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Multiple links (not necessarily of a bookish sort) to stories that I found interesting:

From BLDGBLOG, the lost rivers of Manhattan:

But how much would I love to find myself in New York City for a weekend, perhaps sent there by work to cover a story – when the phone rings in my hotel room. It's 11pm. I'm tired, but I answer. An old man is on the other end, and he clears his throat and he says: "I think this is something you'd like to see." I doubt, I delay, I debate with myself – but I soon take a cab, and, as the clock strikes 12am, I'm led down into the basement of a red brick tenement building on E. 13th Street.

I step into a large room, that smells vaguely of water – and six men are sitting around an opening in the floor, holding fishing poles in the darkness.

For those of you wondering how to save the world, consider urban gardening:

All this has not quenched Ms. Washington’s agricultural ambitions. In April she took a six-month leave from her job and headed to the Center for Agroecology with two other city growers. She said she hoped to take notes and start an urban farm school in New York.

With that in place, Ms. Washington said, the possibilities could be endless.

“So that the next time we ask a kid where a tomato comes from,” she said, “he won’t have to say a supermarket. He can say, Here’s an urban farm, and here is where I’m growing that tomato that you’re talking about. How great is that?”

A lifetime (and three generations) spent studying Lake Baikal:

Marianne V. Moore, an ecologist at Wellesley College and another researcher on the project, said she learned about the data in 2001 when she took students in her class, “Baikal and the Soul of Siberia,” to the lake. Dr. Izmesteva spoke to the group and showed a few slides, which the translator said had been drawn from a 60-year record. “I thought he had made a mistake,” Dr. Moore recalled. “So I basically ignored it.”

When she returned with another class two years later and another scientist mentioned the data, “my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “I realized this is just extraordinary.”

From the Natural History Museums Antarctica blog, "Near Enough is Not Good Enough":

Shackleton and his men didn’t cross the continent as planned. Before reaching land the Endurance became wedged in ice and had to be abandoned by the crew. [Frank] Hurley argued with Shackleton to go back to the sinking ship to rescue his precious glass plate negatives. Diving below the icy waters of the sunken ship he found these jewels that he’d soldered shut in a tin. The legendary story follows how he and Shackleton went through the hundreds of negatives, smashing those that could not be taken in their harrowing journey to be rescued. Imagine the images nobody has yet seen, in an icy grave at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

Finally, Jenny D. pines for the new bicycle novel (which she should write!) and links to Guy Dammann's article at The Guardian on the subject:

Obvious sources from the cycling's first golden age range from HG Wells's follow-up to the Time Machine, The Wheels of Chance to Flann O'Brien's anarchic surrealisation of the Irish countryside, The Third Policeman. Somerset Maugham's long short story, Cakes and Ale, indexes the cycling habits of Hugh Walpole and, more famously, Thomas Hardy, and Jerome K Jerome's sequel to Three Men on a Boat, sees the three companions regroup for some bicycle action in Three Men on a Bummel.

[Images from Lake Baikal including Mikhail M. Kozhov and his granddaughter Lyubov who along with Lyubov's mother conducted the ongoing Lake Baikal study.]

In the wake of Barack Obama's significant speech today on race in America everybody has been weighing with opinions. One of the smaller more telling observations I've made in all this came during Sheperd Smith's show on FOX today. Smith grew up in Mississippi (he's white) and his anger during the levy failure in New Orleans was amazing to watch. I really like him. He had two white commentators on with him today - one middle aged guy for the Democrats who loved the speech and one fairly young woman from the Young Republicans. The young woman didn't like the speech or see its relevance and Smith wasn't taking that from her - he clearly grew up looking at racism in all its forms every day and he wasn't letting her dodge and weave. At one point she that her grandparents had come to this country and worked hard and gotten ahead and this issue of race wasn't part of their lives - or thus the lives of any Gen X or Gen Y'ers. And I thought well of course not.

