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Author: Niki Daly (on JOMB)
Illustrator: Niki Daly
Published: 1999 Farrar Straus Giroux (on JOMB)
ISBN: 0374437203 Chapters.ca BN.com

Gorgeously expressive illustrations capture the small pleasures of a dreamy preschooler, the chaos of failed judgments and the matchless relief of reconnection in this longtime family favourite.

Other books mentioned:

• Jamela’s Birthday
• Where’s Jamela?

Julie Smith offers some Global Diversity activities based on this book here.

I am sure I must have done posts like this more than once in the five years I've been blogging. Once again, we're having computer problems at Chez Gauthier, and I haven't been backing up onto disks. My computer guy has been backing up once a week to an external hard drive, so things aren't as bad as they could be, but on Monday I thought I'd pretty much finished up a little 750 word project for a magazine submission. Of course, I didn't save it anywhere but on the hard drive of the computer I was working on. If I'm lucky, I'll have whatever I was working on last week from Computer Guy's stash. This week's Durand Cousins work is probably gone, too, though admittedly that wasn't much. I was all fired up for working on that today.

Computer Guy doesn't hold out much hope for retrieving much from the impaired machine. I'm only able to do this post because among the family members here this summer we have three computers with Internet access (plus a fourth up and running without it) but it was the good computer that came up with one of those terrifying messages like something that suddenly turns up in horror movies.

Actually, we're all taking this pretty well. I've got a couple of family members I would have expected to be gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes over this. They're so calm that I'm frightened. I'm worried I'll wake up in the night and find them out in the yard sobbing or howling at the moon.

One of them used that computer to start archiving historical materials he collects before transferring them elsewhere. Like me (we do swim in the same gene pool, after all) he hadn't been backing up. At dinner, he just shook his head sadly over our tough, homemade pizza (I had some time to cook since I couldn't access my word processing program) and said, "It's all gone. It's so pointless."

I said, "Yeah. It's like the pyramids. All that work, and they were all worn away by the sands of time."

"Hmmm," he said. "And then there were the grave robbers."

If I were all intellectual and well-educated, I would have quoted Ozymandias. But I'm not. I did, however, control myself and refrained from quoting Mr. Natural. But that's kind of the mood here this evening.