MAY MEETING NOTES

Howdy Spirits, here is the post for the business portion of our May meeting. Since my last post was really long, I'll tone this one down, I hope.

This meeting took place at Indy's Lodge and she made tons and tons of food. Really good food too. You had me at barbeque! <3  And there were even different BBQ sauce options. The bacon and cheese filled potato skins were yummy. And I apologize to everyone because I had more than my alloted proportion of those almond/caramel crunchy toffee kind of things. I felt an addiction to those developing. There was also some great chocolate cake and delicious Derby pie. I had never heard of Derby pie but found out it is a pecan pie with a few extras: chocolate chips (which improves 99.4% of everything its added to) and bourbon! So from that I used my Holmes-like deduction skills to figure out that's where the name came from (like the Kentucky Derby). And I think the Kentucky Derby was raced sometime very close to our meeting maybe? Enough about the food I guess. But that is one of my favorite subjects to talk about.

This meeting fell on the actual Mother's Day, and we have a few mothers in the group. So the non-mothers made some customized coffee mugs for the mothers. Thanks to Pinterest, we were able to use alphabet letter stickers, Sharpie oil paint pens, ceramic coffee mugs (microwave and dishwasher safe of course) and one conventional oven to create these gifts for the mamas. Each mug had the owner's book club secret squirrel code name on it, with some artistic embellishments added for some POP!

Boss read HOP ON POP by Dr. Seuss. He keeps getting better and better at reading.

Now look about the shirts: Apparently the Spirits showed a rare moment of compassion by not chastising Deuce about the shirts this time. It seems as if the company who is printing them keeps making excuses for why the shirts are being delayed. Printers keep breaking, computers keep crashing. have to keep up with The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, etc. Keep pulling us around and the Spirits will unleash our own zombie apocalypse on this guy! He obviously doesn't know who he's dealing with. Anyway, we should have our shirts by the June meeting. Oh yeah! Additionally, we discussed having Novel Spirit book bags made for our 2-year anniversary coming up this August. Sounds like a good reason to meet up and have some wine right?

By the way: what's the deal with zombies? Everyone is absolutely wild about zombies. I just don't get the obsession. I think I prefer mutants, who's with me?!?!?

Archimedes, Chief, Boss and I attended the Lee Smith book signing event on April something. She read from her new book and was a very good speaker. Her new book is about her life growing up in Grundy, VA.

Cat and JB attended the Sharyn McCrumb book signing event on May something. She also read from a new release of hers. Cat and JB reported that she also was a very good speaker. It's pretty cool to have (and be able to go see) these successful local authors from our region.

Book submissions: Okay, we are all fixed up with our next round of book submissions except for one person O_O You know who you are! They are posted in the slideshow gadget but here is the list anyway:

Baron: 1984, already completed. No need to elaborate on THAT
Archimedes: CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
Diesel: THE TALE OF THE DUELING NEUROSURGEONS: THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN BRAIN AS REVEALED BY TRUE STORIES OF TRAUMA, MADNESS, AND RECOVERY by Sam Kean. Jeez Diesel, did you Google: "What book has the longest title ever created?" to pick your book???? And Neurosurgeon is a very hard word to spell.
Cat: SON OF THE WILDERNESS: THE LIFE OF JOHN MUIR by Linnie Marsh Wolfe
JB: KING'S MOUNTAIN by Sharyn McCrumb
Indy: GO SET A WATCHMAN by Harper Lee
Deuce: ................. O_O

Next book: GO SET A WATCHMAN, next location: Cat and JB's Mountain Retreat on Sunday June 12th at 2pm.

I'm excited about Indy's challenge to us: Read the Hamilton biograpy. I definitely want to.

Has anyone started or finished GO SET A WATCHMAN? I'm about 68% complete.

See you in a couple weeks Spirits,

Baron