Our newsletter is coming to you a tad later than usual this week, but with very good reason. We did a topdown redesign of the ReadingGroupGuides.com website. Take a look! Our goal was to make all of our features more readily accessible from dropdown navigation on the top of the site. We feel that there are a lot of features that you were not able to find easily in the past. Also, this will give us a chance to expand the site with even more content in the months to come.

Here comes one of my favorite three-day weekends. The pool here is crystal clear, the lawn chairs are out and the hammock looks inviting. I have no plans except for watching the local town parade on Monday, which the boys and I always call "a Mayberry moment." It's incredibly amateurish, but watching it I always get a lump in my throat at some point --- usually when the older veterans walk by. Knitting (making this cool shawl in a new pattern) and reading on the agenda....lots of both. Oh, and we have a new grill, which supposedly has a ton of features I "am going to love." I think that that was hype to get me all excited about Tom and the boys hitting the hardware store to buy this last weekend. I got an amazing sales pitch from them on why we "needed" this.

The countdown is on. It may be happening next week, or you have have to wait until next month, but for all of you the end of the school year IS coming. We know that there are exams to take and papers to write in the last days of school, which can be a drag, but we also know that you have one eye on the calendar as you do this, and you are looking forward to whatever you have planned for your vacation weeks.

Is there anyone else annoyed about the postage increase this week? I find this maddening since I feel like we are being asked to invest more in something that is a failing system. Sending and receiving mail has become a game that is about as much fun as trying to figure out the timing of traffic patterns at the Lincoln Tunnel (which I have not figured out in 29 years of commuting). We still get mail from the person who owned our house two people before us, which is not astounding unless you realize we have owned this house for 17 years. I used to be able to mail something in New York City to someone in New York City and have it get there in a day. Now it could be a day, or a week, IF it gets there at all. No wonder I love email. The way I see it, if I relied on the post office to get you this newsletter, you might never hear about new releases --- and you would miss all contest deadlines. And that's my two cents on this, which is the same cost as the increase.