Making an E-Book with Designrr...We'll see if it's as easy as they advertise. Could be a way to help many 'book maker' dreams come true for you and your tribe.

My first experience with seeing my name in print in a newspaper for something I said was in second grade in our Kellogg student newspaper. When I got to Eighth grade I recalled that paper was put out by the older students, so I asked my teacher when we'd be doing that. She informed me there was no current publication but if I wanted to start one... Need she say more? I did the math of about 170 families versus many more students (maybe 250 but that's my guess).

This was back in the day of mimeograph, 1976  in a small town. I would personally have to print up the copies by copying each page on a purple ink-filled machine and I do recall seeing even 35 years later, a wheell of purple spin round and round. I wanted this more modern paper to be informative and entertaining with an artisitc flair.

I asked most of the 16 girls and 6 guys in my class.Maybe we had 26 at one point in our career as the biggest and most boisterous class to work our way up through the grades and literally up the hall way before the New Addition plugged the little kids into a separate wing and turned outr multi-purpose room aka gym and auditorium complete with a cool stage we used for a play when I was in third grade. into a  Library.

They did add a real gym in time, with 'Murphy tables' that folded up into the walls (actually two tables which got sandwiched and locked into place.) Mostly they stayed in place, but with the basketball games and wild gym classes, there could be an occassional 'falling out.'

Now back to the Kellogg Journal, the coolest version likely to date of a school newspaper that ran at least monthly and maybe more. Students were happy to step into roles that fit their talent, with a Cover Editor, Sports and Class Editors for each grade (or maybe lower and upper grades, it's been a while.),

Then News and a page of fun riddles and Ripley's Believe it or Not (hope we did not infrings on copyright, but it was not sold just given out.) The whole paper was about 8 or so pages front and back. That meant an assembly line of putting those pages out in order with cover then page 1, 3, 5, 7 and so forth and stapling those together then getting them to eldest student in each family.

I am now wondering if they really always made it home. I'd like to think that the family was able to enjoy it together.

Now I know the personality of students who would handwrite their copy out in pen likely carried some extra energy and evoked pride in parents and teachers alike. My future son Kaelan would said There is evidence that the teachers may have known what they were doing by teaching students the things they did' in his 8th grade speech, and likely that rang true for our community. My son Kaelan Paton essay sadly but heartwarmingly is read on youtube by his former writing teacher, Monica Connor, during his memorial service from 2009 abotu a month after his passing when helping to save a friend from dangerous water.

We had a wonderful set of middle school teachers including the late Howard Reed, whose stepsons were possibly abducted on 'believe it or not' a spaceship when they were kids up the road from Falls Village Ct, in Sheffield MA.

There is more information at www.tomreed.info online (which in 1977 sounded like science fiction if ever we had heard of computers..oh yes, I did take basic programming in high school and even learned of Word Processing at Vassar in the early 1980s which saved my brain (okay butt but my whole shebang of a self and college education) which would not be the best at organizing ideas and staying on topic..surprise,surprise.

I will put this post in park but want to add the next headline in case I get distracted (who, me?). See www.onedrop.today and get smart about Preventing Diabetes With Self-Monitoring and Modifying Diet with your doctor's advice etc if you can get them to give it to you. As one person said simply, "the insurance business is not interested in prevention...and frankly, neither is medicine.'

I have friends in the medical field saying essentially the same thing (and that people take too many antibiotics which can make them less effective) about twenty years ago. So while some things change, some parts of our stories stay the same. What page would you like to write 'for real out there in the world'? Feel free to brainstorm and free write in a comment, and as long as it resonates with this side of Mars and decency, I'll approve it as Editor-in-Chief of this blog, www.livfully.org.