Thankful Thursday

• We got a small taste of spring this week.  Last week, the high was around 15 F if it was a warm day.  Yesterday it was 51 F.
• The school psychologist who comes to Pyrope's class a couple times a month said he had a really good day when she saw him this week.
• Wii fitness games.  Getting to the rec center as much as I need to doesn't happen.  I get bored with DVDs.  I will do Wii fitness games (I have a couple of different ones), the competitive nature helps me along (even if it is just against myself).
• That I'm pretty much a person that can roll with the punches.  It takes quite a bit to really get me frazzled.  This was particularly useful this week at work
• Finding a couple of books that I have really enjoyed.  It makes me want a No.ok or Kin.dle or something.  Our library still doesn't have a huge selection of eBooks, and I really am not a "buy books" kind of person, definitely a library gal.
• Copies medical records of Obsidian's made it from where they are to where they needed to go.  One on the first try, one on just the second (which is really amazing that that particular one only took 2 requests)
• That beef slow cooked with dill pickles really does come out good (I discarded the pickles, cut up the roast, put barbecue sauce on it, stuck it back in the cooker, then it made some mean sandwiches).  Particularly grateful it turned out well because I did it for the first time on a night we had guests over for dinner (I figure, there is always pizza if it was a colossal fail, but everyone liked it)
• Spell check.  I'm a horrible speller, and if I didn't have it, my writing would not be nearly what it is.  First off I would purposely use smaller words versus the ones I really want to use.  Second, I would still have lots of spelling mistakes.

Book review

The books I have read this month are:

1. Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A celebration of 50 years of To Kill a Mockingbird by Mary McDonagh Murphy.  An interesting read to make me think about different parts of To Kill a Mockingbird.
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  This time when I read it, I spent a lot of time thinking about how different the book would have been if it would have been told through someone else's eyes other than Scout.  Along those lines, I was thinking on how truth is more subjective than objective.  My truth version of an event might not be the same as someone else's, even if we were both there. 

To Kill a Mockingbird is a reread for me and I did it for National Banned Book Week (which is always the last week in September).  I started reading book that had been banned by some group for banned book week when I was in 5th grade.  I was hoping to get a "don't do it" reaction out of my teachers and parents.  I got one out of my teachers but to my confusion, my parents just encouraged me.  Throughout grade school I got more negative reactions to my annual read a banned book and flaunt it that I did every September.  My parents on the other hand helped me choose books that were banned (I very clearly remember them helping me make it through Macbeth by Shakespeare, and my language arts teacher over the top reaction to it).  I'm falling behind with my reading goal, but I have a lot on my "really want to read list".  I started "The girl with a dragon tatoo", a book which my mom bought than loaned to me to read (if you knew my mother, you would know that she never buys books, she will wait months to get it from the library, however she read one of the other books in the series than had to read the first but the waiting list was too long for her at the library).  The new Rick Roirdan book about Camp Halfblood is being released on the 10th of this month.  He is currently favorite author of books that I can just escape into.  I also want to reread "Play to Talk" and "Communication Partners" by James McDonald.  I have been doing this with Pyrope, and need to really read it more indepthly.  When I first got the books, I quickly read through them and decided to give it a try.  Other people as well as myself have noticed significant improvements in Pyrope's speech, so I want to read them more closely and decide what I want to implement more systematically.  I have also been thinking about some of the premises in the book and how they really apply to people in general.  Some of the points I would just like to incorporate into my own communication habits so I can be a better friend, co-worker, and fellow human being in general.  Looking at the list, it is an eccletic mix, a popular fiction for adult women (for the most part), a series aimed at tweens (including boys), and two books that the closest genre is textbook.