Giveaway, New York Links, and a Book Fight

Hey everyone.

I have emailed the winners of the Taylor Mali giveaway, but I haven’t received replies from them yet, which explains the delay. Nope. What really explains the delay is that I neglected to email at noon and instead I finally got around to it at dinner time. Anyway, if you did not win, don’t despair! You can still check out  Taylor Mali at  the First Unitarian Society of Schenectady, on Thursday, November 8th at 8 pm. To  purchase tickets, you can email Mindy at

al****@ny***.com











. And you should totally buy them because it’s a good cause, anyway.

Travel blogger Go Big or Go Home is celebrating her love of New York with a blogger link-up, with lots of links to reviews about great places to visit around New York State, so go check it out.

M and I have been reading several Lois Lowry books lately, starting with The Giver, and the final book in the series is the newly-published Son. We’d put in a request at the library for Son, but it hasn’t turned up yet, and we’re too cheap to buy hardcover. Plus, we knew my friend had bought it. So we were waiting for her to finish the book so that we could borrow it. And we were getting impatient. Last night, M said, “When is she ever going to be done?” And I had to confess that I’d just gotten an email from my friend. She’d finished the book and it was now available–we just had to pick it up.

M and I immediately began to bicker about which one of us would get to read it first. She had some ridiculous argument about how as a mother, I should be encouraging my child to read. Bah! What-ever.  I countered that I’m the mother and I’m in charge. Plus, I frequently read short bits of whatever she’s reading at bedtime, so I think that it’s only fair that I just read it real quick, because otherwise I’ll spoil it for myself by reading aloud to her. I’m in the middle of another book, and I should be reading a book club book, but I suddenly realized that escaping into a dystopia would be the perfect antidote to stressing about election night and a possible actual  impending politically-induced dystopia. I called my friend’s house, got her husband, and announced I was coming over to pick up the book. I told Cute W my destination and explained that this was a secret mission, because if M knew that I had the book in my possession, she’d want to read it herself. I figured that I could get dibs on the book before she even realized that there were “dibs” to be had.

I arrived at the friend’s house to an apologetic husband. He’d just seen the book, but it had disappeared. So he called the wife, and she explained that she’d sent the book into school with her daughter, who is J’s classmate. The book had clear instructions: “J, please give this book to your mom.” Instead, my rat-fink second-grade daughter handed it over to her big sister M before school even started, so she’d had it all day and neither of them told me anything about it. I arrived home and the girls were upstairs, snuggled into their beds, M all cozy and already deep into my book.

Well, she has to fall asleep sometime.