#pwpls

Earth Day tip: how to stop junk mail from showing up in your mailbox.

Stop Junk Mail — a Personal Nuisance & Environmental Hazard

Keep trees in the forest. 

Reduce global warming. 

Save water. 

Save time. 

How? 

The Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Mail Preference Service (MPS) lets you opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial mail from many national companies for five years. When you register with this service, your name will be put on a "delete" file and made available to direct-mail marketers and organizations. This will reduce most of your unsolicited mail. However, your registration will not stop mailings from organizations that do not use the DMA's Mail Preference Service. To register with DMA's Mail Preference Service, go to www.dmachoice.org, or mail your request with a $1 processing fee to:

DMAchoice Direct Marketing Association P.O. Box 643 Carmel, NY 10512

Nokesville Neighborhood Library chose April 11 as their Snapshot VA Day. It was a beautiful day and a therapy dog was in the house. Our neighborhood libraries are not very big so they can’t accommodate too many dogs. As much as they may want to.

April 12, 2015, was the day Chinn Park Regional Library chose for their Snapshot VA. Mary Quattlebaum, author of Pirate vs. Pirate visited the library for some pirate fun. But some chose to do homework or other projects.

The children loving reading to our therapy dogs. 

Snapshot VA at Potomac Community Library was on Saturday, April 18. We also had our reading Jamboree the same day where local authors read their books. We also had crafts and therapy dogs. It was a beautiful day and it looks like everyone had fun. A post with doggies will follow.

Here is a small selection of what is new this week at PWPLS:

The residence: Inside the private world of the White House--Kate Anderson Brower

America’s First Families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day.

Awesome sh*t my drill sergeant said: Wit and wisdom from America’s finest--Dan Caddy

Sweat dries. Blood clots. Bones heal. Suck it up, buttercup. The official tie-in book to the wildly popular Facebook page, featuring brand-new crazy, off-the-wall, outrageously funny, and downright “awesome” pearls of wisdom from real-life drill sergeants and instructors from all branches of the military.

So that happened: A memoir--Jon Cryer

In 1986, Jon Cryer won over America as Molly Ringwald’s loyal and lovable best friend, Duckie, in the cult classic Pretty in Pink in a role that set the tone for his three-decade-long career in Hollywood.

Four years in the mountains of Kurdistan: An Armenian boy’s memoir of survival--Aram Haigaz

Armenian Aram Haigaz was only 15 when he lost his father, brothers, many relatives and neighbors, all killed or dead of starvation when enemy soldiers surrounded their village. He and his mother were put into a forced march and deportation of Armenians into the Turkish desert, part of the systematic destruction of the largely Christian Armenian population in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire. His mother urged Aram to convert to Islam in order to survive, and on the fourth day of the march, a Turk agreed to take this young convert into his household.

The Folded Clock: A diary--Heidi Julavits

A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of two years in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits. Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor." The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity.

The underground girls of Kabul: In search of a hidden resistance in Afghanistan--Jenny Nordberg

In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated to “dressed up like a boy” in Dari) is a third kind of child–a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world.

Cake my day!: Easy, eye-popping designs for stunning, fanciful, and funny cakes--Karen Tack

Those cupcaking geniuses, Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, are back, this time with bigger canvases and bolder creations. Everything that can be done with a cupcake can be done better with a cake—with a twelfth of the effort and loads more wow power, using everyday pans, bowls, and even measuring cups.

There was and there was not: A journey through hate and possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and beyond--Meline Toumani

A young Armenian-American goes to Turkey in a “love thine enemy” experiment that becomes a transformative reflection on how we use—and abuse—our personal histories.