Review: The Sorta Sisters

Title: The Sorta Sisters
Author: Adrian Fogelin
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: Two lonely girls—an orphan who just moved to a new foster home and a motherless girl who lives on a boat with her dad—become pen pals and discover they share a love of science.

Review: Sorta good. I liked the author's drawings throughout, and I liked the characters well enough. But the book was sooo slooow! It was almost 300 pages, and too many scenes seemed too long and drawn out or not necessary at all.

Power Savers Unite!

In January, I signed us up for the Austin Energy Power Saver Program, and then I promptly forgot all about it. But this week, we got a box of goodies for signing up—two compact fluorescent bulbs, an energy-saving night light, outlet sealers, and weather stripping. (As nice as that all sounds, I would much rather have gotten a snazzy cape to show off my Power Saver status.)

Austin Energy started the program because most people use most of their energy in the early evening—to cook dinner, wash clothes, wash dishes, cool down a hot house. During a sweltering Austin summer, all this heavy use at the same time can cause a peak demand for energy, resulting in Austin having to generate more electricity or buy it during the most expensive hours of the day.

So when you sign up as a Power Saver Volunteer, Austin Energy contacts you up to 10 times during the summer and asks you to take four simple actions to use less electricity between 4:00 pm and 8:00 pm:

• Switch off unnecessary lights
  
• Delay washing and drying dishes and clothes
  
• Cook dinner in your microwave, rather than with an electric range
  
• Turn up the thermostat by three to four degrees

But remember how I said I signed us up in January? Nice and chilly outside. It's not even June yet and we're already hitting the 90s just about every day, so that last request is starting to look a little harder to swallow. We keep our AC at 78-80 during the day, so that would mean bumping it up to 81-84. Dang.

Who knows? Maybe we'll discover that with our fans on and after changing into light clothes, 81-84 can be bearable. But even if not, it's only 10 days out of the year, so we'll survive.

If you're an Austin Energy customer, why don't you join us this summer and we can lament our sweaty situations together? If you're not in Austin, don't feel left out—your electric company might have a similar program. But if you get a cape, I'm gonna be jealous.

Review: A Drowned Maiden's Hair

Title: A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama
Author: Laura Amy Schlitz
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: An 11-year-old orphan is adopted by three sisters who give her nice clothes and food but keep her secret from everyone they know.

Review: What an eerie little story! I loved it. The main character Maud has just the right amount of spunk—she's no Pippi Longstocking but she can take care of herself. As a lonely orphan, she starts out thinking that any attention is good attention, but she learns along the way that maybe it's not always worth the trade-off.

Review: Flash Point

Title: Flash Point
Author: Sneed B. Collard
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: A high school sophomore who lives in a logging community finds himself disagreeing with just about everyone in town about why the nearby forest fires are so bad.

Review: YA novels with environmental themes can be hit or miss for me, but I enjoyed this one. Even though the environmental issues were central to the story, it didn't feel preachy at all. The details about birds of prey were so vivid. I'm too much of a chicken to watch nature TV shows about predators, but this book had me riveted and I didn't mind (too much) reading about the birds eating mice and rabbits. And the scenes with the wildfire had me reading at lightning speed to find out what happens at the end!

Review: Downsiders

Title: Downsiders
Author: Neal Shusterman
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: A boy from a secret underground world called the Downside breaks the rules of his world and sneaks above-ground.

Review: After the first 100 pages, I still wasn't into this book, so I skimmed the rest of the way just to get an idea of what happened in the plot. The problem for me was that neither of the main characters seemed to have a terribly important problem they needed to solve. The boy character, Talon, has a sick little sister at one point, but she gets better pretty fast.

The setting was intriguing, but I just couldn't connect with the characters.

Review: Influencer

Title: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
Author: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: This book articulates the strategies that the world's most influential people use to solve persistent, resistant problems.

Review: The biggest eye-opener for me was the point that verbal persuasion can't solve all the world's problems, especially when you're trying to convince someone to change their behavior. I've always believed in the power of a carefully crafted argument and prided myself on being able to put forth an effective argument for certain things. But this book made me realize that verbal persuasion is just one eensy weensy technique in the grab-bag of influential techniques, and it's an overused and often ineffective technique at that.

I love how this book teases out the different techniques and gives lots of examples of each. The authors recommend that you read it with a problem in mind that you want to solve. The problem I kept in mind as I was reading was how to get more people at my company to recycle everything that's possible to recycle. Too many times at work, I walk by a trash can that contains a perfectly recyclable piece of paper or aluminum can. And the recycling bin is right. next. to. the. trash. If the person had just moved their hand a measly couple of inches to one side, they could have dropped the item in a recycling bin instead of the trash! But I digress...

For some of the techniques, I immediately got ideas for how to apply them to this problem. For others, I couldn't think of anything. So while I don't think all these techniques will work for every problem, this book certainly made me look at the lack of recycling at my office in a new light, and it gave me a renewed sense of hope for increasing the amount we recycle.

I'm going to put this on my wish list to own because I could see myself referring to it fairly often. The authors also have a web site, influencerbook.com, with a worksheet you can fill out to brainstorm solutions to a problem you're trying to solve.

