Summer’s finally here, but school still has a grip on you because of summer reading.  This year, the library is easing your pain by offering you a chance to win some great prizes just by doing your summer reading! Here’s how it works:

1. Come to the Teen Library and fill out a passport. Each week, come in and write down the title and author of the book you finished and be entered to win that week’s prize.

2. At the end of the summer, receive an entry to win the grand prize for every week you finished a book. So let’s say you finished a book a week for all eight weeks of summer reading– you’d get eight entries to win the grand prize!

What are these prizes? They include a gift certificate to Scoops, Borders, and Wilton Pizza, among others. The grand, end-of-summer prize is a gift card to design your own Flip MinoHD camera!

Hope to see you soon!

And tah dah!  You can create all kinds of things.   Who know about the possibilities?  Well that would be Robert Sabuada at his website.  He has a wide assortment of paper creatures you can make, from simple  to advanced, that range from a simple bird up to a much more complicated (and kind of creepy looking) spider.  All you have to do is print his .pdf directions onto a sheet of paper or card stock, snip on the lines, and presto instant animals.  Depeding on your patience and skill you could have an entire zoo by the end of the day.  Good thing he has directions for an ark on his site too…

Well get it out of your head and onto paper, because the Threadless website is having a tee shirt slogan contest.  In case you aren’t familiar with Threadless, they are design forum but also an ongoing open call for tee shirt design submissions. Anyone can sign up, download a tee template and submit ideas, which are then evaluated by the Threadless community for seven days. Tee shirt designs are selected from the pool of the most popular designs as scored by the community.  So that means YOUR design could be on a tee for anyone to buy.  The best part is the winner of their current contest gets 2500 bucks!  Who needs a summer job when you could design a tee shirt instead!

Waste time?  Who….me?  Seriously, who doesn’t!  But sometimes you have to sift through mindless websites to find a quality item to waste your time on productively.  To save time (ironically) check out the Epic Win wesite - which in our time-wasting humble opinion has clips or images that are funny, silly, or amusing about 99% of the time.  Like the phone booth aquarium to the left.   Contributors from all over the world post their time wasting strategies, like sychronzing light switch flipping at a college dorm.   Plus you can vote for your favorites or leave a comment, and as we all know reading the comments is sometimes just as amusing as watching the clips.

Well, duh!  The Wilton Library has been offering a tie dye summer workshop for years.  plus, who didn’t already know that tie dye is always cool?  But don’t go buy something already tie dyed when it is so fun to do yourself!  Locally there are many places to buy tie dye kits including Michaels crafts and Jerry’s artorama right down the street .  When you have your supplies it is time to follow this tutorial (or you can find your own) on youtube.  Kits can dye up to 15 shirts, so it is a fun way to spend a summer day with friends, or you can just tie dye your entire wardrobe including your pj’s like this guy.

So you have checked your email, read some news, randomly surfed, now what?  We have found a few sites that might help you stay busy.  Or…look busy.  If you know what I mean.  First is  keybr.com which will tell you how fast you touch type.  Then take a personality test at the humanmetrics site before you go to gigagalaxy to zoom in on the solar system.   To recover from feeling so small and insignificant, check out the Encyclopedia of Life website that is trying to document every species of living thing.  Have any good sites you use when bored?  Post them in our comments section!

There is so much of it!  And with everyone talking about the latest stories, you need to keep up unless you will look like a…well, you know.  But don’t despair!  BBC news has a quick way to get a week of facts – their “1o things you didn’t know” section.  And CNN has a new “News Pulse” section that lists all of the top stories, so you can see them at a glance.  Also on CNN, a breaking alerts service that can send the latest to you via a computer pop up, email, or right to your phone.  So don’t let the sheer volume of news get you overwhemled, after you visit one of our suggested sites or sign up for alerts, you will be the one leading the conversation about the latest breaking news!

When, you make them and are not forced to for math class.  If you go to graph jam, which is part of the icanhascheezburger website family, you can make graphs with your own captions.  Favorites of ours: William Shakespeare readership vs. Stephanie Meyer readership in year 2030, and relevancy of Ferris Buller’s Day Off to high school students.  Will that ever be irrelevant?  So crack up your friends (and yourself) and whip up your own graph that won’t become irrelevant!

Of course !  You know it is your secret dream.  But…how to go about actually getting a book published?  Not to mention writing it.  Well one secret to writing a book that no one talks about (probably to scare off talented young authors like yourself) is that you don’t actually have to write the entire book before you sell it.  How do we know that and you do not?  Well through the resources at the Wilton Library of course!  A search through the catalog will yield books on the mechanics of writing your book, then how to get it  published.   According to this website, the YA market is just exploding.  So what are you waiting for?  Soon it could be YOUR book people are checking out at the library!

It is a common phenonmenon, and scientific articles have actually be written about it.  Someone else has obviously had this problem and set up a website about it.  He is named Chirag Mehta and has a website named Tip of my Toungue.  Put in small bits of information the you actually DO remember about your word and it generates some possible words for you.  Now if it could just tell you where your car keys are…