Hating on the Holiday’s

There is no part of the holiday season I hate more than being inundated by stupid television commercials.  At present the one I hate the most is a diamond commercial where a “hearing boy” gives his deaf girlfriend diamonds but first he shows her that he knows how to sign Merry Christmas.

Naturally she’s over come with silent excitement and enthusiasm over his split-second hand gestures; like he just spent a year learning to speak perfect Chinese.  Seriously, she’s hearing impaired not stupid… although her boyfriend might be since signing 2 words appears to be a difficult and complicated feat for him.

Let me just say…barf.

The one I hate the second most is yet another diamond commercial. Mom rocking baby in the middle of the night, Dad gets up in his t-shirt and gives her a diamond.  I imagine her saying, “Oh, honey I can’t wait to see what it looks like on my hand cleaning a dirty diaper!”

Seriously, she doesn’t want a diamond, she wants him to take the baby and say go get some sleep.

The third most hated Christmas commercial is the perfume commercial with a couple ice skating to I’ve Got You Babe. Naturally she can skate well and he keeps falling down, but he is sincerely trying to meet her in her world. It’s about as stupid and trite as that scene in New Moon where the writer wanted to depict a happy future for Bella and Edward by dressing them in white and showing them running through a meadow. It’s vampire fiction not a Julie Andrews film.

Once again, let me just say…barf.

Here’s a commercial I did like! Anyone whose raised a daughter over the last decade knows this commercial is pitch perfect. From the beat, to the dance to the gestures…its all girl.

And another that made my Holiday Like List:

New Moon 2009, Twilight Series Trailer

For all you Twilight fans…

More Twilight Trailers

New Moon Trailer

Catching

I’ve been working to get caught up for some time, I titled this post Catching because I already know that catching up is out of the question so I’m settling for just Catching. I’ve continued to add chapters to my book I’m somewhere in the teens now as far as chapters go, so many at this point that I’m loosing track.

I spent a week wrestling the ending to one single chapter to the floor. It seemed each time I ended that particular chapter I’d come back and it felt all wrong. Revise, revise. Finally I decide to walk away, comeback to it fresh and just move on for now. Naturally, I didn’t follow through with that decision either and I did the rewrite anyway except this time I was completely satisfied with my work.  Sometimes it as if I’m circling an idea and it takes a little while to zero in on the target. Enough on that, The Eyes to See Grace is coming along better than I ever expected but it has been extremely time consuming.

Obviously, blogging and other activities have really suffered. That having been said, its not to say that I haven’t continued to cover books and reading material I just haven’t had a chance to blog about them. Since my last book blog here is the list of books I’ve read or listened to:

Twilight – Stephenie Meyer

New Moon – Stephenie Meyer

Eclipse – Stephenie Meyer

The Thirteenth Tale – Diane Setterfield

Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett

The Plain Truth – Jodi Picoult

I can easily say that the biggest surprise in fiction has been the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I downloaded the audiobook for my daughter.  Since it was conveniently on my audio library I put a copy on my MP3 and the rest is history. I loved it.

The fact that I enjoyed it so much has taken me a while to publicly admit because I feel sort of silly about it. It’s teen fiction, high school vampire romance… seriously. But I truly enjoyed the series and my daughter and I are waiting anxiously for book 4 Breaking Dawn scheduled for release in August and Twilight the movie scheduled to be released in Dec. 2006.

The Thirteenth Tale was masterfully written, an unusual tale that draws you in from the very beginning.

Pillars of Earth – I’ve never read Ken Follett and I know this book and the World Without End are both deviations from his standard genre…all I can say is; well done and keep it coming. It was an epic adventure and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire journey from start to finish.

As a side note, I spent a very long time deliberating on whether or not to select Follett’s books, it earned such amazing praise yet a story about the building of a cathedral sounded so stodgy and lack luster. I’m so very glad I that I reserved judgment because I loved it. World Without End will soon be on my reading list as well.

The Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult, was the third book I read this year that was written by this author. I started with My Sister’s Keeper which was briliant, went on to read Nineteen Minutes, also fantastic and most recently read The Plain Truth. Picoult never fudges on the research that goes into her stories and The Plain Truth was an interesting peek into the lives of an Amish family complete with their own dialect at times. Picoult has yet to disappoint me.

Links will be connected in a day or two.