Now I know I need to start taking more pictures of Sophie and writing down her antics in more than this blog. I just read in the ALA Direct electronic newsletter that Vicki Myron, Director of the Spencer Iowa PL just received a $1.5 million book deal for the story of Dewey Readmore, the library cat. See his life story, which made me smile on this gray and dreary morning: http://spencerlibrary.com/deweybio.htm However, my Sophie is cuter than he was and she can match all of his antics and she was a stray kitten left in an abandoned building. Hmmm - a retirement writing project - give her a few more years to entertain me. :)

I woke up this morning to a car accident - crashing sounds and horns beeping, etc. - but it came from my kitchen! I came staggering out of bed at 6:30 not sure I dreamt it or what the heck had happened. Apparently Steve has his sound quite loud on his laptop, which is on the bar in the kitchen and he opened something up this morning that sounded like a car wreck! I think he was worried I was going to be more than cranky about being woke up but I just grabbed a diet coke and curled up in bed and read for a bit before I took him to work so I could have my car. No, he has not made up his mind about a car yet. Wish he would! Not sure my sending him URLs to cars at local dealerships yesterday helped or just irritated him. The good news is I had breakfast in bed - guess he figured that would ease some of my grumpiness about being so rudely awakened.

Heard on the radio news on the way back home this morning that Kurt Vonnegut died last night at 84 years old. I haven't attempted to read one of his 14 alternate universe novels since I was in high school. Perhaps at this point in my life I might appreciate them more. Guess I will have to get one of them as an audiobook so I can listen to it on the drive back and forth to Greenville.

Not sure I would call it an alternate universe, but I certainly was intrigued by Gracehope, the under ice colony in Greenland, in Rebecca Stead's debut novel First Light. This is a great MS/JH novel - not only because it is a wonderful coming-of-age story but because it has a focus on global warming. There are a number of good nonfiction books for teens on global warming, including Al Gore's YA edition of An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming, but basically no novels. I did a search on B&N and could find nothing - a few adult SF novels but nothing like this. Twelve-year-old Peter is excited about his trip to Greenland with his glaciologist father and scientist mother until he realizes how boring it really is. So he starts exploring the area with one of the sled-dogs, dogs that later pull him out into a blizzard. While lost he finds a red circle in the glacial ice that looks very much like the mitochondrial DNA his mother has drawn on a piece of paper. Curiosity is killing the cat and Peter heads back out onto the ice to find the red circle again. At the very same time Thea and Mattias arrive on the surface, having found the tunnel out of Gracehope, a colony hidden under the ice whose residents have special gifts and intelligence much beyond the normal human. Mattias' fall into a crevasse results in Peter meeting the cousins and helping them back down the steep tunnel into Gracehope where he is fascinated by the lights in the ice and how self-sufficient they are. Of course, there is a link between Peter and the colonists, which is why his parents have been searching for Gracehope for many years. They know that global warming is destroying the icecap and eventually, Gracehope with it. An entertaining novel with science and fantasy woven into a grand, though very chilly, adventure.

All for today.