Bad Weather and Spending Too Much

It's been raining an awful lot at my place, which I know is nothing compared to the tornados that some of my blogging buddies have been suffering. But I have been feeling a bit housebound and the wet washing has been piling up!

I escaped the house to engage in a little "retail therapy" today. For me, shopping is only fun if I'm spending money. The more the better. Boy do I love spending money!

For a while now, Josh's bedroom has been a complete disaster area. Chris and I have decided to try to address it by getting him some new bedroom furniture.

This is the bedroom suite we have ordered for Josh, except we have chosen to get it in all white. We've also ordered a small wardrobe with some hanging space and shelves. We are getting it on an "interest free plan". I'm well aware that you must be very careful with these plans; you pay nothing up front and have small monthly repayments and it all feels so easy. But if you don't pay off more than the minimum monthly repayment you get into trouble when the interest free period ends and suddenly you're being charged a bajillion per cent on the balance owing. Lucky I'm so sensible and this will not happen to me :)

We're also going to repaint, so we've allowed Josh to look at some paint charts. He likes the look of a high voltage orange called "Energy". Believe me, this boy does not need anything that looks like Fanta in his bedroom! We already have trouble getting him to go to sleep before us at night. Seriously, Chris and I are having trouble finding "special mummy and daddy time" because I'm usually asleep before Josh is.

We're also letting Alana pick some colours to repaint her room, especially after she told us that she felt like "the less favoured child" when we were picking out Josh's furniture.

I love picking out colours, but Chris has long given up on the idea of me actually doing anything helpful like painting. But it's super fun to look through paint charts and I tend to get a bit over-excited and imagine buying all new bed linen and curtains and lamps and throw cushions and... you get the idea!

I may also have "accidently" bought myself a couple of books. And visited the library to borrow a few more. What can be better than curling up with a good book when it's cold and rainy outside?

I couldn't resist Charlaine Harris' latest Dead Reckoning today.

It's the latest in the Sookie Stackhouse series which has been re-imagined as the True Blood TV series. Speaking of which, I believe it's only 23 days until the new series starts! But who's counting...

So, how's the weather at your place?

Done any shopping lately?

Know me, know my books

My current "squeeze" is Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris, the latest release in the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampires/TrueBlood series.

I bought it on a recent shopping trip with Alana while the boys were at footy. She had some vouchers to spend from her birthday (in April! She's a careful shopper.) and one of the vouchers was for a bookstore, a very dangerous place for me :) I decided that I simply couldn't leave the shops without a copy of this book, so I searched high and low for the best price, which happened to be at Big W. Hooray for discount department stores!

I've been rationing it out very carefully, but I'm nearly finished :( I hate the feeling of getting to the end of a book that you're really enjoying; you want to keep going to find out what happens, but you don't want it to end.

At the same time I'm also reading Organising Knowledge in a Global Society: principles and practice in libraries and information centres by Hider & Harvey for ETL505 - Bibliographic Standards for Education.

I like to call this page-turner "death by acronyms". Here's a list of the acronyms that appear in the first chapter - "Definitions and introductory concepts":

OPAC - online public access catalogue

ERIC - educational resources information centre

PAIS - public affairs information service

RILM - abstracts of music literature

AEI - australian education index

ISBN - international standard book number

AACR2 - anglo-american cataloguing rules, 2nd edition

DC - Dublin core

DDC - Dewey decimal classification

LCC - library of congress classification

KWIC - keyword in context

KWOC - keyword out of context

MARC - machine-readable cataloguing

UBC - universal bibliograhic control

UBCIM - ?

IFLA - international federation of library associations and institutions

ICABS - IFLA-CDNL alliance for bibliographic standards

ISBD - international standard bibliographic description

Whew! Is it any wonder I had to read chapter one twice? After my first read through, I was heard to mutter "I don't understand anything..."

On my bedside table for after Dead in the Family, are these two:

Every Secret Thing by Lila Shaara is a psychological thriller set in a college. The protagonist, Gina, is a single mum and college professor. I must admit I had started this when I bought Dead in the Family and abandoned it partly read. Bad reader! But I'll get back to it soon.

the Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson is simply the latest in a long line of books that I've read on this subject. I'm a happy person with a very blessed life, and generally I know what I want and where I'm going. But I'm still searching for deeper self-knowledge; that elusive self-discovery that will make everything fall into place and make sense. I very much want to live my life with passion. I want to radiate love and joy and energy and positivity. I want every day to be meaningful. I don't want anything about my life to be mediocre. I don't want to "just get it over with".

Given that I have a wonderful husband, two beautiful children, a puppy, a house that we're paying off, friends, meaningful work...and so on and so on, you may think that I'm just a little bit greedy, or that I expect just a little bit too much from life. Maybe, but I don't think so.

Also "To Be Read" for uni are Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature by Clare Bradford and Books in the Life of a Child: Bridges to Literature and Learning by Maurice Saxby.

These are for ETL402 - Literature in Education, and yes - it's kinda funny that I'll be reading about reading.

So there's me in a nutshell. Know me, know my books.

Is Listening to an Audio Book "Reading"?

In an effort to lift the tone of my blog to something a little more "academic" :) I'm borrowing this discussion topic from Skerricks.

So feel free to comment...Is listening to an audibook "reading"?

For my money...no, it's not reading. Reading involves interpreting and making meaning from the text. When listening to the audiobook, the owner of the voice is doing the reading, not you. But that doesn't mean that listening to an audiobook isn't a wonderful, rewarding experience.

For the record, I LOVE reading aloud. Always have. I clearly remember the sniggers that greeted me when it was my first turn to read aloud from the novel we were studying in English at High School. It took me a while to work out what was so funny...didn't everyone read with expression like me? No, apparently not. And while it seemed that it wasn't "cool" to sound like you were actually engaged with the story and enjoying your reading, I couldn't help it! So I just continued on being uncool.

I read aloud to my children from birth. (By the way, both of them were reading well before they started school, and I didn't do ANYTHING to teach them other than to read aloud.) I read through the entire seven books of the Harry Potter series to them, and they loved it. (My husband, who had read them himself, said he enjoyed it too!) Sometimes I'm a bit sad that they can read so well now that they don't need me to read aloud anymore.

Audiobooks are wonderful things! When facing a long car trip with children they are a savior, and I think work even better than the in car DVD (now that's really saying something!). There's nothing like all breaking out into laughter together when the story reaches a funny part.

Audiobooks are great for reluctant readers, or for helping unconfident kids extend into chapter books. They can read along as they listen, or listen to the first book in a series, then read the next in print form. Long live the audiobook!

What do you think?