I was up and all ready to walk with my Girls when the rain started, followed by enough lightning and thunder to make me go unplug the computer, TV and VCR. I called up the girls at freakin' 5:15 in the morning to let them know we were definitely NOT walking. I drank some OJ, ate a couple Girl Scout Thin Mints and went back to bed, snuggled up next to my sweet wife who doesn't like thunder much.

I just finished reading Robin Cook's "Abduction." For those of you who sneer at romance novels, I have to tell you, most of the adventure ones that I read are way better than that Robin Cook novel. Suzanne Brockmann blows him out of the water (an appropos analogy since SB's novels revolve around Navy SEALs and the RC book began with undersea drilling and went off into quasi-sci-fi about a civilization under the ocean).

I prefer a character-driven novel. If you don't make any of the characters interesting and human enough for me to care about them, I can't really care about the story. Cook's characters were two-dimensional and rather stereotypical.

Let's just finish this up, shall we?

His discriptions were flat, his dialog was flavorless, he telegraphed every single plot twist, and there was nothing that hadn't been done before in a zillion other regular-humans-meet-advanced-race storylines.

And is it just because writers don't make good interior decorators that future-slash-alien-slash-advanced races all seem to overuse black and white? The buildings are black obsidian, the living quarters are all white marble and acrylic, the people dress in white silk tunics. Don't you think advanced races would want a little more color and texture in their lives? Cook did mention that the earth-interior valley was green and the swimming pool water was aqua, but that's really the only colors I saw in the book. Except metallic. Of course there was lots of shiny metal.

One of my work superiors loaned me this book, and I'm going to have to tell her I didn't like it. Otherwise she'll loan me more. I think I'll loan her one of my John Varley novels. Now there's sci-fi with some flava.

I got another score on my Google Bingo card. My First Vibrator. Yay!

Here's the search string.

And here's my updated card:

I'm doing better than I thought I would.

Deb and I had a quiet evening together last night. We started the evening sitting out in the back yard reading, talking, and knoshing. We ate a nice chicken, mushroom, spinach, and pasta stir-fry for dinner, and then Deb rubbed my feet while we watched a "Gilmore Girls" rerun. We went to bed around 10 p.m., and Deb read me a chapter from our latest Den of Antiquity mystery, "Gilt by Association."

No. No, it doesn't get any better than that.

Oh, wait! It does!

I have a date scheduled with Sara tonight, and she's really geared up for some major action. I should say we are geared up.

Then there's family dinner on Wednesday night (that's the plan for now anyway), a lavish anniversary dinner with Deb on Thursday night, and possibly a "Boot Camp" watch-and-grope date with Sara on Friday night.

And did I mention that I have a one-and-a-half-hour massage scheduled for Saturday morning?

Don't hate me because I'm the most fortunate woman on the face of the planet ...