That time of the year

Yes, it is National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo).  Once again, I am going to participate.  That probably means I will be posting what I ate for dinner by the end of the month, but I have been a little blog lazy lately and it is good exercise.

You will have to cut me some slack for kicking it off with a whimper because I got my flu shot today and I am quite woozy.

Lazy-ass that I am, I am going to answer the last of the questions, the rev up with something juicier tomorrow.  Or at least I hope I will be struck by a juicy post idea.  I know you will be waiting with bated breath.

The last of the reader questions:

Eos asks three:

How much tv do you watch and what type of shows?

I used to watch a ton of TV, but now I don’t really.  Thanks to Tivo, I can save it all up and watch it in one or two big binges a week.   In an average week, I regularly watch the following shows: Amazing Race, True Blood, Entourage, Mad Men, Dirty Sexy Money, Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Survivor, The Office, Gray’s Anatomy and whatever series Bravo is running at the moment (Top Chef, Project Runway, Real Housewives etc.)  I don’t watch TV during the day unless I am on the treadmill and I usually don’t watch any until after the girls go to bed.  Sometimes I watch PBS or HBO documentaries.

What type of books/genre do you gravitate to?

When I am in a good groove, I read a lot.  Lately, I haven’t been flying through the books, but winter will probably change that.  I prefer nonfiction.  Lots of memoirs or autobiographies.  I also recently read a lot of “One Year” books where the author does some weird task for an entire year.  I like to wander through the new books section and see if anything strikes my fancy.  If I am reading fiction, it needs to be well-written fiction.

I also love Goodreads.  You can see my Read book selection here, sorted by most recently read.  If you look at the top, you can see my most-read categories.  I big puffy heart goodreads.

How are you enjoying the house after all the work you did to sell it? (I always see those homes they get ready to sell and think “just stay there!”LOL)

It is definitely a lot nicer to live here now.  The biggest improvement was finishing the playroom in the basement and changing the old playroom into a spare bedroom.  We didn’t have a lot of stuff to begin with, but we did a lot of decluttering and it made things feel less crowded.   We stopped working when we had finished maybe 85% of the work, so there are still some things like the upstairs bathroom that need work.  And we were so wiped out from the effort we let the backyard go to hell this year.  Next year, we will have a lot of work to do there.

Last but not least, one more book question from S’s Mom:

I’d like to know what books you have in your kids’ home library. What do you love/hate? You’ve talked a little about books for adults. Especially books for cultural awareness.

While we are a family of readers, we actually don’t buy many books.  For me to buy a book, I have to LOVE it and have read it over and over.  We go to the library 1-2 times a week, though.  So instead of my own personal library, let me list some books the girls and I have really liked.  I will just link rather than describing them because the girls are sleeping in the room with their books while I am writing this.

M is tearing through books so quickly now, I can’t really keep up with everything she reads.  She also prefers big series because then she can just select the next one on the shelf and keep going.  She also likes science books and poetry.  (Seriously, I don’t know where that kid came from. I dislike both of those topics immensely.)   I also hate the Berenstain bears which is one of M’s favorites.  L loves Dr. Seuss which I have always LOATHED.  She also likes Curious George, which I like.

We have some cultural awareness/celebrate our diversity sort of books, but I generally think they are dumb.  We do more of that with talking than books.  I do try to get books that show diversity in their characters and cultures, but off hand I mostly remember the Asian/Chinese ones because the girls have read them most often.

These are some favorites at our house:

• Apple Pie Forth of July
• Millions of Snowflakes
• My Friends by Taro Gomi
• Junie B. Jones Series
• The Magic Treehouse Series(M is currently limited to 2 of these a week and is on #26)
• Huy Voun Lee’s books
• Grace Lin’s books, but not that stupid adoption one
• Dragon Dance
• This is Hong Kong and  This is San Francisco
• The Ramona Series
• The Little House on the Prairie series (we read together aloud)
• Corduroy
• Robie Harris books
• Magic Schoolbus