Sunday, June 22, 2008

Premonition

I made the coffee and put my oatmeal in the microwave and headed out the door. As I stepped onto the back porch I remembered that occasionally running the coffeemaker and the microwave at the same time has blown a fuse. This hasn't happened in over a year. Why I thought of it this morning, I have no idea. When I came back, the microwave and the coffeepot were both shut off and I had to reset the circuit they are on. Premonition? Telekinesis? Coincidence? I'm leaning toward coincidence but this isn't the first time this has happened. A random thought comes into my head - like the morning 22 years ago when I thought, as I climbed into my car to go to work, that our son would come home sick from camp. We got the call later that day. He had chicken pox! Anyone out there have a similar thing happen to them?
In my case, there's no strong emotion - no feeling of dread or certainty - just a random thought.

I have a strong premonition that the Words and Music concert on Friday night at Godfrey Daniels is going to be amazing. Buy your tickets NOW.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Next Friday, June 27th at 7 pm, the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild (including moi-meme, myself) will tell stories while the Druckenmillers play old time music. So cool. This is a fund-raiser to keep the LVSG afloat and to help us fund our Festival - a totally amazing event. Where is this amazing Words and Music concert? Godfrey Daniels, of course in South Bethlehem. Come join us and support the art of storytelling.

South Bethlehem is the happening place, actually, with Lehigh University looming on the mountainside and arts festivals - such as the Storytelling Festival and the Southside Film Festival - and arts venues like Godfreys and Touchstone Theatre. Oh, and a campus of Northampton Community College is on the Southside as well. Bethlehem, PA is an artsy place to live and work all the way around.

Summer Reading Club is mad crazy. I have no idea how many kids have signed up during the first two weeks but our small library is jammed packed every single day with a lull only around dinner time ( 4 to 6 pm). Thank heavens for our excellent teen volunteers. They make the whole program hum.

I managed to read Philip Reeve's books, Larklight and Starcross this past week. Reeve does a great job of imitating a 19th century narrator as he tells of a family's adventures in outer space. Yes, in Reeve's world, the British have developed space flight and have outposts throughout the solar system even though the year is only 1851. Writing with the scientific knowledge available in the mid-1800s, Reeve creates characters who can walk unaided on the moon and float indefinitely in the "aether". David Wyatt's detailed illustrations add to the wild stories. 11-year-old Art and his prim 15-year-old sister, Myrtle, battle alien species such as giant white spiders and mind-controlling hats. Charles Dickens meets Andre Norton in these exciting novels for middle grade readers.