Modern Scholars: A Scrapbooking Update

As any one of our friends' children can tell you, our living room has one highlight: We have an old-fashioned radio replica that not only is a radio, but plays tapes and CD's, too. It is cool for the under 4 years old set because (a) the button to turn it on is easy to turn (once Miss Heather and Mr Jeremy give you permission, of course!), (b) when you turn it on, a light goes on and that's right at about eye height for small fry delight, and (c) there's really not much furniture in the living room, so there is plenty of room to dance with wild abandon to the music we put on.

With all the scrapbook work I've been trying to do over the past few months, I've been putting both the radio and the lack of furniture to good use. As past posts have revealed, I keep using all the floor space in the room to spread out and do my work. But as an avid multi-tasker, I have needed some thing to listen to while I crop and tape pages. Normally, I would listen to books on tape, but our library has something new: The Modern Scholar Series.

Instead of books on tape, these are college professor's lectures on tape, and so I've been listening to all sorts of interesting topics -- mostly, because I like the way he's animated on the tapes, I've been listening a lot to this professor, whose specialty is Dante's Divine Comedy, which tends to find its way into most of the other series he's "teaching." I haven't gotten the courage to actually take the online "final exam" for any of these courses, mostly because I'm not listening so much to learn the material as I am to increase my familiarity with the lecture material, but I do have to admit that I've learned a lot, and it was definitely more entertaining than I thought it was when the local librarian was talking to me about it. (I tend to get explanations on whatever is new at our library, since I spend a lot of time there!) If you're interested, you can ask about them at your local library.

(And, even if you're not, you should still visit your local library during the summer. Did you know that large portions of library funding are often set by the participation rates in summer reading program and the ensuing "pick up" in adult readership that happens? Just by checking out some books, you're helping to prove your library's worth to the community as a whole!)