It didn't affect you, (who most certainly must have come from a nice white suburban background) so of course racism doesn't exist. End of story and end of her thinking the issue is real.

I grew up in Central Florida which is not really southern in the social sense of the word - it's more Lauderdale and Miami and Daytona - more beach then old Confederacy. (Part of this might be due to the fact that the Civil War barely made it into FL so the only truly "Southern" portions of the state are really in the north - areas that Floridians will often say are more like Georgia than Florida.) If you asked me when I was growing up about racism I would say I didn't know beans about it - my classes in school were mixed and not due to busing - it was just the demographics of the working class area I grew up in. But honestly there were no black people that grew up in my neighborhood - they all lived in the black section of town, period. Literally, it is across the railroad tracks (can you believe that?) and it was alway a mysterious place to me. We never drove back there. Across town, there was another black section and while the main road through it was one I drove many many times I was always told to never stop on it at night, even for a red light.

But my hometown wasn't racist. Not really.

I attended Catholic Church until I was a teenager, just as my family had done for generations. (And my grandparents continued until their deaths and my father until his death and my mother still does.) I never saw a black person in our church. I'm sure there must have been at least one sometimes - black people are Catholics too - but I can't recall ever seeing one. What I do know is that there are black churches in my hometown and there are white churches. That's how we all know them. I'm sure there must be some with mixed congregations but I don't know about them specifically. All I know is that I saw black kids in school but did not live near them and did not worship with them. And that was just the way it was.

(I should note that my father worked with a lot of black and hispanic co-workers at the local military base where he was employed for 20 years in a civil service position. He was friends with everybody, united in a common goal of disliking the officers and upper class at the base. I wish he was alive today so we could talk about all this; I think he would have a very unique perspective on it.)

When I was in Fairbanks I met a lot of Alaska Natives (both Inuit and Indian) and that opened up a lot of other racial stereotypes. In Alaska is not really about black and white at all, but white and Native and everyone is part of that conversation. There is also a difference between people who live in the village (white or Native) versus those who live in Town. And there is a difference between whites from Outside and whites from AK. More than once I stood at work complaining about stupid white people - there was no similarity between the ones who made my life hard because they knew nothing about Alaska, airplanes and flying and myself because they were whites from Outside. It was all complicated but that's how it was and I wasn't the only one on the job who hated dealing with white people. (Common conversation: "Who am I flying to Ft Yukon today?" "Some white people." "Crap!")

I started teaching history for one of the community colleges on Ft Wainwright in Fairbanks in January 1997. My students were a mix of black, white and Native American as well as Central American, African, Jamaican and Filipino. There was no universal color or ethnicity. The predominant color however was black. In the beginning I stuck to the standard textbook crap and I was very very dull. But over time I realized that I had black students who knew everything about the Civil Rights movement and white kids who knew nothing about it. I had kids (of all colors) who knew nothing about WWII (not even who fought on what side) and students who could talk for hours about US foreign policy and how it affected their birth country and kids from reservations who never got past the US Civil War in school. Pretty much the only thing they all had in common was money. Almost all of them enlisted to get money to get away from home, get a leg up on the American dream, get cash for college. Getting into the middle class was their lifelong dream but they all had different experiences and a lot of misconceptions about each other. I had students who had never sat in a classroom with someone of a different race - ever. Everything Obama talked about today - about whites hating blacks because of affirmative action and blacks hating whites because of racism - was on display in my classes. I remember distinctly when one of my sergeants told us he had been stopped while out jogging - on military bases - three separate times in his career. They stopped him because he was a black man running. When we questioned the white MPs in the class as to why that would happen, they said a lot of MPs are from the south. They didn't trust blacks, even when they outranked them, because they were certain the rank was due to affirmative action and nothing else. Stopping a black man running was just something they could do - so they did it.

There was a lot of anger in my classes and a lot of work to try and bridge that emotion.

