Getting too old for concerts?

My husband picked up tickets for the Evanescence concert this evening. While I like the band well enough, I have a tough time enjoying a mid-week night out. I typically rise at 5 a.m. So staying out past 10 p.m. is a bit tiresome. On top of that basic math, I do have chronic insomnia, and the last couple of days have been pretty brutal on that front.

The concert was pretty good, though we left before the end by mutual agreement. My back was bothering me a lot, along with being exhausted. The food at the arena was crap. And the music was a wee bit loud (fortunately, I did have ear plugs).

Looking around at the crowd, I was more than a bit amused. A lot of the crowd were Goths. Most of the younger girls who weren't Goths were wearing their pants tight and virtually falling off their butts, which looked unflattering even on the most well proportioned of them. Then there was a whole cadre of girls wearing outlandishly short skirts with obscenely high heels or boots.

Boy do I sound like an old fuddy duddy.

We may go to another concert in March. This one appeals to old people like me: Van Hanlen. Maybe their show will be over by 10. After all, they're old like us.

Book list meme

Thanks Barbie2be for yet another horrible meme that I couldn't resist. It's a lot of work unless you really like the stuff of the bait, which I do: Books!

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Don't alter the ones that you aren't interested in.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)


2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)


3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee).


4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)


5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)


6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)


7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)


8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)


9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)


10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)


11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)


12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)


13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)


14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)


15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)


16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)


17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)


18. The Stand (Stephen King)


19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)


20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)


21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)


22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)


23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)


24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)


25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)


26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)


27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)


28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)


29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)


30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)


31. Dune (Frank Herbert)


32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)


33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)


34. 1984 (Orwell)


35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)


36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)


37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)


38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)


39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)


40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)


41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)


42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)


43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)


44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)


45. Bible


46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)


47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)


48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)


49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)


50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)


51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)


52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)


53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)


54. Great Expectations (Dickens)


55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)


56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)


57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)


58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)


59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)


60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)


61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)


62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)


63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)


64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)


65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)


66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)


67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)


68. Catch 22 - Heller


69. Les Miserables (Hugo)


70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)


71. Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding)


72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)


73. Shogun (James Clavell)


74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)


75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)


76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)


77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)


78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)


79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)


80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)


81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)


82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)


83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)


84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)


85. Emma (Jane Austen)


86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)


87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)


88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)


89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)


90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)


91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)


92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) -


93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)


94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)


95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)


96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)


97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)


98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)


99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)


100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

There's nothing like a snow day

...to make me really hate snow.

The last few days have been increasingly painful for me, back-wise. Since I had heard that we were due for an overnight snow storm (and I hadn't gotten my snow tires on my car yet), I figured that I would probably call in 'unwell' today. Sadly, I knew that I had a boatload of crap to get done this week, so I really couldn't afford to blow an entire day off.

I should have. I REALLY should have.

My home office is not as ergonomically friendly as my work office. The longer I sit at my home desk, the more I regret it. I probably worked at least 75% of the day. And, what do I have to show for it? Well, I did accomplish some of what I needed to today. However, my body is in twice as much pain as it was twenty four hours ago.

Since I was going to be home, I kind of got it in my head that there were some much-neglected home tasks that I might try to accomplish today. Now, of course, I'm pissed at myself for not getting to those either.

Maybe I'll call in sick tomorrow, and mean it.

(Primary) Politics = Ridiculous (Doh!)

As most of you know, I live in NH. We traditionally hold the first primaries in the country for Presidential elections. Politicians favor us with an inordinate amount of attention, relative to the size of our population (41st according to Infoplease), since our primaries influence the rest of the primary elections.

This week, the Democratic Party ruled that all Michigan forfeited of its delegates by moving the date of its primary ahead of the official February 5th start date of the primary season. New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina have traditionally held early primaries/caucuses, and were thereby exempt from the wrath of the Party.

Look, I (somewhat) enjoy all the attention that the candidates pay to NH. I like that they visit my small (by populuation standards) us a great deal in the months leading up to the primaries. Though I do wish they'd stop calling my house. However, this 'race to be first' has gotten out of hand.

All state-residency-loyalty aside, here's how I see it. Wyoming is actually the least populated in the country. Let's let them hold their primaries/caucuses on January 2nd. Let's make everyone else hold theirs at least one week out after that. Currently, Wyoming waits until May to hold a convention to determine their selections. If they would like to continue to do that, perhaps they could offer to sell their slot!

Any state that would like to take on Wyoming's slot, could bid for the privilege. Wyoming is not a wealthy state. Imagine the benefit to them to selling off their preeminent position in the primaries. As the least populated state in the union, they could garner some financial benefit to their position (once every four years) by auctioning off their preeminent primary slot every fourth year in (say) October.

What do you think?

I promise to do a weekly hero post tomorrow. This one was just too annoying to pass off today.

All quiet on the blogsphere front

Now that NaBloPoMo is over, many a blog has gone silent. It's not surprising. Committing to posting everyday for 30 days is hard work, even if some posts are just "I know this is a lame post". It was still a commitment to say something, anything, every day.

All of us had days where we were exhausted from our lives, where we couldn't even think of dragging ourselves to the computer, much less actually stringing a few coherent words together for the blogsphere.

So, allow me to applaud everyone who kept their commitment every day, even if some days ' posts were not earth shattering. Life is like that. Many days are unremarkable. But, each day we get up and persevere.