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Due to a long flight for business travel, I’ve been reading books when it’s not summer vacation. Rather than wait until my annual summer book review and write an interminably-long post, I decided to write about them now.

Here they are, approximately in the order that I read them.

• Airman by Eoin Colfer
  I read this book because my older kids wanted to read it. They go through a lot of books, so I can’t preview them all. Consider this a random sample of their books.

  It was intense. Or maybe it just felt more intense because I don’t go through many stories like this anymore. My reading choices are either non-fiction or books for young children (like Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter kinds of plots).

  It was very engaging, with some mild language and a bit of violence. I thought about how to recommend or rate this, and I settled on a comparison to Treasure Island. The bad people are bad, and they threaten murder and harm, and they accomplish it. But the descriptions of violence are brief and not any more gory than they need to be.

  I’d say ages 10 and up.

• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
  I chose this book because it was purported to be an inspiration to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

  It’s a quick story, and more along the lines of old fairy tales than it is to any modern story. Especially after finishing Airman.

  I’m having a hard time deciding on an age limit. Maybe ages 4 and up?

• The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke
  This was another book that my kids wanted to read but I took it to preview it first.

  There was not any gore in this, and I don’t remember any offensive language. The story was not as intense as Airman, mainly because there aren’t any villains. There are some antagonists, but they aren’t evil.

  The main problem with this book is a common malady among modern stories – kids are the heroes and adults are the problems. It wasn’t that overt, but the general theme was there.

  I’d say ages 9 and up.

• Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
  This is the original story. Another one which inspired some great authors. Beware when checking out or buying the book that it is the original story. Some books in the library were retellings.

  The plot is pretty much as you expect, if you’re familiar with any versions of Peter Pan. Of course, there are some nuggets in there that make the book worthwhile. I’m in particular thinking of the descriptions of Nana.

  If your kids are fine with the movie version of Peter Pan, then they’ll be fine with this book. If you’re reading to younger kids, then you might have to gloss over some parts, such as why Smee’s sword has the name that it does.

  Maybe ages 7 and up for reading on their own?

• Jack by Liesl Shurtliff
  I didn’t read this one, but my wife did – in order to preview it for the kids. She said it was okay, so go ahead and let your kids read it.
• Magicalamity by Kate Saunders
  I didn’t read this one, but my wife did – in order to preview it for the kids. She said it was not acceptable, so we returned it to the library. It had an overall air of rudeness and disrespect, plus some other things. So avoid this book unless you want your child learning new insults and certain medical procedures.

Does anyone use the voice command feature of customer service phone calls? I ignore those and always press the keys.

I find myself annoyed at them, because it takes the lady long enough as it is to go through the prompts normally. But when you add having her say the phrases that you need to say for the option you want, it about doubles the time you have to sit and listen.

I understand that some people might have physical limitations that cause them to have problems with keypresses. For those people, the call system could have that as an initial option. Like they do for English and Spanish. They could say “For English, press 1; para Español, marque dos; for voice commands, please say ‘voice commands’.”

That would also work for the people who are multitasking by calling customer service lines while they are driving and can’t or won’t press keys (or key-like sections of a screen).

Dear customer service representatives: please end your conversations with “Have a good day” not with “Thanks for calling such and such”. Because people will want to respond with “You too” and your final words must allow for “you too” to make sense.

The worst case is when the agent says “Have a good day, and thanks for calling us” because the first part gets the caller’s brain primed to say “You too” and it’s hard to switch gears that quickly. So the end of the conversation ends up being “…and thanks for calling us.” “You too.” Click.

It doesn’t have to be exactly “Have a good day”. It could be any other sentiment to which a response of “You too” would be appropriate.

Why is it that bullies get a holiday?

Not just get a holiday, but get to bully others on that holiday and everyone just accepts it.

It’s more of a problem in school, as bully problems in general are more prevalent in school. People seem to grow out of it once they reach the business world. Most of them do, anyway.

I regret that I did not write this post in time for the day this year, but consider this advance warning for next year’s occurrrence.

Picture this, as from the bully’s perspective.

“I like this particular day, and you don’t care about it. That makes you worse than me. I’m going to ask you about my people. You had better have some representation of my color on you, otherwise I am going to threaten you. No, more than that, I’m going to assault you. The only way for you to be saved from physical pain is to agree with me. Do you understand?”

I was going to say there are two types of people: those who like St. Patrick’s Day and those who don’t care. But I won’t disagree if someone wants to add a third category of people who actively dislike the day.

Me? I’m in the don’t care for it camp.

What I do dislike is being hounded by the people who do care. And pinched.

Why do you need me to participate in your holiday? Why can’t you enjoy it without my participation?

If I remember in the morning of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll be tempted to wear blue (the original color of St. Patrick) or orange (since I’m not a Catholic) and justify it that way. I can celebrate your day, but if I do I’ll do it with the color that I want.

I was working in the barn one evening when Beta popped in. He wandered around and poked his head in one of the stalls.

He asked me “Is that a cat?” Knowing we do not have a cat, I peeked in the stall.

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I provided this image in case you were wondering how I felt about the game of Monopoly. The exception is the card game Monopoly Deal, as that is interesting whereas the board game version of Monopoly is not.

We had an impromptu tongue twister competition the other day. The winner was our youngest child – the 4-year-old.

Beta proposed a tongue twister, which Gamma promptly tried and failed. Then I thought I would propose one which I always mangle: “Word World”. For those of you without young kids, Word World is a TV show that teaches kids letter and word sounds. For some reason, I can never say the name of the show correctly. It usually comes out as “world world”. So I figured it would make a good tongue twister for other people too.

However, the first person to tackle the “word world” tongue-twister was Delta. Being only four, he hasn’t quite mastered his Rs and Ls, so it came out as “wuud wuud, wuud wuud, wuud wuud”. He said it correctly, for how he pronounces things. But the rest of us forfeited, knowing we couldn’t compete with that.