Snow is Bad

The little quail babies are back in town. I saw them bopping across the street on Thursday. They are my favorite fowl. Every time I see them, I want to chase them and pick them up and squeeze them. Squeeze them in an I Love Little Pear-Shaped Birds way, not a Squeezing the Life Out of You way.

Unfortunately, the little birds came to town prematurely. It is still not spring. I glanced out the window Sunday morning, saw a little bit of white on the lawn, and thought, "Huh. Manna." But then I opened the blinds and saw the snow piled up everywhere and thought, "Nooooooo!" Not because I can't handle the snow, you understand, but because I feel for the little birds.

True Confession

When I was growing up, the TV show Beverly Hills 90210 was hugely popular. I never saw a single episode. It's not really my thing. The high drama of beautiful, rich, alcoholic teenagers (portrayed by 20-somethings) doesn't interest me. (Ugly teenagers are a different matter entirely.) I've also never seen episodes of Dawson's Creek, The O.C., or Party of Five. Or at least I hadn't until Friday. Someone donated seasons of The O.C. and Dawson's Creek to the Library, and my co-worker who does our A/V collection development offered to send me home with them, because, well, I'm not sure why she offered them to me. She usually places literary adaptations, foreign films, and romantic comedies set in London in my hands. I accepted her offer of The O.C., though, because Adam Brody reminds me of Dexter in Sarah Dessen's novel This Lullaby, and Dexter is one of my favorite fictional characters.

It was my weekend to supervise the library, so I got home on Friday night around 9:30 and needed to be back at work in less than 12 hours. Closing the library is always a little stressful, because no one wants to leave. (When I'm really stressed out--about anything, not just work--I dream that I'm trying to close the library, but the patrons won't leave and people keep entering the building and the phones are disconnected so I can't call for help.) By the time I get home, I'm usually a little grumpy, because I've practically had to wrench magazines out of patrons' hands or drag them from their computer terminals and personally escort them out the door while they call out, Hey, are those tax forms? Do you have any movies set in China? I just remembered I need to grab a book for my wife. I just need to check one quick thing in the atlas. Don't make me gooooo! The public displeases me when the library is closing. So, I'm saying that when I got home I needed to unwind a little.

So I watched The O.C. Until 3:00 a.m. At first I disliked it. I kept thinking that in all my years working with the incarcerated (over 5), I've never seen such an attractive and polite and well-spoken juvenile offender as Ryan Atwood (played by Ben McKenzie). But Ben McKenzie's actually a good actor. And kind of dreamy (he's so totally making the imaginary boyfriend list). And Adam Brody still reminds me of Dexter. And (I'm so embarrassed) I started to be deeply interested in the plot.

I feel like I need to go read some Foucault or Nietzsche to counteract the pejorative effects of immersing myself in pretty people programming. But first I have to finish watching every. single. episode. And the commentaries. And all the bonus features. It's like a sickness.

Use Your Skills

Sometimes library patrons come in and have this conversation with me:

Special Patron: I got this book from the library about 10 years ago and I don't remember the author or the title, but it was yellow. Can you help me find it?

MBC: (Because I am a librarian) Sure. What was it about?

Special Patron: I don't know, but the cover was yellow and it was hardback and it was probably about 300 pages. I think it was fiction and there was a cat in it. But it might have been non-fiction. And maybe it was a tiger, not a cat.

MBC: (In head) Okay, CrazyPants, I can't help you unless you help me by providing some actual information.

Except there are times when my library magic kicks in and I actually know exactly what the patrons are talking about from their vague descriptions. "A silver young adult book? Artemis Fowl." Which is all to say that I'm looking for a poem. It's by John Donne and I think part of it was quoted in a Dorothy Sayres book once and there's a really nice line about love in it and beyond that I can't remember any pertinent details or words. I'll give you a million dollars if you can find it for me.

So That Later I Can Say I Told You So

There's a relatively new young adult book, The Luxe, that I think is really well-written and is just addictive enough that I maybe ignored (just a little bit) the baby I was taking care of when I was finishing the book. Just the last 30 pages or so. The baby wasn't playing with knives or anything. And if he'd starting eating poison or something, I would have put the book down. After I read the The Luxe, I bought twice as many copies of the book as I'd originally purchased for the library, because I think in 6-12 months it's going to be a Big Deal in our library. There will be waiting lists and people who are shocked that they can't have the book immediately. So, I'm telling you now, while there are copies on our shelves, that if a romantic, young adult, historical novel full of intrigue is appealing to you, go read The Luxe. I didn't make a public statement about The Kite Runner or Uglies or Twilight before they got all annoyingly popular, so I'm establishing my bragging rights for predicting the success of The Luxe right now. It will be big.

