Golden

Cailly and Rooney's aura strings have been tied together...awww...

If you don't know what I'm talking about, then obviously you haven't read Golden by Jennifer Lynne Barnes. It's about sophomore Lissy who moves to a Oklahoma when her mother, who has psychic abilities, solves a little boy's murder, relaying the scene with such accuracy that the family must move to escape suspicion. Lissy has the ability to see auras, and it's not until she moves to her new high school that she realizes the true potential of her gift.

I must have read this book in a single afternoon. The opening scene was hilarious, and the characters were intriguing. I loved the little sister, who is 'blind' and yet to discover her psychic gift. I liked the grandmother too, mostly because I could totally picture her. She's the controlling type that can not enter a room without going unnoticed. She somehow reminded me of the grandmother in Princess Diaries, and she played a similar role: teaching/mentoring Lissy to utilize and cultivate her gift.

I've read a few reviews of this book, and was surprised to find so many people compared it to Twighlight by Stephenie Meyer. Both books are written in the perspective of teenage girls with an element of fantasy. But, when I think of Twighlight, I think fantasy, romance, and vampires. It's a true fantasy - if you take out the vampire, Bella's story would be entirely different. When I think of Golden I think more about high school politics. One reviewer said she was overshelmed with all the aura references. Although obviously a big part of the plot, I barely noticed the fantasy element at all. I guess I would compare it more to Avalon High by Meg Cabot. Either way, I thought it was fantastic and I'm excited to see her next book comes out in January.

Erin

Happy Thanksgiving

Why is it?

How come I'm ALWAYS waiting for a phone call? I mean seriously is it some kind of cruel test of my character? And now I'm all messed up again with the clashing of the worlds. If you get an email from an editor or agent that does not require a response - you ABSOLUTELY do not respond. I think they have a certain number of superfluous emails they allow - like, one - before you are automatically banned from their inbox and sent directly to the spam box. Last week I got an email from a potential employer with my interview schedule. I had just spoken to the person on the phone and he had said - 'I'm going to send you your interview schedule.' So, when it arrived as planned, I read it several times, debated whether or not to respond, and then the obsessive writer in me took over and I thought, 'I do not want to annoy him with a superfluous email.' A day later I got a phone call: 'Did you get my email? Why didn't you respond? Are you still interested in interviewing?' So, now I realize the division between the writing world and the real world. Kind of.

Anyway my point is - why am I always waiting for phone calls? He clearly said 'I will call you on Monday.' And it is clearly TUESDAY is it not?

29 hours and 3 minutes until I leave for Thanksgiving. Yay.

Saturday:

This is what Saturday will be like:

Scene: In the warmly lit kitchen of Mom and Dad fivefootgiant. Dogs wrestling each other - crashing into tables and chairs. Boy looking nervously at Cailly.
ME(to nervous boy): So. Did you know you are most likely related to my sister, the same person you are dating?
BOY: (awkward silence)
CAILIN: This is so awkward. Isn't this awkward?
ME: Just something to think about if you two ever want to have kids. Not like you are. Because you know, teenagers shouldn't have sex. Especially with my little sister who is only just a baby.
BOY: (wants to run from this place and never come back)
JAY: teehee.
ME: Um, anyway. (thinking) Ok, ready? If Cailin is stranded on an island and could only bring on thing, what would it be?
BOY: Um. Dunno.
ME: That is so typical. What's her favorite coffee? 711, Starbucks, or Wawa? Huh?
BOY: Uh -
Me: You don't know do you?
JAY: (laughs) Dude. You've got to know her favorite coffee.
ME: What are your views on spider removal?
BOY: I believe all animals are created equal and have the same right to life. I would leave it alone and buy tiny flies to feed it.
ME: Wrong answer.
JAY: You should have said spiders are creators of evil and need to be disposed of immediately.
BOY: That' s what I meant.
ME: When Cailin grows up does she want to: a. cure world hunger b. facilitate world peace or c. save the sea turtles
BOY: Cure world hunger?
ME: That was a trick question. It's d. be a travel writer. Duh.
Boy: (blinks)
ME: Come on Cailly. We're leaving.
JAY: teehee. World hunger...
BOY: Slinks back to his car never to be seen again.

