I like to travel

...but it feels good to be home.

P.S. Unfortunately I didn't get to travel with Yoda. This is a poster for Star Wars Weekends at Disney-MGM Studios.

I've been sick so I sound like a pirate...

...prompting one of my students to tell me:

Your voice is blue. It's a circle. I can tell.

????????????????????????????????????????????????

P.S. Garnet The Outspoken Pirate is by thedreamygiraffe.

3 Books I Thought I'd Hate But Ended Up Loving

Lost in Books wanted to know which books surprised me when I read them.

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling - My father-in-law told me for a few years that I should read it and that I would love it, yet I didn't quite believe him. But then I remembered what a smart man he is so I gave it a shot, and of course he was right! The series includes some of my favorite books.

2. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer - My friend Michelle was like, You have got to read this book! and I wanted her to join the book club I'm in so I said yes I would read it if she would read The Enchantress of Florence by Salmon Rushdie which is what we were reading at the time. Well she made a better recommendation than I did! The Twilight Saga are not the best books I've ever read, but they were fun and reading them gave me street cred with my nieces in Kansas.

3. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - EVERYONE kept telling me to read it which for some reason made me think I would hate it. But EVERYONE was right luckily and it was one of the best books I read last year.

P.S. i heart books is by vol25.

3 Books that Have Been on My TBR List the Longest

Lost in Books wants to know what books I have had the longest but still haven't read.

1. Toby Tyler by James Otis - I can't remember who gave me this book when I was a kid but I never read it. When I was a child it seemed too long. When I was a teenager it seemed too childish. As an adult, books that seem more interesting to me are what I grab first. But some day I will read it!

2. The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway - my grandma gave this to me after her trip to Australia (I think I was in junior high school!). I love Australia, memoirs, and my grandma, but for some reason have never got around to it. I wish now I had read it while she was still alive so we could have discussed it, or maybe she would have had some story to share about her trip that would explain the purchase of the book. Or it could have been random? She was always buying me books like a good grandma should.

3. Wilt by Tom Sharpe - I had to buy this book for a class in college but SURPRISE SURPRISE! we never read it. I've held onto thinking I might read it eventually, but I think subconsciously the cover turns me away. It's a drawing of a man who looks like he's trying to kill a blow-up doll.

Yes, I've had books on my bookshelf that have gone unread since I was a child and yet...I keep buying more!

P.S. Wall to Wall books is by minimoon on deviantART. It's a portion of a book store in Washington, D.C.

a first

Today Captain Skippyjon Jones stepped in gum. After I pulled gum-encrusted rocks out of his paw, he seemed to take removing the gum much better than a person would. He might have even enjoyed it.

Corey called and I told him what happened and he said HE stepped in gum today too! So I told him that he is connected with Captain like Bo and Hope are connected.

P.S. The photo was taken in March by ME!

you're missed

Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman

This book, which is 2/9 for my Colorful Reading Challenge, was really good because it made me question my beliefs about the justice system in The United States.

Ethan is a small town hero, husband, dad, and baseball coach. He's a volunteer for Monroe's fire department and is always the first on the scene. He's even saved people's lives. Everyone looks up to him.

Jorie is just Ethan's wife of 10 years and a mom, and Monroe is just a small town until the day they all discover after Ethan's seemingly random arrest that in the past he murdered a 15 year old girl.

Questions ran through my mind throughout the book: can a person really reform themselves? Is that enough if they haven't served time in prison? Is someone absolved of a crime just for going to prison? What would I do if that was Corey? What should Jorie do?

This book is a shining example of why Alice Hoffman is one of my favorite authors.

Ruby by Ann Hood

I've had this book on my shelf for quite some time, but I finally pulled it down to read for the Colorful Reading Challenge. I have to read 9 books with 9 different colors in the title this year, and Ruby is 1/9.

To summarize, Ruby is a pregnant teenage runaway. Olivia is a thirty-something milliner (a hat maker to us common folk) whose husband was recently killed in an accident. (I think I've been putting off reading it because I don't really like sad stories, unlike someone very near and dear to me!)

So...Olivia retreats from her NY apartment to her Rhode Island beach bungalow (I like it when people live in cool places in books. Even if it's not realistic! I feel like I get to live there too for awhile.).

I know you can't wait to read the book to find out how they meet so I'll tell you...they meet in Olivia's house after Ruby has broken in! And then Olivia decides she should adopt the baby when it's born and the broken down bungalow becomes a safe-ish haven for all 3.

But really it's not a sad story with a fairy tale or tragic ending. I got the feeling I was seeing how things might play out if that story actually happened out here in the real world.

It's only 225 pages, and I enjoyed it so much that I read it in one day during spring break. There are also several song references (especially The Beatles) so I made a corresponding playlist on my ipod. Those were the days.

And now in honor of Olivia the Milliner, a pretty cool hat in a drawing by Samuel Ribeyron:

Quote of the Week

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

On Tuesday after the teacher from next door came by to ask me something a boy said,

"Why are you and all the teachers so nice?"

A+!

P.S. The Snape deal is by hey my name is jess.

May the 4th be with you.

Always.

P.S. Wrong Helmet is by Steve Bonner.

