Summer reading or viewing

The boys & I have been visiting the library every Friday. They each have their own library card now & I allow them 4 books at a time.

But Havoc has been getting videos instead.

So far he has watched the entire Century of Warfare series and the entire Presidents of the US series.

One day they played trench warfare in the living room using the sofas as the trenches & the area in front of the tv as No Man’s Land. At least they did until I told them to stop Going Over the Top of the sofas to charge each other with lightsabers. The dinos & clone troopers got together for a party at the Christmas Peace. They even had Gatling guns made out of legos.

Don’t tell me tv can’t be educational.

Havoc does have some books. He’s reading one of the Nate the Great series & a book called Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder, plus he has taken an interest in some of my comic strip collection books. He’s read all of Stone Soup, most of Baby Blues (after Hammie was born) and is starting For Better or For Worse.

Mayhem prefers non fiction & is currently studying the solar system. He’s worked his way through all the planets, one book each & is now reading about comets & meteors, which tie in with his dinosaur reading.

I’m trying to get him to read some fiction but they don’t have any Star Wars stuff at the right reading level for him at the library. They are either 2 sentences a page or 150 page novels.  The library doesn’t stock the mid range books of 50-60 pages with some illustrations. The various mysteries his brother read last year just don’t interest him so for now we stick with non-fiction.

The other thing they watch on tv (along with DH & sometimes myself) is Top Gear on BBC America. So now I am treated to non stop car talk whenever we are in the car.

“Oh that’s a Ford”

“That’s a Subaru”

“Fords are faster, they have the V8 engine”

“I prefer Ferrari's”

Until I finally say “Enough with the car talk already!!”

I mean, I like cars but apart from decent gas mileage & reliability I really don’t care about the rest. I don’t need to go from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. My road’s speed limit is 35. I don’t need to be at 60 until I hit the main road which is 10 whole minutes away. Same with when I am in town, speed limit is at most 45. So the beauties of 6.9 litre engine, or whatever it is, is lost on me.

Speaking of reliability, I had to get a new battery for mine.  I’ve had to jump start it several dozen times in the past 6-8 months, when it is very cold, when it is very hot, when it is very wet, when it feels I shouldn’t go to Pilates at the gym…

DH thinks it is an electrical issue but he realizes that due to the total randomness of the outages, it will be a long and probably very expensive process to try and diagnose it.

And possibly it is just the battery, though the randomness argues against it. But it has been jumped more times than is probably good for it so after causing me to miss Pilates twice last week, plus then needing another jump start in the gym parking lot, I drove to Auto Zone & got a new battery.

The boys were thrilled because Auto Zone installs the battery for you right there in the parking lot & they got to talk with the guy about cars while he did it.

This week will be looking for books about cars in the library.