{"id":24612,"date":"2019-10-12T11:43:32","date_gmt":"2019-10-12T15:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=24612"},"modified":"2019-10-12T11:43:32","modified_gmt":"2019-10-12T15:43:32","slug":"a-reminder-if-you-need-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2019\/10\/a-reminder-if-you-need-it\/","title":{"rendered":"A reminder if you need it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/DeadlyBubbles2.jpg\" alt=\"Horrifying opilione\" width=\"750\" height=\"496\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-24616\" \/><br clear=\"all\"\/>Just wanted to make sure you were remembering that Halloween is also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allhallowsread.com\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>All Hallows Read<\/strong><\/a>, and if you&#8217;re in an area that gets plenty of trick-or-treaters (or is that trickers-or-treat?) that you have a selection of books to hand out. The Girlfriend is so enthusiastic about this holiday now that she plans <em>months<\/em> in advance, and has had a pack of kids&#8217; books set aside for quite some time. Mind you, we don&#8217;t purchase them new, but get them from the thrift stores, secondhand book shops, and a book recycling warehouse not too far off. This makes them pretty inexpensive, as well as continuing the recycling thing and, as they say, re-homing some books.<\/p>\n<p>Or if that&#8217;s not going to work for you, just pick a few kids that you know and drop a couple of books their way, or find an outlet online to send some books to deserving children somewhere. From our experiences over the last two years, it&#8217;s more appreciated than you might think. It&#8217;s easy to believe Kids Nowadays all have their noses pressed to their phones and\/or the TV, or would be far more motivated by the candy than by <em>dumb ol&#8217; books<\/em>, but this was definitely not the case on our front steps<strong>;<\/strong> just about everyone seemed delighted, kids and adults, and <em>nobody<\/em> passed on the opportunity. We cleaned out, two years in a row now, and have actually gained a <em>reputation<\/em> for this practice. This is not a close-knit community, and no one but our immediate neighbors knows us by name or on sight, and even my arcane prowling around the yard late at night with a headlamp and camera flash has not produced ugly rumors about my mental health (to my knowledge, anyway) &#8211; but we&#8217;ve gotten positive feedback on the Halloween book thing, now and again, from unsuspected quarters.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/AllHallowsRead.jpg\" alt=\"selection sample for All Hallows Read\" width=\"750\" height=\"500\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-24617\" \/>We&#8217;d do it even if we didn&#8217;t get this gratification, because let&#8217;s face it, it&#8217;s a great idea, and really needs to become a more regular practice across the country &#8211; but yeah, the positive reinforcement helps more than a little. While the original intention was to hand out <em>spooky<\/em> books of course, thematically matching the holiday and all that, The Girlfriend makes sure that we present a mix, even for the toddlers that aren&#8217;t reading yet (not a lot of spooky books aimed at that age, dog knows why. There may be an untapped market here&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Credit where it&#8217;s due<strong>:<\/strong> it was <a href=\"https:\/\/thebloggess.com\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">The Bloggess<\/a> that first brought this to our attention &#8211; not <em>personally<\/em>, mind you, because we&#8217;re still not on speaking terms since that incident where, you know, we&#8217;ve never met, but through her blog (Hey! Maybe <em>that&#8217;s<\/em> where she got that title!) which you should be checking out routinely anyway. Halloween at her house has got to be totally warped&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><figure id=\"attachment_24618\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-24618\" style=\"width: 750px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/MonsterNotIncluded.jpg\" alt=\"New kitten getting into act\" width=\"750\" height=\"525\" class=\"size-full wp-image-24618\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-24618\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Monster not included<\/figcaption><\/figure><br clear=\"all\"\/><span style=\"font-size: 0.8em\">* Just had to note<strong>:<\/strong> the opening image has been sitting in the blog folder for <em>years<\/em>, and is a daddy-longlegs, or <em>opilione<\/em>, that drowned itself in a bucket, but I tweaked it a bit for impact here.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just wanted to make sure you were remembering that Halloween is also All Hallows Read, and if you&#8217;re in an area that gets plenty of trick-or-treaters (or is that trickers-or-treat?) that you have a selection of books to hand out. The Girlfriend is so enthusiastic about this holiday now that she plans months in advance, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1903,12,46],"tags":[4609,5150,5151],"class_list":["post-24612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-because","category-random","category-too-cool","tag-all-hallows-read","tag-give-a-book-on-halloween","tag-no-ken-ham-though"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}