Music City Author’s Haunted Nashville Novel Released: A City of Ghosts

This won’t be news to a majority of the readers that still stop by here, but in case you’re one of the rare few, my friend Betsy Phillips (better known to the blogosphere as Tiny Cat Pants author Aunt B.) wrote a novel featuring ghost stories steeped in Nashville legends and lore – a haunted alternative history of Nashville, I guess you’d say – and it was just released on Amazon today and you can get a copy here.

It also has a cover photo that is quite possibly my favorite picture of Nashville ever, shot by the enormously talented Chris Wage.

For you Kindlephiles, it’ll also be out for the Kindle soon.

About half of the stories were published at TCP last October for the Halloween season (and were awesome), but the rest are brand new and I’m super looking forward to reading them! Be sure and grab a copy of your own (P.S. they’d make great Christmas gifts too!).

Oooooh….. Shiny!

Sorry posting’s been a bit light again. I have got a ton going on this week, but I’m also… (ahem)… playing with WordPress.org – and I am just rather enamored of its sheer awesomeness.

My mad techgeekchick skillz don’t seem to be serving me that well this time and I feel a little bit like a newbie trying to learn Windows 3.x all over again in that respect – and there is just SO much stuff!!! – but it’s pretty neat and I’m having fun. And have fallen in love with the hosting company (Host Gator) after my yucky experiences elsewhere (I won’t say who, but feel free to ask me which companies to avoid at all costs). I actually made a spontaneous decision (based on the recommendation of a WordPress.org expert) to jump over there after pulling my hair out for hours trying to install and update a WordPress blog where I was, and when I got set up at Host Gator, I had the thing on and live in less than five minutes (as well as some really cool other stuff that came with the account).

I’ll let you guys take a look at it when I get a little more moved in and situated. I don’t project that I’m going to move the Zone over there  – well, maybe someday, but I’m still rather attached to WordPress.com and even though it’s probably dumb of me, I never really wanted to put any advertising on the personal blog and whatnot. Now, the music blog, that might be another story – but I’m not jumping ship from WordPress.com with the personal blog anytime soon.

This new adventure is pretty cool though, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. I just hope I don’t break anything, eek.

The Miracle of Malwarebytes

Well, that’s seven hours of my life I will never get back.  I have spent most of the day since I woke up again (after working late last night) trying to rid my newish computer of a particularly nasty strain of malware/trojan/etc. that I’ve acquired before, but the last time I had it, that strain was more easily eradicated.

This one refused to be killed.  As many know, I have a pretty large stable of protection programs of various kinds, and generally my computer is usually probably locked up tighter than Ft. Knox.  None of my usual stable of stuff was working this time – all of which are generally excellent – nor about a half dozen more things I tried in the process.  This thing just wasn’t going away.

Doubly sucks that I wound up with because of a stupid web page.  I suppose I have a little bit of respect for the hackers that come up with executable virii & trojans, the ones you actually have to open up or DO something to get infected.  I even have a friend who was one of those folks in his younger and stupider days.  These drive-by web page weenies are just cowards and ought to be prosecutable to the fullest extent of the law.

Well, anyway, to make a long story short, after hours and hours and going through virtually every other program in my stable ‘o stuff which are all generally excellent and reliable, without a single one working to rid myself of this nasty piece of coward-created work -

Folks, I hereby present to you Malwarebytes.  It was the ONLY one out of about twenty attempts with other programs to rid myself of this thing, and hours and hours of trying, that worked.  I’m a believer now, and am probably going to be replacing one of my usual standards of protection with it, most likely.

I’m not much for commercial endorsements of any kind, but given the circumstances and the outcome, seemed like I ought to share.

On another note, apologies for the lack of anything much since Christmas.  I’ve really been much too busy trying to stay afloat and not homeless and totally starving (as opposed to starving three or four days out of the week in general) and all that fun stuff.  More soon, I hope.

Family of One, Scan On

So, have I mentioned that I’m now a Nielsen family? No kidding.

That’s a little bit scary, huh?

Yep, indeed I am. I have the little scanner thing, not unlike the ones they use at Wal-Mart and Target and Petco and such. I scan everything I buy when I get home, or when I get around to it, and once a week I transmit the data on everything I bought that week. It doesn’t take but a couple minutes to scan once you get used to it.

It’s really pretty neat, and you get points for it you can later redeem for some pretty cool stuff (I of course have my eye on the electronic section of the catalog), and they give away some pretty large cash prizes to people that transmit their data like they’re supposed to. I kept falling a week behind (though I guess I was on schedule for as far as the next week was concerned), but I finally got myself on schedule now.

It’s kinda cool, you oughta try it. It took a few months after I applied to be invited into the program, but you’ll probably get an invite eventually if you apply. They select randomly, so eventually your number’s likely to come up. Click here for the application.

Mountain Dew Revolution – From F to A in 5 Minutes

I was at the store late last night and needing a cold drink, and there was no orange soda in the refrigerated soda case, so I was looking around and noticed something I had never seen or heard of – the new Mountain Dew Revolution, with wild berry flavor and ginseng.  It’s blue, which is usually a tipoff that it’s either really bad or really good.

