Author, authors, books

Saturday was devoted to the ALA convention. We left too early and had to stand around while they did the whole ribbon-cutting ceremony thing. Then the crowd decended en masse on the vendors and their booths. I walked a fine line all day between ushering the kids around to meet authors, buy books and getting autographs, plus making sure I stopped places and I needed to go and talkto people that I wanted to say "hi" to.

The kids were in hog heaven, meeting authors, or course. But, when we went to the Penguin booth, my contact there, Lucy Del Priore, dragged the kids off and loaded them down the review copies of books. They thought that was fantastic. ALso, when we stopped by the Simon and Schuster booth, Kimberly Lauber invited us to their dessert reception the nexy day.

Mike was his sparkling self, charming women everywhere. We actually went by one booth that he was interested - digital books on handy individual players by Playaway. Dad - do you listen to books on tape? This might be the besy way for us to send Harry #7 to you. They are about $60, though. We even ran into our friend Steve Young (not the football player) and we will meet him for dinner some night.

So, we spent all of the day Saturday and most of Sunday at the exhibit hall. Sunday was when the Lubar/Green encounter took place. For dinner we went over to Georgetown. It is the way I wish modern malls would look. All the shops that you find in the mall, but all in restored old buildings. We went by the oldest (pre-revolutionary) house in the area. They have restored the garden and let us peek into the rooms. The builder wasn't particularly an interesting historical figure, but the history is still cool. I like National Park Service rangers. They really know their stuff. That night was the dessert reception. We saw John Green there - he said he was crashing the party. We also had a great talk with Neal Shusterman and Bruce Coville.

Monday, Krista and Tyler went to the exhibit hall while Kime and I went to a session about the 65% solution and advocacy. I asked Mike to go, becuase his mind is much more political than mine and he is great for bouncing this kind of discussion off of. After we met up with the kids, Tyler and Mike took off after T got the signatures he wanted. They went to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. Unfortunately, the American History museum was closed. That night we met up with Steve and had dinner somewhere up by his hotel.