Our snow is all gone now and so begins those ugly days between snow cover and spring green. Everything’s brown. And dead. And matted. All the crap people didn’t get around to picking up before snow fell is revealed again.

Also revealed are the bad gardeners among us, who didn’t weed and properly put to bed their gardens before hard frost. Not surprisingly, that includes me.

I have Sudafed-brain today, so I’m just going to babble about television. I love TV. Sometimes I remind myself I could get a lot more writing done if I didn’t watch television at night, but then I laugh at myself. No TV? Seriously? So what am I watching?

Amazing Race: This is still our favorite show, hands down. I don’t strongly dislike anybody yet this season, but my early favorites are the cowboys, Jet and Cord. If I had to name a team I’d like to see go home next, I guess it would be Miss Maps Such As and her boyfriend.

Cold Case: Getting a little ho-hum for me, but I’m so very glad they’ve ended that ridiculously stupid storyline with Lily stalking the military school guy. That was dumb.

House: Awesome, as always. I don’t get Cutty and the PI, though. Zero chemistry there.

24: I’m not enjoying this season at all. It’s ridiculous and I don’t want Jack to be involved with Rene and that whole thing with the Battlestar Galactica blonde and her boyfriend and the past boyfriend? Hate that. You know it’s very, very bad when my favorite character is Chloe.

Castle: It just keeps getting better and better. I love everything about it and the chemistry between the four of them at work is absolutely perfect. I thought, in the beginning, I’d be annoyed by his goody-two-shoes daughter, but I like her, too.

Human Target: My love for this show knows no bounds. It’s funny and action-filled but still has some depth to the characters. Not a lot of depth, but enough to make me want to know more about them. We DVR it to watch with the kids, because they love it, too, and we’re so glad they moved it from 9pm to 8pm. That means we’re not watching Idol this season, but we’re free to watch Human Target. At 9, the DVR schedule was already full because we were watching Criminal Minds and taping Modern Family and Cougartown.

NCIS and NCIS: LA: Love them so much. At first I didn’t care for LA, but the chemistry and easy banter between Sam and G has sucked me in and won me over. I’m glad on NCIS, they’ve backed off the Tony & Ziva thing. Was worried about shark jumping after their little trip overseas.

The Mentalist: Still enjoying it, though it’s not as charmingly original as it was. But as long as he keeps smiling that impish smile, I’ll be there watching it.

Lost: With the exception of the most recent episode starring Boring Ben, I’ve enjoyed this season. It’s sucked me back in and now I want answers.

Looking forward to V returning. Couldn’t care less about Flash Forward returning.

Survivor: Never miss it. GO BOSTON ROB!!! I’m totally a Villains girl.

CSI: Eh. Starting to not really care. We never started watching the New York series and we finally managed to kick the Miami habit thanks to Castle, but even the original is starting to get a little meh.

What else….

NUMB3RS: Still love this show. But something they said during last week’s previews, and the fact Charlie and Amita are going to England, gave me the impression they’re bringing it to an end. Anybody heard anything about that?

Miscellaneous sitcoms: Still absolutely in love with The Big Bang Theory, Two and A Half Men, Modern Family, Cougartown (which we almost didn’t watch because of it’s dumbass name, but we love now). Starting to feel a little meh about How I Met Your Mother. So much of it borders on ridiculous now.

Favorite new show: Parenthood. My husband and I both think it’s incredible and I really hope it sticks around.

I know I’m missing some, but that’s okay. This is long enough. Time to stare at the clock, counting the minutes until I can self-medicate again!

Taming Eliza Jane is finally available for Kindle!

It’s been a constant source of annoyance for me (and readers) that the second book in the series, Becoming Miss Becky, was available digitally on Amazon, but the first wasn’t. Now it is!

If you’ve known me a while, you know that while I’m afraid of everything from potato peelers to moving a sleeping cat, my one true deep, dark phobia is chicken feet. Not chickens. Just the feet.

This morning, after dropping the Short Kid off at school early for his Student Council meeting, I popped into the grocery store to rummage up something for supper tonight. I didn’t bother with a cart, just went straight to the meat department to see how the chicken looked. I reached for a package of boneless chicken breasts and there they were…

Packages and packages of pale, plastic-wrapped chicken feet.

Next thing I knew, I was in the lady’s restroom, which thankfully isn’t far from the meat department. I really hope I didn’t step on any children or run over any elderly women on my way there, but I don’t know. Previous reactions to being confronted with chicken feet (and really, there have been way more chicken feet episodes than one would reasonably expect one person to have) include blacking out, vomiting and vaulting over a spear-tipped, wrought-iron fence after which I locked myself in my aunt’s minivan. I have no memory of my aunt and mother beating on the windows, trying to get in.

After about fifteen minutes in the restroom during which I managed to stop hyperventilating and even tweeted about my situation—and nobody ran to my rescue, which is the downside to all of my friends living on my computer—I managed to at least fake being an adult about the situation. I left the restroom and took an immediate right, away from the meats. I went all the way to the far wall and walked up the dairy aisle and straight out the door. Then I drove to another grocery store to get supper, which won’t be chicken.

