I gave the 9 year old boy bookwork The Book of Three and The Phantom Tollbooth. The cover of The Book of Three had a picture of the scary horned guy who's the bad guy (I don't remember the name). Anyway, the kid doesn't read books he thinks are scary. He read the first Harry Potter book, and got about to the point in Chamber of Secrets where Harry is hearing voices that no one else can can hear. Anyway, so he opens the book (which, apparently, I was the only person there who'd read it) and his mom says "that looks really scary" to him. It's like, oh, great, so now he's not going to read the book, cause his mom thinks it looks like it's going to be scary. I wish I could've found a copy like the one I had, where it was Taran and Eilonwy and Gurgi, and didn't look scary at all.
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01:22:40 PM,Thursday 23 December 2004
Ways to go nuts: go to the mall three days before Christmas to buy a present for an incredibly picky and tactless person (a person who will actually say when she opens presents that she doesn't like it, or who will go back into a hairdressers to tell them that she thinks the haircut is awful) and your stepsister and her husband, who will be nice and gracious, but who you don't know well at all. We wound up getting a pink scarf for the first person, and an eyemask and rolling massage thing and a gel candle I made for the stepsister and High Fidelity for her husband.
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10:19:04 AM,Thursday 23 December 2004
The Oxford University Press has the Great Scott on sale for $70.
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