A Break for Your Sunday

My dad sends me stuff all the time, but this is hilarious:

One down...

From this:


To this (yay):



When we got outside after getting his haircut he says: "Hey, Mom - I have a new shadow!" Yes indeed.

On this date: In 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Swag

I spend a fair amount of time at various school-district meetings for my kids' school. I went to one sponsored by the California Teacher's Association last week and that had nice giveaways. Among the usual giveaways like pencils and rulers were these:



A bottle opener and a pill case. The weird thing is that nobody else found it particularly humorous.

On this date: In 1884, the Washington Monument was completed.

Blah

Everything is just to the left of center today and I'm not sure why. Could be the fact that I had to try on a bunch of clothes for DH's holiday party. Or the not-quite-dead bird that Spike the one-eyed wonder cat left for me in the dining room. Or the fact that I taught J to play Nadia's theme on the piano and have now subsequently heard it 57 times in the past hour and a half. In any case, hopefully tomorrow will be a better version of today.

Agent Kristin Nelson had a great blog today about how an auction goes down step by step. It's the stuff dreams are made of. Or the stuff that keeps you awake at night wondering if it's ever going to happen.

On this date: In 1933, Prohibition ended. Cheers.

Do You Read It?

I've started to sub my new YA chapters to my fabbo critique group. As I'm giving them a synopsis, one of the gals says "Oh, have you read XX? It sounds similar."

Now, to a writer, there is almost nothing so stomach-dropping as that sentence. One of my favorite threads on a Verla Kay's board was called Someone Wrote My Book - And Won A Newbery. Even though everyone writes a different book, blah blah blah, the last thing you want is to spend an enormous amount of time on a book that's just like something that is already out there. "But I'm different," you say. "Unique. This story has never been told before." Uh huh.

So I spent an hour or so frantically researching this book, and (whew), it's actually quite different. There are a few elements that are similar, but the focus in my book is in a different place. The only thing is, School Library Journal gave it a pretty stinko review (BookList did like it though), and some of their comments could apply to my book.

The $1,000,000 question is: should I read the book? The last thing I want is to "unintentionally internalize" someone else's work, but I'd hate to repeat someone else's mistakes.

On this date: In 1991, hostage Terry Anderson is freed in Lebanon after 2,454 days in captivity.

I really have nothing to say today. Enjoy these photos instead.




Oh the places we've been this year.

On this date: In 1977, Roots premiered.

It Ain't Easy Bein' Green

Like the good Northern California girl that I am, I try to do my part for the environment. As soon as our 1996 VW Golf gives up the ghost, we are going to get a hybrid. I buy only recycled paper towels and napkins. We are slowly replacing our light bulbs with compact fluorescents. I tried to use earth-friendly dish washing soap. There is only one problem with most of these earth-friendly products - they are not as good as what they are trying to replace. You heard me - most of these products s**k.

The paper towels disintegrate at the slightest hint of water, ditto with the napkins. I hate hate hate the light that compact florescents give off (don't even try to tell me that they're the same). The dish soap was a bust because we were having to run every load twice because everything was still filthy. Kinda misses the point. I don't know about the hybrids - my friends that have them like them, except for the fact that Prius' are ugly. (Okay, rechargeable batteries seem to work, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument.)

The newest item on my list of earth-friendly-products-that-s**k are LED Christmas lights. They're not only NOT warm and inviting, they are positively aggressive. The powers that be (pun intended) decided that they should put LED lights on the giant tree in Union Square in San Francisco. That thing is so glaring that everyone was standing around shielding their eyes. Don't look directly at it - it will sear the retinas right off the backs of your eyeballs! It was awful. Today we were in San Jose at their big Christmas in the park. Hundreds of trees with earth-friendly LED aggressive soul-s**king lights. It was so depressing I had to get out of there.

Hey! You developers of earth-friendly products out there! I would love to help you save the planet, but you need to make things that are at least as good as what we are giving up.

Me personally, I'm putting up those big old fashioned power-grabbing C7 lights on our house this year. They're on a timer, so that they don't waste power by being on more than 4 hours a day. Happy Holidays.

On this date: In 1955 Rosa Parks ignited the bus boycott.