I don’t like change—that’s been my grocery store since it opened but, really, what possible reason could there be for somebody in central New Hampshire to want to buy a package of chicken feet? Since it would be unreasonable to call them and tell them to stop stocking chicken feet, I’m going to have to find a new grocery store.

After five days, I’m finally alone again. We’re all healthy (*knocks wood*) and everybody’s where they’re supposed to be today, which is not breathing my air.

I owe email responses and some other things. Working on them, promise.

Also still working on that damn synopsis. I find synopses for straight-up contemporary romances difficult to write. While the romance and suspense intertwine in a romantic suspense, I find the big external plot points give me a framework on which to hang the romantic arc in a synopsis. In the contemporary I’m on my own and I tend to ramble. A lot. It took me four pages to get to the end of the first three chapters, so…it’s a process. *sigh*

I bought a second office chair this morning so I can work at the dining room table with something even remotely resembling correct typing posture. (And so I’m not shredding my wrists on the Macbook’s surprisingly sharp edges.) I just put it together by myself, so hopefully I won’t have to share any injury reports later.

Off to deal with the destruction left in the wake of the Short Kid and I being sick…

I have a pretty sick 9-year-old and a proposal I have to finish, along with a few other writing-related matters, so I’ll be scarce for a couple of days. I have contest winners to draw and email to answer, but they’re going to have to wait until my little guy’s back on his feet.

I gave you a lot of money in exchange for a nook. I chose the nook over the Kindle even though Amazon often beats you on book prices. Even though the nook has some known glitches. Even though it doesn’t do everything you advertised it could do. Even though you, for some inexplicable and stupid-as-crap reason, decided not to capitalize the name of your device.

In exchange, do you think you could let me read some mother:censor:ing books?

Today is Tuesday. Tuesday means new books. I’m not sure why you didn’t get the memo—oh wait, because is there NO :censor:ing memo. Everybody who’s ever read a book knows there are new books on Tuesday.

Except, apparently, you.

Here are two books on my list for today:

Bound, Branded & Brazen by Jaci Burton.

Something About You by Julie James.

Oh, those are AMAZON links, by the way. I would have used yours, seeing as how I shoved my money into your nook, but you don’t have those books available digitally yet.

Amazon does.

Get off your asses and do your jobs, or I’m going to give Amazon my money.

Thank you,

A disgruntled customer who’s willing to put up with a randomly freezing nook that doesn’t do what it’s advertised to do, but won’t put up with not getting new books on Tuesday.

I guess I’ll be taking the weekend off. Though I didn’t do a damn thing to it, I have some kind of agonizing pain in the outside of my right wrist and lower hand. It started last night and just keeps getting worse.

I can’t hold a pen. The Schwans guy came & writing a check almost made me thow up. I can’t type. (Drafting this with my left thumb on the iPod.) Had to go to the post office and mail a contract. With an attention line. And a long-ass Canadian address. I was in tears by the time I was done painstakingly forming hideously mangled block letters. I’m sure the recipient will be horrified by my handwriting.

What’s weird is that it’s not only a pull. If I touch it, the pain is excruciating.

Well then, stop touching it!

Wiseasses.

I have a brace on it now, but the contact pain is so bad I can’t tell if it’s helping. Might switch to an Ace bandage.

I might send my synopsis to the iPod and work on it a little. Or I might curl up with my nook. But I won’t be rocking the word count, that’s for sure.

On February 28th I’m going to give away TWO $25.00 gift certificates to any online bookstore (that offers gift certificates)! Entering is easy!

1) Sign up for my newsletter! I’ll neither share your email address nor inundate you with mail. But if I have exciting news to share, you can have it delivered straight to your inbox! (You’ll be taken to an Access Romance page thanking you for subscribing and letting you know you’ll be getting a confirmation link by email. It only takes a second to click and I think it’s there because of spam laws. Thanks!)

…and/or…

2) Become a “fan” of my Facebook page!

On February 28th I’ll randomly draw two names—one from the newsletter mailing list and one from the Facebook page. If you do both, you’ll have two chances to win!

I’m willing to bet my New Year’s resolution wasn’t exactly unique—stop outbuying my reading pace. The TBR pile—even when it’s digital—is out of control and at some point you’ve gotta stop and read the books you’ve got.

This ridiculously doomed resolution coincided with another—keep track of the books I’ve read. Enter…goodreads.com (links to my profile). I’d signed up at some point, become totally overwhelmed by it and promptly put it out of my mind. But somebody mentioned using it to keep track of the books they’ve read, so I went back and gave it a look-see.

Okay. So I decided I would add books as I bought them starting in January, 2010. I wasn’t about to put in previous books because there so many, but those would get added as I read from the TBR backlog. Excellent plan for Resolution #2.

Except that it illustrates all too well how badly I blew Resolution #1.

Eight weeks into 2010 and how many books have I acquired? 62

How many have I marked as read? 6

Oops. Clearly I need to read faster or buy slower.