One day a 19 year old white girl whose job was to be the driver for the base commander (we all figured she was chosen because she was cute) said quite honestly that she had never seen racism so why did blacks insist it was there? Why didn't they move on? A black female sergeant sitting behind her had to be physically restrained from standing up on the table and screaming. What we finally got down to was that in this room, living on this same base, they still needed to be able to explain themselves to each other and find common ground - find a way to listen. "She is the one you need to make understand," I told the sergeant. "She just doesn't know any better."

Got that Young Republican lady on FOX? You just don't know any better.

I will not go into specifics here, on the internet, about my own personal interactions with racism but I will say that in my extended family I have sat down more than once at the table and shared a meal with people who have been unfailing kind and loving but will also say incredibly racist things - things they believe in. Because of that confusing personal reality, it was this part of Obama's speech that most resonated with me:

I can no more disown him [Rev Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

I love people who are racist and I don't say either of those words - "love" or "racist" lightly. It appalls me and disturbs me when they say the things they do and I always fight back against it whenever words are said that I object to. I do not allow my son to be in their presence if they will not censure their language. But that is who they are - because of geography and history and choices they make about what they want to believe. And I have to accept that while making every effort to change the country so that eventually such attitudes will disappear. (And that is part of why I have supported Obama - not the color of his skin but because he is willing to address and change so many aspects of our class filled society that have lingered for far too long.)

I understand what Barack Obama said today and I embrace it because it is exactly the complicated unpleasant truth that I have been witness to on many many occasions. Even on the simplest terms - such as reviewing books - race is an issue. I struggle constantly to find books with black characters, all kinds of books from serious to fun, for my teen readers. It is incredibly hard. I struggle to find books that address class in a way that both includes and expands beyond the issue of race. It is also incredibly hard. But I do keep trying and that effort I think is an important one. More books with minority characters should be published in this country, period and the fact that they aren't is certainly some subtle kind of racism that we all choose to ignore, that we all pretend is about demographics and dollars and on and on and on. I mean really, how many black Disney princesses are there?

Enough said.

At the end of the day, what Obama is saying is that the issue of race is here and it isn't going away - it is the problem that America still struggles with and just because you convince yourself otherwise, just because your family so handily sidesteps it, doesn't mean it isn't real.

You don't know what it is like for me, my black students would say. And those words would be echoed across the room by white, Native American, Asian, and on and on. So tell us, I would say. Tell us and let us move closer to understanding America; tell us and we will listen. For the first time in our separated lives, we are all in here together and we will listen.

If we truly want to grow up and change the world then unlike those who came before us, we all - every color - need to listen.

Company in town tonight and we're in a cleaning frenzy. Lots of writing on the memoir to do, few reviews to get done. I'll be back for Monday with thoughts on the greatest mountaineering disaster in US history, Liz Hand and dog stories..........

There are no words.

I'm not going to give myself a huge list of resolutions at the start of the year because I just don't have a clue yet what I want to accomplish (aside from the writerly obvious). I was really bothered by an article I read a couple last month about Powells Books though and it gave me an idea. Here's a bit:

And although she hesitates to come up with specific plans, she seems to know what the problem is: competition from Amazon and warehouse clubs; flat revenue on the Internet side and a lack of loyalty from people who order online; unknown technological changes that could involve downloadable books; and a general compression of the field.

"It's been a rocky couple of years for the business," she said. She expects a markedly different industry in five years.

"It's probably as tense as it's ever been," Publishers Weekly's Milliot said of the business climate. "The whole industry, from the publishers down to the bookstores, is uncertain where things are going to go. No one worries that the physical book is going to disappear. But they're all fighting for a smaller slice of the pie."

The trick, Emily Powell said, will be maintaining the culture of the store -- not just the bohemian tone but stocking books that are hard to find in other independent stores, such as conservative and Christian tomes, which her father insists are usually blind spots -- and preparing for the unknown.

Despite her lack of seasoning, industry observers are mostly heartened that the company will stay in the family, the best way to maintain Powell's spirit. Milliot calls Emily Powell "a known quantity."

