Ode to the Ceramic Genius

This weekend is jam-packed with moving and the Storytelling Festival and the Sheepdog Championships, but first up is my friend, the Ceramic Genius', wedding.

There are so many reasons to love the Ceramic Genius, but here are my top picks of why she's amazing.

1. She's a ceramic genius and her dad's a puppeteer, which makes her family endlessly intriguing to me.

2. When she gets nervous she does the Robot and sings "The Rose." In a good way, not in a why-has-no-one-ever-tested-her-for-autism? kind of way.

3. When Madame 3-yr-old started getting naughty, the Ceramic Genius came up with the theory that maybe the Good Madame 3-yr-old was replaced with a Naughty Madame 3-yr-old by wicked fairies.

The term Wicked Fairies makes me laugh really hard. Here's another good one: Nerd-Burglar. I don't even know what that one means, but my brother used it in an email this week, and it made me laugh. It's fun to say out loud. Nerd-Burglar. Nerd-Burglar. If you combine those two terms, you get a really great sentence. And if you add the term little weasels, you're about to strike gold. Hey Nerd-Burglar, watch out for those wicked fairies! They're about to release the little weasels.

Good times, good times. But now I have to go do laundry so I don't have to attend the Ceramic Genius' wedding naked. They frown upon that kind of thing at weddings.

The Ceramic Genius at the Park Last Summer

She was very proud of this photo.

Buried Treasures

I'm moving on Saturday, so I've been madly cramming my belongings into boxes and uncovering all kinds of forgotten treasures along the way, including some striped pants I love but can't wear because they don't match a single thing I own, a Martha Stewart 9x13 pan I bought on some kind of magical everything-costs-negative-15-cents sale last summer, and my aircraft posters.

One of our library patrons used to come into the library every day, steal all the pens and highlighters from the reference desk, and then frantically draw boats and airplanes on poster board. All the posters were given away as gifts to the librarians or security guards. One of the security guards even commissioned a poster for his girlfriend. The artist especially liked our co-worker, Ben, so Ben got many, many posters, although sometimes they were addressed to "Ted." I received three posters, all aircraft.

For some reason, my planes NEVER have pressurization. You probably can't see the detail on this one, but it very emphatically says NO PRESSURIZATION. That seems like a bad deal in a plane. Don't you need that? I think you do.

Posters always include details about the vehicle. The admonitions are my favorite part. Do Not Fly Outside the United States. One of the vehicles didn't allow pets on board. The artist never explained why.

I really do love these posters, but I don't think they're going to be moving with me this weekend, so this is their last hurrah. Say good-bye to the nice posters.

I Don't Know What to Call This One

I bought a couch! Not a new one, of course. I'm not that kind of girl. I bought it used from some of Alice's friends, who are very kindly going to drive it many, many miles to bring it to me when I move into my new house. The couch is plush and comfy and people love sitting on it so much that you have to threaten them with sharp objects to get them off of it. This is very good, because my other couch is referred to by friends as the "chastity couch." It's an old-fashioned, narrow, Victorian couch that makes you sit up very straight, and I always feel like I have to apologize to people when they sit on it, especially young men, who barely fit on it, and offer them all kinds of suggestions for how to be comfortable while sitting there. "Here, take these throw pillows and prop your legs up on the coffee table and go ahead and lean back and stick that blanket behind your head so the decorative woodwork's not digging into your head. Yeah, like that, but to the left a little."

Marmots in the Library

This morning my sister and her kids came to the library while I was working. This is always a most amusing treat for me, because my nieces are HILARIOUS. Li'l Miss 3-year-old likes to wear long sleeves right now and she also likes fabrics that feel good when rubbed, which is how she ended up in front of me at the reference desk wearing a purple velour track suit. She looked remarkably like a library patron I see in velour track suits all the time. Except, of course, the library patron is about 75-years-old. Because that's who usually wears velour. And even the 75-year-olds who wear velour usually wear it in, like, January.

Anyway, one of the special treats of having nieces in the library is that they often show me tricks they can do. Today we were on the second floor of the library, the quiet floor, so both girls were whispering very earnestly to me about how they could stand on one foot. One foot! "Look, Aunt! Look, I can stand on one foot. One foot without hands!" This was accompanied by lots of wobbling on one foot with outstretched arms.

My favorite trick they ever did for me was, "Look, Aunt. I'm very good at being blind." The 4-year-old told me this and then went wandering across the floor with her eyes closed, arms out, smug expression on her face. Miss 3-year-old then cried, "Oh, I can be blind too!" She turned around, set out with her eyes closed, and immediately smacked directly into her sister, who was headed back, still with eyes closed. There was a huge noise of heads thunking together and then crying and accusing. So, they're not so good at being blind, after all. But they'll keep practicing, don't you worry about that.

