Hollywoodland

I was checking my stats yesterday and saw someone had visited my blog using “decoration how to organize a bookcase” as a search phrase. Yeah, we all know I have strong opinions on this subject. Primarily, don’t organize by color if you actually READ your books!!!

I read several vintage decorating/clothing type blogs and one from yesterday had me literally laughing out loud. Go read about some questionable advice.

Census records are a great resource for both family history and writing, but ye gods! The dudes taking down the information could have used penmanship classes in the worst way! Some of them are quite clear and easy to read. Unfortunately, they’re in the minority. Most of them must have been written by doctors given the level of chicken scratchings. At least when I’m using them for writing research, I can skip the ones I can’t read (and don’t feel like trying to decipher) and move onto other records that are more legible. It’s kind of hard to do that with family history research. But it would make my life easier right now if Ancestry had the census records indexed with occupations in addition to names, etc. But they don’t, so finding the info I want is taking longer.

My horoscope for today:

Bizarre dreams might haunt your sleep tonight, but if you aren’t careful, the dreams could disappear as quickly as they appeared. The symbols might be trying to tell you something, so you won’t want to forget them. Keep a notebook and pen by your bed, and plant the suggestion in your mind that you’ll wake up after you’ve had an intense dream. Then write the dream down before it vanishes forever.

Well, I do that anyway. Have done for years. But what if I don’t remember them??? I usually don’t these days….

Happy birthday to actor Nicholas Lea. He turns 46 today.

Tonight on TV, we have Greensburg, In Plain Sight, and Inspector Lewis which is a spin-off of the very popular PBS mystery series Inspector Morse.

Reading: I haven’t quite finished Dead in the Water by Carola Dunn yet. Should do tonight unless I drop off to sleep the minute my head hits the pillow which is highly unlikely. *g*

I was watching Jeopardy yesterday. And they had an answer that said something to the effect of “A miniature bulldog was the pet of this animated boy adventurer”. The question was “Who is Jonny Quest“. Well, the thing is, every reference I’ve found online says Bandit was a miniature bulldog. But I thought Bandit was a pug!!! I’ve thought that ever since I was a kid. So where did this bulldog nonsense come from???

I was lying in bed reading last night when about 1:30am, I heard this loud beeping. It was the smoke alarm. Just the one in the kitchen. About the time I got in there, it stopped. It also woke up my mom. So we both stood there staring at it. Needless to say, there wasn’t a fire. We decided the battery was running low. It’s been changed now. Personally, I can’t remember us changing the batteries in the smoke alarms since we moved here two years ago. Oops.
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Well, yesterday’s Belmont Stakes was a huge disappointment. Something was up with Big Brown, poor thing. He was obviously cranky earlier in the day, but they said he’d settled down. But it was obvious about the middle of the race that he simply did not want to run. He’s got no outward injuries, so that wasn’t it. I guess now he’s getting a complete checkup. I keep wondering if it was just the heat and humidity that New York was swamped in yesterday. At any rate, he’s still an amazing horse.

And I’d like to add that I much prefer ESPN’s and ABC’s coverage of horse racing than the bozos at NBC. The gang at NBC make me insane!!!

In the sort of weird news arena, Wonder Woman star Lynda Carter found a body floating in the Potomac this past Wednesday as she was out rowing. How freaky is that?

Since we’re in full rerun season, there’s nothing on that I want to watch tonight, so it’ll be more recorded shows for me tonight.

I’m now working on organizing my books. What a mess! I suppose it’s my own fault, though, for having over 1300 of them.

Reading: I’m about halfway through Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates by Martin Caidin. And I discovered a problem with having more than one person writing in a series. The continuity sometimes falls short. I’m enjoying the book a lot, don’t get me wrong, but he had one character back at his old job as a jazz musician & member of a mob family in Chicago after the character had married & moved to California. Oops. One thing I discovered about the author that I found interesting, though, is he wrote a book titled Cyborg which was later adapted into a television show you might remember, The Six Million Dollar Man.