Oprah ain’t the only one who can have Favorite Things. However, since I am a poor struggling writer, I can’t afford to plunk down $300 on a Kindle and I’m reluctant to give Amazon more of my money than they already have. So, as one of my co-workers says, “If it’s free, it’s for me.” With that mantra in mind, I present Seressia’s Favorite Thing:

Acrobat.com

Acrobat.com is an online services site from Adobe. It enables you to create PDFs, share documents, create and save documents online, and access them from any internet-connected computer. And it’s free.

Why is this my favorite thing? Two words: Adobe(r) Buzzword(R). Writing online is the biggie. You don’t have to worry about your hard drive crashing, your margarita splashing across your laptop, or your cat peeing on your keyboard because you’re not paying attention to him. Acrobat’s Buzzword automatically saves your document, it’s stored ont heir secure servers, and it also has versioning control.

And if you want to have a brainstorming session or collaborate on an anthology, you can invite others to “share” you document and they all join you in your personalized little corner of cyberspace so you can work in real time. Want to send your file to a beta reader? No problem! You can set them to “reviewer” mode so that they can comment but can’t share the doc with anyone else. Or you can set them to “reader” which means they can only read the document.

And just to show that I’m not biased, I can give a big thumbs up to Google Docs. This program (also free) allows you to create documents, but goes a step further in giving you the FREEdom to create spreadsheets and presentations online as well.

With both programs you can upload docs, though of course Google lets you upload a bit more.

For the lady who turned around and left yesterday after I spent two hours in line to exercise my right…

Diddy: AIn\'t No Line Too Damn

I received a letter today from the District Manager regarding my mysteriously self-ejecting brake light bulbs from my recent oil change experience. Here’s the meat of the letter:

*******

Ms. Glass:

Part of the Full Service is to do a light check. Upon noticing that your lights were out, it is our responsible to let you know. If at that time you say no, we are required to indicate the malfunction on the receipt. At no time we would disassemble your car without your permission. (me: That’s what I thought, too. But then I’m the one who said I must have a car poltergeist, so obviously my opinion is suspect.)

Had you have asked us to check out the lights, we would have done so at no charge. There was no way to have known the lights were out of the sockets without removing the panel. (me: of course, your folks could have told me that they’d check the lights for no charge, but since they told me the lights were out, I assumed that meant that they’d checked the bulbs. Why didn’t I think to ask them to perform a service I didn’t know they could do? Silly me.)

Thank you for letting us know about your concerns. If you have any more questions Please feel free to give me a call.

***********

I do have more questions, but obviously they must be asked of my physcian and not the District Manager for Xpress Lube. Since I don’t have any kids and no one else drives my car but me, I must have had a weird sort of Munchausen by proxy thing going with my car that had me taking the bulbs out and not knowing it. Either that or someone is able to bypass the car alarm and instead of taking CDs, the radio, any of the junk in my trunk or the iPod I occaissionally leave in the car, that person pulled out the light bulbs then managed to re-engage the alarm so that I had no clue things had been disturbed.

I ain’t saying someone at the Xpress Lube did something fishy. Perhaps we just miscommunicated. I thinkt he easiest way to avoud such miscommunications in the vuture is to simply NEVER GO THERE AGAIN.

Thanks Mr. District Manager. You’ve been real helpful.

Check it out! I have a real-life spooky story posted over at the League of Reluctant Adults’ blog. I share my experience while visiting St. Louis Cemetery #1 in New Orleans. Please go by and leave a comment!

I should be exhausted after working 12 hours Monday, 15.5 hours Tuesday, and 11 hours Wednesday for the day job, and semi-regular shifts Thursday and Friday while battling exhaustion/the crud, yet here I am at 5 AM Sunday morning, still up from Saturday.

Do I know why? Nah. Like I don’t know why I just watched and hour entitled PORPOISES: LIFE & DEATH IN THE FAST LANE on Georgia Public Television, thinking the narrator was Gerard Butler (it was some guy named Kieron Elliott) and then spending ten minutes staring at still from Attila, which is when I was first introduced to Mr. Hotty McHot. How did I forget that scene in the bath? Now I’m gonna have to go order this movie. In the meantime, I can always watch 300.

After I get some sleep anyway.

The blog Running With Quills had a guest blog by Linda Keller, a Community Relations Manager for Barnes and Noble, who trains many of the company’s CRMs on the east coast. For anyone wanting to know more about how signings can (and should) go and how books get to the store, you might want to check it out.

So I was a little late leaving for work Monday morning (wanted to get there at 8 instead of nine, but did a 12 hour day anyway) and as I programmed the DVR for “Chuck,” I saw these kids on the Today Show, singing the blues. Singing the blues well, with homemade guitars.

Homemade Jamz Blues Band came in second at the Memphis International Blues Challenge, beating out 92 adult bands. This year, their first album, “Pay Me No Mind,” became the No. 1 blues download on iTunes.

Simply amazing. If you have children, or nieces or nephews, I hope you’re letting them play and be creative and find their way, no matter what way that is.

Today I blogged over at ReadersRooms about lessons I learned from my Grandmother. Please go check it out if you’re so inclined. Even if you don’t read my blog, check out some of the other authors that hang out there and have insightful things to say.

Saturday was great. The day was beautiful, exemplary of why I love fall the most. I had packages waiting for me from things I’d ordered online (it’s kinda like Xmas to yourself) and I had a good signing event. And gas was $2.79/gal. Probably because the speculators got hosed in the stock market and now they don’t have any money left to bet on oil futures.

Oh, and I just finished a story, a novella. I so love endings. The sense of accomplishment, joy, and outright relief–especially when it feels like I had to fight for every word on the screen. I’d like to take a day off–but I have a blog post due at readersrooms.com and I have no clue what to write about. And now that this novella is out of the way and no longer crowding my brain, the next story in line is demanding attention. Like knocking on the inside of my brain demanding attention.

There are days when I’d like to Murder my Muse and spend hours playing Solitaire.

Have you heard about this?

Google’s testing a program called Mail Goggles that will help you help yourself, by preventing you from sending emails you might later regret.

From Jon Perlow, Gmail engineer:

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

Apparently it only kicks in late night and on weekends. When you type up that 2 a.m. manifesto, and hit send, a series of math problems display. To send your email, you’ve got to multiply, divide, and subtract–and we’re not talking 2 and 2 either.

Like I said, if only there was a way to prevent those 2:15 a.m. booty calls…