So I get home and take a swig and immediately hated it.  Seriously was grading it a big fat F, not even a D.  It tasted like carbonated cough syrup.  But I didn’t have anything else cold to drink in the house, so I was going to finish it anyway.

Then a funny thing happened about 1/4th the way into the bottle.  Suddenly, it started tasting good.

I don’t know.  It would certainly never be a favorite, but it’s all right (after the initial couple of swigs anyway).  It’s sort of similar to some of those energy drinks I don’t really like all that much but there’s something about them that tastes both good and not so good.

So if you haven’t tried it and want to give it a shot, be forewarned, but stick with it past two or three drinks.  The carbonated cough syrup effect kind of goes away.

PS: New music blog here.  (LOL, yes, I’m going to keep repeating that for at least a week or two.)

It Works, It Really Works: Dawn Dish Liquid & Fleas

I’ve been reading for years about Dawn dishwashing liquid (the original, not the “new” kind) and its ability to get rid of fleas and just kind of went “ehhh” about it.  Not that I didn’t believe it worked at all, I just figured it probably didn’t work as well as people claimed it did.

I was so wrong.

We have had an awful time with fleas this year – which makes me want to cry because for years we were flea-less until the neighbor dogs moved in a couple of years ago, but anyway – this year has been the worst ever, and I don’t think Frontline is working as well as it used to, though it does seem to finally be working, or at least I think I’m finally seeing a dent in the cycle because most of the fleas I’m seeing now are juvenile and baby ones (heh, that sounds funny).

I’ve been reading a lot lately where people are saying Frontline Plus is no longer working, or works for a week and quits, or suggesting going back to Advantage a while and then reattempting Frontline, or postulating that the fleas are gaining immunity towards all of that type stuff.  One of the statements I see frequently I tend to agree with most – Frontline Plus just does not seem to work as well as Frontline Top Spot.  I do think the cycle is breaking, but it’s certainly not with the speed and severity that Frontline Top Spot always had.

In any case – before I get off topic any further – we’ve just had a time this year and among some other things I’ve been trying, and trying to avoid spending any more than the megabucks I finally had to cough up for Frontline and other measures, I finally decided to see if the Dawn legend really worked.  It does!

My flea traps are drowning a number of those suckers nightly, all for the cost of a bottle of original Dawn dish liquid (a whole 96 cents at Wal-Mart right now).  I have played around and tried a few different things now with it all (including another dishwashing liquid) and this method seems to work the best and attract the most fleas to drown.  You need:

1. Said bottle of original Dawn dishwashing liquid detergent.  Not the now-regular Ultra or anything else.  Just plain old original blue Dawn.
2. A shallow bowl of water, preferably white.  You can use clear ones, but the white bowls seem to attract them more.  If I use a clear one, I put a piece of white paper under it and that seems to help too.  But my small French White bowls (I call it the creme brulee size) and a Corningware mini-casserole dish I have seem to work best.
3. Best spot to place the bowl is on the floor.  I’ve tried other and higher spots and they’ll work, but it seems to attract more if on the floor.  You can put it in a corner or out of the way otherwise, they’ll find it, believe me.
4. A book light or night light.  Many places you read will say a night light and those may work, but my problem is I live in an old house with few electrical outlets and even fewer where there’s any floor space underneath.  I had a couple of mini-book lights, the kind that clip on the book and have the little bendable arm – you can get them at Walgreen’s lately, two for $3 – I just clip them on the side of the bowl and bend the light where it’s over the center of the bowl, and voila.  I have tried some other little book lights since, such as some that Dollar Tree has right now, but they just don’t seem to attract as well as these little lights Walgreen’s is selling right now do.

I have one bedroom that has been hit particularly worse than the rest (Tojo the Psycho Cat’s bedroom) and my flea trap in there is catching 15-20 or more a night and starting to slow down a little, finally.  The rest in the rest of the house are only catching one or two a night now, but it’s definitely all working.

I don’t usually use flea collars because they really don’t do much other than keep the pests away from their heads, but I did buy one for Tojo – unfortunately it was a cheap one and seemed to be making the fleas WORSE than they were, so last week I got the pricier Adams one.  And last week washed all the bedding in the house, too.

Bombing the house, which would probably have been the quickest and surest way to eradicate all fleas, just wasn’t an option – there’s nowhere for all of us to go for a day – and after having spent a small fortune on Frontline, and other stuff leading up to the Frontline which was wasted money because nothing was working – the fact that the Dawn really DOES work, for 96 cents a bottle, is just WONDERFUL.

It’s all working.  We are not 100% flea-free yet, but it’s better and we’re close, and I will swear by this Dawn method from now on.  The dogs (and quite possibly one very mad cat) are going to have a bath with flea shampoo next week and then it will be time to Frontline everyone again, and after that (fingers crossed) with any luck we can go back to only treating the dogs with that stuff.