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

I found out from Page Turners that April is Autism Awareness Month, and their challenge was to, "Read and Review a book...dealing with ASD or learning disabilities or by an author who has been diagnosed." This gave me a great excuse to pull "Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior" out of my to-be-read pile, which deals with ASD and is written by an author who has been diagnosed, Temple Grandin.

I really liked getting inside Temple's brain through her writing. She definitely has a fascinating and unique mind. I think it's cool that she took what could have been an obstacle and turned it into a career. Thanks to her and her autistic brain, McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC use humane slaughtering practices on the animals we eat.

Overall I didn't learn as much about autism from this book as I thought I would since it was probably 90% about animal brains and 10% about autistic brains. Still I found some very interesting factoids about animals that I had to read aloud to Corey because I knew he'd think about them all day at work. One was, "A Chihuahua never advances past the wolf puppy equivalent of twenty days of age..." which startled me because Corey always says Captain Skippyjon Jones is like a permanent puppy.

And because I used to have goats I liked reading these 3 sentences and learning a new phrase to describe them: Locomotor play is the pretend chasing and jumping-and-spinning play a young animal does when it's alone. (If you want to see locomotor play, watch a goat. They are the biggest jumpers and spinners ever.)

The final bit of information I had to share with Corey was that there is evidence to suggest that dogs and people coevolved! You should read the book if you want to find out what scientists discovered in dog brains and people brains from 10,000 years ago. Corey says he may want to skim through the book now too.

The Avett Brothers rock!

Last night my friend Stephanie and I went to see The Avett Brothers, which are a folk/rock band. The first time we heard of them was when they opened for Dave Matthews last year and we've been fans ever since. Last night they got to headline!
We decided to meet beforehand for dinner and drinks. As we walked around Historic Downtown Mesa, I was surprised to come across this American Gothic sculpture. It was a little weird to see it in 3-D and giant-size at that.

After dinner we went to a bar for some drinks. We saw a guy that looks like Andy from The Office. Stephanie was excited to see they served absinthe since she's writing about an absinthe expert in her book and she had never tried it. It's not the best taste but it makes you feel good.

We got to Ikeda Theater and discovered being in the third row meant we could almost touch the stage!

Truth and Salvage Co. opened and I was a little nervous from the name that they would be a Christian band. But their first song was about reefer which gave me much relief. I really dug their music and joked to Stephanie that maybe next year we'd see them headline somewhere.

The Avett Brothers are super talented and musical! Not only can they sing, but they each played at least 3 different instruments during the show. Here's Seth on keyboard:

Here's Scott (he's got a big voice) strumming the guitar:

Now Scott on banjo and Seth on guitar:

The hottie bass player is Bob Crawford, not a brother:

The cellist is Joe Kwon. He played the cello like a madman and was blurry in real life too:

They played for 2 hours and did "I and Love and You" for the encore. And don't worry. Just like every other concert I've been too there was that token guy who has to prove intensely that he's the number one fan there.

As we filed out we saw Andy again. We also overheard a girl telling others how she's the only one of her friends who knows who The Avett Brothers are and she can't believe she's the only one who knows The Avett Brothers songs. But she kept mispronouncing their name so Stephanie and I had a good giggle about that. (It's long A, not short a).

It was probably one of the best concerts I've been too. If you haven't heard their music you can check out my favorite video of theirs here:

They did not sing St. Joseph's at the concert though.

Happy(ish) Earth Day!

I did my annual trashing of the classroom today but it didn't quite go as well as last year, due to the spring-breakless-non-functioning-brains of my students.
First when they got back in the class someone screamed at the top of their lungs. The kids started frantically scooping up the crumpled papers (good) but then one of them started cramming them in the garbage can (bad). Then two boys started chasing, battering, and wrestling each other over a catalog (worse), and another boy started ransacking the class library (get me out of here).
They did better when we picked up trash off the playground. Some of my students from last year happened to be out there and helped out too (much better).

1 more day until spring break...wish me luck.

P.S. Hello Spring is by Cathy Nichols.

I'm exhausted.

Did you know we haven't had spring break yet? It's not until next week. And it's the worst idea ever to have spring break in the middle of the quarter because the kids' brains are full and the teachers are dying of exhaustion. But nobody asked for my opinion. Now it's all cloudy and I just want to go to bed but instead I'm going to clean Strega Nona's cage and grade papers. 2 more days...

If you live in Arizona, please vote yes on Prop 100 May 18th. Teachers need your pennies.

P.S. Cold Hands Warm Heart is by Emily Martin.

3 Books I Should Love, But Actually Hate

This week Lost in Books would like to know what books I didn't like, perhaps so other people can avoid them too. Here they are in random order:

1. "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I can't quite pinpoint what made me dislike this book so much. It bored me: probably because there was too much description. I also hated how it ended.

2. "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne - I didn't like the main character and couldn't understand why she wouldn't just out the priest that knocked her up. Boring. (I recently learned that Louisa May Alcott was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne. I much prefer "Little Women"!)

3. "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert - I can't understand why people love this book so much. The author divorces her husband and gets to check out of life for a year to travel and deal with it. Wow, I feel so bad for you. Stop whining. Luckily a lot of my friends hated this book too, so we get to trash it together.

P.S. I did not take that picture and I don't know who did.