"We're in a very antiquated industry in many respects," she said. "You have to like bookselling, not just books, in order to bring change."

What got me was that lack of loyalty from online customers. I'm one of the people they were talking about and I need to change that because I love that store, it is an amazing store, and I hate the thought that it might one day just not be in the world.

We need places like Powells; we just need them to be there.

So my first resolution this year is that every book I buy, for myself or others this year, will be from Powells*. Sometimes I might pay full price for a new copy, sometimes I'll get them on sale and sometimes I'll buy them used (because standard used from Powells is pretty much as good as new) but that's where I'm buying my books. This is not because I think amazon is evil or B&N and Borders are trying to take over the world, it's just because I like Powells and I should be willing to put my dollars into a company I like.

So there you go, I'm supporting Powells this year. I feel pretty good about this and quite frankly, I'm hoping it is going to be how it will be from now on, forever. It's a nice way to give back to a place that gives us so much just by being there.

*Okay, I do have $100 in credit at the local used bookstore but I think that buying from the local used store is also a good thing and I doubt Powells would begrudge me that! (They have an awesome polar lit section - how can I resist?)

Okay birthday fun was had and I survived while my son has now (at 11 PM) finally collapsed into some kind of ecstatic six-year old heap. (How I ended up the mother of a child - and not a baby - I will never know. I swear he was just a toddler yesterday....)

Questions have been fired off to David Mack and Nick Abadzis and some follow-ups to Lisa Ann Sandell all for the Winter Blog Blast Tour. Tomorrow I send a few to Loree Griffin Burns and then it is just Christopher Barzak I have left. I ead another of his short stories last night; I swear this guy never ceases to dazzle me. He is truly a wonderful author.

A wee bit of work done on the day job but not nearly enough. Tomorrow - sad to say - it will be time to be a boring business woman. We have also heard that a nasty wind storm might be headed our way on Thursday which raises concerns for our smallest plane which is currently tied down on an airport ramp a bit south of here. We really need to buy a hangar; I hate the idea of a plane fighting for it's life in the midst of 60 mile an hour gusts. It's just not a pretty picture.

I am deeply sucked into a book on Arctic exploration - one I did not think would captivate me so much as I know a lot of this particular story already but boy the author does a great job of making it all fresh again. More on this later, after reviews for all the books I have finished are written. (And no - none of that done today, but there was no chance of it happening anyway.)

But mostly I am finally feeling like I can go back to Alaska - in a literary sense. It was nice to take a break from the book and just think about it and really, I had no choice. There was too much traveling and visiting to worry about writing any certain amount each day. I wanted to write but I was lucky to sleep more than a few hours every night. We crammed a lot into the last few weeks and there simply was no room for writing. By Friday my agent will have what I have written thus far and I will keep moving forward. Oddly enough I feel like I'm in a good place with this book, hopefully that positive feeling will carry over to the writing. We shall see.

Back later with love for Ned Vizzini. Go take a look at Robert's Snow and spread some love yourselves over there.

This is a week of playing catch-up. So far the only thing I can be truly honest about accomplishing is the mountain of laundry we somehow acquired on the way home. Here's what is still on my plate:

1. A birthday party for a certain six-year old boy. We don't do the big birthday parties with gift bags and all that; never have. I grew up with mostly family parties when I was young and only started including lots of friends as a teenager - well past the gift bag stage. My son likes to have his best friend Kassie over and they make the cake together (really!) and enjoy the heck out of each other all day long. So it's not a big scary party, but still my night was spent turning the dining room into a combination military/Star Wars design (it actually came out good) and tomorrow will be squeals of excitement all day long. Lots of fun, but not conducive to getting much else done.

2. That whole day job thing. I don't write about it much but my husband and I own an aircraft leasing company which is not a whole lot of day to day work (not like working at the Company was) but still generates lots of paperwork that must be attended to. Right now I have a month's worth of said paper staring me in the face. Must tackle that pile soonest.

