I have an unspoken prayer request today.  If you have one, know that I am praying for you. 

Meanwhile, have some African daisies from my garden.  They make me feel better, and I hope you will be refreshed, too.

We went out to dinner last night for my birthday.  We had a really nice booth in the center of Brio beneath  fabric streamers that radiated to meet above our table.  The five of us had a wonderful time.

I am a people watcher.  There was a couple not too far from us who were dressed up for a Tuesday, at least compared to me!  They were very attractive but not very animated.  They pretty much just ate.

Before the first couple left, a second couple was seated.  It's funny, but except for the colors the ladies wore, they were carbon copies of each other--late twenties, very nicely dressed.  Both were right in my line of sight, so I would have had to stare at my plate to miss them.  Anyway, the first couple soon made their stately exit, apparently used to being the center of attention.

Then our waiter brought the first course to the other couple.  He had been very efficient and charming as he served us, but he proved he was only human.  A sharp knife slid from the wooden tray, tip down, to land at the second young man's feet.  I cringed for our waiter, but there was no reaction from the gentleman or the lady.  The waiter brought out a clean knife.

Then as I watched, the second young man caught his date's hand and pulled it next to his heart.  Then they tipped their heads together and asked the blessing.  I was so moved I had to look away. 

That's what I want for my kids.

Thank you for the kind comments and birthday wishes.  Come back soon.

I used Random.org  (http://www.random.org/) to generate the winning number from valid entries--there were 28. 

I'm happy to announce that the winner of Ev's book, Coin-Clue Puzzles, is bunnybox9!  I will be contacting you today, bunny.

Please visit Ev's Web site and look around--she shares many valuable resources.

http://echristensen.atspace.com/

  You can also read Nancy I. Sanders's  interview with Ev here (bonus photo!):

http://nancyisanders.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/author-interview-evelyn-b-christensen/

In honor of Ev and her math skills, how many different ways can you rename my new age, fifty?  Leave your way in the comments.  And believe you me, I heard many different ways over breakfast! :)

Thanks again! 

***Entries are now closed--Winner announced July 1!***

You are going to love meeting my friend Evelyn B. Christensen.  She's a delight!  And to make things even more exciting,  Ev has graciously offered you a chance to win Coin-Clue Puzzles!  Just leave a comment with a way to reach you by 10 pm EST on Monday, June 30th.  I’ll announce the winner on July 1st in celebration of my 50th birthday! (PS: Ev's birthday is July 9...) 

  And be sure to join Mary aka Canadagirl for more great Shows and Tells.  The link is at the lower right hand corner of this page.  You can also win more great books at Gretchen's Jewels in my crown...Someday Summer Book Giveaway:

http://jewelsinmycrownsomeday.blogspot.com/2008/06/wahoo-party-my-place-book-carnival.html

And now, here's Ev!

1.      Ev, thank you for talking with us today.  What does writing do for you?  What are you           looking for when you sit down to write?

 I’m delighted to be with all of you.  Thanks for inviting me.  Writing provides an opportunity for me to express my creativity (which I definitely feel is a gift from God).  When I sit down to write I’m looking for a way to share my ideas with others—most frequently with kids.  Often I’m hoping to create something which will make learning more fun for them.

2.      Why do you feel you have so many acceptances for your writing?  I like St. Augustine’s quote “Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you.”  I attribute my success in writing to God, but I do work hard at it.  I study the market and try to match my work with publishers’ needs.  If a new market opens up, I try to send something to them promptly before they get swamped with other submissions.

3.      What is there about poetry that appeals to you?  Is it the mathematical side, like meter and rhyme scheme?  When I was younger I wrote mostly free verse and I think I liked it because it was just a beautiful way to express a thought.  Now I write mostly for children so I write poems with a set rhyme and meter.  I think I enjoy writing these partly because it’s almost like a puzzle to see if I can make it all fit together so it works.  Poem: http://storiesforchildrenmagazine.org/VisitingtheDentist.aspx

4.      You are as much at home with stories and poetry as you are with math and logic.  How did you get to be so well-rounded?  Umm…genes maybe with a good dose of nurturing?  My mother loved art, languages, literature, and writing; my father loved math, science, and engineering.  I think I got a good balance of both.  I really do feel incredibly blessed to have had the parents I did. 

