Odd ramblings to avoid work

{Photo blatently stolen from Stuff On My Cat because I like it}

I’m a little groggy today. I was awake from about 4 to 6:30 a.m. ~ just in the bed thinking about stuff, battling DS-8s elbows and Djin’s furry face, trying to sleep. As usually happens. I went soundly to sleep at 6:30 a.m. and woke up about 15 minutes before the children were supposed to be to school.
A storm is blowing in, and as I have discovered since moving to this town, storms in our little town are preceded by wicked winds.
Yesterday the weather was wonderful. But last night at about 7:30 p.m. when I went out side with a spray can and yet another project I had a hard time getting the spray paint to stick to the wood because the darn wind kept blowing everything sideways.

In an attempt to avoid work I have created a blog for my local scrapbook store. You can find it here: http://scrappilyintooele.blogspot.com/ And yes, the first entry looks oddly familiar.

I have also been on a reading kick lately. I’ve read something like six books in the last week. It’s not as ambitious as it sounds. Four of them were children’s lit fantasy stories about a door in the woods and a dream world.
Oddly enough the two adult books have ended up sharing a common theme, the challenge faced by cultural and racial prejudices, and neither one overtly speak of the theme, it is just there as an underpinning of the stories.
The first is Fanny Flagg’s “Welcome to the World Baby Girl,” about a female newscaster in the 1970’s watching as muck rackers destroy the lives of good people by digging up smut from their past. As it happens, this newscaster has her own secret ~ although she isn’t really sure what it is. The girl’s father was a World War II soldier who met her mother during training and married her before being shipped overseas.
He ends up being killed in the war, and his wife and daughter come to a small southern town for a few years before the mother takes off with her child because she is hiding some unknown secret.
The other story is Tony Hillerman’s “Shape Shifters.” Anyone familiar with Tony Hillerman knows his books are mysteries based on the crime fighting of Navajo police in America’s southwest. I spent several years on the fringe of the area written about in the stories, although I never understood the Navajo people as explained by the book, even though one of my good friends in St. George was part Navajo.
His story also touches on the Hmong, an obscure people treated badly in their Asian home. I’ve never heard of the Hmong (pronounced Mong) until last year of so when I did a layout for a friend who’s husband served an LDS mission in California among the Hmong.
Both books are a pretty good read, if you are looking for something to do.
DS-8 has his first baseball practice tonight. He is so excited he just can’t stand it. He’s even trying to get me to go out and help him catch. Poor deluded child, he thinks he has a Mom who is willing to do that sort of thing.
It should be interesting learning to play baseball in a wind storm.

One more thing. While I was doodling around looking for a story related to my English as a Second Language story I am currently (avoiding) writing, I found this.http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660192238,00.html It might be of interest to my family members.