This is a picture of Madame 3-year-old hiking in Cascade Springs last week. You can see that she has a very refined sense of fashion.

The Many Uses of Business Cards

Yesterday I helped this really lovely single, British guy at the reference desk. I emailed a friend about it, to which she replied (hope she doesn't mind the sharing), "You really need to just have little cards with your name on them to hand to men if they are dateable and you wish that they may be in your life." Well, this is a very convenient suggestion, because I just got my new business cards last week. Five hundred of them. So, there are plenty of cards to use for non-business purposes. In fact, you can all expect to receive Christmas gifts fashioned from business cards this year--little shellacked boxes, folded business card jewelry, the possibilities are endless.

Anway, despite my friend's wonderful idea, here's how I envision the plan she suggests going down.

Lovely British Guy: Where are your periodicals?

Me: Upstairs on the south end of the building (I say south, you see, because we live in Utah where this is perfectly normal)

Lovely British Guy: Thank you.

Me: Oh, wait! Here's my card. Now, if you can't find the periodicals, you just call me at this number here. Except come back downstairs first, because there's no cell phone use on the second floor. Or you could email me at this address here, and I would be happy to help you locate the periodicals and suggest one or two that make particularly nice leisure reading. Oooh, and here's my fax number, but we don't offer public fax service in the library. You could run over to Kinko's, though, and you could fax me any questions, or a date invitation, or a limited-time special vacation offer, which is what we usually get from our fax.

See how that might not work? But I'm open to suggestions.

In Praise of Bread

The Musical Tourettes is strong upon me today, but I'll try to rein it in long enough to tell you about my new favorite store bought bread. Aspen Mills makes a really lovely Honey Wheat bread.

Here are its major strong points

1--It's delicious.

2--It's a Utah's Own product. Aspen Mills is located in Ogden, so, if you live in Utah, you can feel good and self-righteous for supporting local business. It's distributed (at least in my town) through Sam's Club, so you don't even have to go to Ogden to buy it (although then you're supporting a giant, soul-sucking chain, so you have to be slightly less self-righteous).

3--Here's the entire ingredient list: Stoneground whole wheat flour, honey, water, salt, yeast. Real bread! It costs just a fraction more than other brands, but after my brief, brief foray into the world of generic bread (so generic that the label just said BREAD, not even a made-up, knock-off name like WONDERful BREAD), I'm sure we can all agree that not having your bread taste like tissue paper notably improves quality of life.

If you're looking for the best bread in Utah, try Volker's. The bakery's located in Kamas, Utah (yeah, I don't know where that is either), but they send trucks to the farmers' markets across the state. I'm especially fond of their multi-grain bread. Volker's is a little pricey, but it's so delicious. In fact, just thinking about it is making me hungry, so I'm going to have to go scavenging through my desk for some kind of treat now.

Me and Bridget Jones

As is my summer custom, I've been reading chick lit this month. I just finished two novels by Katie Fforde, Bidding for Love and Restoring Grace, both of which I liked. Chick lit is pretty formulaic. You have a 20-something young woman who's awkward and prone to mishaps but has a heart of gold and eventually gets what's coming to her in the form of a nice young man, a British one if she's really lucky. So, the other day it occurred to me that I'm an excellent candidate for a chick lit heroine. I totally qualify.

Chick Lit Heroine Requirements
1--Twenty-something Female
Check.

2--Awkward and Prone to Mishaps
Check. A couple of years ago I fell into a manhole. True story. And there was that time I got trapped in my car, because I had to visit this guy I had recently stopped dating, and it's too long a story to tell but it was aaaawkward. And that time Mr. Dreamy Guy took me out to dinner and afterwards we had to run by my office and he noticed the picture of Hugh Dancy at my desk and asked about it and I had to hustle Mr. Dreamy Guy right out of there so I wouldn't have to explain about Imaginary Boyfriends. Whew! Awkward.

3--Heart of Gold
Check. You can always tell that chick lit heroines have hearts of gold, because they befriend doormen and service people who often help them out of scrapes when the heroines seem doomed to failure, which is why it's so great that I'm friends with Angel, our Hispanic day porter at work. He teaches me Spanish. My roommate also teaches me Spanish sometimes, so I can say important things like Take out the garbage! and I'm going to take out the garbage. Remarkably, this has never helped me when talking to Angel. Of course, the things Angel teaches me don't help me either, because he teaches me words like Hand and Tired. I need someone to teach me how to say, "I'd like to go home, because all these library patrons are making my head ache. Please call Bombay House and tell them I'd like some Chicken Tikka Masala to go."

So, I just need my nice British man. See what you can do about that, would you?

