Where Is Your Bookmark? (09/09/2014)

I bought my first Christmas present this weekend. It is a silly gift, but one I think that will be well received. Now that I have a tentative surgery date, I have to buckle down and get my Christmas shopping done before then. I will be in the middle of recovery come the holidays.  

We had an extremely busy weekend. The new soccer season began Saturday. Mouse moved up an age level and is now in the "big" kid class. She had a lot of fun that first class and said she cannot wait until next Saturday. Mouse did very well in the older class, without a parent by her side. It is amazing how much she has learned since she first started the classes when she was two years old. We also spent a little time at the park and the library. The library air conditioning felt so good after being in the summer heat!  We followed that up with a visit to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate the beginning of the soccer season.  It's one of Mouse's favorite places to go.  I just hope she doesn't expect us to go every Saturday.

Sunday was just as busy. The morning was perfect for a day at the pool with Mouse and her best friend, our usual summer Sunday routine. I watched as the storm clouds begin to roll in in the distance. The wind had picked up just as we were leaving, and, by the time we were on the freeway headed for lunch and ice cream to celebrate an early birthday, the rain started coming down hard and fast. We later learned of reports of flooding of city streets, trees had come down, closing roads and damaging property, and the power was out in some areas. It hadn't even rained that long.

Today my daughter is officially 3 1/2, and I am, well, I'm a year older.

Weekends tend not to be the time I get much reading in, unfortunately, and this past weekend was no different.  I currently am reading two books for A More Diverse Universe Event hosted by Aarti of Booklust, which begins next Sunday. The first is One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories, which includes stories written by a variety of different authors, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. The short stories span many continents and cultures. The few I have read so far are quite good. The book I am reading is Ash by Malinda Lo. Ash is a re-telling of Cinderella about a young girl, abused by her stepmother, who longs for the fairies to take her away from it all.  She doesn't have a fairy godmother per say, but there there is a fairy who takes an interest in her, and, of course, the required love interest, a royal huntress. It is a young adult fantasy type novel. I am already in love with the writing and care deeply for young Aisling. 

What are you reading at the moment?  Is it something you would recommend?

Every Tuesday Diane from Bibliophile By the Sea hosts 

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where  

participants share the first paragraph (or a few) of a 

book they are reading or thinking about reading soon.

I thought I would share the opening of Malinda Lo's Ash with you today:

Aisling's mother died at midsummer. She had fallen sick so suddenly that some of the villagers wondered if the fairies had come and taken her, for she was still young and beautiful. She was buried three days later beneath the hawthorn tree behind the house, just as twilight was darkening the sky.

 Would you continue reading?

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© 2014, Wendy Runyon of Musings of a Bookish Kitty. All Rights Reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Musings of a Bookish Kitty or Wendy's feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.