There you go Cailin. Just so you can prepare him. You better make sure he knows these things.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

I love anything MT (which I recently learned stands for Matthew Tobin) Anderson writes. Cailly - have you read FEED? Because if you haven't, you have to. It's sooo good. And scary. And I think about it everytime I log onto Amazon.com and they have a list of recommended books for me. Or when I email from gmail and all the advertisements switch to honeymoon adventures and bridal shower gifts if the topic of our discussion happens to be bridesmaid dresses. Anyway.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is so different from the rest of his books (Actually ALL of his books are different from the rest of his books), it's amazing. If I had to compare it to any of his other books I'd pick Feed I guess - only because the story is dark and frightening. In Feed though, the world he creates is in the future, a scary prediction of what our consumer society could come to. Octavian Nothing is based in the past, during the very beginnings of the Revolutionary War, and derived from true events. MT Anderson says in his author's note that Octavian Nothing was inspired by true experiments performed during the late 18th century on 'non-Europeans' to guage whether or not they had the same capacity to learn as Europeans. And, as you could imagine, a lot of people were only satisfied if the results proved they did not. It is a chilling account, and much of the book is written in the perspective of Octavian as he learns that he is nothing more than a research subject.

The book is written in challenging, realistic 18th-century language. It is hard to read, and I'm not sure how many teenagers are going to willingly pick this book up themselves. Cailin - I have to honestly say I'm not sure if you'd like this book now, but in a few years, maybe. It's dark and heavy and hard to read. There are tons of terms that I didn't recognize, and when I chose a few to look up, I wasn't surprised to find they were from 'Old French' and specific to the time period. This isn't to say that I don't think this book should be read by every teenager out there. It belongs on the teen shelf. And I am actually really irritated with all of the reviews I'm reading that say 'Despite it being a children's book,' or 'This is clearly an adult book,' or this.

But anyway. Buxton clearly enjoyed this book as well, especially the cover and first fifty pages which he ate entirely. I have to go slink over to the library now...and buy them a new book...

Kara Appreciation Day

1. She introduced me to Pumpkin Spice coffee creamer.
2. She mostly almost always tolerates my dog even when he licks her toes whenever she comes to visit.
3. She is fiercely loyal to her friends and family and will kick some a** if anyone thinks of messing with them. Unless there is a spider involved, then you're on your own.
4. She is totally fun.
5. She used to say 'poola' when she was little is she wanted to go in the pool. Or if she was hungry, she was 'hungering.' And one time we convinced her that their was a salamander on her sock. But, anyway.
6. She never walks home at night by herself because she knows how unsafe it is and would rather call her older sister from four states away to call her a cab.
7. She used to pick her nose at the table but she has mostly grown out of that.
8. she lets her little sister throw parties...only one, only cuz we got caught though.
9. she doesnt get mad when people ID her when ordering alcohol
10. she doesnt get mad when people say "omg! i thought u were 12!" that takes real patience after the 50th time.
11. she lets her little sister sleep in her bed she was "scared" at night, even though it was just becuase she wanted to be with her. and im pretty sure she knew that.
12. she doesnt own comfy clothes so she has to steal her sisters who is 6 years younger than her, and they are still huge on her.
13. she is extremely high maintenance, but she can pull it off without looking bitchy.

we love kara
end of story
HAPPY BIG 2-3!
Love,
Us

Lizzy Bright and the Buckminster Boy

I'm obsessed with Malaga Island now officially. It's an island off of Phippsburg Maine which was inhabited by a community of 50 or more very poor people for generations. There is a lot of legend surrounding the first people of Malaga - I read some accounts that say sea captains would 'take a lady' with them for journeys and then drop them off on Malaga before returning home to their families - or that Malaga was founded by runaway slaves. Either way, it ended up being the home to an interracial population of people for over 50 years. In the 1910s, Phippsburg saw their shipping port failing and decided their next industry was going to be tourism. In order to attract the rich tourists from Boston, they had to get rid of Malaga as it was - which was a collection of ramshackle shacks that were visible from Phippsburg's coast. Their only solution - obviously - was to evict all of Malaga's people, forcing one family to actually put their house in the river and float it down to Boston - and to throw the rest of them in an asylum where they all eventually died, and not of old age. They burned their houses down, and waited for their beloved tourists to arrive. I don't think they ever did. It's an unbelievable story. The fact that they got the entire town in on it - to evict an entire island community that had been getting by for generations (without much help, mind you) - is amazing to me. It's almost as bad as what happened on Kalaupapa on Molakai Island in Hawaii, except people were exiled TO Kalaupapa (babies and all) when diagnosed with leprosy in the late 1800s, not from. Still.

Lizzy Bright was a Malaga resident, and the 'Buckminster Boy' was the minister's son in Phippsburg. Lizzy and Buckminster formed a friendship, and the reader gets to see both sides of the Malaga/Phippsburg story - from the side of the Phippsburgians, and the side of the mistreated Malaga Islanders.