3. That whole Alaska memoir thing. My agent is looking for what I have thus far on the Alaska flying memoir ("The Map of My Dead Pilots") and I want to get it to her right away. I made some handwritten changes to the latest chapter though while in the car and need to transfer those to the computer and all that. I promised by Friday so that will be my Wednesday job.

4. Contribute to Robert's Snow. I am blown away by how well organized Jules at the Seven Imps has made this big project. The early posts are so impressive and I really hope that we generate enough interest in Robert's Snow to bring the auction some new buyers and increase the take on these snowflakes. I am writing about Carin Berger on Monday - and she has no web presence at all that I can find. So sometime this week I will write all about how cool her books are, how sweet her snowflake is, and my own personal experience with the Jimmy Fund. This is one post that I want to really do a good job on.

5. Conduct my interviews for the Winter Blog Blast Tour. That's right - I've only done one of FIVE interviews so far. I am so far behind on this it is not even funny. So tomorrow night I will have questions off to two of the other subjects and be ready to send the others as soon as I hear back from their publicists. I swear, this will never happen again. I hate not being ahead on a project this big - waiting to the last minute is so stressful!

6. Write reviews of four books - including Ned Vizzini's wonderful It's Kind of a Funny Story. More on that book here this week. None of these reviews should be hard to write but still, it will be nice to have them done so I can not worry about forgetting what I read! ha!

7. Figure out just what I'm going to do with the 75 books that showed up while I was gone. For some bloggers that might be a small number but for me it is pretty daunting. I've already weeded out the ones that are duplicates or I'm just not interested in and still, I have 75 left. Some of them I requested, some sound great and some I might not review but still - I might if given a chance. Right now I have almost all of next year's columns stacked up on the floor in my office: SF, Fantasy, Coming-of-age funny, Coming-of-age serious, Nonfiction, etc. I know from experience that I will start to read some of these books and then decide not to review them (this just happened with a book I started last night), but still - that's a lot of freaking reading. I'm thinking I might not request anything for awhile unless it is something I really really really want to read. There are so many good books already waiting for me; it seems crazy to go looking for more. (Hilary McKay's last Casson book is already requested!)

I also need to rework my outline for Winter, as one of the characters from the past is developing as more significant to the present and I need to figure out just what dead pilots I plant to include in total in the memoir. That's all fun stuff though, and should be a nice afternoon of writing and thinking.

I'm not generally such a list maker but with everything piled up around me, writing down what I must do in the next few days makes it all seem a bit more manageable. A return to regular literary content here tonight though. One can whine about their stacks of books only so long before the blog gets more than bit boring!

Hey guys - I'm in KY right now headed west. I'll try and post tonight on Into the Wild and why some people get regional stories so very very very wrong (while others, bless them, are so right). I'm also reading Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story and love it. (How did I miss this?)

Two more long days left and I'm home....here we go........

Hey guys - I'm in the middle of a big travel deal now; should be posting back on schedule in a couple of days. So far I have learned the following:

California is going to disappear if someone lights a match. (Really hot and dry..really really really hot and dry!)
If you see tens of thousands of cows in a feedlot on the side of the road you will make a solemn vow to never eat beef again.
You will also seriously doubt that whole "illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Americans" line. (Have you ever smelled a big feedlot? Good God.)
Windmill farms are very cool.
Seeing the B2 Bomber do touch and go's over Edwards AFB is very cool.
The desert gets boring after five minutes.
There are an enormous amount of trucks on our highways.
Hotel rooms fill up fast in Flagstaff.
Bakersfield would be cooler if you knew where the statue of Buck Owens was.
I miss my bed.

Back tomorrow with an entry about all things Aussie Day, Recommendations From Under the Radar, Scots Day and the WBBT.

In other words, stuff is going on!

We got in at 6AM this morning after a delayed (big surprise) Alaska Airlines flight. My son has slept for a grand total of three hours since yesterday and is proving to be some sort of bizarre energizer bunny of a child. My dog needed a post-kennel bath, food was required in large quantities and I have a ton of emailing.

