Well, Erika is right, I did up and leave her and did have a baby boy. And look at how terrible I’ve been, not even updating the blog for a WHOLE YEAR!!! It is time for a fresh start! Here are a few pictures of some shirts I was forced to buy for my son. Totally semi-hip.

I crashed my computer last night.  The only computer I have left to do my very important work (like blog posts) and I crashed it.  Sadness consumes me.  Was going to post pictures of all my work in the garden, but now you all will have to wait. 

It’s been a long time, folks!  Since we last spoke, Alicia has up and moved hundreds of miles away and had a beautiful baby boy (I might be biased because I am his godmother).  I’ve gotten engaged and fixing my house up to accomodate two teenage stepsons soon.  Egads!  Anyway, I think Alicia and I should get this thing back and running.  What do you think?

Semi-hip is back up and running, thanks to the tech-savvy awesomeness of our best PHP nerd, Josh Weiland! Woo-hoo!  And what better way to welcome ourselves back than a very funny movie trailer for the new movie “Vampires Suck.”  Enjoy!

We here at Semi-hip have been informed that Blogger will no longer play ball with those of its constituents who upload their blog via FTP. This is a very small majority of bloggers, they say, but it just so happens that Semi-Hip falls in to this category.

So. What does this mean for us? This means that as of March 16th (or somewhere around there, I can’t remember the exact date they gave) Semi-Hip will no longer be able to publish our blog posts with Blogger.

Now, we could use one of their pre-existing templates, but that would take away from the fun of our unique and Semi-Hip personality. So instead, we have decided that we will migrate over to WordPress. They are more Semi-Hip any way. And thanks to our very best fan EVER, Josh W., our transition should not be too bad. Thanks Josh!

Our address, www.semihiplibrarian.com will remain the same.

Have you seen this? These nifty old books are actually a hard case for your laptop!

Interested? Buy it here!

Have you ever noticed that whenever an author dies, their books just fly off the shelves? Or you constantly get a question like this one I had today: “Do you have that Salinger book?” Hmm……
Here’s an article on “The Death Effect.”

J.D. Salinger’s Death Sparks e-Run on ‘Catcher in the Rye’
By JEFF BERCOVICI

It happens all the time: An author/musician/actor dies, and sales of his most famous book/album/film immediately go through the roof. In the case of J.D. Salinger’s passing Thursday, we were able to quantify and track the “death effect” in real time thanks to the sales rank feature on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

Reports that the 92-year-old writer had died hit the web around 1 p.m. Eastern time. At 1:15 p.m., the most popular paperback edition of Catcher in the Rye was ranked at No. 565 among all books on Amazon. Barnes & Noble had it at No. 826.

A little over two hours later, it had climbed to No. 202 on Amazon and 223 on Barnes & Noble. That sounds like a huge increase, but that far down the list, a relatively modest change in volume can produce a big jump in rankings.

But then the sales rush began in earnest. By 5:30 p.m., Catcher in the Rye had cracked the top 100 on Barnesandnoble.com and risen all the way to No. 23 on Amazon. The last time I checked, at 6:30, it was No. 13 on Amazon and No. 61 on Barnes & Noble.

What a delicious piece of fiction! A truly precocious eleven year old girl delves into the gory details of a murder in her family’s cucumber patch with the zeal and insight of Sherlock Holmes. The year is 1950 and Flavia de Luce lives in a giant manor house with her older sisters and her reclusive father. But Flavia is no ordinary little girl. She has a knack for chemistry and a penchant for poison, spending most of her time performing experiments in the manor’s giant chemistry lab.

When a man breathes his dying breath into her face, exhaling a smelly “Vale!” as he expires, Flavia realizes that the man was murdered – she could smell the poison on his breath. Knowing that she is smarter than everyone around her, she throws herself into discovering the secrets surrounding the murder. She is Sherlock Holmes, in manner and intelligence, in a little girl’s body.

What a truly fun read! And good news! There are to be six more in the series!

AND! If you are uber-nerdy, there is a Flavia de Luce fan club:
http://flaviafanclub.ning.com/

Happy Reading!

From The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley:

pg. 58:
As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  No . . . eight days a week.

pg. 61:
“Yes?” she said, peering over her spectacles.  They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science.

The article of clothing that got many comments today? My socks. Apparently, stripey socks are semi-hip. Who was the first to report on this? That would be yours truly.=)