The name-sake character of Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline is a bored young girl whose family has recently moved into a strange old house filled, by and large, with strange old people. Left to entertain herself by her always-too-busy parents, Coraline sets off exploring the grounds, meeting the neighbors, and puzzling over the strange door in […]

Jumping Monkeys, the really very excellent podcast I blogged about here, is running a contest to win an autographed copy of Chandra Prasad’s book On Borrowed Wings, the story of a young women in the ’30s who goes to Yale disguised as a man. Here’s what you need to do:
To enter to win […]

My dad just moved and is unpacking some boxes that have been packed for decades. He was showing me a stack of my fifth and sixth grade papers, and I noticed how good my handwriting was then compared to my sixth and seventh grade step-kids. I don’t think I held any particular fondness for […]

Here’s an idea I whipped up when we took a family vacation in August. We were in Utah, doing some hiking and visiting ghost towns and the like, and I was worried about the kids wandering off. The best thing would be an information card tucked into each one’s pockets, but getting thm […]

One of the benefits of being a teacher is that every so often you come across great discounts for educators. This weekend (and up until Tuesday) Borders offered an educator’s discount of 25% off all books, CDs, and DVDs. (I don’t know if that’s nation-wide or just in my area.) On Friday night they […]