Santa, You Rock!

I hope Christmas Day was as marvelous for each and every one of you as it was for me. It was just Denis and me all day. We woke up when we felt like it, opened our gifts, and spent the day enjoying them and each other's company.

Denis modeled one of his new T-shirts, we listened to a few discs of the remastered Beatles boxed set, and watched Independence Day.

Besides Independence Day, I also received Andrea Bocelli's My Christmas CD. (We listened to that first. Beautiful!) And my blue netbook was thrilled with the Bluetooth cordless mouse it received. I think the mouse was a bit perturbed with me at first because I kept trying to use its butt to point with instead of its head. (I've got myself sorted out now. 'onest!)

I have a husband who pays attention to online wish lists. All I have to do is keep them current. When Denis went Christmas shopping, he also shopped for books. Once again I can murmur "Precioussssssssssss!" and stroke a shiny new stack of books. (I'm beginning to think that my middle initial G stands for Golum.) Of course I'm going to let you know which books he chose for me!

--Cut Throat by Lyndon Stacey. "Beset by nightmares of the riding accident that sent him crashing into a viewing stand full of people, crippling a young girl, 27-year-old American rider Ross Wakelin is devoting most of his time to getting drunk when Lindsey Cresswell, a young British colleague, offers him a chance to return to the riding arena in the U.K. Her uncle, Colonel Preston, has a show-jumping yard in Wiltshire and needs an immediate replacement rider. Ross agrees, but he has scarcely gotten out of the car at Oakley Manor when he is greeted with the news that one of the horses is dying, the apparent victim of poisoning, the second such incident at Oakley Manor."

--Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer. "Living on the streets of London with a gang of street urchins, orphan Mary decides she’ll have an easier time of it if she poses as a boy. Following the murder of her friend Charlie, Mary steals his clothes, collects his “shiv,” calls herself Jacky Faber, and signs on as a lowly ship’s boy on a Royal Navy frigate."

--Castles in the Air by Judy Corbett. "When Judy Corbett caught sight of a great stone mansion in the craggy wilds of north Wales, she had little idea of the adventure on which she was about to embark. She and her husband, Peter, had long dreamed of buying an old ruin and escaping the pace and excesses of modern life. But it was only when they had moved into the vandalized, squalidly filthy, cold and wet Gwydir Castle that they began to realize what restoration dramas lay ahead. Restoring the 16th-century castle, which reduced the couple to near penury, turned their lives into a curious blend of real and imaginary, past and present. But the magic of the place, its history and the landscape, ensured that they stayed to tell this charming, deeply romantic tale of escape and homecoming."

--Company of Liars by Karen Maitland. "Desperate to outrun the Black Death ravaging England during the sodden summer of 1348, nine disparate souls band together in this harrowing historical, which infuses a Canterbury Tales scenario with the spectral chill of an M. Night Shyamalan ghost story. Maitland gives each of the travelers a potentially devastating secret. As the nine strangers slog cross-country through the pestilential landscape, their number shrinking one by one, they come to realize that what they don't know about each other might just kill them."

--The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas. "Newly transferred from his home in the Pyrenees to Paris, the 45-year-old Adamsberg arrives with a reputation for solving big cases, though his diffident manner doesn't impress his colleague and foil, Adrien Danglard. A solitary man drawing blue chalk circles at night around stray objects in Paris streets manages to create a media sensation, but Adamsberg senses evil behind the act. When the corpse of a woman is found encircled in chalk, he's proven right. Adamsberg's indirect approach, his ability to sense cruelty and to let solutions percolate to the surface make him one of the more intriguing police detectives in a long time."

--Monty Halls' Great Escape: Beachcomber Cottage. "Former Royal Marine Monty Halls recreates the simple life of a crofter on the west coast of Scotland, living off the land, raising sheep, pigs and cattle, and growing his own vegetables. It’s a life-changing, survival story set against the most dramatic landscape in Europe."

Fabulous haul, eh? Santa (AKA Denis)-- YOU ROCK!