I am doing much better and should have some content up here soon. I am SOOOO lucky that the situation with my back was not a permanent situation. Back yoga is gonna happen here at Chez Oddbooks and I feel pretty confident that I’m back to normal.

A week after our beloved Tabby died, two little cats with injuries showed up in our lives. Of course they did. The cosmos let them know there were openings. A mother and daughter – mom’s a tuxedo and her kitten is solid black, both semi-longhair with fuzzy tails. We weren’t going to keep them but we made the rookie mistake of naming them and now we’re screwed. Once you name a cat, it’s pretty much yours. But they came along at a fortuitous time. No cat can replace Tabby or Miss Baby but the two new girls provided a distraction from overly involved grief.

So we’re back up to 8 cats, same as it ever was.

I have a movie discussion coming, as well as the long-promised Jim Goad/ANSWER Me!/Rape edition discussion. That will likely happen in September because I want to get a copy of a couple of books that are topical to this discussion and make sure I have all my ducks in a row.

Before that happens, there will be some bizarro reviews and a discussion of why one of my favorite horror writers is a complete disappointment to me. Seriously. I feel like I’m his mom and he came home drunk with a hooker, barfed in the houseplants, and missed the toilet entirely when he peed, soaking the family dog.

I really appreciate the kindness shown to me at the end of July.

I also need to mention that I got a flurry of e-mails around the anniversary of the Breivik mass murders. I tried to answer a couple of them and they quickly turned into a diatribe wherein we were no longer discussing 2083 and what it showed about Fjordman and Breivik. The messages became a mess of kitchen sink accusations against Islam and Muslims that were so disjointed that the only thing uniting them was hatred and a weird way of processing information. I apologize if you sent me an e-mail in good faith hoping to discuss specifics of the Breivik case or 2083, but once again, the True Believers have made it hard to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Conspiracy theory is a badge of tribalism in an age where there are no tribes and is important to the identity of many people. I get that. And I don’t want to mock people who engage in this sort of thinking, though I know it happens from time to time. I do mostly try to be kind and patient. But I only have so many hours in a day. I have a husband, 8 cats, a house to neurotically clean, meals to cook, books to read, discussions to write. As much as I appreciate that people may want to talk to me, I don’t have the time to reply to 10,000 word messages. If you sent me such a message and feel slighted, again, I apologize. If you simply want people to read what you have to say, please leave your messages as comments on the entries themselves. Unless you advocate something illegal or so immoral I cannot stomach it, I won’t censor you.

So things are back to what passed for normal for me and I appreciate my readers here. Next entries will have actual content, yay!