Sunday Salon: Where to begin?

Happy Sunday to you all! I'm sitting here on the tail end of the 24 Hour Read-a-thon, knowing that in just a few short hours I will need to be on the road to Sarasota for a shopping boondoggle with one of my High School friends who is vacationing in sunny Florida. I will be gone most of the day, so I guess now (4:45am) is the perfect time to tell you about my week. And what a week it was!

My kids were on Spring Break, so much of my time was spent playing. Emma and Ryan both had playdates throughout the week, we did some shopping, saw The Last Song per the request of Emma (as loathing as I was to see it, it wasn't all that bad), and attempted to go to Universal Studios, only to find out that it was blacked out. Boy did I feel like a heel for not checking! Overall, it was a nice week of hanging out though.

Friday night was our big Adult Literacy League fund-raising event, and it was a huge success! I don't have numbers yet, but it was close to sold out, and people were bidding on everything. Seriously, the book table was overwhelming...such an amazing array of literary coolness, thanks to many of you! Of course I had to buy a few of the books back for myself. My husband was also running amuck with a drink in hand, bidding on things. He ended up winning one of the "big" prizes...the Chef's Table for 8 at The Capitol Grille with limo service! He also got Emma and I tickets for Discovery Cove, where you can swim with the dolphins. But here is the auction item that blew my mind and that you will appreciate...he bid on the opportunity for MY NAME to be in Connie May Fowler's next book!!!!! Can you believe it??? What an amazing gift!

And speaking of Connie May, I did finally get to meet this lovely woman (if you missed her amazing guest post on Friday, you really must check it out). I had her sign all of my Connie books and was able to snap this picture:

















I was pretty star-struck. In fact, I dreamed about it all Friday night! I know, I'm such a geek.

Then of course the 24 Hour Read-a-thon on Saturday. For those of you that get the automatic e-mails, I apologize. You probably didn't realize I was going to be posting a million times over the period of a day. The kids did a pretty good job. My non-reading son Ryan read 160 pages. Emma read 323 pages. And I read just around 500. I slept 3 hours, and took a break for a shower and church. This was my first time participating, and it was an interesting experience. I'm very impressed with the individuals who organized it, hosted various shifts, the cheerleaders, the readers, all. It is truly awesome to see 400 bloggers all supporting each other in a common mission!

So what this all boiled down to was a decent amount of reading. The kids and I are about 7 discs into Harry Potter 6. I wasn't able to make much headway on the audio "Let the Great World Spin" since the kids were always around, but after 6 or 7 discs, I'm seriously loving the story. I finished Facebook Fairytales, The World We Live In (the third and final installment of The Last Survivors trilogy), Small Change (a review copy), The Summer of Moonlight Secrets (middle grade ARC from my buddy Danette Haworth), and Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin. Not shabby eh? Now I just have to find time to write the reviews!

So now I think it is time for me to go back to sleep and get a couple more hours of shut-eye before I doing some driving. Have a wonderful (and for those sleep-deprived, restful) Sunday!