reading material already. (However, the reason I saw this in the first place is because it was on a "Best books of 2024" list, so if you're interested: The Bookshop.) I'm sure I will read it before too long but I don't know that I'll read it right away.

I posted a list yesterday with all the books I bought in 2020, as part of a project that mostly has to do with getting rid of some of my paper journals. I wasn't keeping count, but it looked like I had read more than half of them, for sure, but that's a lot of unread books. I have a list with a lot of my unread books on it, somewhere, and I try to get myself to read from that list - and I do, some of the time.

As a matter of fact, I had some trade paperbacks of The History of the Lord of the Rings - a couple of big fat volumes of them, and they were old enough that one of them fell apart while I was reading it. (I'm guessing I'd had them since shortly after the movies came out, so probably 20 years or so!) - Are y'all familiar with this series? It's Tolkien's son Christopher doing a deep, deep dive into his dad's manuscripts. It's pretty fascinating. I actually read both of those this past summer and am almost finished with the third one - there are four in all. (Three books was not enough to cover the three volumes of LotR, apparently.) And there are more volumes for his dad's other works, too - I think it was a dozen total.

So I guess I kind of had Tolkien on the brain, and I happened to notice on Black Friday and over that weekend (which seems to have just become an extension of Black Friday, I assume I'm not the only one to notice that!) that, well, the Tolkien books were on sale. I don't think it was all of them, but it happened to be concentrated on some that I didn't have - The Children of Hurin, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Fall of Gondolin. That's what I bought. Oh, and one more volume of the History of Middle Earth (which is the full series title for the rest of those books I was talking about above). The one I got was the very last one, The Peoples of Middle-Earth. Hey, they were $1.99! (I've been happily reading about the Prologue to LotR, which for some reason is covered in that volume.)

And it's not like I had read all the Tolkien I had in the house, either. I know I have Lost Tales lurking somewhere, unread, and maybe some more. I kinda have a book-buying problem - not that that's anything new. (I'm sure a lot of y'all can sympathize.)

(But - progress in the unread department - I did finally read The Three-Body Problem this year!)

(Possible mild spoilers, of course!)

I always feel like I should read something appropriate for the season, every year. Last year, all I think I ended up doing was re-reading The Christmas Bookshop. This year, I actually read the one Thanksgiving book I happened to have, which was Penelope In Retrograde, and which it turned out I really liked. I thought it was going to be a romance novel - I bought it a couple of years ago, I think - and I figured out at some point that it was set at Thanksgiving, which is not something you see all that much, so I decided to save it for seasonal reading. It actually was not really a romance novel - there was a romance there, but it was more like a comedic reconnecting-with-family kind of thing in the end. Much more fun than I was expecting. (I don't know if it's a nearly-senior-citizen thing or what, but I don't have much use for romance novels any more. Suddenly they bore me.)

And then it turned out that Amazon had what they called a short story (and I would call a novella, it was around 100 pages, I think) by the author of said Christmas Bookshop, Jenny Colgan. It's called The Christmas Book Hunt, and it is right up my alley: a little romance, a little family drama, a lot of poking around in bookshops looking for what turns out to be an extremely rare book. I enjoyed it, you might can tell. It's the librarian in me.

I don't know if I'm done with holiday-related reading; it's still two weeks til Christmas, after all. I have a couple more unread books that I think are actually that kind of thing - meaning holiday-themed - but I also think I've already tried reading them before and didn't get into either one. I'm probably more likely to end up re-reading some old favorites, really!

Current Music: singing "Dancing Through Life" to myself

Have you ever walked through a door just in time to see another car hit your car? That's what happened to me earlier tonight. Luckily it turned out not to be nearly as bad as it looked. This guy (who I know by sight because he parks by us and apparently gets off work at exactly the same time we do) kind of sideswiped my car - he was trying to back out the wrong way, basically - the spaces are slanted one way and he wanted to go the other way, so he swung wide and my car was in the way. He has a pickup and my car is really low, so he probably couldn't really see my car very well - which doesn't make it any less his fault. Anyway, we opened the door to the parking lot just in time to see it happen. It looked pretty bad. But amazingly, it really did very little damage. Rob said he could see a couple of little fine scratches, but I couldn't see anything wrong. My car is ten years old so a couple of scratches more or less don't worry me. (I just hope it doesn't look a lot worse when I see it in the daylight!) He was very apologetic and I wasn't going to go to the trouble of filing an insurance claim for invisible damage.

I got home and there was a box of nail polish on the doorstep that I'd been feeling guilty about ordering, and I decided that I earned that nail polish (for my trauma, more or less) and I wasn't going to feel guilty about that one any more. It was cheap nail polish, actually, but it's really pretty and amazingly, none of the 12 polishes was broken despite being really really badly packed. (Amazon is notorious among nail polish people for just throwing bottles of nail polish into boxes with inadequate packing materials, and then being shocked when they arrive broken.) This one came with a dozen polishes in a plastic bag stuck into a way-too-large box, with like a couple of little cushiony things thrown in - not enough to make any difference whatsoever. Are they extra-frazzled because it's almost Christmas? The only thing that saved it, I think, is that the plastic bag that the polish was in actually was the right size. (Amazon needs a big button when you order where you can say, "I don't need this til after Christmas, thanks." They do have something like that for some things, but I've wanted it a couple of times in the last week when it was not offered to me.)

We have to work tomorrow, then we're off til after New Year's. Woo! Apparently the students are mostly already gone, because things have been dead the last couple of days. Tomorrow it's going to be even slower, presumably.

I had a doctor's appointment today, and it went okay, but she ordered blood-work because I hadn't had any in a while, and they took about a pint of blood out of me, it looked like. - Ok, well, it was five vials, it probably didn't actually add up to a pint, but still. And my old doctor had retired, and this was the first time I'd seen my new one. I was a little worried about that, but I really liked her, thank goodness. The other one was my age or a little older, and she talked to everybody like they were kindergarteners. It drove me crazy - I think she gave me flashbacks to my mom the elementary school teacher.

Anyway, the day could have gone a lot worse.

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Entries tagged with amazon

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