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If you don’t want to hear The Grinch in German (see previous post) here is a little video, from a couple of years ago, of me reading it in English.

Today, in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza, a little something in German :)

Wie der Grinch Weihnachten gestohlen hat

Hint: “wie” means “how”. “Weihnachten” is “Christmas”. “Gestohlen hat” means “stole”. And “der Grinch” is… “the Grinch”. :)

I can’t find this book for sale anywhere, darn it. Well, read along with your English copy and you’ll learn a little bit of German, perhaps!

The Sweet Smell of Christmas: a scratch-and-sniff picture book. I had this book when I was little and loved it! Sorry you can’t scratch-and-sniff while I read to you :)

The Sweet Smell of Christmas

Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!

Amazon blurb:

Christmas is almost here! Little Bear can smell it—and so can you! The air is filled with the aroma of gingerbread cookies, minty candy canes, the piney Christmas tree, and yummy hot apple pie. Celebrate the holiday season with this classic Golden storybook which includes six scratch-and-sniff scents.

Ever get obsessed by a song suddenly and for no apparent reason? Today my Sudden Song Obsession was Dinah Washington singing “Ain’t Misbehavin'” (1947).

It’s a wonderfully intimate and sweet recording. According to the youtube poster (Overjazz Records) the trio is “Rudy Martin’s Trio (Rudy Martin (piano) possibly Hurley Ramey (guitar) Bill Settles (bass).”

So lovely.

I hooked up my laptop to the speakers and put the mp3 on repeat for a couple of hours and sang along. Not kidding. Sorry, neighbors.

Another Melendy Christmas chapter for you! This time it’s a chapter from Spiderweb for Two, the last Melendy book. I’m in the middle of recording this book; I hope to finish in January if I can stop coughing!

Spiderweb for Two, 07 The Joyous Season

Click the image to see this book on Amazon and buy your own copy:

Amazon blurb:

Randy and Oliver Melendy awake one fall morning full of gloom. Their brother and sister are away, the house seems forlorn and empty, and even Cuffy, their adored housekeeper, can’t pick up their spirits. Will they have to face a long and lonely winter? But a surprise message in the mailbox starts a trail of excitement and adventure that takes them through the cold season. When summer finally comes around again, the children have found fourteen messages in all, and the end of the search brings them a rich reward.

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza we have the Christmas chapter from a wonderful book called “The Four-Story Mistake”. If you like this chapter, you can find the rest of the audiobook on my “Kayray Reads to You” page.

The Four-Story Mistake, Chapter 8: Noel, Noel

Y’know, this is a fantastic book in a fantastic quartet of books. It would make a great Christmas present for your favorite kid (or adult who loves kids’ books)! Click the image to see it on Amazon. Get the rest of the Melendy books while you’re there :)

Amazon blurb:

Into the Four-Story Mistake, an odd-looking house with a confused architectural history, move the Melendy family — Mona, Rush, Randy, Oliver, Father, and Cuffy, the housekeeper. Though disappointed about leaving their old brownstone in New York City, and apprehensive about living the country life, the four Melendy kids soon settle into this unusual new home. Here, they become absorbed in the adventures of the country, adjusting themselves with all their accustomed resourcefulness and discovering the many hidden attractions that the Four-Story Mistake has to offer.

The Four-Story Mistake is the second installment of Enright’s Melendy Quartet, an engaging and warm series about the close-knit Melendy family and their surprising adventures.

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza:
Chapter 7, the final chapter of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 7

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza:
Chapter 6 of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 6

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza:
Chapter 5 of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 5

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

We finished decorating our tree yesterday! Isn’t it great? Every ornament has a history. Lots are handmade: mostly by me (I make more every year), but there are some very special ones made by beloved relatives. There are a few ornaments that go back to my very first memories of Christmas and many that were gifts from special people. I love my Christmas ornaments :)

On the table you can see my little paper Christmas Village! See this old blog post to read its story and find the files to print your own:
http://kayray.org/2011/12/07/dec-7-2011-a-christmas-miracle-revisited/
(I printed mine at 50% because I wanted a tiny village.)

And here’s our Nativity Scene. Strong Bad and his pals attend every year!

Also, now that I’m finally feeling better, I’ve been working on Dan’s gloves. He now lives in a place that gets actual winter and I don’t want his hands to be cold. I bought conductive thread for the fingertips so he SHOULD be able to use his iPhone without taking off his gloves.

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza:
Chapter 4 of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 4

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

This old Sesame Street counting song just kills me. It’s SO much fun to sing along with. I love the modulation after they count to ten for the first time!

I like to imagine the guys in the recording studio. Count it count it count it higher!

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza:
Chapter 3 of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 3

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

Over the last few days I’ve really started to feel better — well enough to sit on the couch and watch TV with Henry! A few nights ago, at his suggestion, we put on the wonderful 6-part BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. And we found out that it has finally been released on Blu-ray so we didn’t have to watch the super-crappy old DVD rip. Just finished up last night. Ahhhhhhhhh.

The scene where Lizzie is visiting Pemberley and helps cover Georgiana’s discomfort when Miss Bingley mentions Mr. Wickham. SIGNIFICANT GLANCES. That whole Pemberley part is wonderful. I love the bit where Lizzie introduces her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner to Mr. Darcy and everyone is civilized and pleasant.

