Category: General

According to several long-time Santa Feans, the never-ending winter of 2009 was the coldest and snowiest they’d ever experienced. This year has starting off very differently — only one hard frost and one (very light) snowfall thus far. I certainly hope that it was the worst one I’m going to see too — when we arrived here last January, the heat in our “new” house promptly stopped working and we discovered that the water pipes had frozen (I have a very different relationship to and appreciation of water after nearly 3 weeks without it while the pipe problems got sorted out!) But this winter our new heating system is keeping us warm and the water pipes won’t be a problem either. I have a lot to be thankful for this week, especially a husband who has dealt with our move and various challenges here with humor and patience.
To celebrate the beginning of this very different winter, I’m giving away of a set of my coasters. To enter, describe what you like (or don’t like) about winter in exactly 3 lines (doesn’t have to be a haiku) in the comments below. Contest ends Monday November 29th at 7am (MT), when I’ll select a commenter at random.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) began November 1. According to their website, “Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.”
The website offers support to participants (called “Wrimos”), including pep talks with advice and thoughts on writing, a discussion forum section, and even tshirts.

The Heldfond Book Gallery in San Anselmo California sells these witty “Biblio Pulp” posters — 8.5″ X 11″ for $25. There are more here. To give you a taste, they read, from left to right:

Inside the ethical waste land of rare book appraisals
What Are They Worth
Bookman?
. . . .
Every Bookseller in Town had Been in her Library
Bibliobimbo
Depraved by an Unbridled Lust
for Rare Books
. . . .
A Heinous Conspiracy Revealed.
They Made Me a
Book Collector
Rare Booksellers and their Fiendish Plot
to Indoctrinate the Compulsive

Canon’s Halloween printables site has this 2 1/2″ tall skeleton-zombie and other papercrafts for you to print and assemble.

Found here, where she gives these directions for finding the template for the skeleton: Click here. Scroll down to “Halloween Decoration” and find “Halloween Night.” This printable document contains many characters (cat, pumpkin, etc.) and a house you can build. The skeleton is on one of the pages. Click A4 or Letter, depending on what your country’s standard paper size is, to download the PDF. When the template is downloaded, print page 3, the instructions, and page 8, the skeleton body parts.

Directors Lernert & Sander from Amsterdam have made three commercials for Pearle Opticians using life-size pop-up books. Here’s the first one, see them all here.

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