Butterflies and Books

We got ourselves a swan plant a month or two ago, in the hope we'd attract a monarch butterfly or two and get ourselves some caterpillers for Marcus to watch grow and turn into butterflies.

We're now on swan plants numbers 4 and 5 as the first two have been eaten to bare branches and the third is quickly going that way. We've had 2 butterflies hatch now (on is currently sitting on the deck railing getting ready to fly away and looking beautiful), we have 2 chrysalises (or whatever the plural of chrysalis is) and about another 9 caterpillers so this experiment has been a great success. Marcus is fascinated and Dave and I find ourselves rather captivated by the whole process as well.

If this keeps up it will have been a little expensive on swan plants at about $6 a pop, but otherwise most satisfactory.

I remain exhausted and while I've been doing some reading, there hasn't been much else going on. I thoroughly enjoyed my week away staying with my parents - especially teh 24 hours spent on the way home with my niece who is adorable - but I'm paying for less sleep now.

I picked up two new released before leaving town (copies for me and my best friend down in Palmy) and we both read them and got a chance to talk books, something we don't do much now we live so far apart, although we did constantly when we lived in the same town. I loved J.R. Ward's latest, Lover Revealed (along with a whole lot of other people) and also Nalini Singh's second, Visions of Heat. I also skim read my way through C.E. Murphy's Thunderbird Falls and I'm still not sure if it was worth it or not. A pity, as I really enjoyed the first one. Getting tired, I've read a couple of quickies, including Stephanie Rowe's Date Me Baby, One More Time, which was silly, but fun, quick and perfect for that moment. Now I'm on a reread.

I loved Tanya Huff's Vicki Nelson books when I read them (as they came out in the nineties), so I got my hands on Lifetime's new show based on them, Blood Ties. The pilot was based on the first book and I thought they pulled it off quite well. I'm sorry they took out the whole joke of Henry being a bodice ripper romance writer to update it to creating graphic novels, but can understand why. I think the casting for Mike was great and Vicki and Henry are both quickly growing on me.

So I went and pulled out Blood Price, the first book in the series. I'm totally loving reading it all over again, both because it holds up nicely after 15 years and reamins a very good book, but also for the back-to-the-past feeling it generates. Maybe, especially when I'm tired, I should try rereads more, instead of feeling guilty about the growing TBR and thinking I have to read from that. I don't know yet, but I shall continue enjoying Blood Price all over again.