The Big Game's On Read-a-Thon!

The details:

• No rules, no guidelines, just read
• No start/end times, just read at your leisure.
• Mini-challenges will be created to break up your reading time. Participating in these challenges is not mandatory, but you will be eligible for a number of great prizes!

Since Fiona's with Jeremy til sometime on Sunday, I figure I can be super productive until then and spend Sunday reading.  Probably just what the therapist ordered at this point.  Better get working on that laundry & bill-paying!

Friday 56 and Book Beginnings -- Blackout by Connie Willis

Hosted by Katy.

How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you're reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence.

Colin tried the door, but it was locked.  The porter, Mr. Purdy, obviously hadn't known what he was talking about when he'd said Mr. Dunworthy had gone to Research.


I have a lot of fun with time travel and I enjoyed this one.  I will say, though, that it was hard for me to keep up with exactly who was when and how that compared to the other characters -- Thiswhere was a book that needed the name of the chapter (for example "En Route to London, September 17, 1943) at the top of each page.  All Clear is Collins' follow-up/conclusion to Blackout and I'll be putting it on hold at the library as soon as there is space on my account!



Hosted by Freda.
Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Link it here.

His first instinct was to put his hands out in front of him and feel his way forward, but this was the southeastern coast of England.

The Simple Woman's Daybook -- February 3, 2011

Hosted by Peggy.

FOR TODAY

Outside my window... Not so cold -- and supposed to get close to 50 degrees tomorrow!

I am thinking... that bucking conventional wisdom is sometimes a good thing.  If only you knew when those times were.

I am thankful for... my niece, Ainsley -- it's her birthday today!

From the learning rooms...  enjoying Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct -- makes me miss my linguistics class from college (I <3 Skip Barnett).

From the kitchen... I'm hoping to make bread in the next few days.

I am wearing...  a sports bra that I'm pretty sure originally belonged to my Aunt Vinnie.

I am creating... a butterfly cross-stitch design for my daughter.

I am going... to host book club this month.  We are reading the first Sookie Stackhouse.

I am reading... Blackout by Connie Willis.  Good stuff.

I am hoping... to keep hoping.

I am hearing...May You Always by the McGuire Sisters playing on my awesome Pandora station.  You know, 'cause it's totally my generation and all.  :)

Around the house... my daughter, Fiona, is with her dad til Sunday so it's a little quieter than usual.  I'll miss her but I know she'll have a great time.

One of my favorite things... jokes with old friends that never stop being funny or at least dryly amusing. :)

A few plans for the rest of the week:  Hopefully I'll send Tim and Amy off for a little mid-day date tomorrow  while I stay with Mark and Lilly.  At the end of the weekend, Jeremy, Fiona, and I are going to meet and see what we've come up with as far as ideas about what to do about the rest of the school year. Beyond that, I should try to get bills paid and work on paperwork. 

Here is picture for thought I am sharing...

A work in progress

A sleepy Wednesday night in cold, cold, Colorado

1.  It is currently -3 degrees outside.
2. The skin around my nose is starting to heal -- a sign that I'm not so sniffy!
3. I'm not sure how to make the rest of the school year work for my daughter transportation and schedule-wise.
4. I am safe & warm and I had food to eat today.
5. February 2011 used to seem so far away.
6. I have The Mists of Avalon waiting for me on the holds shelf at the library -- have any of you watched it?
7. I'm keeping an open mind and looking for possibilities for next steps.
8. Tomorrow I'm going to try to post a picture of the butterfly cross-stitch I'm working on for my almost seven-year-old daughter.
9. While liking the song, I'm still not sure I completely understand "Hallelujah".  Perhaps I'm looking for more of a narrative than is actually there.
10. Rest well, amigos.

Teaser Tuesdays -- Fear Itself by Andrew Clements

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

 "I was the custodian at Oakes School."

Ben almost choked on a grape.