And if for some crazy reason it doesn't go big, we must never speak of this again.

Running

I really want to be a runner. It looks calming. It looks healthy. When I get home from a walk, I look mildly invigorated, but when people finish a run they look like they've really accomplished something (evidenced by the sweat coursing down their bodies). And I always imagine that if I were a runner, I would be less susceptible to the Rage Cycle of the Librarian. I imagine that if I were a runner, I wouldn't plot the assassination of problem patrons. And in the grocery store when I see Beautiful Shallow People selecting cheese, and they take the cheese they've decided not to purchase and toss it into the meat section, because they're too lazy to reach their arms the one foot to hang the bag of cheese back on the cheese rack, it wouldn't make my blood pressure rise and I wouldn't clinch my fists and consider grabbing the girl by her Barbie hair and beating her with a frozen pizza. No, if I were a runner, poor grocery store cheese etiquette would not enrage me. I would have a runner's inner Zen-like calm. My rage would dissipate through my healthy, physical exertion.

For all of these reasons, every few years I decide to take up running, and every few years I remember that I HATE to run. My brain bounces around in my head in a way that I'm certain isn't good for me. I feel like I'm giving myself a concussion from the inside when I run. This is the year that I would normally try running again, but I KNOW my efforts will fail, so I'm looking for running alternatives. Any ideas?

Let This Be a Lesson to Us All

I'm teaching a blogging workshop for the library this spring. There are many things I feel duty-bound to teach the masses about blogging, but Lesson Number One is going to be Your Blog is on the Internet. The Internet. Inter.Net. The public, searchable Internet.

Translation: If you write about authors' books, they will email you to tell you a) Thank you for posting nice things about my book OR b)You spelled my name wrong.

Because Your Blog is on the Internet.

And if you post THIS, the Development Director at the Festival will email you. And then you will be utterly mortified because you will realize that you shouldn't refer to someone as your imaginary boyfriend if you're going to MEET HIM, and he (and the entire Festival) will see your post. But by the time you do realize it, it will be too late and you'll just have to live in fear that your plane ticket to London is going to be accompanied by a restraining order.

Because Your Blog is on the Internet.

They didn't cover that in the workshop I attended before I started blogging. I'm happy to pass this wisdom on to new bloggers, though. My embarrassments ought to benefit someone.

Happy (Belated) Easter

My sister and I usually employ our Tricky Tape Technique to dye Easter eggs. This year, though, we used the plants in my sister's yard to make flower prints on our eggs.

This is a crocus print.

The secret technique:
1. Place the flower (or plant) on the egg and secure it with a stocking.
2. Dye the egg.
3. Beg the little children helping you not to smash the eggs. (Madame 5-yr-old does not like to EAT eggs, but she loves to PEEL them. Tuey loves to eat them even if the peel is still intact.)

This is my sister taking a dyed egg out of a stocking.

A selection of flower print eggs (and a glimpse of Madame 3-yr-old's beautiful spring pants).

Tuey dropping a decorated egg into an Easter basket.

Marmot Sports

The first day of Spring was also Madame 5-yr-old's first day of soccer. Tiny child soccer is hilarious.

Madame was very serious about her soccer. She wore a deeply concerned expression on her face throughout the practice. Her little neighbor boy friend is also on the team. He hops across the field like a tiny gazelle boy.

Tuey and my sister and I watched from the sidelines while Madame 3-yr-old and Marmot Dad were at the playground. Tuey sat on my lap and exclaimed (repeatedly) over the amazing treat of seeing so many soccer balls and babies all in the same place. Tuey Heaven. (Look at that gorgeous blue sky!)

Eventually, Tuey wanted to get in on the action. He told us, gick, gick! (kick! kick!) and then demonstrated his gicking technique, a sort of foot sliding into this wide-legged stance.