And we were already tired from the work we did up north!

Later......................

I was thinking about what to write for July 4th, something about war or history or patriotism - something with lots of links and throwing around words like rebellion and revolution and terrorism. Something that explained how American history is so different in America than it is in other countries, if that makes any sense.

I've read a lot of American history, a lot of war history (a lot of it while in college); a lot about how no one is ever really good or bad at that moment on the battlefield; how mostly it is all sad and tragic and royally fucked up. And then I read about that helicopter rescue in Iraq and I felt like singing that damn Lee Greenwood song just because the image of those guys going in and picking up two of their own on the ground under fire and how good and brave they were to do that and how amazing that pilot was to fly out of there with two guys hanging on his helicopter, well that imagined picture in my head blew me away.

And then I realized that the picture would still be great if they were British or Polish or Kenyan or Russian. That I wanted those sailors to live on the Kursk because the thought of them hanging on for so long and never making it out was just heartbreaking. And I wanted those Pakistani soldiers not to die in Somalia because it wasn't right that they should - they were reaching out to the people there; they were struggling to make a connection and dying shouldn't have been part of it; dying shouldn't happen to the Blue Helmets who are there to make peace.

It's not American bravery I admire, not really, it is bravery itself. And I thought wouldn't it be grand if we could change all the histories and not wrap ourselves up in flags of glory saluting our historical heroes under the blanket of nationalism, but just celebrate their innate human bravery. Must you call Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry and all the Founding Fathers Americans? Were they fighting for the country of America - a country that did not exist as real but was only an ideal, a hope, a few words on paper when they launched a revolution? Is that ideal different from what so many Irish died for after the Easter Rebellion? Does it matter that their ideal was tied to a place called Ireland and ours was tied to a place called America?

Is geography the most important part of courage?

Did Nelson Mandela struggle harder for South Africa or Martin Luther King Jr. struggle more for America? Or were both of them fighting the same fight - Ghandi's fight - on different soil? Is it so important to claim only our national heroes or can I claim others as well? Must you be an American to earn my admiration? Is that the way I am supposed to learn about bravery?

Are only American heroes the ones worth honoring?

If we knew what burned in the hearts of most Iraqis and Afghanis and Saudis and Bosnians and Serbians and Sudanese and Congolese and on and on and on and on, would we find the same thing that burns within us as well?

Do so many of us fight for the same thing - the same hope and dream and secret wish - that ends up in rhetoric tied to the ground we were born on and thus becomes wrapped up in a flag others can not admire?

In other words, is it all just about freedom and is your country merely an afterthought, an offshot, a corollary to that more important goal?

Maybe the bravest thing I could do tomorrow would be to say "God Bless the World" and not worry so very much about America. Because if the world is free, then I think America will be just fine - the America that I want to be part of anyway.

I'll let one of the best American writers ever explain what I mean:

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

- Langston Hughes

Happy Fourth of July everybody...........

Some trouble with spam lately (as in way too much porn getting posted as real comments) and I'm trying to get some kind of authentication procedure in place that will stop it. Right now, I can't get the thing to allow anyone to comment...so bear wtih me as we mess with this.

Anything you want to say, please send an email to colleenatchasingraydotcom and I'll get right back to ya!

I hit my 1000th comment tonight. Thanks guys, for taking the time to tell me what you think. I really appreciate every word (even the less than positive ones!)

Okay, Jen tagged me last week for the 8 things meme. I'll try to give you stuff you don't already know from the killer 7 Imps interview. Here we go:

Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1. I learned to bodysurf when I was 5 years old by riding waves on my father's back. He was an awesome body surfer. I did surf on a board in college and I was okay, but I'm way way better at body surfing.

2. My older brother is one of the coolest people on the planet. He and I talk still about all the time movies and comic books and I send him books all the time after I review them. I know a lot of people who are not that close with their siblings but I got lucky, my brother is as good as it gets.

