Happy Birthday, Jessi

I haven't fallen off the face of the planet. I've just been incredibly negligent about blogging. And since I haven't been keeping up with my blog, I haven't been keeping up with everyone else's. Truth be told, I got pretty burned out on reading nothing but BSC for who knows how long, and the blog got the short end of the stick. I had planned to put up a post about a summer hiatus, but I just didn't. So, in order to [hopefully] redeem myself, it's Jessi's birthday, so....Starring Jessi!!

A while back, I read #14 Hello, Mallory, and this is Mallory's description of the "new girl":

Jessica Ramsey sat next to me, a mystery. I kept looking at her long legs. Maybe she was a dancer or a gymnast or something. Of course, I looked at her face, too. Jessica's eyes were huge and dark. Her lashes were so long I wondered if they were fake. Probably not, if her mother was anything like mine, and I decided that was a distinct possibility, since Jessica wore glasses and didn't have pierced ears, either.

What happened to the glasses? (It turns out that she only wears them for reading.) That's one for the continuity beast, I guess. She also tells a lot of corny jokes and Mal thinks they're hilarious. And she's got the dancing thing going on.

I don't remember exactly the first BSC book I ever read. I know others do, and I applaud your memory. I don't know if I started reading them before or after Jessi joined. I'm pretty sure I read them in order, and I know I had all of them up to the late 70s before I moved on to slightly more mature reading. (RL Stine, I'm looking at you.)

I do know that I was okay with Jessi in the beginning. I said in a different post when and why my Jessi-toleration turned sour. After that, she turned into a stereotype. It got worse after the shipwreck book, when Jessi's parents leave her in charge of her sister and brother for the weekend. HELLO YOUR DAUGHTER IS 11, SHE IS NOT OLD ENOUGH!!! Where's CPS when you need them? I hated when she harped about how her parents didn't trust her. Well, look what happened when they did.

Ok, good points about Jessi...
*She was dedicated to ballet.
*She was a good friend to Mallory (most of the time).
*She was good with kids, mostly.
Oh, what else? Feel free to add your thoughts to mine.

And here's the semi-bad news. My blogging record these last two months has been sad and pathetic. Unfortunately, it will probably be like that for the rest of the summer. I may throw on something here and there (Claudia's birthday is July 11) but it'll be far from regular. One thing that has been taking a lot of my time is that I've been writing. I used to write a lot of short stories when I was younger, and writing that SVH fanfic kinda got my pen flowing fingers typing again. I've been working on a short story for the last month or so, and I think it's going to be a long short story.