Sunday Salon...Birthday Edition

Grandson Jamie. We hadn't seen him for about three weeks and we couldn't believe how much he changed in that amount of time.

Weather: Overcast, threatening rain, rather gloomy.

Birthday: I turned 64 on Friday. My husband woke me by singing the Paul McCartney song, "When I'm 64". Have a listen from the Beatles remastered Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band record. Fun, huh? When I was a preteen listening to this song for the first time age 64 seemed like so-o-o-o-o old. Now here I am. All day there were little happy birthday moments. My hubby purchased a lovely cake from a local bakery, my daughter made risotto for the first time while Don barbecued steaks. No one complained when I requested the game I wanted to play--- Quiddler. My eldest daughter wasn't able to make it over with her family but they did visit the next day. Both of my sisters called. My mom and brother remembered me in other ways. So now I am officially old. 

"The King's Favorite": Banana cake with peanut butter and chocolate frosting. (The king is Elvis Presley, in case you are wondering.)

 

Family: We had a fun visit with our oldest daughter and her sons yesterday. Jamie is five months old and so curious. Here he is interacting with a little stuffed elephant who plays peek-a-boo with his ears. He is holding his teething giraffe in his hands. The boy always wants to have something in his mouth. His brother Ian is three. Ian was playing a dice game with Auntie but wanted to keep score. When she told him her score he would scribble something down on the pad. One time he looked up from his scribbling and announced that he just drew a boat.

Lent: With Ash Wednesday Lent began. It is 40+ days of reflection before Easter. This year we attended the Ash Wednesday service on Zoom and pretended to put ashes on each other's foreheads. Now we are participating in Again and Again practices daily to see if we can get some spiritual practices to stick. Today's practice: Read one chapter in your Bible today. Good plan!

George, aka The Puzzle Cat, is enjoying another puzzle moment on our latest completion this week.

Books:

• Completed:
• Apple: Skin to the Core by Eric Gansworth. A YA Printz honor book. It is a memoir written in verse by a Native American author and artist. Very moving and heartbreaking.  Print.
• Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. Set in New York and in the Dominican Republic. Two sisters find each other after the tragic death of the father they share. YA. Audiobook.
  
• Currently reading:
• Fury and Grace: 40 days of Paintings and Poetry from Prison edited by Rev. Riley Pickett, Revs. Layne and Crawford Brubaker. These three pastors work with incarcerated women in the Washington Correction Center in Purdy in my county. The women prisoners contribute poems and art to this Lenten guide. Print. 11%.
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama. Inching along on this one. Audiobook. 57%.
• Molokai'i by Alan Brennert. A book club selection for this coming Wednesday. Set on the Hawaiian island which was a leprosy colony until just recently. Audiobook. 56%
• Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie. Another book club selection for a future month. Set in post WWII Japan. E-book. 17%.
  
• Book Club: My SOTH book club met on Zoom Tuesday evening for a very unsatisfactory book discussion on Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys. All anyone wanted to talk about, concerning the book directly, was how much they don't like Whitehead's writing style. Oh I miss face-to-face discussions. I'm sure we would have delved deeper into the story beyond the story of this horrific school for delinquent boys where boys were actually killed for minor infractions.
• Nonfiction book reviews of Cybils finalists. (So far I've posted eleven reviews of the 21 written. Click on the hyperlinks to read these reviews. Next week I'll have another batch for you to preview.) I hope all my librarian friends check them out since so many of them will make great additions to libraries.

•  High School Nonfiction finalists:
  

  -All Boys Aren't Blue: a Memoir-Manifesto // Johnson
  
  
  -Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You // Reynolds WINNER
  
  
  
  -The Radium Girls: Young Reader's Edition: The Scary But True Story of the Poison that Made People GLOW in the Dark   // Moore
   
  Middle-Grade Nonfiction finalists:

  -All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team // Soontornvat WINNER
  

  -How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology, and Daring Feats of Science Behind Humanity's Greatest Adventure //Rocco

  -Plasticus Maritimus: An Invasive Species // Pego

  -STEM in the Final Four // Marquardt

  -This is Your Brain on Stereotypes: How Science is Tackling Unconscious Bias // Kyi

  Elementary  Nonfiction finalists:

  -The Story of a Civil War Hero: Robert Smalls // Halfmann
  

  -The Next President: The Unexpected Beginnings and Unwritten Future of America's Presidents // Messner WINNER
  

  -Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries of Mary Anning, the First Paleontologist // Skeers

Prayers for Texas: The news out of Texas this week were so dire. My prayers today and all week were lifted up for those who were suffering in the cold without heat or water. In America? Tragic. And I can't help but jump on Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator who left the state to vacation in Mexico while his whole state was in a deep freeze. Tone deaf, for sure. He is not a leader. Everyone remember this in the future.

Just a few funny items that came my way this week:

1. Um, let's see. What is the name of this yellow fruit?

2.This one took me a moment:

3.I'm pretty sure we've all met a teenager like this one...This one makes me giggle, afterall, I was a high school teacher for thirty+ years. I've seen this stance many times.

4.

5. And the one that made me laugh the hardest this week:

 Have a good week!

-Anne