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Congrats to Yvette, who won Love Comes Around (Senses #4) by Andrew Grey! Love Comes Around is being released today by Dreamspinner Press.

Congrats to Loren, who won With Wings (The Dark Angels #1) (2nd ed) by Z Allora!

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Randonymity

• If you’re going to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day…

Bookity

• New releases: Fiction Vixen (UF/romance)
• Book and publishing news from Dear Author.
• Becky Black with pointers for authors to safely navigate Goodreads.
• “The curious case of Ellora’s Cave“.
• Things you might not know about Slaughterhouse-Five.
• Harry Potter compacted into a single (large) comic strip.
• Filthy Shakespearian insults.

Do, Make, Think, Learn

• 35 jobs that aren’t around anymore.
• Oh, poor Texas, they’re getting grief over their climate change denialist textbooks. (USA, you’re scaring me again. And I live here.)
• Hopefully you’ve all configured your phones so your photos won’t give away your location.
• If you want to remove that U2 album from your iPhone…
• The setup for this What If? is pretty complicated, so I’ll go with “Balloon Car”, too.

Cookity

• Mexican chocolate and almond ice cream.
• Blueberry cake.
• Breakfast hash.
• Lasagna-stuffed spaghetti squash.
• Vegan pad thai.
• Spinach and tomato frittata.
• Winter Caprese beet noodle pasta. (via The Kitchn)
• Curried roasted eggplant with coconut milk. (via The Kitchn)
• Egg and eggplant sandwich.
• 14 eggplant recipes.
• 18 Rosh Hashanah recipes.

Gluten Free

• Easy monkey bread.
• No-bake coconut raisin oat crunch bars.
• Apple pie cookies.
• Beer-battered chicken fingers.

Crafty

• Knitting linkity from kmkat.
• Knit yourself a sweater that’ll turn you into a Wild Thing. (via Bron’s Pinterest)
• Knit an Outlander cowl.

Cool

• Mirror wolf.
• Origami penguin.
• Skull coffee grinder (not real, alas). (via maderr)
• Crayon sculptures of famous characters and people.
• Spaceship sizing chart.
• Short film with a cat in a spacesuit, plus alien bees.
• Linkity from kmkat.

Cool or Wha…?

• Charging cable with built-in Christmas lights.
• Guardians of the Galaxy with cats.
• CatConLA.
• 20-sided die cake pan.

Wha…?

• Thieves in Lichtenstein stole 1.4 tons of listeria-contaminated cheese.
• Mitten flask – three whole ounces!
• Bacon caramel bourbon milkshake.
• iPad Mini as facehugger. (Or how not to do virtual reality.)
• Drive-thru funeral home viewing.

LOL

• Sesame Street Star Wars parody.
• Works for me.
• Remind me next year.
• How Canadians see the US and Canada.

Teh Cute

• Tiger! Kitten! Kitten! Baby red pandas! Kitten! Tiger and baby! Red panda and baby! Koalas and babies!

Reading Update
The Grendel Affair (SPI Files #1) by Lisa Shearin. Ok paranormal romance about a seer who works for a secret non-government agency devoted to keeping the existence of the magical world secret. Since I never got invested in the POV character, I don’t believe I’ll be reading more of this series.
Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous #1) by Kate Griffin. Good urban fantasy about a London barista who discovers she’s a shaman and somehow has to rescue the missing spirit of the city. I enjoyed the unusual premise, but struggled a bit with the style – although that got better as I became more used to it. Plus I think this could’ve been trimmed down a bit, as bits of the middle seemed to drag.
The Devil You Know (Felix Castor #1) by Mike Carey. Good London-based urban fantasy about an exorcist who’s been on hiatus but takes an innocuous sounding job because he desperately needs money. I tried reading this 18 months ago and quit at 1/3 because I couldn’t get into it – no such problem this time!
Vicious Circle (Felix Castor #2) by Mike Carey. Good continuation of this urban fantasy series as Felix tries to do right, but things get terribly screwed up in the process.
Dead Men’s Boots (Felix Castor #3) by Mike Carey. Good continuation of this series in which Felix finds himself helping the widow of another exorcist, who killed himself. Of course, nothing’s as it seems and everything gets much more complicated. I did catch a couple of continuity errors, which I always find distracting.

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“…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…” -Chaos & Mayhem

This picture requires a bit of explanation. 🙂 Mayhem’s side is in the foreground – you can kind of see one of her ears to the left of Chaos’ head, between his head and his tail. She’s sleeping with the top of her head smooshed up against Chaos. He started to hiss at her (I think she was making happy paws on his throat), but fell asleep mid-hiss.