3. My son has two middle names, the second one is "Jet". We actually thought about naming him that (John Travolta did!) but the grandmothers were not thrilled. My husband and I had just bought our first airplane together when I was pregnant and we thought it would be cool to commemorate the occasion by naming him after the kind of plane we hoped to buy (jets are very expensive). Nobody knew we were going to give it to him as a middle name until after the birth certificate was written. He thinks its awesome, which is really the only part that matters.

4. When I was young I really wanted to attend Notre Dame for college. I had no idea how to apply, or what paperwork to fill out and knew the school was expensive. In the end I didn't really tell anyone and ended up going to school locally. I wish I had tried harder at 17 to do what I wanted to do.

5. I was bored a lot in school (every year of school) and used to list the states and capitols in alphabetical order in my notebooks to pass the time. We had to memorize them that way in the 6th grade (I have no idea why) and I can still do it. I also used to list major leage teams: baseball, football and hockey. My notes were full of this kind of thing.

6. Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was the first book that made a deep impression on me. I had read many other books I loved prior to that, but it was in the 5th or 6th grade that my friend Lisa Hoff gave me that book and told me to read it. I still love it - I don't over analyze why I love it, I just do.

7. The first time I studied WWI was in college. We only got past the US Civil War once when I was in high school - in the 11th grade we made it to WW2. I didn't learn about how WWI happened until I was in a class on modern American history. What bothers me about this is that WWI and the Treaty of Versailles are the cause of so many of the geopolitical problems today. It is way more significant then the War of 1812 and yet....I studied the War of 1812 at least a dozen times.

Don't even get me started on how much I hate the Pilgrims.

8. One of my favorite tv shows is the British comedy As Time Goes By. Judi Dench is perfection.

Okay, I was also tagged by A Wrung Sponge who turned the 8 things meme on its ear with the "4 New X 2" things meme:

My new meme is called "4 New x 2". You have to share four things that were new to you in the past four years. I mean four things you learned or experienced or explored for the first time in the past four years. New house, new school, new hobby, new spouse, new baby, whatever. Then you have to say four things you want to try new in the next four years.

Here we go....

1. I learned how to balance carbs and protein and insulin. Not because I wanted to but because that is how we live now. I also learned the fun of going to Seattle Children's Hospital every three months and bringing along the notebook that lists every single thing my son eats and when and how much insulin he gets and when.

I guess I learned to get organized.

2. I started writing for Bookslut, Eclectica, Voices of NOLA and Booklist. Much writing for many people, all with deadlines. This has made me a much better, more focused writer.

3. I learned to rewrite, courtesy my agent Michele Rubin.

4. My niece Emma was born and really, it doesn't get much more fabulous than that.

Four things for the future (not so much new, but definitely goals):

1. Complete AK aviation memoir.
2. Complete YA urban fantasy.
3. Bench press my weight.
4. Catalog my personal library (eep!)

Since I'm the tail end of this, I'm not going to link. But thanks for thinking of me guys!

It's been a long week guys, and I really want to thank all of you who posted comments and sent emails about Tucker. Your kindness has been overwhelming and I really really appreciate it.

I'll be back on Monday with a long lovely post about why author interviews matter (or at least, why they matter to me). I shall also endeavor not to write about why the NBCC ticks me off - although posts like this are a perfect example of how anti-general-reader and pro-single-agenda that site (and organization?) has become. There will be words on girl books vs boy books and if that is a good division to make (I write this as I finish up my big "girls get your beach blanket reading here" column for June -eep!). I will also update on all the confirmed interviews for the Summer Blog Blast Tour and discuss the merits of being a serious reader - and how hard that can be when all the serious topics suck the life out of us.

The puppy is sleeping on my feet right now; it's not the same, but it's still pretty damn good.

My dog Tucker died today.

