A Pleasant Surprise

This morning I was going to publicly start whining about how January 2012 was going down as one of the longest, most miserable, "don't want to get out of bed" months in recent history.

That is,  until I read an email from the author of one of my favorite blogs telling me that I was the winner of his weekly give-away!

Michael Popek is the author of a blog called "Forgotten Bookmarks."  He describes his blog like this:

"I am a used and rare bookseller.  I buy books from people every day. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in these books"

It was in fact, Dahling Thomas MacEntee who turned me on to Michael's blog about 3 years ago.  I have been a faithful reader ever since.

Michael shares the wonderful things that people have left in books.  There are the usual items :  pieces of paper with recipes written on them, letters written but never mailed, quite a few photographs and alot of just plain weird and bazaar crap.  A clever, witty comment accompanies each item Michael posts.  A few of my personal favorites can be found HERE, HERE and one of special interest to any genealogist researching New York and the Hudson River Valley.

I know, I know - I can hear some of you thinking - "Didn't she just write something recently about  trying to overcome the OLSS (Oh Look, Something Shiny!")  thingy?"  Well judge me not dear readers.  Here is my defense that time spent at Forgotten Bookmarks is not the time sucker you may think it is.

Each item left behind in a book tells us a little about the person who left it there.  Some of the books are really old, which makes the item left behind really old.  So this makes the item an artifact.  (still with me?)  So if I am looking at an artifact left in a book by a person from a long time ago that means I am doing some kind of social science kind of thing.  And what Michael is doing is preserving cultural history, right?  So voila! Reading  the Forgotten Bookmarks blog does not equal time sucking, rather it contributes to my ongoing commitment of education for myself and others.

I rest my case.  You are welcome.