Sunday Salon---September 14

The plate we created for our parents on their 50th wedding anniversary. This year they celebrated 63 years together.

Weather: Beautiful blue skies, temperatures in the low 80s. It is a lovely end-of-summer day.

"If you give a moose a muffin" event. Are you familiar with the children's book If You Give a Moose a Muffin? If you do give the moose a muffin you get trapped into doing a chain reaction of other things, like making blackberry jam to go on the muffins, and picking the blackberries to make the jam. The moral of the story, don't start or it will lead to something else.
     Well our "moose-a-muffin" project started a few weeks ago when we bought a new car. That meant we would need to clean out the garage so there would be a place to park it. But cleaning out the garage meant buying shelves to put the stuff on and building a shed for all the gardening supplies...you get the idea. We started phase two of  "moose-a-muffin" project this week-end. We bought shelving units, put them together, then moved our garagey items onto them.  We are half way there. Next week-end we start the garden shed. We have lived in this house for seventeen years. What has taken us so long to get with it?

Saying good-bye: The youth director at our church is moving after serving our church for twenty years. Today was his last church service with us and tonight was the farewell party. I had no idea that I would take it as hard as I did. At one point in the service, our education director ask everyone in the congregation who has ever been part of the youth program with Brett to come up. The front of the church was jammed with all these adult-looking people. I started bawling and basically cried the rest of the service. My daughters both grew up in the church under his leadership. Farewell, Brett, we love you and will miss you so much.

Books read this week: None completed but I am working on a lot of books because...

50 Page Project: I am trying to read at least 50 pages of a bunch of YA books we are considering for our Mock Printz list of books.  Here is my progress:

• Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafon---pg 30; I will read on. 
• The Family Romanov by Candace Fleming---pg. 75; I will peruse more pages.
• The Here and Now by Ann Brashares--- 1 audiodisc of 6 completed; I will continue listening.
• Starbird Murphy and the Outside World by Karen Finneyfrock--- page 66; I have read enough.
• This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki--- page 50; I have read enough
• The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean telt by hisself By David Almond---page 9; I have read enough. It is written in vernacular and is very difficult to read.
• A Time to Dance by Padima Venkatraman--- page 31; I will read on.
• Through the Woods by Emily Carroll---page 208; oh, I just realized I DID finish one book this week: this one.
• She is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick---complete. I read this book last week but it is another selection being considered for the Mock Printz.

Up next on my 50 Page Project: All these books are either here in a pile or on-hold for me at the public library.

• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
• Otherbound by Corrine Duyvis
• 100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith
• Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern
• The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson
• The Tyrant's Daughter by JC Carlson (audiobook)

I know that this sounds like a lot of books. I want to read a bit of all the books I can on our list and by committing to reading just 50 pages I get a nice feel for the storyline and the writing style without bogging down on one book. Of the nine books I read a part of last week I was able to weed out three that I am really not interested in adding to our list; three others deserve a few more pages before I decide; and I will recommend inclusion of the last three based on the pages I read.

First World Problems: While cleaning out the garage, my husband and I were forced to make decisions  that would make people in other parts of the world cringe. Should we keep the bread-maker machine? We haven't used it for years but still, we may want to. The huge Pioneer speakers
that have been taking up room in the garage for the past ten years need to go...but we bought them when we were young and poor. Should we keep this or toss that? We have so much, it seems so selfish of us to even ruminate over STUFF.  On that note, for your listening enjoyment, Weird Al Yankovic: First World Problems.