 Story “Dandruff Prank” -- http://storiesforchildren.tripod.com/id21.html 

5.      I’ve shared with you that math is not my best subject.  How can you help somebody like me conquer math phobia?  Doing math that’s fun is often a good way to get over the phobia.  Start out with some easy math puzzles where you know you’ll succeed and gradually work up to harder ones.  Also, try to make sure you understand the why when you’re doing math.  When I was coming along in school we were just told the rules of how to do math (like in subtraction—just mark out this number and put a 1 up here), never the reasons why it worked.  It was all very hocus pocus and I never appreciated the beauty of math until many years later.  (As a kid, I was good at math but I didn’t particularly like it until I got to college.)

6.      How do you write a book like Coin-Clue Puzzles?  What do you want kids to take away from this book?  Writing a book like Coin-Clue Puzzles is fun because I spend a lot of time just playing around to create the puzzles.  It’s a great way to combine both the precision of left brain thinking with the creativity of the right brain—definitely a satisfying experience.  One thing you learn to do in creating these kinds of puzzles is to be very flexible in your thinking.  When you give clues for the puzzles you want to give enough information so they can be solved, but you don’t want the clues to make the solution obvious.  Therefore you have to think of roundabout ways to convey the same information.  With a book like Coin-Clue Puzzles I want kids to have fun using their brains.  I want them to learn to read carefully, to think logically, and to be willing to try alternative solutions.

7.      What's involved in writing a rebus?  A rebus is a short story (usually 100-200 words) which uses small pictures for some of the words.  The stories are wonderful ways to encourage young children to be interested in reading because the children can help with the story as an adult reads it to them.  Writing a rebus is a challenge because of the low word count and the need for “drawable” nouns.  Most editors also like the stories to have a twist or surprise at the end.

8.      What is your favorite kind of writing? Puzzle writing is my favorite, probably because it’s what I’m best at.

9.      Do you have any writing goals you have not yet realized?  Oh, yes.  I have a couple of picture books which I’d love to have published.

10.   You are a teacher.  Do you have any math tips, poetry tips, writing tips?  How about helpful resources to share?  A lot of the resources I’d want to share are listed on my website on the Teachers page.  There are links to helpful teaching sites.  Plus, I have oodles of activity sheets which can be downloaded.  I add new activities every week and also new puzzles on the Puzzle page.  http://echristensen.atspace.com

11.   When I ask you to pray for me, I know you will not forget.  You also have a color-coded system to keep track of your writing and submissions.  Do your organizational skills spill over into your home life?  Is there a place for everything?  There are some areas of my life in which I’m very organized.  My classroom was always very organized and I’m very organized with my writing. But my house?  No.  I always say—if you want to feel good about your house come visit mine!  I don’t enjoy cleaning and I’m too much of a collector.  That wonderful gift of creativity has its down side.  It means I can think of multiple potential uses for any given item, so it’s hard to throw things away.  I’ve also never agreed philosophically with our “throw-away generation.”  (God has entrusted the care of the earth to us and we’re doing a horrible job of it.)  Being a primary teacher was also an excuse for collecting countless books, materials, and hands-on items which could help kids learn.  On top of all that I’m also very sentimental so it’s hard for me to throw away old letters, photos, memorabilia, etc.  So to answer you question—Is there a place for everything?—sort of, but there’s just way too much stuff!

12.  Let’s talk about Kentucky.  I’m proud that my mom and all four of my grandparents were born in Kentucky.  What would you like people to know about your home state?  It’s a beautiful state!  I love the rolling horse farms in central Kentucky; I also love the mountains in eastern Kentucky where I grew up (my husband says I should call them “hills,” that they aren’t big enough to be “mountains”—he’s from out west).  The people in the mountains are good-hearted, down-to-earth folks—I love’em.  The people in Lexington, where I live now, are very diverse, but you might be interested to know that the city was recently listed as one of the top ten most educated cities in the US, based on graduate degrees.  (I bet that’s a surprise to most people.)

13.  How do you apply your faith to your writing?  I try to keep in mind the verse that says, “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God.” (Col.3:17) For me, applying my faith to my writing is a matter of attitude more than specific output.  It might be hard to see any connection between math puzzle books and Christian faith, but if I’m trying to use whatever gifts God has given me for his glory then I think he will find ways to use my books—I can confidently leave the “how” in his hands.  I do dedicate each of my books to God and include those dedications on my web pages.