Play it Again, Sam (and Again and Again and Again)

I had a roommate in college who called me the Song Nazi, because after buying a new CD I would listen to one or two tracks on repeat for a week or two before allowing anyone to hear the other songs on the album. Because she is one of my favorite people, said roommate will not be punished for calling me mean names. (She also called me a sleep nazi for adhering to a strict 10:00 bedtime in college. I rarely go to bed that early anymore. I have to stay up late and party with other librarian rock stars.)

Here's one of my recent song addictions. Enjoy!

Back to the Grind(ing Headache)

I’m back at work to teach my computer class and be the supervisor this evening, before returning to my reunion tomorrow afternoon. I took great pains to clear off my desk and get all pressing matters squared away before I left on vacation, so I wouldn’t come back and weep when I saw the mounds of work waiting for me. My plans were foiled, though. When I walked into the workroom this morning, my phone was flashing with messages, I had 86 emails, there were stacks of books and papers left for me, and post-it note messages were all over my desk (including one very nice one from a teen boy who put a smiley face over the letter i).

Fortunately, I have Inner Resources (and some leftover pie waiting in my refrigerator), so I pulled myself together and I can almost see the surface of my desk again. As long as I don’t get any marriage proposals from patrons today, I may be okay. Leaving the library world and opening up that pie-mobile is looking mighty tempting, though. Mighty tempting.

Whac-A-Mole!

Guests at Aspen Grove can check out games to play with their families, so my sister and her husband checked out Whac-A-Mole to play with their girls. The girls were interested for about 5 minutes, until they were distracted by the other people on the lawn and abandoned the game. My sister still wanted to play, though, so she and I took the mallets and went at it. We are VERY good at whacking moles. Little children starting gathering around us, asking to play too, but we told them NO, as we stared intently at our moles and kept whacking. Picture it: two adults crouching in the grass with plastic hammers, wailing on plastic moles wearing glasses, while little children beg to be included and are denied!

It's probably good we're not a sporty family. We'd probably take steroids and trip the other competitors.

Embrace Your Inner Freakshow

This is what happens at a family reunion. You get together with a group of people you've known your entire life (or their entire lives) and, after being away from them for an extended period of time, notice that all of you are freakshows.

It started right away with our current reunion when I heard Mom murmuring about "these bugs" as she rummaged through her suitcase. I took a peak and, yes, Dad had packed (on purpose!) dead cicadas and hauled them 2,000 miles across the country for the grandchildren's viewing pleasure. The Tupperware container he put them in had somehow come open and cicada shells were in among the socks and pants and coloring books in the suitcase. Mom didn't seem to notice that this was freaky behavior and put all the bugs back in her Tupperware and set them on the dresser, where my sister found them (thinking the container held some sort of special snack) later that evening.

Dad's not the only one, though. It's all of us. My weird food views came out at dinner when I had to explain to my siblings (because somehow they missed it growing up) that I don't believe in bananas as a mixed food. They aren't allowed to be inside other foods. No bananas in jello, pudding, smoothies, or even banana splits. I do not allow it. It's wrong. And don't even get me started about banana flavoring.

My sister's kids are the most amusing freakshows. They have very vivid imaginations and are usually pretending to be other people. The 3-year-old spent a good part of last summer refusing to respond unless we called her Dr. DeSoto. When she was only 2-years-old, she watched the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special on DVD and was mesmerized by the chair that Snoopy fights. She made us call her Teeny Fighting Chair. When I called her by name, she very firmly told me, "No! Teeny Fighting Chair."

So we're all hanging out together this week, looking at dead cicadas and teaching each other how to hypnotize chickens (my brother's specialty). Ahhh, family time.

Reality is Not My Best Medium

Yesterday while Mom and I were walking around Cedar City, Michael Sharon (the actor who plays Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night) rode past us on his bike. I do love a man on a bike. He was headed in the direction of the Cedar City Public Library, so I decided that if we saw him at the library when we went there a little later in the day, it would be a sign that he should be added to my Imaginary Boyfriend List. He wasn't there. Too bad. I don't think anyone on the list has sword fighting skills. My roommate says that her brother has sword fighting skills, but he also proposed to his wife in iambic pentameter, so maybe that type of fellow should be kept far away from the list.

Parsimonious

Mom and Dad in Zion National Park--Kolob

I'm in Cedar City with my parents for day two of the grand Shakespearean adventure. We went to see Twelfth Night last night and this evening we're going to see Coriolanus. This morning we hiked in Zion National Park and Mom and I had this most excellent conversation.

Mom: Oooh, there's a bug on you.

Me: Aaaaaagh! Get it off! (I don't care for bugs in any form.)

Mom: Whap!

