Anyone know a good order for reading the Ender series?
Started my goal to read 30 minutes today by starting Ender's Game. Got through four chapters of it, too. I impress me as I consider myself a slow reader.
But Im looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and I dont know what order to read in. Seems that theres another six books after the initial one: Speaker For the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind seem to follow Ender's Game. But then theres a second series of books as well: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets that seem to parallel the events of the first four books.
This leaves me rather perplexed, and I dont think one should be so when one is talking about pleasure reading. But the fact remains: does one try to intersperse the two series? It seems that Ender's Shadow tells of events that happen during Ender's Game -- going on descriptions on the back of the books only -- for example, so is it worth trying to read that book after Ender's Game? Or do I treat the other triology as a separate set of books and read it after the first four? Shadow of the Hegemon *is* billed as the sequel to Ender's Shadow.
URGH! Im so confused. What gives? silverfist would probably know as he got me onto this series in the first place, but Im not even sure he read LJs anymore. If youre out there, dude, clue me in? Or anyone else with insight, clue me in?
Anyway, that was my latest in a long line of accomplishments today, which included mainly mundane stuff like cleaning the cat box -- I *really* need to do that daily -- making phone calls, paying bills, shopping for groceries, and generally catching up on all the stuff that didnt get done in the past few weeks due to illness.
Got the aforementioned license plate fixed as well, mostly due to Adrian's help. See, like in most -- all? -- states, Colorado requires you to have two plates, and the back plate is supposed to display the month and year stickers for when the plates have to be renewed. In my case, this is December, so Im forever doing this nonsense at the end of the year. But when Adrian put the plates on the first time, he put the back plate -- the one with the stickers on it -- on the front and the front plate on the back.
Now, I didnt realize this until about a month or so ago when I noticed that I had no stickers on my back plate ... cause it was on the front. Oops. Managed to never get pulled over -- guess the cops following me from time to time, as they love to do on Motsenbocker cause its a frigging 30 mpg zone speed trap waiting to happen -- but knowing my luck, it would run out, so I figured I needed to get the plates around the right way.
Im the first to admit, Im no mechanical genius, so I wouldnt know what tool to get these bolts off. So when Adrian was actually HOME in December -- which wasnt often before the weekend before Christmas cause of his fricking fracking travel schedule -- Id whine and complain and beg him to swap the plates, to which Id get the 'find the tool you need and do it yourself' response.
So, this morning, I was fully intending to go downstairs, bring up EVERY tool in the case, and play 'lets make a deal' with my license plates for two hours. And as Im getting ready to head down to the basement to find said tools, I find Adrian coming in from the garage with my back plate -- which had been on the front for a year -- in hand. 'Here. Clean this so the new sticker will stick,' he tells me before heading back out to the garage.
Um, ok? Never asked him to start this process for me, but he did so without me asking after a month of me asking. Go fig. I cleaned it, and then headed to the garage for what I like to call 'moral support.' This consists of me standing around like an idiot -- usually freezing my butt off in the process -- watching Adrian complete a task in some effort to feel like Im contributing.
And it was a bit of an effort as none of the tools Adrian found the first two times going down to the basement seemed to fit the bolts on the back plate. Yes, the bolts to hold the plate to the back of the car are different than the ones to hold the plate to the front if of car ... just to be difficult, I think. Finally, Adrian finds an adjustable tool, gets the back bolts off. The swap of the license plates is complete! And yes, just like when they ate Sir Robin's minstrels, there was much rejoicing.
The one thing I didnt do today was exercise. I decided Im going to work on forming good habits in other areas -- reading, cooking, eating -- this week, and then tackle that next week. I really dont want to do much until I get my foot looked at again, and Kettie isnt back until the 8th. I think shes going to tell me to just do non weight bearing stuff -- thats what she told me last time, pretty much -- so I think the first step is to get on the bike and do that. I think weight lifting is going to have to tabled for a while longer, but at least I can get back into the cardio part.
While grocery shopping, I tried to make some good decisions. I need to eat a lot of small meals -- mostly healthy snacks -- over the course of the day. Thing is, I never stock anything in thats healthy to snack on, so I fixed that today. I picked up some cheese wrapped in individual packs as well as fruit packed in preportioned cups. I got some stuff off the antipasto bar to snack on -- marinated tomatoes to go with mozzarella and basil, as well as a nice corn salad -- and some 90 calorie bags of popcorn cakes. I think if I do 2-3 healthy snacks a day along with 2-3 actual meals, I should be able to fake out my metabolism enough to keep it going and hopefully lose the rest of my weight.
I also picked up a Weight Watcher's cookbook. Not sure if I want to *do* WW -- Andrea and Cheryl said they were going to start after the new year -- but I want to look at the new point system and see how it works. And I figured the easiest way was to pick up a basic WW cookbook and try some of the recipes out and figure out how many points I should eat. Might be interesting to see how many points Im eating now, too.
We wont be eating light tonight, however. Ive decided in addition to my goals I posted earlier, Im going to start doing real cooking again ... as in, pick a recipe out of a cookbook and make it for dinner. I then decided as a service to people on my friends' list, Id post the recipes that I make with comments on what I think about it in case any of you care to try it out. We used to have a recipe topic on a board I frequented, and we rather enjoyed trying out each other's creations. I miss that. So first up will be Christmas Pasta. Be on the look out for it later tonight or tomorrow, depending on when I get it all typed up.
Another goal Im going to attempt is to write a handwritten letter to someone at least once a month. I know this will be a great effort for me as Im not much of a writer, and if youre a recipient of one of these letters, its liable to be VERY mundane. But I guess its an ode to Mom ... I kind of want to carry on her letter writing habit, so Im going to give it a whirl. Thing is, my handwriting sucks ... so this might be a very bad idea. XD
I guess by adding these things Im breaking the 'only do five things at once' rule as I already had five on the list, but as Bump is going to be a longer term project, I figure I can get away with more. Who knows. If I fail, Ill just try again.
Guess thats about it. TV time.