April 2006 Reading!

Been very busy late reading. In my last update on what I'm reading, I had just started reading The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime. I finished that about a week and a half ago and really enjoyed it. Jasper Fforde has a real funny and unique way of combining stories you know as "real" with the detective genre. I really enjoyed the murder-mystery about Humpty Dumpty in this and it kept me guessing. Highly recommended.

Since then, I've been reading a couple of recommendations from my son - first, Ulysses Moore: The Door to Time was entertaining but felt a LOT like it really should have been like the first quarter of a full book. Trying to stretch it out into a series like I haven't seen before...

The second, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, was a much better book and I really enjoyed the combination of the classic Greek mythology stories with a kid-oriented contemporary story line. It felt like it would really appear to a lot of kids for a lot of reasons. I'd recommend it to any 10 year old boy :-).

I'm just about to start a new book I picked up kind of at random at Border's this past weekend - I hadn't planned to get it, but picked up the paper back in the store and thought it looked interesting - it's titled The Mask of Atreus and from the blurb on the back sounds a whole lot like The DaVinci Code. We shall see.

April Catch Up

Once again, it's been longer than it should have been since my last update.

Not quite as much going on as the last update, but some news of late:

• I've played 2 soccer games with my team (we had Easter Sunday off). I managed to score a goal and had a beautiful assist in our April 2nd game. Unfortunately, they were both in the last 3 minutes of the game and we ended up losing 3-7 anyway :-(.
• In our last game (against the best team in the League again for the second time this season), we had a great first half but due to a shortness in numbers of subs, we fell apart a bit during the second half. Still improving.
• My daughter's U-9 soccer team has started practicing and they have their first game this Saturday. She's doing really well in practices (she seems to have been practicing dribbling in the off season when no one was watching or something) and I'm looking forward to the season for her.
• My son's expressed interest (now that three of the four of us are playing soccer) in playing soccer again - he played one season when he was a kindergartener but since then hasn't been interested. He also has expressed interest in lacrosse (yikes!)
• I went to the Middle School orientation for my son - who'll be going to middle school next year. Sounds scarey - they talked a lot about how much the kids change during this period and I'm not really looking forward to it.
• Played a couple games for my GLWL season. Overall, having a crappy season. I lost the first of the two, but had a great comeback in the last turn of the game. I had a tie in my second of the two games (my third game of the season) but only because I again had a great last turn. I gotta get me a new general, I think.
• My mother came to visit a few weeks ago - always good to see her and the kids were excited, as they were about my mother-in-law coming this past Sunday for Easter.
  
• The scandal-of-the-week is that one of our favorite trees was chopped down without warning by the city. GRRRRRR... They claim it was an ash tree (it was maple) and it had the Ash Borer (it didn't). I'm so mad I can't even believe it!
  

That's about it for now.

More later (and hopefully sooner!)