My Grouchiness Runneth Over

Understand me when I say that I don't lie to the students in my computer classes, but sometimes they ask things that they aren't going to understand even if I properly explain them, so I give them the you are very old and can't remember how to use your mouse and you don't need to understand the difference between RAM and ROM and I can't remember exactly what they stand for at the moment because I never discuss them outside this setting and let's just agree that they're both forms of memory answer. It's much harder to give these answers when I have a young whipper-snapper who likes exactitude in question answering as a volunteer in my classroom. If I refrain myself from teaching Tuey that turtles say, "Yibbetty Chee!" (doesn't everyone want to teach little kids the wrong sounds for animals?), I think I should be able to take some creative license with computing acronyms. It's a lesser form of evil.

(And I don't want any comments about Random Access Memory and Read-Only Memory. My bright-eyed, perky-pantsed assistant remembered them.)

Birthday 1, Birthday 2

My brother's birthday is next week. He and his wife went to Italy to celebrate.

My birthday's in a few months. It's a big one.

Here's where I'm going on MY birthday: work.

I might be really good to myself and leave work early that day.

So I can go grocery shopping during the day when the grownups are working at the store and can successfully direct me to the polenta.

It will be a special day.

The Death of the Library?

Librarians talk about technology all the time, because we're interested in the dissemination of information. We want to know how to use things like Google, Twitter, Second Life, and Facebook to reach people and to make the flow of information easier and richer. And in conferences we always reach this nearly hysterical climax in at least one discussion in which it really does seem like we're all going to have feeds planted in our brains and that the global information world will dominate every aspect of existence. Fine, fine, maybe that's so. In the midst of this, there is always discussion of the Death of the Library. There's a prediction circulating out there that libraries will be extinct by 2019. I don't believe it, and here's why. There are three distinct types of services the library offers (more actually, but three for my present argument):

1. Information Dissemination--This is what everyone's considering when they become hysterical about the speed of technological innovation. Librarians will assure you that the general public is lousy at evaluating the masses of information made available by the new technology, so libraries are still necessary to help people navigate through their information. Sure. I'm good with that. More importantly to me, though, is that there is the second service.

2. Book Provision--Libraries have books. They have print books. They have books for pleasure readers. I don't care what Bill Gates says, the majority of book lovers who read for pleasure are NOT going to do their reading online. Print books always work, they're cheap, they don't require a power source, they don't have to be powered down during airplane take-offs, but more importantly, people love them in their current form. They smell good. They feel good. Another faction says that even if print books stick around, libraries aren't going to be the way to go in the future, because readers can find books so inexpensively on eBay an Alibris. It's true that books are available quick and cheap from online book vendors, but not everyone feels compelled to OWN. Libraries are green and anti-consumerism in their approach to book buying. Some of us care very much about that, so I'm saying libraries will stay relevant for that reason. As much as the death of reading is bemoaned, book publishing continues to rise. Somebody's readin'. I doubt that the people who predict the extinction of libraries are pleasure readers or are at all familiar with public libraries, especially with the third service.

3. Community Space--Libraries are important as community centers. It is important to have spaces in society that are free and open. Physical locations. Doesn't matter if you can fulfill every information need online (and a lot of society still can't, having no computer access and no computer skills), people still want community centers, story times, summer reading programs. We got an angry letter a year or two ago at our library, because someone was there in the summer and thought it was too noisy. It is a noisy place in a lot of areas, because the community uses it in huge numbers. It's an important place to the community.

And there is more than you ever wanted to know about current library issues. If you chat with Bill Gates, now you can tell him why he's wrong.

Top o' the Morning to Ya!

Okay, the slow-loading poll was driving me crazy, so I removed it.

The results at the end of St. Patrick's Day were

38% Pro-Dyeing Food Green
33% Anti-Dyeing Food Green
28% Indifferent

If you would like to elaborate on your answers, leave a comment.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Conferencing

This weekend I'm attending this conference in Salt Lake. Tonight was a reception followed by the keynote speaker, a senior editor for Mad Magazine who was talking about censorship and First Amendment rights. Despite the fact that the speaker was very dynamic, I was having some concentration issues due to the following:

1. There were male librarians in the room. I very rarely encounter male librarians. We have two in my entire library. They're an oddity to me, like three-toed sloths.

2. My seat was this high-tech, shiny metallic chair with a back that flexed backward if I leaned into it. It was also surprisingly slippery, so I was leaning and sliding and trying not to look like I was leaning and sliding.

3. The reception had really excellent food, including whole roasted garlic cloves and several kinds of bar cookies that I would have horded away for future eating pleasure, but it's a relatively small conference and I didn't want to be known as the girl who stuffs desserts into her bra (I didn't have pockets).

