So like, one of the interesting things about seeing any famous painting in person is that these images, you know, their images are - especially in the age of the internet, are just everywhere, right? Like, the amount of times I've seen The Birth of Venus on t-shirts, online, in ads, in YouTube videos, in, you know, whatever. Same with Nighthawks, same with, you know, The Old Guitarist. You cannot escape many of the images of the world's most famous paintings. And, you know, just because I'm a philosophy major and I like to talk about this kind of thing, I was reading an essay, and to be fair I was reading it late at night and I don't remember all of it and some of my knowledge of this essay, despite the fact that I've read it, is, like, summarized from YouTube videos. So I guess I'm not, you know - this is probably a bit of an under simplification. But I was reading an essay by the literary critic and philosopher, theologian, and whatever. He's really all of those things, yet kind of none of them, but Walter Benjamin. He wrote this work called the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". In it, he kind of, you know, wrote that that art has, I guess, I think what he calls an aura. In other words, the fact that this image is existing in some kind of object, presents a kind of special effect to the viewer in that you kind of recognize kinda the physicality of the image and it's uniqueness as that particular - the uniqueness of the image as that particular object, right? The Mona Lisa is the one and only one Mona Lisa. And yes, there may be copies, but there's something, you know, historical and kind of physically present in the object that makes it, you know, unique. That's the Mona Lisa. That's the - and he worried that in the age of mechanical reproduction, right? Where copies of these works are mass produced, and this is long before the internet too, that the art was a little bit in danger of being cheapened, of losing that aura, of losing that significance because - in large part, because of it's the sudden lack of uniqueness, the lack of uniqueness of the image, right? But I think his concerns, I guess, may have been…

Our furnace went out, and my husband - after having sat through the ice storm and having no power for eight days during that, the power came on and then it was out again two days later. We were out for three days. And then just the other day, poof, there's no heat. The electricity's on. We had 30% power in our tank, or fuel in our tank. There should be no reason for it to go out other than the furnace broke. It acted like it was turning over and doing - making the noises it was supposed to make, but it just wasn't producing any heat. So I called the landlord and he come right over with the heater to heat the house up. It didn't work. It stayed pretty chilly in here for a couple of nights, but he put the item on order, the part that we needed. And it took a couple days for it to get going, but it finally - finally, he fixed it. And he ordered a new thermostat, that's the last thing, but it's working without this thermostat. So that's a good thing. But I'm really tired of this winter taking out our power. I packed up the puppy and my husband, I went to his mother's house when we were eight days without power. God love her, she took us in.

We have something I'm looking forward to. Well, coming up this week at work, we have Battle of the Books coming up. So fifth graders read 10 books that were chosen - before I started, the books were chosen. But I did get to help write the questions for the books this year. Next year, I'll get to help select the books. And we... Yeah, so there's probably around 50 fifth graders who are coming in in teams and they will compete answering the questions about these 10 books. And I have never participated in a Battle of the Books before so I'm kind of interested to see how it goes. How the kids do, how hard or easy our questions were. It's kind of - I felt like it was a little bit hard for us to judge what a hard or easy question will be for these fifth graders. So we'll see how that pans out. And I also contacted all the authors of the 10 books. Well, nine authors and Roald Dahl's estate, to see if they would send any, you know, congratulation words or a video or something. And I think we had seven out of the ten authors responded and sent something in. Some of them sent even like bookmarks and stickers and things like that, several videos and a couple, you know, written things that we'll read out to the kids. So I think they'll be kind of - I think they'll be surprised about that. You know, hearing from the authors, seeing some of them, and getting, you know, congratulations from the authors of these books that they read, so I'm excited to see how they react to all of that.