Susan Sontag had an event and talk with the grad student group I was part of and she was really disdainful and dismissive and it was horribly depressing, especially considering I basically worshiped On Photography at the time. So I both met and was horribly disappointed with her on the same day. I keep hoping maybe…

Honestly, Nora Roberts is successful because she does it well. Her heroines are usually self-saving, the men are realistic and there’s a lot of plot that isn’t romance-related. She tells a good story, most of the time.

Please please PLEASE try to catch up with Jenny Trout while you’re there. She’s awesome and kick-ass and writes really hot books, but hot books where the characters are developed and realized and interesting and refreshingly normal, which makes them relatable yet still awesome.

As a former army brat, I can confirm officer pay is pretty crap too, at least until you hit major. There's a whole different set of unrealistic expectations there (For example, my captain dad made only barely enough to disqualify me from various student grant options when I went to college, and not enough to be able…

And the drug deals you can watch go down in the Children's Museum's former parking lot, right in front of the shiny new covered one (no, seriously. I was there last month visiting my family and it happened.)

I'm 41 and swear by Chanel's Vitalumiere Aqua (so many spelling mistakes there, sorry). It has enough coverage to make everything even but doesn't settle into my small lines. And it's fairly moisturizing! The Chanel counter people are usually pretty free with the samples, so I got to try it for a month or so before…

honestly, I couldn't understand what he was trying to accomplish there. I even said something like "good luck with that" as he

The only time someone has taken an upskirt shot of me was on the escalator heading into the Paris metro*. A lot of Paris is skeezy. There’s a lot of beauty and culture, but the underside of all of it is barely below the surface.

I like Dulles. Since they revamped their international arrivals, connecting (coming in from Amsterdam, but with a US passport) is easy and fairly quick and it’s pretty simple to find my gate. I haven’t even had to go on the weird people movers in a few years now. And you can smoke indoors in one of those horrible…

I was a total oops, or, as my mom put it later "We got caught practicing." But we knew that we were loved, that only my sister (of us three) was deliberately planned and my brother was the trailing "baby or vasectomy?" pregnancy. All of it was handled with love and humor and jokes about which car I was conceived in…

MAC brushes. I have a set (from the outlets, bc omg pricey) and 3 years later they're still amazing. I occasionally wash them with baby shampoo, but I'm pretty much a brush-cleaning slacker. They have a little angled one that's perfect for brows and liner.

The feral parakeets in NL aren't your average pet- they're basically the size of a small parrot. I love watching and hearing the flocks near my house, but they're definitely invasive and there's a huge population.

not sure if you're serious, but he died last year. And while it's thematic, I don't see them agreeing to bring Egon back for the third one, under the circumstances...

Jim C Hines's Princess series comes close. The Stepsister Scheme is about what happens after the "happily ever after" and has her dealing with her stepsister's jealousy and assassination attempts. It's pretty entertaining, too.

Exactly this. I live in NL, where the summer days are incredibly long. If there was no DST here, we're have sunrise at 4 AM and sunset around 10 PM. Alternately, in the winter when we're back to standard time we only see the sun from like 8:30-4:30, so I'm happy to have more usable hours half the year.

That's Delft! That's up the street! (also, my Dutch husband sat here snickering because he recognized it without audio. My expat self hadn't seen it.)

I love Honey Lust. It's shimmery, but more of an accent shimmer than "look at my glitter!" and it stands up well on its own while still being lovely and neutral.

I've had a lot of luck with the mufe liquid liners, to the point where I've started stocking up when I go to the US (Sephora has no Dutch locations anymore. I nearly cried while raiding the closing sales). They're worth every cent.

The thing is, with a good editor the trilogy could have made ONE semi-interesting book. And it would have had to be a hell of an editor.

Between this and Yoshi's Woolly World, it looks like my 2015 will be the year of clever cuteness.