I Dare You to Top My Week: 137 Books Read, a Book Fair, Flooding, My First Grand-baby, and My Birthday

How's this for a week?

The book fair ran this week at school. That's always madness. Along with the book fair, we had Red Ribbon Week, Open House, and Book Character Day. Whew!

On Wednesday, the doctor induced my daughter-in-law and my beautiful granddaughter was born. A whopping nine pound girl and my heart is full. Annie Nance has arrived and I am Nana Nance.

If that wasn't enough, I found time in the spaces this week to read on in my quest to pick the best fiction picture books for 2015 for the Cybils. Our panel has 253 books to read before the end of the year. I've swamped my wonderful local library, the Brazoria County Library, with requests for books, and I've put holds on books at the Houston Public Library and the Harris County Library. I was up to 119 books read when I remembered that I have several more library cards and looked up books online. The Texas City Library turned out to be an amazing resource, so I drove down there Saturday morning and found 26 more books on the shelf that I had not yet read.

It had rained and poured all through the night, but I thought the worst was over. I decided to hit the Harris County Library and pick up some holds and stop by the Friendswood Library for a few more.

Mother Nature decided otherwise. I was skillfully bypassing pools of water in the street by weaving to the left and to the right when I came to a dead halt. A river of water was streaming across the one-way street I was traveling down. I'm not talking a Chocolate Bayou river of water; I'm talking Mississippi River, folks, and, like the Goin' on a Bear Hunt chant, I couldn't go over it, I couldn't go under it, I couldn't go around it...I had to go through it. A Toyota Yaris is probably not the best car to traverse the Mississippi River, so I sat there. For two hours. Waiting for the water to go down. As hundreds of other cars and trucks drove up, accessed the situation, sat there with me for a while or took the plunge. A few stalled out, which added to my resolve to wait this out.

It never went down. Cars behind me started turning around on the one-way road and going back the way they had come. Good girl that I am, I called 911. What was I to do? I asked the dispatcher. She never told me what to do (apparently the dispatchers can't do that) but she did say that extraordinary situations call for extraordinary measures sometimes. I got up my courage and drove the wrong way down a one-way road. Once I got to higher ground, I was determined to make my way home, even skipping over my planned stop at the Friendswood Library. And I did.

I brought home a total of 46 more books to bring me to a grand total of 165 books.

So, here's the short version: This was a week in which I ran a book fair with sales over $9,000 along with Open House and Red Ribbon Week and Book Character Day...welcomed my granddaughter into the world and spent lots of rocking and hugging and singing time with her...tracked down and read 137 picture books, despite torrential rains and flooding...

And today is my birthday. A day of rest. I think a restful birthday might be just what I need today.

What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them,and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....That's what happens at the Sunday Salon, except it's all virtual. Every Sunday the bloggers participating in that week's Salon get together--at their separate desks, in their own particular time zones--and read. And blog about their reading. And comment on one another's blogs. Think of it as an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book. Click here to join the Salon.

The Sunday Post is a meme hosted by Kimba at Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It's a chance to share news and recap the past week.

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page. We share books that we found in our mailboxes last week.  It is now being hosted here.

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews in which you can share the books you've acquired.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is now being hosted at The Book Date.