So much has happened in the past two weeks! My brother, Daniel, was home for a short visit from Japan, with his wife, Kana, and their son, Hugo. The visit was too short.

Then there was Children's Book Week, which will end tomorrow. So the library had a wonderful drop-in program to celebrate the week and the One Book, Every Young Child selection of this year, If You Were a Penguin.

AND, there was the Parkland Festival of the Arts that began on Thursday and finished up today. I hope that went well. I wouldn't know BECAUSE I am in Richmond, VA, as I type this. We attended the wedding of our best friends' youngest son.

The excitement will not end here because I have more traveling in the near future.

I finally finished Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and I want to read parts of it again. I was so involved in this book that I was actually shivering during some of the scenes in the Arena. Collins imagines a future so unfair, and so debauched that it is truly terrifying. No wonder Hunger Games won The Battle of the (Kids') Books this year.

I also read Saxby Smart, Private Detective - the Curse of the Ancient Mask and other case files by Simon Cheshire. Saxby is Britain's answer to Encyclopedia Brown. He's a bit younger and his cases require more work to solve. The reader is invited to guess what Saxby has deduced from several clues. Then he reveals all. I got most of the deductions right!! I could be a ten-year-old private eye, if I wasn't already more than 5 times that age. Sigh.

Right now I am reading the Klise sisters new book, Dying to Meet You : 43 Cemetery Road. A combination of letter, and newspaper clippings, Kate Klise's story and M. Sarah Klise's illustrations tell the tale of an abandoned 11-year-old boy, a ghost, a grumpy writer and a very old house and they tell it very well.