Sunday Salon: Super Bowl Sunday 2015

Carly and I baked cookies to serve during the Super Bowl

Weather: Foggy, rainy and grey.

Super Bowl Sunday is today and the Seattle Seahawks play the New England Patriots. After two weeks of build-ups and non stop football talk we will finally have the game. Everyone around here is Seahawks crazy, so much so our church has changed the time of the worship service to an earlier slot.

Mock Printz Workshop: was Thursday after school. Forty students participated in reading the YA books on our list as potential Printz award books, thirty of them attended the workshop. It was a fun, opinionated bunch who got sillier and louder as the afternoon got later. The book they identified as their favorite, Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, was also the book that most of the students had read. We had way too many books on the list this year which meant that many of the books weren't read that widely. Click on the link for my post about the Mock Printz event and to see photos of the kids.

Fan Food: Even at the fellowship hour at church we served Seahawks fan food. Blue and green everything!

Feed My Starving Children Mobile Pack event yesterday: 17 Honor Society students, and their friends, joined me to help pack up meals for the Feed My Starving Children organization. All together we packed up enough of the meal pouches to feed over 420 children a meal a day for a year, our session alone packed enough for 113 of those kids.  If you have a minute take a look at the video of the good work this organization does.

Prayers for: a colleague's daughter who is experiencing serious mental health issues. Prayers for her parents, too, who are carrying a heavy burden right now.

Books read this week:

• Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Some bloggers believe this is one of the best YA books of the year. We'll find out tomorrow when the winners are announced.
• How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson. Also a potential winner this book is made up of 50+ poems in unrhymed sonnets about the author's formative years. I want to reread it and linger over the poems this time.

Currently reading:

• Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire. I am bummed I didn't get to this book earlier. It is simply wonderful, a real potential winner. It is my audiobook selection right now. Both of my daughters have already listened to it and keep asking me about my progress. On disc 2 of 11.
• Laughing at My Nightmare by Shane Burcaw. A memoir by a man who is living with a very debilitating genetic disease. He has a good sense of humor about his lot in life. 

ALA Youth Media Awards: The Printz Award, Newbery, Caldecott, YALSA Nonfiction Awards, Morris book, etc, are announced tomorrow at the end of the ALA mid-winter meeting.  Stay tuned. Every year I host a reading challenge to read one book in each of the categories. Stay tuned for that, also.

Game time in two hours. Time to get some work done around the house and quick dog walk in the rain. Go Hawks!

Every day is a second chance.