Armchair BEA Introduction and Giveaway #1

Since my health and my finances prevent me from attending BEA (though one day I hope to go), I am staying home and enjoying Armchair BEA this week with lots of other great bloggers.  Today's post is simple:

Who are you, and how do you Armchair?

 

My name is Crystal and I am a bookaholic, I know I am and I am not undergoing any 12-steps to get rid of it. You see I could have worse habits, like 300 cats instead of books. Books don't need feeding or have to use the bathroom, they just sit there and look pretty on my shelves and only cause me some pain when trying to decide what to read next.

Okay that was me two years ago, now that number has probably tripled no matter how many books I give away on my blog. I'm pretty sure my husband is eying me and considering whether the insane asylum is a good idea or if I was gone there would he end up there after having to care for the kids by himself for that period of time. I'm pretty sure the books will win out in the end. Plus he has the benefit of me saying "hey honey, I think you would enjoy this book" and I haven't been wrong yet with book or author recommendations for him.

So who am I? I am an obsessed book blogger, who is going through a rough patch in my health at the current moment and that may have me in Duke Hospital within the next month, but it won't be in the mental health ward. With all of that I also get to say this is the last week of little league for my boys and while I have enjoyed watching them play and the camraderie of the other parents, I will be glad to see it end, because I do work as well and this 8-4 work, then 5:30 - 8:30 running the kids around and finally eating at 8:30 gets old pretty darn quick (and it was close to landing me in the insane asylum). I will be happy to catch back up on my reading and to actually see my boys more nights of the week. I hope also to get back to my blog more and visiting other blogs I have missed out on that while socializing at the ball field lately.

So that leads to the personal me. I am a wife of 13 years and my husband and I have actually been together for 19 years (since the end of our senior year of high school) and no you cannot do the math! I have a 10-year-old who is becoming a know-it-all, but he is a sweet boy and a 6-year-old who keeps me on my toes (he was singing California Gurls by Katy Perry while waiting in line at Walmart yesterday - Bikinis, zuchinnis, martinis). We also are owned by a sweet black cat who keeps getting into disagreements with snakes and his name is Buckwheat. And the final member of the family is our pound puppy Chewey (short for Chewbacca - my boys' are Star Wars addicts). Chewey is part lab and has the prettiest coat. He's also the perfect size, about 3/4 the size of a full-blooded lab. Everyone but Chewey and Buckwheat love to read, and Buckwheat loves to pester us when we read, so maybe he loves to read as well.

That's pretty much it - I have to say that blogging for the last two years has really led me to branch out in my reading and I love that. No longer am I waiting on 3-4 of my favorite authors to release new books, now I have a whole world open to me. Oh and I have a Kindle so I have even more books than my husband knows about, but hey a lot of them were free, okay some of them were free, he doesn't have to know about the ones I do the one-click thing with - you know it doesn't even seem like spending money ;)

So what about you? Tell me something about yourself and be entered in to win your choice of two books my read pile. I'll be putting up a page to look at the choices later today (it's here now), but there is something for everyone. I do have to limit this one to the US/Canada because of postage costs. It takes a lot of money for my book habit, ooops I mean to raise two hungry boys. LOL. Giveaway ends the end of this week, 5/27/11.

I'll also be running other giveaways this week because I like to share the wealth (and my husband likes me to remove some books from the house from time-to-time).