Here's a picture of Malaga:

interesting day...

well my school day was fine...it was after school that sucked.

ok, first i got caught coming out of the BOYS bathroom with my friend tyler, by no one other than...FATHER ANDRES. tyler took my sweatshirt and kept going into the boys bathroom so i finally just followed him in, and when i came out father andres just happened to be coming in. i tried to explain it to him, but he just seemed skeeved out so he just walked away without asking questions.

then, i got out to my car and there is mud, popped balloons, and leaves all over the hood of it and on my doorhandles. yesterday i filled my friends car with balloons; that was funny. this was just gross. there is this marsh infront of my parking spot cuz its been raining alot lately, so i picked stacey up becuase i knew she did it, and pretended to throw her in. well my friend DJ though it would be funny to push me in so we both went tumbling into this discusting littered, leafy, muddy water. it was so smelly.

then, like evryday, people took my car keys and wouldnt give them back. so my car ended up (about and hour later...literally) in the next parking lot.

the only reason i stayed was becuase i said i would take this girl who lives near me home. she has an 8th period and i dont so i waited for her becuase im nice like that. yeah, her mom picked her up right after school. so i waited for nothing.

i never got really mad, it takes alot to get me truely mad. but i was annoyed. o yeah and our water is shut, of so if i wanna wash my car i have to pay for it.

AWESOME!

well i just got out of the shower and im all clean so im happy! and no school tomorrow or friday!! but im going into school tomorrow for 8th grade visitation day, it will be fun though cuz ill be with my cheer girls.

Cailin

Worlds Collide

So, last night in my dream I was at a writer's conference that accidentally morphed into a biotechnology convention. I was watching a demonstration of something where these two guys in labcoats were doing an experiment right in the middle of the writer's conference. I was watching through some glass and this guy in a suit comes up and is like - wouldn't it be cool if you could do something like that - all condescending. And he proceeded to go on and on about how smart these lab guys were until I finally burst and said - I CAN DO THAT TOO. And then an editor came up to me and handed me an apple. And when she walked away I saw that she had written on it: I'd like to publish your book. And then hubby woke me up because he had an itch on his foot.

i will get that crossing guard fired...mark my words

i had 2 run ins with extremely rude adults on two days....

run in number 1:
this happened yesterday. my friend jen got 2 detentions for our lunch table being dirty. she doesnt get detentions. so she went into the students services office (SSO) to get it taken away. i waited outside because mr.mangin (the head detention guy) hates me and knows me by name, so i didnt think it would be good for him to know me and jen are friends haha. well she came back out after like 1 second so i asked if she talked to him. she said no, so i poked my head in the doorway to see if mr.mangin was in there. the stupid secretary says "EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME MISS. GET BACK HERE." so i walked back in and she started yelling at me how this is a "private office" (which its NOT)and i cant be snooping around. i got blamed for waiting outside the office! ahhh o hate her.

run in number 2:
this one just happened. im still upset about it. it took all my might for me not to start crying right there, i had to wait until i got home. i was pulling out of the wood driveway, i looked left and saw a car stopped, COMPLETELY STOPPED. so i started to go cuz i thought he was letting me in. all of a sudden the crossing guard(who was suppossed to be gone by that time anyway) cames screaming towards me. i looked at her and i have never seen someone so livid. she was so pissed. she starts yelling, literally YELLING at me about how im not allowed to go around kids in the parking lot and that i was being an irresponsible driver. i had no idea what she was talking about. i think she was mad first of all becuase i didnt see her, she could have been telling me to stop but the other car was stopped and so i thought i was allowed to go. if i saw a crossing guard say stop i wouldne just be like...o i think im going to go anyway, i wouldnt do that. i was like "kids? what are you talking about. i dont understand" she was like "ARE YOU DENSE??" i couldnt believe she just called me dense! i apologized atleast 3 times even though i didnt do anything wrong. she still wouldnt let me go. she just kept being rude, extremely rude. then my friend maura decided to get into it cuz she thought since i wasnt sticking up for myself she was going to. everything maura said to her was right though. she was saying that you cant treat people the way she was treating me no matter who they are and then the crossing guard called maura dense! if it takes me all year and a couple of arguments, i will get this crossing guard fired. ill just keep pissing her off until she hits me or something.

this started to happen to me more and more this year, i decided to stick up for myslef in the beginging of the year. wanna know how it turned out? i ended up failing conduct becuase of my "defiance". i was close to going to summer school. well now i just let it go. but the crossing guard just wouldnt let me go. i apologized mulitple times. i still cannot believe how rude she was. no one should be treated that way. its not eve like im a bad kid! wtf...i hate this.