Review: The Starfish and the Spider

Title: The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
Author: Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: This book argues that decentralized "starfish" organizations are more powerful than more traditional top-down, hierarchical "spider" organizations.

Review: Mildly interesting. It's been compared to The Tipping Point, but I didn't have any big "aha" moments like I did with The Tipping Point. They gave lots of examples of successful decentralized organizations. And they did try to summarize the qualities those successful groups had. But that part was pretty short—I wanted more of that. I didn't get a lot out of the book that I feel like I can apply in real life. Whereas The Tipping Point helped me to start making connections about how to create tipping points for things I care about. If you're looking for practical advice on how to encourage a decentralized community feel in an organization, this book doesn't have much to offer.

A Gift Card Collage?

Last week, I used up all the money on an HEB gift card I had. So I asked the cashier if they take the empty cards back to reuse:

Cashier: "No. And you can't put more money on them after they're used up."

Me: Holding up now-useless gift card. "So what am I supposed to do with this?"

Cashier: Shrug. "You could make a collage out of them." Laugh.

Ah yes, a gift card collage. What a clever idea. I'll get right on that.

I happen to know that some gift card technology out there does allow you to recharge an empty card because I've done it at Whole Foods. And if that's possible, how hard would it be to take back empty cards and reuse them?

According to the HEB gift card FAQ, I can contact HEB at 1-800-987-4438, Monday through Friday between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., with my questions or issues about the HEB gift card. Oh, my sweet HEB, you are going to rue the day you hired that snarky cashier with an affinity for arts and crafts!

I called, and the nice lady on the gift card hotline said that they don't have the capacity to recharge used gift cards, although they've talked about the possibility for the future. I registered my frustration with having to throw away a perfectly good gift card, but I'm just one little person.

So my fellow HEB customers—will you call too? I promise it'll just take a couple minutes out of your day. Or if you prefer, you can fill out an online contact form. And let me know what you hear back!

Review: The Off Season

Title: The Off Season
Author: Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: D.J. Schwenk starts her junior year of high school as a linebacker on the football team. Just as her relationship with the quarterback at a rival high school starts to heat up, real life gets in the way.

Review: I liked this sequel better than The Dairy Queen because the action picked up a lot faster. It's easy to root for this honest, hard-working girl who just so happens to be a linebacker. And even though the plot was a little more heavy than the first book, I think it was handled in a much more balanced way that left me feeling hopeful at the end. I also liked that certain things weren't given a Hollywood ending.

Baby's First Farmer's Market

Every New Year's Eve, Erik and I cook a nice early dinner (because we're lame and never have exciting NYE plans), and we sit down to eat with two sheets of paper. On the first sheet, we list all our accomplishments from that year. Everything from "We switched to cloth produce bags" to "Erik brewed 31 beers" to "Mae won the dog division of Run for the Rovers for the second year in a row." Okay, technically that accomplishment belongs to one of our dogs, not us, but it's not like she's going to make her own list of accomplishments—so we get bragging rights.

On the second sheet of paper, we write down our goals for the next year. Not resolutions. These are goals, which we can start any time during the year. As opposed to resolutions, which if you don't do them every day of the year starting with the first day, you are A Big Fat Failure. So one of our goals for 2008 was to start going to a farmer's market at least once a month. Because even besides the fact that local food has to travel less distance to get to you so you're helping to save a bunch of fuel or even the fact that shopping there supports small family farms, The Sticky Toffee Pudding Company has a booth at the main Austin Farmer's Market, and in said booth they sell scones and other amazing deliciousness.

So yesterday, we made our first trip of 2008 to the farmer's market, which also happened to be Abby's first farmer's market trip ever. She did great in her Zolowear sling until she puked all over herself. But then she was happy to be out of the sling and taking it all in. There was another baby there her age—a little boy—but Abby was way cuter. Even his mom said that girls are so much cuter than boys.

The farmer who sold us some eggs even helped us fully immerse Abby in her farmer's market experience:

 

Review: Writer Mama

Title: Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids
Author: Christina Katz
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Freelance writer Christina Katz offers advice for moms wanting to begin a freelance writing career.

Review: I'll definitely be purchasing a copy of this book to keep. The advice for starting a freelance writing career is straightforward and practical, especially how to start off small and work your way up to bigger publications. And by doing just the first few exercises in the book, I got a ton of ideas for articles I could write.

If you're interested in writing fiction, some of the advice will be helpful to you, but in general the focus was on nonfiction freelance writing for magazines, newspapers, and so on.

Review: Writing Motherhood

Title: Writing Motherhood: Tapping Into Your Creativity as a Mother and a Writer
Author: Lisa Garrigues
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: Writing teacher Lisa Garrigues offers advice on chronicling your experience of motherhood.

Review: This book has a lot of great ideas for writing prompts. I was expecting more practical information about balancing motherhood and a writing life—there was some, just not a lot. But this book would be worth owning for all the great prompts. You would never be able to say "I don't know what to write about!"

If you're looking for a book with more practical advice for moms about launching a writing career, check out Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids.