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Our house came with a fireplace. A typical brick chimney and open hearth meant for burning wood. Due to various reasons, we haven’t used it. But earlier this year we got a wood-burning insert, so we will use it, so now I need to stock up on firewood.

The good news is we have a couple acres of trees that I can harvest. So far I’ve been taking already downed trees. Most died and then fell over but a storm took down two live trees so some of this wood needs to age first.

But I thought the stacks of firewood were scenic, so I took some photos of them and am sharing them with you now. I had a plan for two of the stacks but I ended up with more wood so we basically ended up with random stacks of firewood around the yard. My goal is to consolidate them a bit, maybe next year.

That last one is not as pretty as the first or fourth photos, but some may appreciate the rusticness of it. Those are big logs, so it will turn into a huge pile of firewood once it’s cut and split, and I don’t have a spot for it yet, so that’s waiting.

With a couple different trips this year, I’ve had time to read some books. Half of these I picked and half of these were recommended to me by the kids.

I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

This book was a mixed bag. It is a collection of short stories, and most of them had interesting premises but the stories had objectionable material. Most of the stories could have been saved by changing some of the side topics or characters situations without changing the premise, but my guess is the author was going for pushing a diverse cast of lifestyles.

There were a couple of short stories in there that were fine, but overall there were more things I didn’t need to read.

Next up: Winterhouse by Ben Guterson

This was actually a review of two separate books, Winterhouse and The Secrets of Winterhouse. I read Winterhouse first then when I saw the library had another Winterhouse book I grabbed that.

I liked these books. They are mild mysteries, nice easy reading with nothing bad, meant for lower middle grades I would think.

Next up: Sky Raiders by Brandon Mull

This was tremendous. Out of all the middle grade fiction books I can remember reading, this series was my favorite.

I didn’t come to that conclusion after reading the first book. This is a series of five books. I read the first one and was intrigued enough to read the second one. And then so on.

And then after I finished the last book, I was sad about it. Partly because of how it ended but mostly that it ended. The last time I got so involved in a series was the Little House on the Prairie and that was decades ago.

I will note that Gamma said that Five Kingdoms is his favorite Brandon Mull series. And Beyonders is his second favorite, so that’s in the queue.

Next up: The Land of Elyon: The Dark Hills Divide by Patrick Carman

This one was a random book I found on our shelf. No one seemed to know anything about it, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

It was okay. It’s the first in a series, but it wasn’t interesting enough for me to want to continue with the remaining books in the series. Part of that might have been because I had recently finished the Five Kingdoms series and it would be hard for anything to follow that.

There was nothing wrong with the book, and I assume the rest of the series would be fine too. So if you need something to try, this should be an option.

That’s it for this review. Got some more planned for winter.

I was looking at some things at Michigan State University and I noticed that a lot of them looked like they should be in Star Wars.

So I put together this little quiz of silhouettes. Can you tell for each of these if it is from MSU or Star Wars?

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H.

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Answers:
A. MSU – Wilson Hall
B. MSU – Breslin Center
C. MSU – Snyder Hall
D. Star Wars – Destroyer
E. MSU – Weiser Hall
F. MSU – West Fee Hall
G. MSU – Broad Art Museum
H. Star Wars – Death Star

Now that no one is talking about the Fremby font anymore, it’s time to announce that Font Grill has released a new font.

Introducing: Fontopian Font

Go download Fontopian.

I was inspired by the logo of The Autopian website. I didn’t think much of the logo before this, but they ran an article about how the Autopian logo came to be and that got me nostalgic about the process of making a font so I decided to give it a go.