A new year and new arrivals

January already, you say? No, I haven't gone mad, I know it's not the New Year, but it is the second year of this blog: happy birthday blog-me, I am one year old today! My blogging's had its ups and downs and is hardly going to set the world on fire, for one thing I'm too lazy to put the work into blogging that others do. I greatly admire those who do things like host carnivals and challenges, blog almost every day and still find time to visit and comment on loads of people's sites, as well as reading a huge number of books and having incredibly busy lives; there don't seem to be enough hours in the day for me to fit this in with work and a full WoW schedule - hmm, maybe that's the problem! It's been a lot of fun, though, and I've met some great people through doing it, as well as discovering some books and authors I would never otherwise have read. The thing that has amazed me most about the book blog community is how nice everyone is even when there are disagreements, which there will naturally be. After all, reading is a very personal thing; what to one person will be the best book ever will seem a great pile of drivel to another, it's only natural. Something I really didn't expect from blogging was that it would affect my reading. I don't mean the books I read, the fact that I have picked up recommendations from other people was only to be expected, but the way I read. Pre-blog I would read one book at a time to the end, that was the rule. Occasionally if it was a particularly long book I might take a rest in the middle and read a short book for a break but that was it. Since starting the blog I find I have two or three books on the go at the same time that I pick up as the mood takes me. It's as though there isn't time enough for just one book, I need to have more than that in my head at once. At the moment I have taken this to extremes as I seem to be incapable of finishing a book and flit off to another at about the half way mark - currently on the go are a book on poetical metre by Timothy Steele, Princess Lieven's letters, Paradise Lost, The Occult by Colin Wilson, and the Mammoth Book of Horror Comics which I bought on a whim last weekend and immediately became the current favourite. I will finish all of these, I have been enjoying them so much, but time is hard to find. And here is the main reason why: The loss of our lovely cat left a cat-shaped hole in our home and so the new arrivals to herald in the new blog year are these kittens: Stewie (ginger) and Leela (tabby). They are both tiny, full of mischief and exhausting, as they are constantly looking for new ways to potentially injure themselves, but they are very sweet and seem to have settled in well.