Giveaway adds Hummingbird Feeder, Rubber Stamps and Books

I have been adding new stuff to the Giveaway every day.
Don't forget to enter. Scroll down to see all the goodies.

Plus there is more to come.
There will be 3 winners.
Grand Prize wins everything listed plus a jewelry item from my shop.
2 other winners win jewelry too.

There really are some great items here.

Please enter, there are so many ways to get extra entries.
Plus fun questions of the day so you get to go look around.

I love my followers and really want to show it.
Plus there is CANDY ! yes, a cool star shaped tin with some CHOCOLATE in it!

How the Library Helped Us Buy Our Land.

Well I'm pretty upset. Libraries are closing around the country due to budget cuts. Some are cutting hours, some are cutting days, a lot are on the brink of closing all together. Our little library is now closed on Thursdays. Also they are only having one night a week of extended hours, used to be three nights.

I am one of their most patrony patrons. Usually I have 20 - 30 library books at home.
Along with a few DVD's and CD's.

Here is the story of what the library has meant to me...

Larry and I were on the same page ever since we met back in 1970. (I was 12, he was ummmm....older ) We both loved living in the woods and wanted to some day own a good amount of land and build our own home. And even after losing touch for 27 years we both kept that dream.
When we found each other again, in 1998, we made a plan. To save as much as we could and in 2 1/2 years buy land.

I moved up here from N.C and got a job as a pharmacy technician in a drugstore one block from the 1 bedroom apt. that Larry had rented right before I moved here.

He was working as "an agragate relocation specialist" (he hauled gravel) The apt. he rented was 3 rooms, heat, water and trash included, so the bills we had were: rent,electricity,phone and car insurance.We drove an old car, one he could work on himself and we both took packed lunches to work.

We bought nothing. Went out to eat once a week at "an all you can eat" place. And socked away our money.

Here's where the library comes in....Our soul form of entertainment was built around it.
We checked out tons of music. Loads of movies and read books on how to garden, digging wells, building houses,plumbing your own home, wiring, canning food, woodstoves, compost toilets, greenhouses, catching rainwater, frugal living...and so much more.

By utilizing all that the library has to offer, we managed to save almost $30,000 in those 2 1/2 years. Enough to buy almost 10 acres of land and build our home. And learned so much along the way. Giving us a wonderful knowledge of how to do for ourselves.

And now they want us all to buy a Kindle or some other reader. To me, a plastic "reader" is just never gonna be the same I tells ya. There's just something about holding a book, seeing them lined up waiting, with goodies inside, on a bookshelf.

I've always had bunches of books around. Always had a book nearby with a bookmark in it. I grew up in foster homes and so many times a book was my only friend. I could be anywhere, and pretend I was anyone through a book.
I learned how to "Be here now" with the help of a book titled "Be here now".

When I was little and my mother was still here, I had piles of books. I was an early reader and I know this helped me survive the after years.
When my kids were babies I read to them and we would go for the books at yard sales. They always got books at Christmas and birthdays. And we would go to the library.
They loved the library.
I would catch both of them at night, up reading after I had called lights out. I never got upset. I was just so happy they had an early love of books. They both did well in school and they are both wonderful adults and they both still love books.

Well, this is my rant about loving the library and feeling sadness every time I read about another town or city having to close theirs.

Please support your local library.
It would be horrible to one day hear a child ask "Mommy, what's a book"?

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Have you ever read, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', 'Of Mice and Men', 'Gone with the Wind' or 'Where’s Waldo'?
Then you have read a Banned or Challenged book.

Yes, you read right.
"A BANNED or CHALLENGED book". Scary words to me.

This isNational Banned Books Week . Seems too strange to even be saying those words here in the ol' U S of A.


Banned and Challenged Classics

Each year, the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom records hundreds of attempts by individuals and groups to have books removed from libraries shelves and from classrooms.

According to the Office for Intellectual Freedom, at least 42 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the target of ban attempts.

For more information on why these books were challenged, visit challenged classics and the Banned Books Week Web site.

-. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
-. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
-. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
-. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
-. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
-. Ulysses by James Joyce
-. Beloved by Toni Morrison
-. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
-. 1984 by George Orwell
-. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
--. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
--. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
--. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
--. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
--. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
--. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
--. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
--. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
--. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
--. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
--. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
--. Native Son by Richard Wright
--. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
--. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
--. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
--. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
--. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
--. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
--. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
--. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
--. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
--. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
--. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
--. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
--. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
--. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
--. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
--. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
--. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
--. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
--. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
--. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
--. Rabbit, Run by John Updike


Most frequently challenged books: 1990-1999

-. Scary Stories (Series), by Alvin Schwartz
-. Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite
-. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
-. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
-. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
-. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
-. Forever, by Judy Blume
-. Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson
-. Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman
--. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
-. The Giver, by Lois Lowry
--. My Brother Sam is Dead, by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
--. It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris
--. Alice (Series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
--. Goosebumps (Series), by R.L. Stine
--. A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Robert Newton Peck
--. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
To see the rest of the list ....Click Here
Both my children and I have a deep love for books. And I believe you should be the one monitoring what books are in your children's hands not a "group".
What's next? The internet?

Here is an excerpt of a letter a librarian wrote to a patron when that patron asked that a book be removed from their library...
"... our whole system of government was based on the idea that the purpose of the state was to preserve individual liberties, not to dictate them. The founders uniformly despised many practices in England that compromised matters of individual conscience by restricting freedom of speech. Freedom of speech – the right to talk, write, publish, discuss – was so important to the founders that it was the first amendment to the Constitution – and without it, the Constitution never would have been ratified." To read this wonderful compassionate letter in whole... Click here.