We got started on our giant collection of Christmas specials and movies. So far we’ve watched:

Elf
Love Actually
The Toys that Made Christmas (A special hosted by Robert Webb, in which British actors and comedians talk about their favorite toys from childhood. Very sweet.)
A Colbert Christmas
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
How The Grinch Stole Christmas

We bought our tree three days ago and finally got it decorated today! I’ll post a picture tomorrow, maybe.

Today in my Christmas Audiobook Extravaganza:
Chapter 2 of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 2

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

Guess what! I have just filled my “Kayray Reads to You” podcast feed with Christmas stories! There will a chapter every day from now till Christmas (and maybe after).

Click this link to subscribe in iTunes: Kayray Reads to You

Today, we start with the first chapter of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Although it was first published in 1971, I missed out on it when I was a kid and didn’t discover it until Henry was little. Hope you like it! There are seven chapters and I’ll podcast one chapter every day, so be sure to refresh your podcast list daily, or come to my blog to download directly.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chapter 1

(Click the image to see the book on Amazon and buy your own copy!)

I’m still sick but yesterday I felt well enough to sit in the living room and watch movies with Henry and do some knitting. And I’ve been reading a fantastic book that I got from the library a few weeks ago. I’m not done yet but it’s due tomorrow and I’ve already renewed it once so I really do need to give it back. But I’ll just check it out again as soon as I can so I can finish.

Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It

The story of the pandemic is just crazy. Around 40 million people died, worldwide. Forty million! (Record-keeping was spotty, so the death toll was probably far higher.) The pandemic hit near the end of World War One; more American soldiers were killed by the flu than were killed in combat.

In one division of soldiers who fought on the front lines in France from October 26th until the end of the war, “the flu killed 444 men. The number who were killed, wounded, missing, or captured in the war was 90.”

This was less than 100 years ago, and probably affected almost every family in the US. Probably most of us have a relative who died. (Family legend has it that my Great-Great Aunt Irma died in this flu pandemic but she actually died a couple of years earlier, in 1916.)

But this pandemic was, according to the author, “expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society’s collective memory.”

Why? One theory is that it was just too horrific. So many people died in such a short amount of time, plus it was combined with the brand-new modern horrors of WWI (mustard gas, trench warfare, automatic weapons). People just wanted to forget the whole thing. Understandable, but I want to KNOW about it. I suspect that more people are familiar with the Black Death of the 14th century than are aware of this very comparable outbreak in modern times.

I watched a wonderful episode of American Experience a couple years ago about the 1918 flu pandemic. I need to see if that’s online somewhere and watch it again.

Still sick. Thank you very much for the kind get-well comments and the praise for my recordings :) It thrills me that there are so many of you who love the Melendy family as much as I do! I hope that someday I’ll stop coughing long enough to record some more.

Sick, sick, sick. I stayed in bed all day and watched season one of Boardwalk Empire, which is just as good as everyone says! I’m totally hooked. Kind of glad I didn’t discover it before now, because it sure is helping to pass the time while I recover from whatever-this-is. I don’t think it’s the flu because I never had chills and aches, and I only had one day of fever. Whatever. It’s no fun.

I can smell turkey and onions and other nice Thanksgiving smells through my open window.

If you’re looking for something really great to listen to while you wait for me to finish Spiderweb for Two, may I recommend The Dark is Rising? It’s a completely different kind of story, but it’s so good and so well-written that I can’t imagine anyone not liking it. I’ve been listening to it again a lot lately. It’s on my “karabooks” playlist which I listen to all night. I’ve been falling asleep to a book which is further up on the playlist, so that I wake up to The Dark is Rising.

Here’s chapter one:
Pt1, Ch1 – Midwinter’s Eve
If you like it, you can find the rest on my Kayray Reads to You page.

Well, even though I’m fairly miserable, I’m very very thankful that I’m not sicker, and I’m not in the hospital, and I’m very cozy, and the cat keeps me company all day, and my lovely family keeps checking on me.

Today I feel like I might be starting to get better. I actually got out of bed and sat on the couch with Henry for a few hours. We got caught up on Doctor Who. The Anniversary episode was lots of fun! I am super-excited about Peter Capaldi taking over as The Doctor. I loved Eccleston and liked Tennant, but never could warm up to Smith. I guess I prefer an older, craggier Doctor.

Cough cough cough. All the coughing rattles my brain around and gives me a headache. May I please have a new respiratory system? My factory-installed one is a lemon.

I really try not to complain about my health here but I guess once in a while it’s ok.

So sick.

It has been a week since I first noticed extra coughing and exhaustion.

Monday and Tuesday I stayed in bed, mostly, and rested, hoping to nip it in the bud, but Wednesday I started feeling really bad. Thursday I had a low fever all day and that night the sore throat started. Meanwhile all week I’ve been having great, wracking, horrible coughing fits that make my throat hurt even more and make all my muscles sore. And my head aches so much, and my eyes burn.

I’d like to list all the things I’m grateful for (warm bed, clean water, etc.) but I’m feeling too ill to write any more. Ugh.