definitely, possibly, maybe

so i started writing the previous post last monday, and it took a week to post because the carpenter redoing the basement door decided to cut our cable and "fix" it with electrical tape, ensuring that our cable, internet and phone were completely out for over two days, and then we had out of town guests for the rest of the week. so, even though it took me all weekend, i've finally caught up with television that aired last week. show more monday's premiere: "gossip girl" oh, upper eastsiders how i've missed you and your ridiculous parties. and even more ridiculous clothing. and utterly ridiculous lack of plot and character development. " reversals of fortune " feels like a transition episode from start to finish, the gang is recovering from their summers and are eagerly anticipating their falls, and the show tries to balance recapping everyone's summer with some teasing of storylines to come, but it's just not that good at it. here's...

it seems that vampires are all the rage, no? so after a summer of avoiding "true blood" [for no specific reason, dh and i just never got our act together.], i spent the weekend catching up on the show just in time for the season finale. and what a season it was. watching it almost all in one go, i think, gave me a sense of what worked and didn't work this season. in list form, here are my thoughts on season 2 of "true blood": 1. maryann and the zombie-eyed orgies one of the challenges i face when i watch this show is that i really love the books. and i've read the books. so going in i knew that maryann was a maenad. what alan ball did with the character expanded on what happened with that character in the books. and it did give tara a significant storyline for the season, obviously an area that ball will tend to have more creative license with, since her character in the books is almost tertiary. the story about maryann was the frame for the whole s...

ah, it's back. network television in the fall. professional football. reasonable weather in new england. these are all good things. this week started off light, giving just a small taste of the fall television goodness to come, but i think that was a good thing considering i essentially stopped watching television this summer. [i'm not one to turn on the t.v. and flip. i'm the absolute opposite of a channel flipper and happen to be very lucky to not have married a channel flipper. we lose track of the remote so often in our household we wish it would come with a pager from the cable box. why hasn't anyone invented that yet?] anyway, so this week the cw premiered about half of its fall schedule and fox premiered "glee" [if other channels premiered things i don't know about them, the aforementioned lack of channel flipping and the fact that most of what i watch i schedule on the dvr and watch when i'm in the mood to.] anyway, here are my thoughts on the ...

i've been reading a lot lately. my dvr will attest to this, i have over a month of " general hospital " episodes, almost the entirety of season two of " true blood " [there are only two episodes left], and well, i still haven't watched the finales of " dollhouse " or " fringe " [and i really like these shows, well excluding "general hospital" which i love to hate or something like that]. so anyway, i've been reading a lot lately and viewing nothing at all and i keep feeling like i have nothing to write about except with the ten+ books a week i've been reading i have plenty to review. i want to adhere to a more frequent posting schedule, and once fall tv kicks up i hope to get back to a regular routine. but in any case here are a few of my favorite romance/chick lit reads: 1. something borrowed by emily giffin i know girls who hated this book. they couldn't get past the fact that the main character, rachel, s...

i've been a bad blogger lately, but the last two weeks have been a whirlwind and among my excuses are: birthday, work travel, personal travel, my niece's christening, and crazy deadlines at work, plus my recent obsession with cataloging my books instead of reading and writing about them [which i am blaming on my dear husband] and all my excuses amount to the fact that i haven't really been writing in part because i have been to busy to write and in part because i couldn't bring myself too. but that isn't to say that i haven't had anything to write about, i've had blog posts going on in my head for days now! so i discovered butterfly tattoo while reading smart bitches-trashy books . twice recently, it came up on their top romance picks, and the first time i read the description, i thought-- well, that sounds interesting-- but being a judgy bitch myself, i couldn't get past the cheesy cover art [displayed in all it's cheesy glory above]. when it came ...

i had said i'd write this up a long time ago...there is something shall i say, special about television viewing while away from home. when i'm traveling for work, staying at hotel rooms all across the country [a sampling of the cities i've visited since january this year: san diego, cincinnati, chicago, las vegas, new york, philadephia, detroit, denver ] life takes on a sense of unreality. channel line-ups are so weird in hotel rooms and so often it is impossible to find a piece of paper telling you what the channel line-up is so you have to go through every channel available in order to find the one you want. and this may be just me, but i can honestly never remember the channel numbers in hotel rooms. it's weird, it's like you can only ever know two channel line-ups at one time. i know my parent's television channel line-up and i know mine [obviously we live in different states], that's it. so in a hotel room, even once i've found a channel i like, wh...

so i recently watched confessions of a shopaholic , and well, it wasn't good. having read the books [at least the first three in the series] i knew that i couldn't expect too much of the story or the characters, but i love isla fisher, so i decided to give it a chance anyway. i often wonder at how popular this series is. i mean, the books themselves are not badly written, but rebecca bloomwood has to be one of the most singularly idiotic characters ever written. from book one she has a hard time managing money, goes to crazy lengths to hide the extent of her shopping addiction and inevitably ends up hurting the people she is closest to and then making it up to them. [even bridget jones exhibited some growth in edge of reason .] and then becky does the same thing over again in shopaholic takes manhattan and in shopaholic ties the knot . the thing is, if it were a novel about drug or alcohol addiction where the character struggles with relapses and destroys their life w...

so there are these three books that appear early on in my grandmother's collection of harlequin romances that look slightly different from the rest. and as i was reading another of the books [ love is eternal by yvonne whittal] i noticed a blow-in advertising an set of four harlequin romances to introduce new readers to the series. the cover images on the ad looked pretty familiar! and when i looked a little closer, lo and behold, three out of the four books in the introductory set matched ones in her collection. i can only assume that she didn't particularly like the fourth book [she used to throw away the ones she didn't like, however due to the wonders of ebay i've managed to track it down and will post about it once i've had a chance to read it]. from what i've gathered from her collection, she must have bought a few one-offs before subscribing to the service. #884 cap flamingo by violet winspear back cover copy: "you must marry me right now!"...

i've caught up on a week's worth of episodes of "general hospital" and have to admit that it is always a roller coaster ride. [except the more i think about it, the roller coaster would be a pretty terrible one that mostly stayed straight and close to the floor and had an occasional loop that would exhilarate you and then nauseate you just a quickly.] from the sublime: robin and patrick singing " i had the time of my life " was possible one of the most enjoyable things to happen on gh in a long time. the best thing about the whole karaoke evening was that you could clearly see how much fun everyone was having. you could see that these people genuinely enjoy each other's company. there's not often a lot of joy on gh so every little bit of it counts. and picking a song from dirty dancing was actually genius. song choice being key to every karaoke perfomance, both kimberly mccullough and jason thompson sold it. i started watching gh the summer kare...

i'm the kind of girl who needs to go to the movies with people. i don't like to go by myself. since most of the movies i enjoy don't require a big screen for maximum enjoyment, i have made a habit of watching things on dvd or on-demand. but every once in a while, especially when i have the rare opportunity to spend time with my best friend (we live in different cities), i actually make my way to the theater. over the july 4th weekend, while visiting her in manhattan, we decided to go to watch the proposal . most of the reviews i'd read were positive , but beyond that i had a feeling that this film would become a favorite. how could a movie with ryan reynolds , sandra bullock , and betty white not be enjoyable? i mean betty white is just plain awesome. ryan reynolds is a cutie and was so dreamy in definitely, maybe . and sandra bullock was in one of my favorite chick flicks ever, while you were sleeping . i don't know what it is about romantic comedies, but even t...