So, there's this really awesome contest going on over at Confessions of a Bookaholic blog. It's called the Summer Lovin' Giveaway! From now until August 19th, she's giving away some cool books, and you can sign up now. Winners announced on August 23rd. Just click here to read the rules and enter!

Good luck! :)

Sooo, there's a contest. To win Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Right here: abbylibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/07/thats-right-shes-giving-away-catching.html

Go to it! Enter it! And hopefully win it! You just have to promise to share the book with someone. ;)

Some movies based on books were just never meant to be made. This was one of them, taken from Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.

( Spoilers... if you can call them that. )

Okay. After seeing it for the second time today, I need to get my thoughts out about this movie, based on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling. And since it's all one big spoiler...

( Spoilers, I mean, ships ahoy! )

So, back to my summer project: recording old videotapes onto discs. One of them was a collection of home videos from kindergarten to around second grade. Boy, were those days easy!

I mean, it was when I could run around dancing to Pokemon and Britney Spears and not care if anyone saw me. When I could still pet my two old dogs who I miss a lot. When I got so excited about getting a toothbrush and Band-Aids for Christmas (and screaming it out even though I had bronchitis). When I was still friends with people I'm not now, and when I could invite all of the girls in my second grade class to a birthday party. When I still went to dance class and was in a white with multi-colored flowers two-piece suit for the recital to "Let's Get Loud".

There are so many little things that make up your childhood, and you can be so careless not to notice them. Now it's like, your mind's running 24/7 and you can't even think past how much fun or what you're doing to do to have fun on any given day. I had so much more confidence and liveliness back then. It seemed like those days were the funnest things in the entire world.

Well, it's not all that bad. I now have proof of my brother and his friend doing the Fossil Rock at their preschool graduation. ;)

Maybe you've heard of the Pulse It Board when it was cool. I did. I was a part of it when it was cool. But guess what? It's not anymore. Because I went to leisurely reading free books in my spare time wherever I wanted to being forced to be obese in front of my laptop. Don't understand? I'll explain.

About six months ago, six-months-younger me sent in a consent form for the Pulse It book club. Limited amount of members and the waiting period to get in was up to four months, but I didn't care! I mean, I love reading, it is my life, so getting free books every month from then on out was something that got me all excited and flustered. When I got my first book this past January, I was ecstatic. I read it as fast as I could and submitted a review, the price for staying in the club.

It continued on like this until April. All Pulse It members got an email that said they'd be "revamping" the program. My thoughts, and everyone else's: Yeah, right, this means no more free books? And Pulse It responded like: No, of course you will still be getting free content!!1OMG!!1! Like hell we all believed them.

And what kind of email did I get today? One that said that in the new program there are only E-BOOKS (books online, for all you people who live in the 21st century and still don't know the term) and we can REVIEW to get POINTS that we can use to enter montly SWEEPSTAKES and maybe even the AUTHOR of the book will TALK to us. And EVERYONE can join! Hear that? EVERY-FRICKIN-ONE! And the best part, WITHOUT A CONSENT FORM!!

Okay. I know this doesn't sound as bad as it could be -- i.e., no program at all (which I'm actually thinking would be a better alternative than the disappointment I have to deal with now, but that's just me and all the other Pulse It members). But the fact that in their email they were trying to pass it off as omg the best thing the world has ever seen!! is pissing me off. They're basically simplifying the program, but trying to be all, This is fabulous and perfect and amazing!

My guess as to why they did this has to do either with the economy right now (catch-all excuse) or publishing problems, like they had with February's books. But why can't they just tell us? Do they think we'd drop out? I have more odds in favor of dropping out now than if they had just come out with the real reason: this new program sucks, but there's nothing we can do about it.

There's one thing I know for sure: I am not reading a 329 page book in less than 51 days from my computer screen.

Ughhhh. This is so freaking annoying.

Okay, so, like a couple days ago my mom got a converter to DVD for our old video camera, right? It sounds awesome. Except it takes as long as the tapes are to convert into a DVD. So, like, that's two hours, max. For such a good deal (saving all of the embarssing moments of my past, hooray), it seems like a small time to wait, right? WRONG.

Because then, in order to edit the movies on my laptop, I have to go through a very complicated and highly professional process to convert the DVD into actual movie clips (let's just say I'm not saving energy on the electric bill):

A) Put in a DVD onto Teh Windowz computer.
B) Open the DVD burner and wait until the clips rip.
(Which takes about 1/3 of the actual movie time.)
C) Put them into the DivX converter.
(Which takes around 200% more fricking time than the actual movie time.)
D) Put them into iMovie and wait for them to import.
(Which takes the same amount of time as converting it into divx, which makes NO SENSE.)
E) Edit the movie and then export it.

And then it goes into iDVD to burn a DVD, which is the final step. Except I'm still on Step C because my Windows computer sucks. But why can't things be faster? There HAS to be an easier solution, especially with Sims 3 being on iPod Touch. Just a solution that I have no idea about. But once a DVD is finalized (like the ones that come directly from my video camera to DVD converter... so confusing), it ain't so easy to get it into clips again.

Well, everyone, this is my summer "project". Woo hoo?

On second thought, maybe I should do this for my Spanish How-To this week...