Happy Book Lovers Day!

August 9th is Book Lovers Day, widely celebrated around the world (or at least on the Internet). Since a lot of our A to Z challenge participants are authors or book bloggers, we though it would be nice to acknowledge this cheerful and bookish day.

So.

HAPPY BOOK LOVERS DAY!

If you have a book that was born from an A to Z theme, please drop links in the comments!

To celebrate, I wanted to share my favorite reading challenge with you. There are a lot of amazing reading challenges out there - please share YOUR favorites in the comments!

The challenge I have been enjoying the most in the past years is run on a Hungarian book site (moly.hu) by community members. It's called Polymath Training. Every January they announce 12 topics that participants have to read freely selected nonfiction books for. Topics range widely from astronomy to animation to church history to classical music. 11 topics are the same, the 12th is generated randomly for each participant (using Wiki articles). I have found amazing books through this challenge that I would have never found (or been interested in) otherwise, and I learned a whole lot of fascinating things about the world. Whenever I finish the list early, I usually generate some more topics for myself just for the heck of it. There really are no prizes or anything, just the adventure of discovery.

Whatever your genres and tastes are, I hope you have a great time reading today! :)

World Emoji Day

 Happy World Emoji!

Do you know why we celebrate World Emoji Day on July 17th?

It's because on the original calendar emoji, the date shown was July 17th! This is what I get when I search for a calendar emoji:

But the typical calendar emoji we can insert easily is more vague: 📆

If I had to pick a favorite emoji, it would probably be 😈

In my youth, I spent a lot of time in chat rooms (I'm showing my middle-age) and we used emojis before they actually existed. >:-) was my favorite then, and that has continued into adult-hood. But now that we have the pineapple🍍, it might take the favorite slot for me now. My husband and I used it so much that he named me Pineapple in his phone and all of our rooms have pineapples everywhere!

What is your favorite emoji? Drop it in the comments!

A to Z 2023 Road Trip Is Here!

It's time for the Post A to Z Road Trip 2023! This is a great opportunity to catch up on the many blogs you would have liked to have spent more time visiting, but didn't during the Challenge, and a chance to visit the blogs of people who did the Challenge that you never got to. And, if you're one of those people who did the Challenge but didn't get a lot of visitors, this is a way to let people know that you'd appreciate a visit.

Here's what you do:

1. Sign up for the Road Trip. There's a place where you can put in the URL of a post that you would like visitors to read first. Then, grab a copy of the Road Trip badge from the graphics page (if you want) for your home page to use as a "bumper sticker."
2. Get copies of both the Road Trip List and the Master List. Both will be useful.
3. Start with the Road Trip list and visit the blogs of the people who signed up there. Take some time to read their blog and their Challenge entries. Leave comments where you feel led to do so, and make sure you identify yourself as a Road Trip participant. Leave a link to your blog so they can return the favor.
4. Then, if you have the time and inclination to do so, visit some of the blogs on the Master List that you didn't get the chance to visit. Even if they didn't sign up for the Road Trip, I'm sure they'd appreciate a visit.

There's no set time limit to the Road Trip (i.e. no specific end date), so if you wanted to, you could visit everyone who was part of this year's Challenge between now and the start of next year's Challenge. If that's what you want to do, go for it! Most importantly, have fun!

Happy Motoring!