4000 books!

Dialogue on a sweltering summer day:

"Carrie wanted a drink, but she pushed the cup away and made a face and said, 'Nasty!'

"'You better drink it,' Mary told her. 'I want a cold drink, too, but there isn't any.'

"'I wish I had a drink of well water,' said Laura.

"'I wish I had an icicle,' said Mary.

"Then Laura said, 'I wish I was an Indian and didn't have to wear clothes.'

"'Laura!' said Ma. 'And on Sunday!'

"Laura thought, 'Well, I do!'"

--On the Banks of Plum Creek

Aquilon Books, my father's used book-selling venture, sold its 4000th book last week after a dozen years of online sales through ABE Books.  We celebrated with a party, and the whole family was present, along with four nieces and a Chinese friend Moira met teaching English.  Father spent $140 on Indian food, which took three days to finish.  Moira also baked a vegan chocolate cake (accommodating brother John's family), and decorated it with the digits 4000.  I tend to find large-scale company tiring, and now I feel like I've gone through Christmas already!

Donald was there and solved the problem of my computer not allowing you to open Google Play Ebooks and ignoring the prescribed steps to solve the problem.  Unfortunately, after he left the problem came back! (I don't have the heart to tell him...) But he did fix our widescreen TV set so that when you start the DVD player the screen no longer cuts off an outer ring.

Yesterday I went to the Lillian Smith library to borrow some books, but it turned out I'd lost my library card!  I thought I'd left it at the Yorkville library the day before, but I checked and it wasn't there.  I couldn't find it at home either, so it looks like I'll have to get a new one.

This afternoon was the last Reading Out Loud at the Victory Cafe. (Next month we'll try the Ryerson Hub.) It was December so our topic was children's writing, and I titled the event with the Whittier line "Blessings on thee, little man!" I read the Walt Whitman poem "There Was a Child Went Forth"; the middle part of "A Christmas Memory"; and the chapter of Huckleberry Finn where Huck gets separated from the raft in the fog, then tells Jim he's been dreaming, hurts his feelings and ends up apologizing.  You know, I think I'm pretty good at reading things aloud!

There was a new member called Beatriz from Argentina.  I gave her a chapter to read from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book On the Banks of Plum Creek. (Unlike Huckleberry Finn, that's easy English for a foreigner.) It was "Rings of Fire," where their haystacks are threatened by burning tumbleweeds from a prairie fire to the west.  And I gave Max the chapter from The Wizard of Oz I've just been translating, where the Scarecrow describes his brief life before meeting Dorothy.  Afterward Doreen gave me some chocolates!