The Gas Crisis Hits Home

So I'm driving home from my mother's house last night and suddenly my car starts sputtering. I'm out of gas. I haven't run out of gas in twenty years. My excuse is that I'm currently driving a rental car (thanks to a fun rear-ending accident I caused a couple of weeks ago), and while the gauge says I have a partial notch of gas left in the tank, apparently there's not actually any gas left in the tank.

However, this is one of those stories that has a fun ending. So my car starts sputtering, and I realize I'm out of gas. The power steering loses its power. It's 11:30pm. A recipe for disaster, usually, or at least a recipe for extreme inconvenience. But not tonight!

I was only a couple of blocks from my house, so I just let the car coast. Thankfully there was no traffic on the road. I coasted and slowly lost steam. Right at the corner of my street, it was really struggling. I had to really force the steering wheel to make the turn, but I managed it. I finally lost all momentum right in front of my house. The car came to a dead stop and I just got out and went in my house.

In spite of the stupidity of running out of gas, I'm actually quite amused how this turned out.

That's all. Nothing more interesting than I ran out of gas and coasted home. Move along, everyone... move along.

Woo Hoo! I won a book in an online contest!

One of my favorite blogs is "Pat's Fantasy Hotlist" that covers, you guessed it, all the fantasy book news (and some sci-fi) that's fit to print. Tons of great reviews as well. This guy is a reading machine. Anyway, from time to time, he holds contests to win books that he is given by publishers. I've been entering the contests for the books I've been interested in for a few months now, and today, it finally bore fruit.The book I'm winning is called "Bloodheir", which is the sequel to "Winterbirth".

This is a new fantasy series by a new author, Brian Ruckley, that's been given loads of praise. The books and world-building are being compared to George R.R. Martin, which is heady praise indeed. Of course, everything is compared with Martin nowadays, as it has become the defacto standard for modern fantasy. If he'd only write a little faster, I'd feel a bit more confident in that declaration. The longer he takes to write each book, the less confidence his fans have that he will actually complete the "Song of Ice and Fire" series (he's writing book five of seven right now). Anyway, that's a digression for another day.

I've been looking forward to reading "Winterbirth", and now winning "Bloodheir" with this generous contest, I'm even more excited about tackling this series.

Yay me.