cabulous rhymes with "fabulous"

lesighh:

deliciouskaek:

collababortion:

etonia:

nikkipryde:

wholmesianmisfit:

Who remembers

Scholastic

Book

Orders

And then the magical traveling circus of scholastic would randomly show up

at the BOOK FAIR

My family had like no money and I was only allowed to order $5.00 of stuff and then my friends got so much and it made me sad. ;3;

We had the Weekly Reader instead…but man, I do remember the book fair. My family was also poor. I got maybe two or three books over all of my elementary school years.  To be fair, I was also a voracious reader and to buy the amount of books I demanded would’ve seriously hurt the family financially. XD That’s why we had a public library. 

Really? Nobody else is going to say “the fuck?” about that Rachael Ray book?

yeah, that’s… :/

omg memoriessssssssss

i remember everytime i got those, i would go thru them meticulously, circling the books i reaaaaally wanted.  then i’d leave it somewhere that my parents would see it in the hopes that they get me one or two of them.  

rarely got any tho.  it was a matter of money and smart spending - why buy books when there’s a library, they said?  can’t fault them for that logic.

We definitely maxed out our library cards on a regular basis (I forget what the limit was on books checked out at once, but during the summer I’d be in twice a week to rotate books), but we also bought a lot of books.  (My family is middle-class and there was money to spare for it, so I was lucky.)  We didn’t actually buy a lot of book order books because my parents rarely thought much of the selection, though.  They made me use my own money to buy stuff like Baby-Sitters Club books, which was usually what I wanted from the book order.

Not a book order story, but I remember once, we were driving from Missouri to Florida to see my paternal grandfather, and this was before reading in the car made me sick, so my parents wanted to buy me something to read to keep me quiet (generally a reliable strategy).  So we stopped at a bookstore, but I desperately wanted a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book, which my parents rightly pointed out was unlikely to keep me occupied for even a full hour because I read so damn fast, and what they were looking for was VOLUME.  But I was adamant, and they wanted to get back on the road, so finally they bought me the SStTitD book AND the largest YA trade paperback they could find with no input from me, which turned out to be Amy’s Eyes by Richard Kennedy.  It was 437 pages long—and remember, it was a trade paperback.  It actually lasted me most of the way to Florida.

Back to the book orders: we get them from my baby’s daycare now, and I am a huge sucker (for them).  The nice thing about it all being online now, though, is that a) I can price check them against Amazon (they usually are the same price or cheaper for the same product, though I generally prefer to buy hardbacks and they more often offer paperbacks since most parents don’t want to drop a ton on book orders, who can blame them), and b) they do clearance on previous months’ selections, which meant that this month I’m getting a Christmas-themed hardback book for $5 that was still listed at $9 on Amazon (Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas, if you were curious).

We did used to count up all the books under the Christmas tree every year (my parents had a definite problem over-spending on Christmas anyway, but when it came to books…).  Our record was something over 70 for the five of us.  I don’t think anyone got much that WASN’T a book that year.

(Source: pyralspite)

On the subject of my childhood & religion…

I was born in Tucson, Arizona, where my father was doing his PhD in biology at the University of Arizona (my mom had her MA in Spanish & Portuguese, and adjuncted there).  Tucson, in case you didn’t know, is where hippies flock to if Madison, Wisconsin is too cold for them.

As a toddler, I talked about Jesus pretty much constantly, having worked out that it made my parents’ hippie friends very uncomfortable.

(Actual quote when, at age 2, I entered the living room to find a parent and friend listening to psychedelic music: “Do you expect JESUS to come out of [the speakers]?”)

When I was not-quite-4, we moved to Rush Limbaugh’s hometown in southern Missouri, and suddenly no one was upset by my Jesus references, so I stopped.

…Then I started kindergarten and became a foaming-at-the-mouth atheist because some other kid told me that if my family didn’t go to church, we were going to hell.

…One of my mom’s favorite stories is about when, in junior high, some kid told me if I didn’t believe in God, I would go to hell, and furthermore if my parents didn’t believe in God, they would, too, to which I responded, “Well, it wouldn’t be hell without Mom there.”

Oh, MY GOD.

dr—grumbles:

unknowablewoman:

My mom just told me the weirdest thing.

When I was six years old, I told my entire class that my mom found me in the woods and I had been living with a wolf pack. A concerned parent called my teacher, who proceeded to schedule a very serious parent-teacher conference about it.

Moral of the story: I was a weird fucking kid.

When I was in kindergarten I went to class and proudly proclaimed that we had fleas, but my mom was going to the vet to get it fixed soon.

In reality, she’d told me she planned to buy a flea collar for our cat later that afternoon.

I was also a weird fucking kid who got a concerned parent teacher conference.

Kindergarten: I refused to say the pledge of allegiance because I had become a foaming-at-the-mouth atheist in response to my classmates’ constant comments about how my family was going to hell because we didn’t go to church.  I objected to the “under God” bit.  My mother had to write me a note.

4th grade: My teacher became concerned that I was “morbid” because I was really into murder mysteries.  Parent-teacher conference.

10th grade: Evil French teacher wrote “Cabell, I wish you would come to know my god” on a paper I’d written using the future subjunctive in which I expressed the desire to move to New Orleans and read Tarot cards in the French Quarter.  Parent-teacher conference, at which my father had to restrain my mother from committing assault.

fuckyeahwomenprotesting2:

Tank Girl is on netflix. 

I don’t care if the movie is nothing like the comics I like it anyway

My dad took me to see this in the theater when it came out.  We went to an early Thursday evening showing and we were the only people in the theater, which was fun.

Afterward, he raved to everyone about what a great role model Tank Girl was, because she kicked ass and took names and when she shacked up with a guy “it was just because she wanted him for sex—she didn’t need his PROTECTION or anything!”

Also, I love Lori Petty.