Monthly Archives: May 2014

Book groups, Children's literature, Spare time - Culture, Young adult literature

Currently reading

There’s a large stack of books next to my favorite chair, waiting to be read.  Most are for upcoming book groups, but I’m also starting to accumulate some “fun reading” books in anticipation of the June break from book groups (and then the August and September break from book groups, which allows me a lot of time to read other things!).

Here are the books that are piled next to me:

  • The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud (5th grade book group)
  • Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell (6th grade book group)
  • The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan (Teen book group)
  • The Great American Dust Bowl by Don Brown (Teen book group)
  • Years of Dust by Albert Marrin (Teen book group)
  • The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton
  • The Outcasts by John Flanagan
  • Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante
  • My Heart is Boundless edited by Eve LaPlante
  • The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie
  • Curtain by Agatha Christie
  • The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
  • And assorted magazines, long neglected by me:  The Atlantic, many New Yorkers, and Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country.

Any other must-read suggestions for me for my upcoming season of fun reading?

Cats Dogs Plants Animals

Pippa

Pippa 1997? - 2014
Pippa
1997? – 2014

Four weeks ago today, we had to put our beloved, but elderly and infirm, Pippa to sleep.  My life has been a bit crazy lately, and so I feel like I haven’t really mourned her yet.

But this morning I got up after having slept a bit late, and thought to myself how lovely it would be on this day off to make a pot of tea and snuggle on the sofa with Pippa and our favorite “magic blanket.”  And it hit me like a ton of bricks that Pippa isn’t here anymore.

She was a wonderful girl: smart, affectionate, kind, tolerant, dignified, and an incredible (if reluctant) role model to Moses, Millie, and Moxie.  I miss you, Pippa.

 

Blog administration

Some changes here

I have recently upgraded to a new theme for this blog, and there are two changes to be noted:

I consciously changed the comment settings so that readers can only comment on posts that have been published in the last fourteen days.

And, I have noticed that this new theme has a habit of splitting words at odd points to justify text.  For instance, in one past post, the word August was split this way:  Au  gust, with no hyphen after the Au.  When I have more free time on my hands, I will try to figure out how to fix this (if it can be fixed), but for now please know that it is the software and not I who is splitting words oddly.

I hope you enjoy this new theme as much as I do, though!  I especially like the random rotation of header photos when you click on one of the pages.  The photos are:  Moses as a wee little sprite of 6 weeks; crocus in our yard; and the odd duck that we saw a summer or two ago when kayaking on the Concord River.

Librarianship, Spare time - Culture

Dream

The other night I had the weirdest dream…a library dream, of course.

I dreamt that a library patron called the children’s room and asked me to pull a large selection of DVDS – chosen according to some odd guidelines dictated to me over the phone – and then, once I’d pulled everything for her, that I deliver them to her house.

So I pulled  a large stack of what were now CDs (who knows why it switched from DVDS), and proceeded to open each CD case and take all the CDs out.  As each disk came out of its case, it turned into an ordinary green pea.  Logically, I put all of the peas into a bowl, then went to eat dinner with my family.  I might even have eaten a couple of the peas/CDs…that part is a little fuzzy.

A few minutes into eating dinner, my mother turned to me and said, “Don’t you need to deliver those CDs to that lady?”  Panic set in, and I rushed over to the bowl of peas and realized that before I could deliver anything, I needed to get the peas back into the CD cases.  But the peas were just green garden peas, and weren’t labelled like the CDs had been, so how was I to know which pea went into which case?

I contemplated eating the peas to figure out what they each were, but realized that would be counterproductive, so then I thought about gently tasting each one to determine what music was on each.  And I considered just jamming random peas into CD cases and delivering them that way.

When I woke up from this very very long dream, I still hadn’t figured out a solution.  Somewhere in my dream world, there are still green peas that need to be converted back into CDs and put into their cases and delivered to an imaginary library patron…