Me: Did you just get bug guts on my white shirt!?

Mom: It was a really little bug, but he packed a lot of guts in there.

(Mom's sitting here watching, and she says she didn't say that. She says that she just commented on what a juicy bug he was. She definitely used the word guts, though.)

The first time I came to this festival, I was 7-years-old, and our family came down here every year while we lived in Utah. Inexplicably, one of the festival highlights was that I always got to buy a tart before the plays actually began. A tart cost about $0.50 and was made from some sort of purchased pie crust and lemon pie filling from a can. Not the highest quality product. Tarts are still sold before shows but they now cost $1.75. I bought one last night, because it's tradition and it makes me happy, which leads me into a brief discussion of MBC's Monetary Beliefs.

I briefly thought about purchasing a house this summer. I talked to a realtor and got pre-qualified for a loan and then decided to wait another year, because my head wanted to explode every time I thought about paying for a house. Taking all my money and going to Prague or Greece or Scotland for a year, though, makes me feel warm and happy inside. Investment=crisis. Travel=joy and sunshine. I don't really want to own things, but I like having experiences. I did, however, just buy a cookie press at Ye Olde Catholic Thrift Shoppe. How can you not want to own something from somewhere with a name like that?

Let's Discuss What a Librarian is Not

I just had someone AGAIN say something to me along the lines of, "It must be so nice to be a librarian. You get to read all those books." As if what I do all day at work is read, because I DON'T have 12 million projects like buying books and visiting schools and detention centers and speaking at conferences and planning events and creating advertising and running programs and teaching computer classes, which is what I DO do at work. This is a bad thing to say to a librarian. So are the following:

No. 1--"Why did you have to get a master's degree to be a librarian? What did you learn? The Dewey Decimal System?" This is always followed by a hardy chuckle, which causes one to want to slap the person speaking and remind him (it's always a him) that you are smarter than he is.

No. 2--"It must be so peaceful to be a librarian." Are you kidding me!? Have you been to a public library? Did I mention all the stuff I'm trying to get done while simultaneously listening to undermedicated patrons explain to me where the comet ending the earth is going to land and helping men who dress like vampires write letters to Mitt Romney? While children scream in the background?

No. 3--Anything that suggests I shelve books for a living. Pages shelve books (except, maybe, in very small libraries). Librarians buy books.

No. 4--"Do you have a copy of Eclipse? You don't? Really?" You are not the only person who uses the library. Try to remember this when you're asking for an insanely popular best seller two days after it's released.

No. 5--"Dan Brown. B-R-O-W-N." Yeah, I totally know who wrote The Da Vinci Code and how to spell his name and where the copies of the book are shelved if we have them checked in and all of the other books Dan Brown has written. Don't spell at librarians unless they ask you for that little service. They are always smarter than you think they are. Always.

So be kind to your librarians. Don't say things to them that will encourage them to develop their thunder vision and destroy you. And if you know in which very amusing memoir thunder vision is discussed, we might move your name up on the waiting list for Eclipse.

The Still Small Voice

My parents are coming into town today, and tomorrow I'm going with them to the Shakespearean Festival. When we come back, we're going with the rest of the family--siblings, in-laws, and nieces and nephews--to Aspen Grove for a week. Hanging out with my nieces and nephews is extremely amusing. It's like hanging out with little animals that talk. Beavers or marmots, maybe.

Sunday I was having dinner with my sister and her family. We were eating a side dish with broccoli in it, and my sister was trying to convince her two girls, ages 3 and 4, to eat some of it.

Sister: Just try a bite. You don't know you don't like it until you try it.

4-yr-old: No, please, Mommy. I'll eat it when I'm an older girl. I don't like it. I know it.

Sister: Maybe little girls who don't eat broccoli won't get to eat dessert either. (She sounded a lot like a mother out of a Little Golden book when she said that. You naughty kittens, you lost your mittens, now you shall have no pie . . . )

4-yr-old: Weeping and wailing

Brother-in-law: Wait! Listen. I hear something. It's a tiny voice. It's saying something. It's saying, "Eat me." It's the broccoli!

3-yr-old: Oh, Daddy! That's so silly. That's not the broccoli. That's the Holy Ghost!

So, what do you say to that? No children ate broccoli. Everybody ate chocolate mousse.

Name That Blog

So, I discovered this very interesting site, foldschool, while I was reading a review journal for work. It has directions on how to make children's furniture out of cardboard, which I've decided will inform my decorating theme when I move into my new house in September. All cardboard, all the time. This will be different from my current decorating theme, which is Free (and Unattractive) Furniture People Have Given Me.

On a completely unrelated topic, I don't know what to call my blog. So help me out. Give me some suggestions, and I'll pick my favorite. Maybe.