Revealing myself as a LOTR nerd

Good answers!  I love that everyone has such intelligent reading habits.  I mean, no one answered "Fat Diamond Dynasty" by Danielle Nickel or anything. (Ha Ha, get it?  Nickel?)

I love it that Jennifer listed a Gene Stratton Porter book!  And The Horse and His Boy.  Excellent.  I think my late mother-in-law met Toni Morrison at some point or other (she was a journalist with the LA Times) and I need to read The Giver.  Love Little Women (it was one of the books that I shipped with our books from home) and Little Men and Jo's Boys are good too.  Barbara Kingsolver is the bomb.  I've never read the Tom Robbins book, and I started to read A Fine Balance, but couldn't continue because I was pregnant and my husband was far away in another country, and I just knew something terrible was going to happen and I couldn't handle it.  But I know I will read it one day.

Ummm.  101 Recipes for Babies' Noses? Never read it.  And that's disturbing.  You'd better find someplace else to live, Renee.

As for me... it's true, how can you pick?  I love My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok.  Maybe one of the genius books of the world.  And for Indian lit, The God of Small Things is amazing and beautiful and heartbreaking.  I'm a sucker for The Lord of the Rings, although in some ways I wish I'd never watched the movies because now the actor's faces are in my head and I'm not down with all the casting.  (Not down with Elrond, not down with Aragorn... although I love Viggo... not down with Faramir. The hobbits are okay.)

Also, while we're in the fantasy realm, Robin McKinley is rather wonderful.  And I cannot for the life of me remember any other books that I've ever read.  Ever.  Why does that happen?  It's like going to the video rental place.

The fraud issue is a matter of signing an affadavit that I haven't received, since FedEx couldn't locate my house here.  Non existent address.  Although it DOES exist, I'm sitting right here.  So they took the money back and it was quite a bit and these are the frustrating things about being far from your origins.  I'm hoping they'll work it out for me.  I've had to be quite firm.  Which is not easy for me.  I'm more likely to pick the fly out of my drink and go on drinking it than mention it to the poor harried fast food worker in the food court.

It apparently is not "done" to drive with your light, or lights on in the day here.  Which is fine, I can dig it.  But wouldn't it be awesome if people reacted the same way when your fly was down?  Imagine it, a whole group of people yelling "Fly!  Fly!" as you sauntered past.

And the hat thing.  We definitely don't go out in the sun, yet, (by "we" I mean, Solo and I) so I can only assume it is one of the strict rules that exist around here about newborns.  I've run into a few.

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And on a completely different note...

Chessia wrote to me lately to let me know that her organization has been nominated to be one of the top 25 in an effort American Express is putting together.  Their project, "Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children," could receive funding of $1.5 Million, allowing them to feed a lot of hungry children, saving a lot of lives in the food crisis around the world right now.

I can barely keep breathing when I start thinking about children being hungry, and so it was a good thing to find Chessia's letter in my inbox, with such a simple way to help them gather funding.  You can read more about the project here, (scroll down) and vote for them here, the only hurdle being that you have to be an American Express cardmember to vote.  The voting ends on September 29th, so go for it, AmEx cardmembers!