Sorry, can't hear you. Our ears are still ringing from that last one. We're going home to read quietly. The library's 37th Annual Oak Park Book Fair is next month, you know, and we need to decide which books to give away. This is not easy, but we've perfected a good technique.

First, we remove all our books from the shelves, carefully placing them in tidy stacks on the floor. Next, we ask the rest of the family to look through them to see what they want to keep. Then we let the book piles sit for three to four days, meanwhile checking on the donation particulars. This year, as usual, there will be special Book Sale bins in front of the high school, beginning tomorrow, July 5 (445-6260). Finally, we put all our books back on the shelves, every last one of them, put on our Hawaiian shirt, and sit in the backyard to wait for Saturday night.

Saturday, July 7, is Exotica 2007: Surfin' in Chicago, a celebration of surf and Hawaiian music from noon to midnight at FitzGerald's, 6615 Roosevelt Rd. (788-2118). We wish we could find the bobble-head Tiki figure that our brother gave us for our birthday last year, after he decided to stop giving us real presents and start giving us funny trinkets instead. Oh that's right, we took it out in the alley and jumped on it repeatedly until it was only faux Polynesian dust. See? This is what happens whenever we get rid of something. We always end up needing it.