Tuesday, March 25, 2008

You Know Where to Find Me

Rachel Cohn is such a wonderful author. You Know Where to Find Me is an original, in-your-face, *special* piece of work.

In it, a chubby HS girl is struggling with her close cousin's suicide. She lives in Washington, D.C. and is full of civic alarm as well as teen angst. A recurring topic in the novel is of D.C. statehood as well as taxation without representation.

It's sort of a weird juxtaposition for me with all the government issues aside the drug abuse in the book. But somehow it works.

I will have a lasting memory of a particular scene in the book where a Dr. is explaining how exactly drug overdose victims usually die. They choke on their own vomit. They do not fall asleep into oblivion and experience no pain like so many believe. A sobering wake-up call for anyone experimenting with drugs and experiencing despair.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Recycled Magazine Flower Tutorial

I think this will be a fun program for teens @ the library...

Start with a discarded magazine. Rip out about 25 pages. Don't be fussy...as long as you get *most* of the page, you will be fine.

Fold your first page in half.

Do this four times and you will get a thin strip about 1/2 inch wide.


Start rolling your piece into a tight spiral. At the very end, dab a bit of hot glue on the tail and smooth it onto the sprial so the piece is in tact.
On the left is a spiral with 2 magazine pages.
Continue rolling folded pages around the center until you reach your desired diameter.

For the stem, take a folded page and fold it in half vertically and glue it to the back of the flower.

For the leaves, fold a bunch (6?) of pages in half and staple 3 times vertically about an inch from the edge. Then cut out a leaf shape.
Repeat for as many leaves as you need.

Fringe the outer edges of the leaves by making small snips all the way around the edges, leaving the "stem" in tact.

Punch a hole on each side of the staples and cut a piece of yarn long enough to go all the way around the punched holes and leave enough to tie a knot.

Notice the triange shaped punched holes.
Glue the leaves into the stem with hot glue. (Sorry this photo is fuzzy).

And now you are done!

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Gonna be a good book...

From You Know Where to Find Me by Rachel Cohn: "Bruises mapped my body from bumping into tables and tripping over curbs while walking with a book in my hand, my eyes focused on the pages instead of the live space around me".

Monday, March 10, 2008

Still (stuck) in Florida

This will have to do with books by the end, but I'll start by saying that I am still in Florida. I should have done pj storytime tonight at the library in cold, Walker, MI.

Yesterday morning my mom drove me to Orlando (which is an hour from her home in Melbourne beach). She dropped me off, said goodbye and drove home. I got my boarding pass and headed to the gate only to see that my flight was delayed. I approached the desk and plead my case about a connecting flight in Atlanta and they sent me to another gate with an earlier flight heading out. But when I got there the bad news cloud was darker. The captain for this flight was on the same airplane that was delayed from the other flight. Neither captain would be leaving Orlando anytime soon. Standby in Atlanta wasn't an option as there were already several people ahead of me and no seats on any flights out to GR until TUESDAY. I called my mom (who had already arrived back home) and asked her to come pick me up. Oh, and did I mention my luggage made its way to Grand Rapids without me?

So here I am...still in Florida. Reading Eat Pray Love for the second time and STILL loving it. I have never had such a "right book at the right time" moment before in my life. Tonight I will leave the house at midnight and drive an hour north to the Kennedy Space Center where Space Shuttle Endeavour will launch at 2:28 a.m. I am told it is an incredible sight and not to be missed. I've seen a rocket launch before but never a shuttle. So here in Florida I am living it up, savoring every minute while missing husband, home and dog with an aching heart.

Elizabeth Gilbert's book is bringing me so much comfort. I have had such a relaxing and peaceful vacation, even with a 2 day vacation addendum. I've finished part 1 of EPL again and here is the final words of the 36th chapter:

And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

On vacation...

I'm on vacation in beautiful Melbourne Beach, FL visiting my mother. I just finished reading Infidel by Ted Dekker (will blog later) and my mom had Eat Pray Love on her bookshelf so I picked it up.

And of course I'm loving it. The first adult book of read in ages is really good.

Plus, I just looked up the author, Elizabeth Gilbert and found out that her sister is Catherine Gilbert Murdock of Dairy Queen and Off Season fame.

Fantastic!

Inubaka v.7

Volume 7 of Inubaka was just as cute as every other volume. Little Suguri is still getting herself into trouble. She's still making friends and still making a fool of herself every few pages. I'm starting to wonder if these books are helping people become more aware of the problems facing animals today. The author of the graphic novels is obviously pleading the case for dogs as often as possible. I'm also starting to wonder if Suguri and her boss at the pet shop are ever going to admit that they have the hots for each other. Maybe in volume 8...

Infidel

I didn't like Infidel as much as I liked Chosen but I won't go as far as to say I didn't enjoy it at all. The series is unfolding nicely and Infidel had a nice side-story with Johnis on a quest to find and save his mother. Dekker explores humanity a bit more in this book as he describes the world of the Horde in more detail and opens the eyes of his heroes to the lives of their enemies.

So the quest continues. The books are still lost and so is Billos - one who swore to help find them. Renegade is the next in the series and is due out in a few months. Stay tuned...