I love books, I read all the time. It didn't start out that way. When I was a little kid, I went to a country school and you had to know how to read proficiently by the time you left kindergarten. And I had a really hard time when I first started learning to read. And I remember my mother worked nights, and she would come home in the morning from the hospital and, and I had to read to her before I went to school and I can't even imagine the torture that must have been for her after working all night, having to listen to somebody who did not read well read to her, out of a children's book no less. So anyway, I had kind of a rough start and I never got into it, reading, myself. But I loved to be read to, 'cause I can remember at school frequently, grade school teachers would have a book that they would read every day to the students and I just absolutely loved it. In fact, that’s the first time I ever heard Anne of Green Gables, was from a teacher that read to us every afternoon. And it was just amazing, I just loved that, but I couldn't get myself to read proficiently enough that I could get into, you know, feeling the story, feeling part of the story, until I probably was, gosh, I don't know, third or fourth grade, maybe, that my aunt, one of my aunts sent me a Bobbsey Twin book for Christmas. And I was not that thrilled about it, but, you know, I was gracious. And later during the winter, I remember this so clear, that one time I was, I think it was a Sunday afternoon. Everybody in my family was curled up at a chair or someplace wrapped up in a blanket, 'cause it was usually cold in the house in the wintertime, reading a book. And I didn't have anybody to play with and I didn't know what to do with myself, and then I remembered that book that my aunt had given me, The Bobbsey Twins. And so I thought, "Well, I'll give it a try." And so I sat down with that book, and I like to say the magic happened. The magic happened for me that I had learned to read well enough that I was…

Interesting note, my girlfriend had a wire down in her backyard after a storm blew it down. And the electric company showed up and did their part, but then said that there was a PVC pipe on the side of her house holding a particular portion of the wire, and the fact that the PVC pipe broke was her problem. It was on the consumer side, not on the electric company side. As a result, she had to -- I'd never realized that it was this complicated, she had to go to City Hall and she had to get -- I think the, what, permit pulled? No, she had to get something pulled, like, why am I blanking on the word? She had to go get paperwork for her house pulled. She had to present it to an electrician. Had to hire an electrician who had to fix the problem and then she had to reach back out to the electric company after she had an inspector come through, and the electric company had to essentially charge her -- 'essentially?' -- not essentially, they did, they charged her $122 to reconnect the power afterward. To come back out and flip the switch.  So, when I went over to her house to take a look at the wire, we were both like, "Well, we gotta call the electric company and they'll come through and they'll fix it, it should be fine by morning." And instead, she ended up shelling out more than $700 just to get the PVC pipe that was encasing the wire replaced, and just so AEP, the electric company around this way, could come through and flip the switch. A real learning experience honestly, and I'm chuckling about it, but she certainly was not expecting that this was gonna be a almost $1,000 endeavor when she saw the wire down. So that was a big bummer.

I used to read three or four books at one time when I was a kid. And I used to have multiple books from the library and from my own library going at the same [time]. Sometimes got into trouble because I didn't get up and move as fast as I was supposed to sometimes, and I didn't get moving on my chores sometimes as fast as I was supposed to. And sometimes my father, who didn't like to read much, couldn't understand why I read some of the books I read over and over and over again, and I'll get to that more later. One summer, when I was about 13, I was supposed to do some house cleaning for my mother and I did not do it when I was supposed to, and she was very busy and she got very disgusted with me. And she threatened me that if I didn't get my stuff done around the house, she would not take me to the library. Well, we lived about a mile and a half from the library and it was a walk I took -- a frequent, frequently, because it was next to my elementary school and I sometimes walked there when I was a kid. So, I thought, "Well, really doesn't matter if she doesn't want to take me, it's summer, I can walk to the library." So, I walked. I did my chores, but I also walked to the library and my mother laughed at me when I came back. And she never really threatened me with that again because she knew if I really wanted to go to the library, I would just walk. And one of my really good friends was also a big reader, and if I wanted to go to the library, most of the time, one of us would go, we would go together. So, we also at the age of 13 had to get notes from our mothers, to leave at the library, saying that we were able to read certain things. The thing I really wanted to read at 13 was Gone with the Wind. It had just come out at the movie theater for the first time in many, many years. And my mother had taken both me and my friend to see it. And we loved it and it was great and I wanted to…