But I will be keeping at least one or two homemade Dawn flea traps on the floor at night at all times, maybe all year long but definitely during the warm months, probably one in Tojo’s room and another in some other corner of the house somewhere.  I now highly recommend it for any dog or cat owner.  Even if you don’t really have a flea problem or aren’t seeing any, just one bowl set up like that with the Dawn and the book light or night light ever night will almost certainly assure you don’t see any.  It works!

Why fleas like the Dawn so much more than other liquid dish detergents – and why they prefer it as opposed to the newer, “ultra” Dawn – now that’s something to ponder, but I can tell you for a fact that they don’t like lemon Ajax as much.

Ouch!

So I got one of the new Fruitista Freezes at Taco Hell today because it’s like a million degrees outside in Memphis today. I got the just Strawberry instead of the Strawberry Mango, ‘cos sometimes mango doesn’t taste too good to me.

I give it a pretty enthusiastic thumbs up, even with the half dozen ice cream headaches that came with it.

The Squirrel Queen claims that one can relieve brain freeze by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, adding that it warms the nerve endings there that cause the ache. And Rachel agreed with her. But I dunno about that, that sounds awfully weird to me. I’ll try it next time tho.

Bits, Pieces, & the Like

(1) Somebody (Jag? Aunt B.? I can’t find it now) wrote about these a while back and I was covetous and waiting for them to appear on Memphis grocery store shelves. Finally they have, and now I can NOT stop eating them because they are the best thing EVER:

(2) I just got back from a 24-hourish trip to Birmingham. I drove through a monsoon in Mississippi to get there. Got there and Alabama was, like, sunny and warm and had been all day. Today it was like 78 degrees and felt as humid as any June day in Tennessee. I get back to Memphis and not only am in rain again but immediately have to change into a sweatshirt because I’m freezing. Grrr.

(3) Trying to decide if I should be worried about Dobie having eaten a few Nair wax strips, but considering all the other dangerous, ridiculous, and just plain gross things he has ingested in his 13 years on the planet, I think probably not.

In Which I Do the Happy Dance & Get Ready in 2008 to Get Physical… I Mean, Political

Oh hey, remember my Roger Abramson Watch?

He’s baaaaaaaack! I guess I can take it down now (or soon). I know my fellow Rogerettes are thrilled as well!

Unfortunately not on WordPress, but on Blogger (heavy sigh). I still cannot leave comments successfully on any Blogger blogs and haven’t been able to in months (exasperated) – but that’s okay! He’s baaaaaaack!

(And so too recently, I note, is Sean! Woo! Watch me get all excited about politics and current events in 2008 now, this should be fun, huh?!?!!!!) :D

Love is a Mix Tape

This is another one of those long-delayed posts, much like the one about my trip to Los Angeles in March. Coincidentally, it was on the plane trip back from L.A. that I finished this book. I wasn’t long into reading when I realized this should not have been an airplane read and I should have read it at home in a weekend or something… mainly because it was a tremendous struggle to keep from weeping buckets uncontrollably on the plane.

I’m not sure I can truly do this work any justice with my words, so I’m not going to even attempt to make this out to be a big review of sorts. I just need to write about how awesome it is.

The novel I am talking about is Rolling Stone editor/writer Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, now soon releasing in paperback in December. The book was brought to my attention last winter by Mike over at Chez Bez, who wrote about it here and here and brilliantly so, and I was just immediately, like, oh yeah!!!… I HAVE to read this! So I ordered it, then it took a while to get around to starting it as I’ve just gotten so lazy about reading anything that’s not on a computer monitor screen these days, and then I opened it, finally… and was immediately hooked.

It’s the story of Rob and his wife Renee, who had little in common except a grand love of music. He was a shy, geeky Irish Catholic boy from Boston when he met her, a loud and extroverted Southern girl (borrowing those astute adjectives from an excellent Amazon review, well put!), and they bonded over their rather extreme connection with the music thing – a dynamic I have not been unfamiliar with in both past and more recent years myself. They married during the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/and/all/that grunge age of the Nineties, and were happily so until Renee’s sudden and untimely death from a pulmonary embolism in 1997, dying in Rob’s arms in their kitchen and at a distressingly young age.

It is quite simply the most wonderful, and most gut-wrenchingly sad and heartbreaking, story I have ever read, I think… but it’s probably so to me because it hits awfully close to home – same age, same time, similar circumstances, and almost the same places. I cried not only when she died, but pretty much through the whole thing; I think I wept reading the first or second page, in fact.

I believe the only other book I have even come close to weeping so much over was Doug Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, and that experience just doesn’t even compare – while heart-wrenching, the story itself is a fantasy. Sheffield’s tale is achingly real and almost unbearably so, but wonderful and beautiful all the same.

This book is probably not for everyone, but if you’re a total music geek like me – and especially if you are in your late thirties or early forties and were around and in the indie music scene wherever you were at the time – and even more especially, if you ever spent hours making countless mix tapes on those ancient antiques called cassette tapes, back in the days before the computer age – yeah, you really need to read it. And have a box of tissue handy – seriously.