Dear World,

The farthest I have ever been on my own steam is probably three days.    Mmm...three whole delicious, empowering days.           Okay...make that two...becuz psst...I cheated on the last day.         

However, since no one was any the wiser, lets call it three days in case the-Guinness longest-record-keeper-guys ever decide to ...er...um...ahem...record me. Hilarious.     
  

My three-day-food-strike was not done to bring neighboring countries to their knees nor was it engineered to soften God for great crops and neither was it attempted for weight loss......rather it was for a trifle more outrageous reason....my starvation spree was my brilliant strategy to keep my parents off my ‘book' case for good!       

You see, they made the mistake of threatening to burn all my storybooks!  Books that belong to the school library!

The nerves!!
 
You know, they would have gone insane if they had to raise kids in the x-box and you-tube age!   (No wonder Life gave them small challenges, and one in the form of a daughter who was addicted to storybooks and nature....and oh yes, daydreaming...;-)

I mean...where on my forehead was it written...okay...never mind my forehead...where in the commandment is it written that ‘thou shall not read too much?"

The blantant nerves! 

First they brought me into this story-infested world,(against my will) fill my head up with Wynkyn and Blinkyn stories and then try to take the Nod part away from me...like what the heck???

And if you had parents like mine, you would see it the same way, trust me.   And the way I saw it was that it was a drastic situation and there was no other way to reason with them except through drastic gandhi-like-starvation measures........

.........Oh, they were not ‘bad' parents but to a 10 year old, trust me, they were book-terminators in human habit.

Anyway,  since I hated cooked food in those days, the food-deprivation spree was easy-peasy....and psst, while I gave my parents the silent treatment, I hid under my bed and read all the same old, same old storybooks I had *borrowed* (another word for "keeps"...either that or leave the books at the mercy of the field mice;-) from my school library donated by the Ranfurly Library, a British service that donated new and used books to developing worlds...(I still find it hard to believe that my parents gave me everything except books ;-)

Sigh.  Lack of material to read was not my only problem.  I got blamed for every unsolved mystery.

There was this time when my house almost burned to the ground and yours truly got blamed all because when the cry of "fire, fire" hit the silence, instead of running towards the fire like my moths-to-doomsday siblings, I ran to the kitchen, filled a large bowl with water and ran up the stairs to rescue my books....

And mommy/daddy of course remembered this incident.  Instead of applauding their daughter for her insight and bravery and trying to save her precious books, they put two and two together and came up with "carelessness."

Yes. "Carelessness."   Go ahead and gasp if you need to...but they claimed that I left a lamp burning haphazardly....oh who knows...with the kind of imagination that posessed them, I bet they saw me reading under the bed with a night lamp....

The awful nerves!!!

Ya know!!  There was this time when my mom gave away a whole third of my wardrobe to the needy folks without asking me!!  So why was I upset about skirts and dresses if all I cared about was books?  Hello!!!  My books were hidden in that very same box of unwanted clothes!!

God!  I gave my mother the silent treatment for two whole days with plenty of poisonous glares in between, letting her know loud and clear that I put her right up there with field mice who somehow believed they were nature's paper-shredders...

...Ya think  mother learned a lesson from my silent treatment?  Nope...she never did.   Ya think I learned from my experience?  Er...yes....but my kids will demand to differ.  You see, when they were younger, I kept on giving away their toys to the salvation people without asking their permission. 


Oh for Elmo's sake...what's the point of asking them anyway, they would only say ‘no'....I mean which kid really know the true meaning of  ‘clutter...' or the ‘joy of giving."???


My kids are a lot older now but they still look at every ‘garbage bag' awaiting pick up with high suspicions....and lol...there are times ‘dejavu' happened for each time I tried to ship Elmo off for adoption, I got the feeling I had done this before.......(lol, either Elmo jumped out of the sack or someone sneaked him back in the house when I wasn't looking ;-)


One item my kids get to keep for always....yes you guessed right....I cannot bear to part with any of their storybooks ;-)

Yours truly has truly run out of steam....
Amy :-)