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Spent the day in Bainbridge yesterday talking to kids and signing books. Mostly signing. Thanks to a generous grant from the Books With Senator Libous program, we smashed my previous one-day record and sold five hundred and ten books. Piled up, they made a stack almost eight feet tall. I signed almost all of them. Later, on the drive home, my arm fell off.     

It was a fun visit, especially since we did the presentation in the Bainbridge Town Hall Theater. They bused the kids over from the elementary school and they filled the seats and a good bit of the balcony. It’s a great space, and I felt a little like I was on vaudeville.

My thanks go out to everyone who helped make this visit possible, including Dolores Nabinger, Cathy Sherrick, David Leib, Bev Fox, and Michelle Shirkey and everyone at Greenlawn.

Here’s some terrific artwork by the Ms. Paoletti’s Greenlawn art students:

Hamagrael is one of the closest schools to me, yet it never knew exactly where it was until last Friday. It’s a small, neighborhood school hidden away down a series of side streets. And it has a strange name.

I had always assumed the name was Dutch. (Around Albany, it seems like almost everything has a Dutch name.) But it turns out the story is much stranger: Hamagrael was named to honor the children of the farmer who originally owned the land. It’s Harold plus Mary plus Grace plus Ellen (or Eleanor - there was some debate on this point.)

In any case, Hamagrael really rolled out the red carpet, and even the principal, Mr. K., got into the spirit. My thanks to Ellen Eisenbraun, Joan Martelle, Christine Schade, and the librarian, Mrs. Held, for pulling everything together. It was a really fun day.

I leave you with some terrific pirate drawings from the walls of Hamagrael (click to enlarge).

Visited the Discovery Center in Binghamton, NY on Saturday, but didn’t have time to take any pictures. Luckily, this blogger did. Thanks!

Last night I slept in the library. How cool is that?

I’m speaking in the Old Forge, NY, library today, and they have a small apartment upstairs where authors stay and do writing residencies. (An author living in the library - why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?)

I felt a little like Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode, Time Enough at Last. Thankfully, I didn’t break my glasses.

What a difference a week or two can make. Seems like only yesterday I was down in Austin, TX, and the weather was in the 80’s. Today I found myself in Alexandria Bay, NY, just a few short minutes from the Canadian border, and there was snow on the ground.

Even the schools themselves couldn’t have been more different. The district in Texas had thirty elementary schools, some of which had over a thousand kids. The Alexandria Central School district, by contrast, is entirely in one building, K-12, and has about 800 kids total.

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I spent the last week and a half in Round Rock, Texas, just north of Austin, visiting schools. Click below to read the highlights.

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