Tuesday, May 02, 2006

And a Good Time Was Had By All

I wish the LA Times/UCLA Festival of Books came several times a year! As always, Angelique and I had a wonderful time.

We did our usually hop from mystery bookstore booth to mystery bookstore booth chatting with authors we know or getting autographs from authors we plan to try. I got chastized for not having read Pari Noskin Taichert's second. And we found out that Jerrilyn Farmer's next won't be out for another year. Furthermore, the teaser at the end of the last book is wrong, so I bought it as a collector's item. Which meant I had to buy the paperback of Perfect Sax as well. She was quite amused, but in a happy sort of way. Nope, not an obsessive collector. Another highlight was discovering Cookie Jar publishing and telling Joanne Fluke about it. (Her main character is a cookie baker who owns a shop called The Cookie Jar.) This one looked like a kid's educational book publisher.

For the first time this year, we went to a panel. Dianne Mott Davidson, Jerrilyn Farmer, Earlene Fowler, and a guy who I hadn't heard of and whose name I can't remember talking about their books. We really enjoyed it. Quite humourous and very informative as well. We're going to try to hit more of those in future years.

From there I headed up to game night at Konrad and Carol's. I won two of the three rounds of Mexican Train Dominoes we played, so you know I had a god time.

I wanted to go back to the festival Sunday, but we finally had our SAYF (Sunday Afternoon Youth Fellowship) that day. Wound up playing volleyball at a nearby park with Nick and five of the jr. high girls. We had fun, and I think the jr. highers did as well.

The part of the weekend that wasn't fun but was challenging was Friday night. One of the high schooler's organized a fund raiser for the Invisible Children fund. The story of these kids hiding so they won't be kidnapped and force to serve in the rebel army in Uganda is very sobering. I've been challenged by it, and I really need to figure out how to help them myself.

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