Tomie De Paola's Refrigerator

We have recently been reading and greatly enjoying Tomie dePaola's autobiographical series, which begins with 26 Fairmount Avenue. We love his picture books, and some of our favorites, such as Strega Nona, Jamie O'Rourke, and The Art Lesson have become quite dog eared. The "Fairmount Avenue" series begins when Tomie is very young, in 1938, and his family is building a new house. Everything was new in their new house, except the refrigerator. Tomie's dad said their old monitor top refrigerator kept food colder than any new refrigerator, so they kept that. The refrigerator, a box on legs with a cylinder on top, was described very clearly (much better than I've done, so here's a link to some pictures, if you are curious http://www.antiqueappliances.com/monitor_top_refrigerators.htm
Anyway, on Thursday night, while watching "To Kill a Mockingbird," we saw Tomie's refrigerator! There it was, right in the corner of Scout's kitchen. Pretty neat, eh? And then, on Friday night, we were watching "84 Charing Cross Road," and there is was again, in Frank Doel's kitchen. I love it when I learn about something new and start making connections!

Our new church in Sparta has no stained glass windows, so I was looking out the windows today (which is a good reason churches should put in stained glass) and was surprised to see snow flurries. It hadn't been snowing when we'd gone in. Apparently they get more snow because they are in the mountains. T. chickened out on the acolyte thing when he got to church and Father Blanck was showing him the ropes. I told Father that we would talk about it with him some more, but I'm going to push him (T., that is) to do it, as I think it would be good for him. He is the only kid in the church (aside from K., who is the youngest child there) who isn't an acolyte.

Inspired by some other homeschooling "LibraryThing-ers," I've been trying to get more of my books entered in my LibraryThing account. In case you haven't noticed it, there is a section at the bottom of my sidebar which lists Random Books from My Library. This is from LibraryThing, and clicking on it connects you to my collection, or, more accurately, the part of my book collection which I've gotten around to entering. I started with LT because I wanted that cool blog widget, but now I'm kind of hooked on other neat features, such as seeing how many other users have books that I have, what other books people who I share a lot of books with have, and so on. Completely useless information, of course, but I find it very entertaining. The most fun part of entering books, aside from the joy of being that one closer to my goal of having one thousand entered (no good reason for this, but it's a nice round number), is when I enter a book and find that I am the only user, out of 143,532 members and 1,688,931 unique works (as of their latest numbers) to have a particular book. That is fun, and I always assume that this means my book is a rare treasure, not deservedly shunned by the rest of the book buying world.