14.  My blog name comes from my favorite Bible verse.  What’s your favorite Bible verse?  One of my favorite verses is Romans 8:28.  My favorite chapter is Psalm 121.  We have a family tradition which makes that Psalm very special.  Whenever someone is ready to leave on a trip we all hold hands in a circle and say it from memory, even the little kids.  “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth and even forevermore” is such a wonderful promise.  We used that Psalm in both my parents’ memorial services.  We also used it in our wedding 30 years ago.  Our wedding was outdoors in the mountains so “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…” was perfect.

15.  What makes you laugh really hard? Absurd things (I laughed out loud when I read your question #11).  Also toddlers.

16.   Where can we find your books?  A lot of educational stores carry my MindWare books.  If you go to my website I have a link for each book to the publisher.  You can order online or ask them to send you a catalog. (Sometimes the catalog has sales which aren’t listed on the website.)

 Books Authored by Evelyn B. Christensen

http://echristensen.atspace.com

Venn Perplexors, Levels A, B, C, and D*

Tan-Tastic Tangrams

Subtraction Secrets

Addition Adventures

Multiplication Mosaics

More Multiplication Mosaics

Division Designs**

Fraction Finders

Decimal Destinations

Math Path Puzzles, Levels A and B

Tactic Twisters, Levels A and B

Clip Clue Puzzles, Levels A and B

Fraction Frolics

Addition Arrays

Subtraction Squares

Multiplication Mysteries

Division Decoders

Spellbinders*, Levels A and B

Adventures with Area

Math Map Puzzles**, Levels A, B, and C

Coin Conundrums

Coin-Clue Puzzles

Rod-Clue Puzzles*

Write 30 Forms of Poetry about Rabbits…***

*Co-authored with my daughter Susan E. Christensen               

**Co-authored with my son Stephen M. Christensen

***I wrote the 30 poetry examples for this ebook

Don't forget to stop by here tomorrow for a chance to win a book!  You will love meeting my good friend. 

First, a couple of photos of a summer school talk audience last Friday down in Ripley, Ohio.  Ripley is where the Rankin family had their station of the Underground Railroad.  My books Across the Wide River and The Light Across the River are about the Rankins and their Underground Railroad adventures.  I had to take two photos to get everyone in!  The tech guy in the green shirt is my PowerPoint guru husband.

Thanks for being great listeners, RULH kids!

Now to this morning.  We are briefly down one car, so I drove my daughter to her college summer class.  Yes, she looooved that.  :-)   The class is only an hour and fifteen minutes long, so I didn't have enough time to go home, and I'm not really a downtown kind of gal.  Luckily I knew of a bookstore nearby and I planned to browse happily--did I mention it's almost my birthday?  Birthday $$$ will be coming in.

Then came the big dilemma.  I write books.  Bookstore I planned to visit doesn't stock 'em yet.  Should I take copies of both books and talk to the manager?  I've done it before without success, even when my son worked at a bookstore cafe.  I was really draggy this morning, too, since for over an hour we had huddled in the basement for a tornado warning at 11:30 PM.  Not at my best, and it can be quite humbling to ask a general market bookstore to stock Christian fiction by a local author.

I decided to go for it.  I had a fleeting thought last night while the storm was raging (and was it a scary storm, with a huge wall cloud illuminated by almost constant lightning).  "I think there's a Borders near campus, too."  I confirmed that this morning and decided to go there with books in hand and pride at low mast.  I knew enough to say, "Hi, I was in the area and thought I'd drop by with a couple of my books for you.  Here's an e-release sheet from my publisher."  The manager flipped my book to the back cover.  "Christian fiction?  What's it about?" 

So there it was: another failure.  Doomed before I began.  But I plunged ahead.  "It's about a family who ran a station of the Underground Railroad in Ohio."  She looked interested.  I continued, "Have you ever heard of Rankin House in Ripley?"

Get ready!  She said, "Oh, yeah!  My mom was born in Ripley!  She lived on the hill.  She used to play on the steps when she was little.  Back in the 30's."

These steps.  Not likely she was familiar with them unless she knew Ripley well.

So I told her I was in Ripley just last week, talking to kids about the Rankins.  She told me she would stock my books and display them face out, and I could come in and sign them.  She gave me her card and confided that they do signings, but it was better when the signing was connected with some sort of local angle, like a newspaper story in my hometown paper.  When that happened, she would be happy to hold one.

I thanked her and shook her hand.  Then I went to the restroom and cried a little.  My faith is so small and God is so big.