~ p.52, Fear Itself by Andrew Clements

This is the second book in Clements' Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School series and I've really been enjoying reading the series with my six-year-old daughter.  I highly recommend them.  I appreciate the positive (yet not smarmy) interactions between the main character, his friends, and his family.  His parents have semi-recently divorced and I appreciate the way the author deals with that as well.  I also (as always) appreciate portrayals of pleasant, strong, platonic friendships between males and females and such a relationship is a key part of the Keepers of the School series.

Meet Me on Monday -- January 31st, 2011

This is my first time with Meet Me On Monday, a meme hosted by Java.

Questions:

1.  What do you put on your hot dog?
Sweet relish, brown or yellow mustard, sauerkraut, raw or cooked onions.  I don't touch boiled hot dogs but I'll eat grilled or fried.  My favorite aunt cuts them longways but with a bit still connected and fries them with onions.  Yum.

Image via Wikipedia

2.  Do you play Sudoku?
Nope.  It doesn't attract me at all.  Cryptic crosswords, on the other hand -- sign me up. I enjoy doing them with other people as well.  I also like regular crosswords and logic puzzles.

Image via Wikipedia

3.  What is your favorite vegetable?
Gosh, I don't know -- I like lots of vegetables.  I'll say spinach and swisschard.  (Three others that aren't actually vegetables:  mushrooms, avocados, tomatoes.)

Image via Wikipedia

4.  Do you color your hair?
I've highlighted it once or twice and maybe dyed it once or twice as well, but not in the last 10 years or more.  I've been craving blue hair for about 20 years.

5.  What is your favorite brand of clothing?
In general I'm not very much of a clothes brand aficionado (a?) and I love home-made and/or local stuff.  I like my pair of Maggie's Organic socks with words on them and wouldn't mind more.  :)

Celebrating Girls: Nurturing and Empowering Our Daughters by Virginia Beane Rutter

I can't remember where I first heard about Celebrating Girls but it's been sitting on my to be read shelf for quite a while now.  Published in 1996, it speaks to any woman who has a relationship with a growing girl.  The author is a Jungian, so if that school of thought makes you uncomfortable, some aspects of this book may do so as well.

A few chapter titles:

Three: Bathing: Nourishing Emotional Integrity
Six:  Dressing: Developing Social Awareness
Eight:   Storytelling: Teaching and Learning
Ten:  Walking into Beauty:  Coming of Age and Sexuality

From the first chapter:
"Our task is to invest our daughters' everyday care with purpose, intention, and awareness of their feminine value, and then to create celebrations to mark the passages in their lives.  Broadly speaking, I use the word celebration to mean a conscious attention to making the girls in your life feel that they matter -- to you, to the family, to the community, to the world."(3)

From the third chapter:
"Vacillating, ambivalent feelings are part of growing up and developing emotional maturity.  As a mother, it is easy to get caught up in the tide of your daughter's feelings and try to solve her problems for her.  But it is best to ride the waves with her, maintaining some inner detachment so you do not get invested in either extreme." (30)

Rutter speaks of a mother who gave her 13 year old Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth "to educate her about the cosmetic industry's manipulation of women and girls". (73)  I'm not very familiar with this book, but I like the idea.

From the sixth chapter:
"Social development is important for a girl's self-empowerment, but if you do not want a daughter who just goes along with the crowd, she needs to feel that she has the ability to make changes and choices of her own, not based on peer pressure or your pressure.  This is a delicate balancing act we are asking our daughters to perform -- to be comfortable being exactly who they are (self-expression) and at the same time taking other people and social convention into account (social development)

The object is to be a woman who is in touch with her own needs and creativity and also considers others.  Because, historically, girls have been taught to consider others first, we must be sure that we honor our daughters' individuality and self-expression.  Amazingly, this development often takes shape around the clothes they wear." (88)

This book has given me the opportunity to reflect on the way I care for my body and for my daughter's body.  I want that time to be a pleasant and gentle time.  I hope to talk to her about some of the author's ideas and anecdotes sometime soon.

If I were to say one downfall of the book for me, it would be the somewhat frequent suggestion to use rewards for good behavior, etc.  But I know this is just an idiosyncrasy of mine and it will most likely not bother most other readers.