Sunday Salon, January 24, 2016

Part of the SOTH crew after the Feed My Starving Children Mobile Pack event. (At least the hair nets are off.)

Weather: Right now the sun is shining but I expect it will soon turn to rain. It is so wet around here our backyard has turned into a new little pond. I expect that ducks will find it soon and start swimming around. Ha!

Windows 10: I upgraded my computer this week to Windows 10 and now, of course, it is acting all clunky and uncooperative. Bummer.

Super storm-Super Cute: We live on the West Coast of the country. On the East Coast a huge snow storm has struck the area. All the pictures on the news are of piles of snow and terrible flooding. All except this one, taken at the Washington, DC zoo. Somebody is happy it snowed. Click the link here.
I have looked at this panda playing in the snow about ten times and I smile each time I see it. Enjoy.

Cyndi and Greg Helle and kids pray over one of the palettes of food ready to ship for FMSC. The Helles are the folks who organized the Mobile Pack in Puyallup once a year.

153: Yesterday the three of us joined others from our church to assist in a mobile pack for Feed My Starving Children, an organization which delivers high quality food packages to children living in impoverished areas. My Honor Society students also joined the pack at another station. The mobile packs are so cool. Eight to ten of us man a station. Two to Four people scoop the dried veggies, soy, rice, vitamin mixture into a funnel where another volunteer holds a bag to collect the contents. Next a person weighs the bag to make sure it is within a weight range. Two people then seal the bag and send the bag down the line to the person who boxes up the sealed food bags. Each bag feeds 6 meals, each box holds 36 bags. Our team boxed up nearly 20 boxes in our two hour shift. When added together with all the other stations, in two hours we bagged up enough food to feed 153 children a healthy meal every day for a year. Talk about feeling good. Check out the Feed My Starving Children website for more details about the organization.

GKHS Honor Society members and officers after the mobile pack at FMSC. Love the hair nets.

A Mystery: Yesterday afternoon, after the FMSC event, I went up to school to help out at the district Technology/Art Fair. Part of my job was to clean up the library station. I decided to store the items I needed to return to other librarians in the district in my library, which wasn't being used for the fair. When I entered the locked library I found a graphic novel propped up against my computer opened to a page with a drawing of a half nude character. Who did this? How did they get into the library? Why did they do it? Did they think I should ban the book? I don't know. It is a mystery. (And it is bugging me.)

Weirdly, half way: I am weirdly exactly at the half way point on the three books I am currently reading. This is very unusual. I am usually at the beginning of one, near the end of another, not 50% on three at one time. The books are:

• Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: a memoir by Margarita Engle...this was the Pura Belpre winner in the Youth Media Awards this year for books written by a Latino author. It is a collections of poems which tell a story of the author's young years.
• Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez...this was just awarded a Printz Honor. It set in Texas in the 1930s about a taboo relationship between a Mexican-American girl and an African-American boy. It is historically based around the events of an explosion at the school which killed many children. It is slow going.
• The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick...an alternative history after the Axis powers won WWII. We watched the mini-series on Amazon Prime created from the book. But, and this rarely happens, I like the show much better than the book. This is my current audiobook.

Book finished this week: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and it really is award-worthy. Look for my review later today.

Quote for the day: ‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito’. African proverb.