council rock district got off!!

council rock school district had ONE bomb threat and they got off for 2 days!!!!

bomb threats: the new fad

wow, i ahve blogged in a while. i have been very busy lets start with last week.

the firday before halloween we had a bomb threat in the school. do u think we got off? no. do u think they did ANYTHING?? no. all they did was post something on the school website saying there was a threat. not what kind of threat, or what did they about it(which was nothing).

halloween, i went to rooney's. it was fun, i met his friends, they are halarious. me and maura went looking for a costume the day before for.....4 hours! we couldnt find anything. we ended up going to like 5 defferent places, it was ridiculous. i was a cowboy and maura was a bunny, kinda of a slutty one if u ask me haha. we sprayed the bottom layer of her hair pink and it dyed it. hahahah its looks so funny cuz its just fading out.

the day after halloween i went back to rooney's house. it was embarrassing cuz his mom caught us kissing. it was horrible. o so now we have gotten caught not only by his mom, but by mine too. like 2 weeks ago my mom walked in on us. we werent doing anything horrible but it was still really embarrassing. we are really bad at being sneaky and stuff. so we can tell you now that we wont be doing anything for a long time cuz we keep getting caught. not that we have done anything anyway. wayy too early.

well the next day at school we had another bomb threat. they still didnt really do anything. o yeah, on friday we werent allowed to walk outside between classes and before school started they checked everyones back pack.

and friday there was one last threat. but this was a gun threat.

in summary here are the threats:

THREAT 1: found on the boys bathroom wall. it had a map of where the bombs were going to be placed. also said something like "have a good time being blown up on costume day." thats halloween, only seniors are allowed to dress up in thier costumes. one wrong person was expelled for it and another person was suspened because he knew who did it but didnt tell on him.

THREAT 2: rumor is it was on the boys bathroom wall again, but other people said it was on a piece of paper found on the floor. this one said "happy SAT'S" or someting like that, we were supossed to have the sat's on saturday but they were rescheduled for next weekend cuz of the threat.

THREAT 3: this one was different becuase it was a gun threat, it was a girl, and it was directed to a specific teacher. my freinds were the ones who found it. it was on the girls bathroom wall.

i dont take any of these seriously. its a fad. everyone just wants a day off. i know of atleast 2 other school in the past week who have had threats. its actually quite annoying. becuase of this everyone had to clean out thier entire locker and bring everything home. i had literally about 10 pounds of books. and andrew thought it would be funny to knock the books i had in my hands on the ground....they landed in vomit. it was discusting. it smelled. i had to wash my books when i got home.
there will be more. i will let you know when it happens.

i took the sat's on saturday at a different school becuase i just wanted to get them over with. i actually liked the essay part. the whole test was alot better then what i thought it would be like. i get my scores back in aout a month. i really wanna see what i got on my essay, i think it was pretty good.

well thats the big stuff that happened latly, ill probably think of more and fill you in later. bye!!

Cailin

Plastic suits and eggrolls.

This place is just wierd. I'm six years out of college, and feel really comfortable in the lab now. If someone says to me, 'can you rerun that with a step elution instead of a bump?', then I'm like: Sure! Or if someone asks me about my pool, I have learned over the years that they are actually not talking about my neighborhood pool, but something entirely different. Fast forward to today when I have entered the completely foreign world that is otherwise known as the new lab I'll be working in. I show up all geared up with my lab coat and such, which they told me to remove and handed me a package. What I unwrapped was a fancy trash bag with more holes for appendages than I feel are required. Also, the thing about plastic is that it doesn't breathe and it takes a maximum of five seconds to get sticky and unbearably hot in there. I put on my fancy plastic bag that is flourscent blue, proceeding to staticize myself to the point I am audibly crackling. They only have large, and the belt (yes, there is a belt) naturally hit me around the knee area. I bunched it all up and tied it around my waist in a big bow. I ignore the fact the bag has suctioned to my body with all the static and I now look like I'm wearing flourescent blue chaps over my pants. I sit down and get to work. Except that I have never done this kind of work before, so I feel like a complete moron because every other word out of my trainer's mouth is foreign. I stop asking for clarification about ten minutes into her talking, and was so flustered that when she asked me to add 100 + 250 + 350 in my head, I couldn't figure it out. And then she asked me if I wanted an eggroll and I didn't know if eggroll was some kind of acronym like E.G.G.R.O.L.L, or some crazy science term I should know, until she said: 'Jen down in chemistry made them.' Hmmm... I'm just so happy it's Friday.