Connie's book group selections

Here are the next book selections for the After Hogwarts book group:

May 16th ~ Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

June 13th ~ The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor

July 11th ~ The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

Aug 8th ~ Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C Wrede

Sept 12th ~ Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

Oct 10th ~ Surving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan

Nov 14th ~ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Books, asthma, fences and leaves

Yesterday Melinda, Lisette, Miles and his friend Davis went to Connie's book group at Barnes and Noble. Connie does a really nice job. It's really useful to have a source to find good new books. Lisette especially loves it; the last book they read, Maximum Ride, by James Patterson, really sparked her interest so she went ahead and read the whole series.

Melinda said she was feeling sick since she went downtown to see the symphony. After the book group she wasn't breathing well, so I sent her to see her dad. Looks like she had an asthma attack. She is feeling much better after taking Prednisone and using an inhaler.

I finally got around to staining the wood fence. Our neighbor actually owns the fence, and is very good about getting both sides of it taken care of. In April or May he started staining our side with me, and then he left the rest for me to do. He even left all the stain, a roller brush, and a paint brush. Well now that it's November I finally did it. I have dreaded doing it for for almost 6 months. I had to just walk outside grab the stuff without thinking about it. Actually it was pretty easy. Melinda and I decided that I have this deep seated rebellion about not wanting to do something that someone else tells me. Sigh. Rebellion is so taxing. It would have been so much easier to have just done it then. Oh, well.

The kids helped me rake up the neighbors lawn this morning. Melinda thought it would be good for them to do more service. Really, it's more like minimizing the disservice of our tree dropping leaves on their lawn. But the kids enjoyed it, especially jumping up and down in the trash can to compact the leaves. We took them to the back yard and spread them around the garden beds.

Live in the now

Wednesday I picked up a book that caught my eye in the library; "Hyper-chondriac: One Man's Quest to Hurry Up and Calm Down" by Brian Frazer. It was a very funny read. Plus, it's always so reassuring to read of someone more neurotic than myself.

This is a guy with some serious issues (milk products make him faint,) yet he tackles them with such humor and grace. Some of the measures he goes to calm himself and conquer his anger seem absurd (his knitting group was a fiasco.) However, I find Frazer's action to improve his wellness instead of feeling like a victim quite inspiring. He serves as a good reminder not take yourself too seriously and try to see the humor in our misfortunes.

He came to realize he was just rushing through everything, trying to get to what came next. Joy in life comes through living it. It's a good reminder to "live in the now" and to let tomorrow take care of itself.

Support your local library

Salt Lake County has a fantastic library system. All of the libraries in the Salt Lake Valley have their catalogs linked, so if you local library doesn't have a book, you can simply look it up on their website and have it delivered to your local branch. They also have a lot of music CD's and DVD's to check out. Most of the movies I watch are checked out from the library. It's hard to beat free.

It's also cool because you can check your account online to see how many items you have out, and you can renew them from there as well. One disadvantage is that you can only check out 30 items at a time. However, Lisette, Miles, and Ian all have their own cards. So all together our family can have 150 items checked out from the library at any time. Of course we never really have that many out at once, but we easily get up to 120 items at any time.

It's really great for homeschooling, because we can get tons of books on history subjects, and lots of educational movies as well. We always have books around on the various subjects du jour. For example right now we have books on Islam, Catholicism, ancient Egypt, speech therapy, health and exercise, Yoga, Jesus, snakes, tarantulas, science for kids, and various easy readers and works of fiction.

However, today we discovered things had gone wrong, very wrong. Usually Melinda or I check all of the cards every Monday to make sure we have everything renewed or turned back in. Somehow we miscommunicated and I didn't check my card. Books on tape or movies are fined at $1 a day. So I had several of those overdue for a week. Ouch. Not to mention once your fines get so high, they don't let you renew anything. So Monday I went to the library near my office and coughed up over $47 in late dues. Dang! That would have covered almost 6 months in Netflix dues. So if you can't think of what to get me for Christmas, I hear you can give gift subscriptions to Netflix. Wink, wink, hint, hint ;)

Topping yourself

Lately I've been reading a lot of books from English and Scottish writers. Now I want to call everything I like "brilliant" and I notice the children having "rows" and rude and clueless people are now "gits." The newest English idiomatic expression I learned is that "topping yourself off" is to kill yourself. I got this from the Nick Hornby novel "A Long Way Down" which is about 4 individuals that accidentally met on the rooftop of a tall building on New Years Eve, ready to throw themselves over. They eventually form a rag-tag self-support group and meet up regularly despite their differences. They help each other out (in rather hilarious ways) and they all have enough life change to keep going.

I read Hornby's book "About a Boy" and really liked it. It was witty, insightful, and funny. I thoroughly enjoyed his writing style so I thought I'd try more of his books. I then read his book "How to be Good", but it was rather disappointing. However "A Long Way Down" was much better. Unfortunately there was too much strong language, but it was funny. Oddly enough I read it and a particularly appropriate time. Last weekend someone from work "topped himself". I worked with him quite a bit, and though we didn't end up being pals, this event left me feeling quite disturbed. I guess he was having some marital problems and his wife and two children left him. So that same weekend he did himself in.

It is so sad that he didn't just wait it out a bit. He could have just waited a week or two and see that life can still go on. In the book the 4 people found out that if that could make it 90 days they found they still had things to live for and their situations changed enough for them to keep going. Just in one season you can gain a better perspective on things and see that life is worth living.

We acquired one half of this guy's information company last year. He was the main programmer and it was a small operation and he was key to almost all of the processes. Just Friday one of their servers went down (a bad hard drive). He hadn't backed it up and nobody is really sure what all is supposed to be on there. He left a big mess for us to clean up at work. Someone is going to have to come in and reverse engineer all of his work and "figure out" what he did the hard way. That is just small beans compared to his poor family. His spouse is going to live with grief and guilt for her whole life. His poor children may never completely come to grips with his actions. Not to mention his parents, siblings and friends.

It would be easy to say that he took the easy way out and that his actions were purely selfish. Maybe that is the truth, but how can you ever know what goes on in someone's mind? Mental illness is a malady that can strike anyone. It is simply a tragedy.