Why is it the nights you actually make a dinner and have it in the oven when your husband/wife calls and says they are going to be late from work? Oh well, it will heat up when Steve gets home. So I have a few hours to veg by myself before he gets home. I have VH1 Country blaring on the TV. I love country music but Steve does not, and that is saying it mildly! :-) We do not have a country station in the islands so I have to listen to CDs or VH1 Country. Didn't have that problem in Texas! :-)

I snort laughed my way through Ron Koertge's Where the Kissing Never Stops. What a wonderful book with a delightful main character, Walker. His sense of humor is wonderful as is his ability to accept his weight and his use of food to deal with stress. But, as soon as he and Rachel become a couple his weight starts to come off. Being out working on the property that his father left him when he died helps too. Walker would have a pretty normal life with a girlfriend and a best friend who acts like a psychologist, but his mother works as a stripper at the Ye Olde Burlesque Club. Having a 40 year old mother with that profession would be difficult enough for a teenage boy who lived in a big city, but Walker lives in a small town outside of Kansas City. Walker had me at hello! :-)

On the visual delight side - take a look at Katya Arnold's Elephants Can Paint Too!. What a fun photo essay comparison of her young students learning to paint at school with the elephants she works with in Asia. The narrative comparison is delightful too - "A young elephant sucks its trunk the way babies suck their thumbs." The left side of the page shows a child painting and the right side shows an elephant painting. The author and her husband established painting schools where they train about 30 elephants to paint. The proceeds from selling the elephants' paintings are used to help saving the diminishing number of Asian elephants. Cool book for any age, but little ones will certainly relate, and think it cute, how much they are like elephants.

Now I am going curl up and reading Looking for Alaska!