Things That Made Me Miss My Childhood Today:

• Googling the game Zoom Schwartz Pifigliano after seeing it mentioned in one of my old scrapbook journals. We played it at day camp. And Buzz. Those were fun games. Why don't we play those anymore?
  
  
• Copying the poem Animal Crackers for jackiejj. My mom used to read that to me, along with the poems about the Gingham Dog & the Calico Cat, and the Sugarplum Tree, and Over in the Meadow, and the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead.
  
  
• Reading a chapter from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to Martin.
  
  
• Watching the glee with which my children brushed their teeth this morning because of their New! Magic! COLOR-CHANGING!! toothbrushes. Plastics technology rocks!

My brother is a voracious reader, just as I am, but his tastes deviate quite widely from mine, for the most part. But every now and then he comes up with a gem. He was the one who finally got me to read Sherlock Holmes a few months ago, and now he's responsible for introducing me to one of the best books I have ever read...and I've read a lot of books. After having a hellacious 10-hour trip in the car from Holland to Germany, I was determined to beat my car sickness on the trip home and read something, because the thought of sitting still for that long AGAIN with nothing to do except referee the kids was making me want to cry. He gave me a gigantic paperback to try, 1076 pages long by Ken Follett. Now, Ken Follett isn't normally my kind of author. He writes adventure-thriller-spy-mystery-stuff, things I'm not really interested in reading, although I've read a few of that genre in the past and while I enjoyed some of them, they just don't do enough for me to keep me hooked. This book, however, is so completely different from everything else he's written that it's hard to believe it's the same author. If you've never read The Pillars of the Earth, and you want to shed your 21st-century skin and slip back into the Middle Ages of England in a way that will make you shake your head in a daze whenever you lift your eyes from the pages because everything around you seems so strange and foreign and wildly unfamiliar, I can highly recommend it. I read it in 2.5 days because I could not.put.it.down. It's a keeper.

Yesterday was a happy-mail-dance day. All that mail that was held during our trip arrived at once in a big envelope, and there were 2 little envelopes inside and they were for me! One was an absolutely stunning amethyst pendant wrapped in curling silver wire that I special ordered from the incredibly talented Kythryne Aisling at Wearable Sculpture; my early birthday present for myself. In addition, she included a lovely and completely unexpected pair of amethyst earrings! My thanks to chimeraesque for the recommendation to her site. I'm so pleased and I can't wait to wear it. :)

The other envelope for me was a copy of bluepoppy's book! It's a breezy and extremely readable book about feng shui for college students living in dorm rooms, and I wish I'd had a copy when I was in college, although to be fair, I'm a bit skeptical of the whole feng shui thing, or at least skeptical of the extremes to which I've heard some people enthuse about it. Regardless, a great deal of it seems to be common sense, and since there's a sad lack of that these days, I'm all for anything that genuinely helps people better themselves and their space. While I was reading it, I found myself thinking a few things. One: that I seemed to have been already intuitively incorporating a great deal of balance in my surroundings, according to the basic principles of feng shui. Two: that I wanted to know more and find out how the elements described in the book for small one-room living situations apply to large sprawling ranch-style houses like ours. Then I stopped halfway through and scribbled a list of things I wanted to improve and do during the next 2 weeks. This morning, I picked the book up again before I got out of bed and finished reading it, and then I jumped up, energized, and CLEANED THE WHOLE DAMN HOUSE. Bluepoppy! You sneaky thing!