I fully intend to be a better conference attendee tomorrow.

Getting Fit

The city for which I work cares about the health of its full-time employees. Apparently, they care considerably less about the well-being of their part-time employees, because when I worked for them part-time I wasn't getting the flu shots or health counseling or incentive programs that I receive since moving to 40 hours a week. In fact, even though I was doing basically the same job when I was part-time, I didn't have to sign anything saying I'd undergone safety training or that I wouldn't steal office supplies or use my computer to look at porn until my hours increased, either. Well, joke's on them, because I couldn't convince anyone in my department to give me safety training, so I never returned my forms to HR. As soon as I figure out how to use the copier or microfilm machines unsafely, I'm gonna. I'm still as unsafe as I was when I worked part-time.

Annnyway, now the city cares about me, and today I participated with some of my co-workers in a personal training session at the city gym. It involved some painful exercises that required me to hold weights over my head while lunging across the floor. I exercise, but my weak little arms were not prepared for this. Several years ago, I sustained a shoulder injury and when I got new health insurance later that year, my shoulder was excluded from coverage, so if I injured my shoulder playing sports or exercising, my health care would consist of my insurance providers standing around saying, We told you so. So, my shoulders are weak.

It was kind of nice having such a legitimate reason to excuse myself from sports. It's so much easier to say, I can't play on the softball team, because of a shoulder injury than I can't play on the softball team, because as a teenager I played on a co-ed team with this one kid who was such a misogynist in the making that I never really got over his ball-hogging, girl-patronizing ways. And I throw like Madame 5-yr-old. I also have lasting volleyball trauma from the 2nd grade, when the entire 2nd grade was regularly made to play volleyball together--50 kids on one side of the net, 50 kids on the other. We each stood in our one square foot of space and prayed that the ball would stay far away from us, because we didn't have enough room to move our arms and hit the incoming ball.

But back to today's training session. It was at noon, so I had to come to work flushed and sweaty, change clothes in the bathroom, and go straight to a meeting. It was very much like junior high gym, which is not really an experience anyone voluntarily revisits.

The end.

A Marmot Obsession

Madame 5-yr-old wants to be Mulan. She eats with chopsticks, and she breaks into songs from the movie, and she does Mulan exercises, and yesterday she made me play a game that involved guessing the name of the Mulan character she was thinking of (she helped me out by writing the first letter of each character's name on a bean first, and, no, I don't know why she was writing on beans). Unfortunately, I was very bad at the game, because although I've seen the movie once, I watched it with the marmots, who talk all the way through movies (Aunt that's a bad guy. See his bad eyes? He's a Hun. He's bad, but I'm not scared. Well, I'm a nittle bit scared, but I won't have bad dreams). And sometimes Tuey likes to give me lots of presents that he finds on the floor and then wait for my praise, so I was watching the movie while listening to a running commentary and thanking Tuey for the bits of cheese and My Little Pony panties he was handing me.

So, this is how the game went:

Madame: Okay, Aunt. It starts with a 'C' but it makes a ch sound.
MBC: Chen?
Madame: No.
MBC: Chang?
Madame: No.
MBC: Charlie?
Madame: No.
MBC: Chester? Chewbacca?
Madame: No, Aunt. Ch . . .

You can see how the game might get old fast, but I think we'd still be playing it if it were up to Madame. Her Mulan love knows no bounds.

NERDS

I just got off the phone with my brother who is in graduate school to get his library degree. He's taking a young adult literature class, so we were talking about young adult books and the people in his classes, who he informs me are nerds. This is not a surprise. The majority of librarians are nerds. I don't think most people who have attended a library conference would dispute this. Here's the thing: I love nerds. Nerds are fantastic, because they're interested in things outside of themselves. They love math or music or books or something. I had a friend in graduate school who was the prototypical nerd. He was studying hydrogeology, and he was in love with rocks (he and my mom would get along). It's true that he could be socially awkward, but I'd way rather hang out with him than socially savvy people without interests (I guess some people manage to fall in the middle, right?). I think curiosity and passion for information are desirable traits. But then I'm a librarian.

Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup

Over the weekend I attended a charity fundraiser. I thought it was a fantastic event. It was held in a local arts center, ceramic artists from the community donated bowls, and a local caterer provided soup. We purchased bowls and then had them filled with soup and the proceeds benefited the soup kitchen in town. The Ceramic Genius donated some of her work, and another friend purchased one of her bowls. The bowl was much admired. Many people noticed the bowl and confided to my friend that it was their favorite bowl available for purchase. It took a great deal of willpower on my part not to tell everyone who commented on the bowl, "I know the artist! She's my friend. I may even have been lying on her bed talking to her while she made that very bowl! She made me a bowl that has a unicorn on it. I eat my oatmeal out of it in the morning. My friends are cool! They make bowls!"

I don't know what the friends of the live musicians refrained themselves from saying to people, because the music was stinky. Usually I'm a fan of live music at events, but the music at the fundraiser was someone playing a keyboard while a woman sang schmarmy songs about how we can all be someone's angel. I'm sure it was supposed to tie in with the charitable aims of the evening, but mostly it was just annoying and made me consider alternate, diabolical uses for my soup.

Next week I'm going to a similar event, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for better music. Maybe jazz.

A Good Poem

I like this poem. I hope you like it, too.

The Man Watching
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Parents vs. The Sink

My parents are staying with me for a few days. The first night we were at my house, I mentioned that my bathroom sink has been draining really slowly, but I couldn't get the stopper out to investigate and sick myself out with whatever nasty build-up had developed on it. I'm usually okay with just sitting in the dark and going blind (oh, it's okay, I'll just lick myself clean and swallow the toothpaste after I brush. I don't need a sink), but my dad likes SOLUTIONS. He pulled out his pocket knife and went to work wrenching the stopper out of the sink. He triumphed over that sink with only the tiniest bit of broken property, and then, and this is where he gets the extra pillows in heaven, he scraped the gunk off the stopper with his knife. So. Disgusting.

That was not the end of the sink woes, though, because there was something in the drainpipe. Something that looked like it was wearing a bad toupe and was going to crawl out of the sink at night and drag us off to a seedy night club where people performed Barry Manilow songs in leisure suits. Or it might have been a tiny, dead muskrat. I was getting ready for bed and every time I used the sink to wash my face or brush my teeth, I couldn't help but glance down at the sink and be totally grossed out by the thing in the sink and feel like maybe I needed to lie down and sniff some smelling salts. Which is when my mom went rummaging through my cabinets to find vinegar and baking soda and boiling water and somehow dislodged and relocated the thing. I assume there was some kind of Mom Test she passed before I was born that gave her the necessary skills to do this, because I was planning to let the creature have the bathroom and to move myself and my belongings into the tool shed.

Driving Difficulties

Right near the top of my Try To Avoid list is driving. Here are the conditions under which I ENJOY driving:

1. No one else is on the road.

2. Um, well, that's about it.

3. Oh, wait, actually, I like it to be light outside and for the weather to be good.

4. And I like to know where I'm going.

5. And I like to be in a state where people use their blinkers and don't pass on the right.

6. And I like for there to be pumpkins growing on the side of the highway and I like to have some John Denver (yes, John Denver--he's only allowed in the car) in the CD player.

7. And I like the car to be going South. Driving North makes me nervous. Round trips are so trying.

Saturday I did not have ideal driving conditions. I was meeting someone from my London trip to have dinner and to see a play in Salt Lake. It was beautiful when I left my house. And then it started raining. And snowing. And blizzarding. As soon as I arrived at my meeting place in Salt Lake, I called my sister to say there was no way I was getting back in that car and that I'd see her in April when it was really and truly spring and not this mean, pretend spring that makes you regain your will to live only to dash all your warm weather hopes by snowing on you while you're trying to drive, which is not a preferred activity to begin with. It's a good thing I read all those wilderness survival books as I child and knew to lay in supplies before hypothermia could overpower me. I walked to the nearest grocery store and bought some contact solution in preparation for my unexpected stay in the city.

I didn't stay in the city, though, because it stopped snowing while I was in the play and I eventually made it home on dark, wet, unfamiliar roads via a secret slow way.

I think I need a chauffeur.

Tuey Hearts Babies

My parents came to stay with me last night. I will tell you of the mighty battle they waged against my bathroom sink and of my harrowing driving adventures over the weekend and of my hour-long conversation with Madame 5-yr-old about Mulan (which is about 50 minutes longer than any sane person would like to discuss the topic), but for now, here’s a picture of Tuey with his newest cousin. Tuey LOVES babies. In fact, I’m a little concerned for Tuey’s upcoming sibling, because Tuey’s going to want to love him down all the time.