Reconnecting With Books

In recent years the calendar has been dominated by personal projects, some of which have all too completely absorbed the number of hours which pass for the waking interval of my attention span. Indulging in the pleasure of reading for purely it's own sake is also a luxury I have for the most part denied myself during this same period as a middle-aged woman dealing with ADHD, as not to break the all important and precious focus which I've been able to apply for the first time in certain cases to successfully bring to a number of these projects to a marvelously delightful and miraculous fruition!

If fairly recent events in my family life had not developed along the lines of the ambiguous script which is slowly playing out as this is being written, my reunion with the concept of unwinding with a book at the end of the day might have continued to be a stillborn infant for another quite unknown slate of a few more years. I am today to recognize a small list of books old and new which have as they say "hit the spot", launched me off happily to embrace their comfort and enveloping embrace and whom to the last author and tome I can fully and heartily recommend.

Depending upon your own reading preferences the list of books which have caught my eye may appear to be less than electric. To this I will answer with this confession, there has been a deliberate choice to counter the heady and circuitous chaos to which I now find myself, and my choice of escape is less of an adventure and more of a cocoon! Most prominent is the lack of any single novel on the entire list. And while every writer has in their time been included on some sort of listing of authors or celebrities of popular note, only two of them Sarah Ban Breathnach and Nora Ephron, might possibly qualify for membership on the rolls of current bestselling authors.

A) A Hotel Is A Place, Shelley Berman, copyright 1972 Shelley Berman, published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers. 108 pages.

B) The It-Doesn't Matter Suit, Sylvia Plath, copyright 1976 Frieda and Nicholas Hughes,
published by Farber and Farber Limited. 41 pages.

C) Moving On, Sarah Ban Breathnach, copyright 2006 Sarah Ban Breathnach, published by Meredith Books. 284 pages.

D) My Life As A Small Boy, Wally Cox, copyright 1961 Wally Cox, published by Simon and Schuster, Inc. 128 pages.

E) I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts About Being A Woman, Nora Ephron, copyright 2006 Heartburn Enterprises, Inc., published by Alfred A. Knopf. 137 pages.

Reunite abandoned store carts with their families!

My personal contribution to the on-going campaign waged against abandoned shopping carts! Mizu Sugimura, copyright 2009.

If the residential area where you live has become anything like mine, you've noticed orphan shopping carts have popped-up by the roadside miles and miles from their habitual home base. During an idle search on the Internet a few years back I discovered a sampling of some of the myriad and truly creative solutions individuals in communities in all part of the world have come up with (the actual data may be revealed in another post) to try and deal with these wandering spawn of global commerce.

While I won't claim the idea sketched out in two and three dimensional form in the picture above is among anyone's Top Ten, if the powers-that-be in my own community would put the imagination up in their grey matter to work and what resources they have in hand today into motion it's quite likely we'd already have a more effective solution than our present bandage.

I just want to show visually that the germ of a city-wide publicity campaign can be pulled together by ordinary citizens working in the homes with scrap materials on hand.