Sweltering Prickliness, Preaching Canine Abstinence, and Apparently Having a Dragon Tattoo Doesn’t Automatically Make You Interesting

Just some random thoughts on a Friday morning until I get off my butt and write a real post:

(For my Query Letter Blogfest Entry, click here.)

Has anyone read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?  I assume “yes” because for the past year, I haven’t been able to escape hearing about it.  For a while there, it seemed so incongruently popular it was as if Jonathan Franzen had written a book about sparkling vampires on the coast of New Jersey who were part of a secret society founded by Leonardo Di Vinci.*

I finally broke down and bought it because the (virtual) jacket flap sounded interesting.  I’m on page sixty or so right now, and you what?  It kind of sucks.  I’m bored, the writing is tedious, and the only character I’m slightly interested in is the old guy who’s got a crush on the girl.  Can anybody tell me if it gets better?  Am I the only one who doesn’t think it’s the best thing since a book about sliced bread?

*I’d totally read that.

I recently switched browsers from Internet Exploder Explorer to Google Chrome.  I was leery after the debacle that was Firefox, but I love it.  It’s faster, more streamlined, and it’s a lot easier to perform simple tasks like bookmarking.  One of the unexpected perks is that it has an automatic spell check.  Whether I’m typing in a search box, a blog comment, or a Facebook update, it catches my misspellings and makes me look smarter than I actually am (Yay, deception!).  One of the side effects of this is that it always red-squigglies my last name.  Out of curiosity, I right-clicked.  These are the spelling suggestions for Klinefelter:

• linefeed
• interlinear
• sweltering
• prickliness

I’m thinking about having a flash fiction contest with those words as prompts.

All three of my dogs (two male, one female) have finished up Puppy Puberty and are looking to score – with each other.  Fortunately, they’re rarely left home alone, and it’s pretty easy to keep an eye on them.  Unfortunately, the earliest the vet can get any of them in for surgery is February.  In order to prevent any unwanted coupling while all four of us are out, my wife bought doggy diapers to put on the girl.**

In other words, my dog is wearing a chastity belt. 

Don’t make fun of me; maybe there’s a story in here somewhere.  I’ll call it The Red Crayon Diaries.

**In case you’re wondering why we chose to lock up the girl’s goods instead of the boys’, it’s because we have two boys and would go through twice as many, that’s all.