Dec. 18, 2006
Treasured Moments of Laughter and Peace -- AKA squirrel hunting
We took our little rat terrier, Crystal, to the park this weekend and let her chase squirrels. We had never done it before and she loved it and we all were able to wallow in her ecstatic joy. At one point I said, "I think she's treed about five squirrels." Gabo, who listens very closely to my words, even if he doesn't always do what I'm telling him, said, "But Mom, I thought you hated it when people turned nouns into verbs." I just laughed at the tiime, but I was a little worrried. Had I turned into one of those people who says things like "the project impacted"? But when we got home, the dictionary confirmed what I had thought, that "treed" is an acceptable past particle and past tense of "to tree" which can mean to chase up a tree or to cover and area with trees.

Dec. 5, 2006
Three Cheers for Elizabeth Kay, author of the Divide series
My nine-year-old son, Mario, and I have been having a fantastic time reading the Divide and now Back to the Divide. These books tell the adventures of and English boy named Felix in an alternate world where unicorns, pixies, griffins and elves are real and people are mythical. The books are entertaining for children but also very literate and funny for adults. I just finished a very funny section in Back to the Divide, where a female griffin, Thornbeak, is reading an English newspaper and is discovering with horror how low-brow it is. "The front page is all about the results of a game of something called football. The second page is about some singers in short skirts. It's only as we get further in that there's a report about an earthquake and a scientific breakthrough. Am I missing something? Is football a way of settling international disputes, perhaps?" she asks. Thornbeak continues to consider the paper in shock and asks if perhaps television is directed toward people of higher intelligence. Felix explains about soaps and reality shows, getting more and more embarrassed. Thornbeak asks, "Is this what mass communications lead to, Felix? Worldwide brain death?" I'm not sure Mario got the joke, but I loved it. However, the stories do not usually focus on such matters. They are usually about Felix's death-defying adventures in this alternate universe, in which he flies on dragon's backs and struggles against evil elves.

Dec. 1, 2006
Shakira! Shakira!
When I agreed to write a biography of Shakira all I knew about her was that she was a popular singer and that she was Colombian, like my late husband. I have so much enjoyed delving into her life story, her music, her humor and her politics. In her print interviews, she usually seems pretty earnest and serious. But lately I've been watching interviews of her on Youtube.com and she can be really funny on television. One interviewer asked her (when she was about 20) if she still lives with her parents. She said, "Oh yes, I live with them. I travel with them. I even sleep with them when I get scared at night." What's difficult is trying to figure out what to include and what to leave out when the book is only suspposed to be 3,500 words.