Update on the awesomeness

Thank you for all your suggestions on my post asking for gift ideas for an anonymous 10-year-old Harry Potter/anime/fantasy fan. While I really wanted to give her manga, reading the guidelines a bit more closely revealed that they mentioned that batteries were a luxury item, and therefore to avoid gifts that required them. While manga does not, in general, require batteries,* most of them require purchasing more manga to get the full story, and I didn't want to leave a young reader hanging on a cliffhanger if she might not have the ability to get more (and might not have the ability to get to the library, either, as I don't know her circumstances).

So I ended up going for the first four books in Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series, as they formed a complete story arc, with additional stories later if she wanted to explore more in the world. Don't know her reading level, but I figure if she can read Harry Potter she can read this series just fine**, and I know she's got an affinity for the "school of magic" genre. :) And I left in the receipt in case she had already read them and wanted to get something else.


* Except perhaps for some very special titles.

** Unless she's a media fan and prefers the movie versions, but I have to make some assumptions!

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Second day of new habit: we got up 1/2 hour early and biked for 20 minutes. Miles: 3.

Total: 1258 mi. From Rauros: 18 mi. Still messing about in that gully.

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I just wonder why the people who kindly collate all the links to Yuletide letters into a spreadsheet don't put them in with each request in a separate row. Right now, it's excellent if you're sorting by requester's name, and terrible if you want to sort by fandom. You have to do a ctrl-f and search for the fandom's name, which takes much longer and assumes you know what you're looking for and spelling it correctly.

My first guess is that it's easier, except that it's really not significantly easier - right now, in order to make it, each individual element has to be copied and pasted and to make it sortable by fandom, you'd just c&p onto different lines, then highlight the URL and requester's name, copy, and paste two more times.

(ETA: Or do what I just did, which is download the table, c&p it 4 times (once for each of the request columns) then delete the extraneous column in each section.)

(ETA2: Turns out there's a little button at the bottom, in faded-out text, that says "Letters by Fandom A-Z" which will sort them in fandom order for you.)

(Not participating this year; just poking about looking at them in case anything sounds interesting.)