He was a black Lab that weighed 85 pounds and was one of the strongest dogs I have ever known. He was my Alaska puppy - I got him when he was only 2 months old and he loved Fairbanks; loved playing in the snow, loved laying in it outside at 30 below zero, loved running as far and fast as he could go.

He was a big, bold, boisterous personality that followed me from room to room and always made me feel safe.

I know I did the right thing for him today; he suffered terribly from arthritus and was struggling to walk even across the street. At the age of 13, his life had gotten very hard and it wasn't fair to who he was inside. It wasn't fair to keep him here just for me.

But I miss him so; at this moment I can't believe how much my broken heart misses him.

I told him in the last moment to go find his buddy Jake and chase moose with him again; I told him to go find Jake who has been waiting the last four years for his friend to come and to run together like they used to do. That's my idea of heaven for him and I hope that Tucker has found it.

Everything about the VA Tech tragdy is so horribly sad, but reading about Ryan Clark really breaks my heart. What a wonder he was throughout his life - it compounds the tragedy even more.

Family visiting and we are driving around today. More later or see me back here on Wednesday!

I think we are supposed to feel like we're winning now, because of this. And hey - they were "gunmen" and "militants" so it's good that we killed them.

Kill them all, right? Let God sort them out.

And no, I"m not saying that our troops should be left defenseless and unable to fire back or any of the rest of that crap that someone might want to assign me. But I have read an awful lot of old history and do you know what this sort of headline sounds like?

WWI - Korea - Vietnam. You pick the suck-ass war where a ton of people died for little or nothing and it had headlines just like this one.

Yea, we're winning.

My letter for New Orleans:

Dear Sirs & Madam:

Please accept this letter from a very frustrated citizen who is tired of bearing silent witness to the degrading situation in the city of New Orleans. I am not a resident of the city, nor the state of Louisiana, however as a taxpayer and voting American I feel it is both my privilege and responsibility to make my anger known over continued violence and lack of economic development in the city. I understand that billions of dollars have been pledged to New Orleans by Congress, but as many citizens have attested in interviews and blog entries, and as the major news outlets have covered, there are still massive problems with city services, neighborhood security and the school system. To put it bluntly, the city is broken and just as the federal, state and local governments were incapable of saving its citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees, we all seem incapable of moving fast enough now to prevent the city’s final collapse. On one level this inaction is disheartening but as exhibited by the march on City Hall yesterday, on other levels it is downright infuriating.

I understand that our national security is threatened on multiple levels from multiple directions in the 21st century and I would not suggest a simplistic solution of abandoning Iraq and Afghanistan to save New Orleans. However, I am sure it is abundantly obvious to all of you that it is hypocritical to pour so many resources into distant cities that might pose future threats to our safety when the murder rate in an American city mirrors that of one halfway across the world. U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq and the President has pledged billions of dollars to save that country’s fledgling democracy; citizens are dying in New Orleans and it barely makes the news and the money….the money seems locked in endless committees, requiring an infinitesimal amount of red tape to be cut to free it, and a thousand promises of commitment given before it will be released.

The U.S. military might very well save Iraq in the year 2007, but it will not matter for the Americans who live in New Orleans; they will perish or abandon their dying city and the elusive unexplained victory so many politicians seem to crave in the Middle East will be a hollow one because of that. It will simply be proof that we care about our citizens only if they are threatened by outside forces and not at all if they are bleeding from the hands of Americans – not at all if they are dying in America.

Something has got to change.

Dollars need to be freed up for honest, solid, planned rebuilding efforts. Dollars need to be freed up for increased focus on education that works. Dollars need to be freed up to fix one of the most inept and pathetic criminal justice systems in the country. Dollars need to be freed up to make city streets safe. Frankly, dollars need to be freed up to get the power on and sewers cleared. It’s that basic and that simple and I don’t see it happening and neither does anyone else.

I am not a citizen of New Orleans or Louisiana but I am an American and I vote. And I am watching what happens in that city, along with many many other concerned citizens. We are watching, and thus far, we are not impressed.

It's not too late to fax yours too.