Cathy the Librarian

I just (a couple of months ago now) got a new mp3 player, and my husband tossed a bunch of stuff on the player. One of the things he put on was the soundtrack to Kill Bill 2. The Kill Bill soundtracks have a lot of neat music on them, however I’ve become absolutely OBSESSED with one song in particular recently. Its called Tu Mira and its by Lole Y Manuel. Now I need to listen to more flamenco music. What an untapped treasure! Its sad and bouncy at the same time. I’ll have to put them into Pandora, which is an interesting take on internet radio. You plug in an artist or song that you like and it finds similar music that you might like. If you like it, you give it a thumbs up. If not, thumbs down. Sometimes it has interesting choices and I can’t really see the connection, but ah well. No one is perfect.

Ack. Its midnight. Time for bed.

If you’re around Rochester, you should take the time to check out Central Library’s newest exhibit. Its art all done by staff members throughout the Monroe County Library System. Check out the article here on the MCLS website. What a great idea! It lets people see another aspect of staff that doesn’t have to do with books. I must admit that I am mad that a certain boss of mine didn’t let me know about it until about a week before so that I didn’t have enough time to get it together. Oh, well. Maybe it’ll be so popular that they’ll do it again and I’ll have time to submit something. Hopefully someone will take the time to put pictures of everything on the library website. Then more people will get to see the art!

Maybe in the future, they could have a staff art competition in a couple different areas (photography, yarn craft, jewelry, painting…) and have patrons judge the art. They could make the winners “staff member of the month” and have some prizes or special things for them. How cute would that be?

but I LOVE having a harness for my son. He wants so badly to be independent, but he’s still so little that he doesn’t always listen to me. Really, he NEVER listens to me. He never wants to be in a stroller, and god forbid if I want to hold his hand.

Today, I went to the Monroe Community Hospital for their Harvest Craft Fair with my mom, grandmother, sister and Jack. Jack was full of beans while we were there. He was into everything, even with the harness. My sister was holding him as he pulled and she overheard a (youngish) woman saying, “How horrible, they’re children, not animals! That’s disgusting.” How dare she?! Soon after, we were talking to a vendor (who was a grandmother) and she mentioned that she loved those harnesses. She stated that she would rather know that the child was safe and close by, rather than let him run free. She said that it was especially important during these times because there are just so many terrible people out there. Plus they could easily wriggle out of your hand and run into the street.

I completely agreed with everything she said! Why then, did it still sort of hurt to hear what the other woman said? I’ll try not to let it bother me, since I won’t stop using the harness, but it still upsets me that people can’t see how wonderful they are. I don’t go almost anywhere without my harness. I just feel safer.

Oh well, we can’t make everyone happy, can we?

I want to try and make a couple of those drawstring bookbags. One for me (of course) and a couple as Christmas presents. Supposedly, they’re very easy to make, but I’ve only used a sewing machine a couple of times. I like making special homemade presents for Christmas, and not always just giving presents that I had to punch people out to get. The bags would be for my nieces, and I’ll try to make some things for other people in my life. I think it really shows people that I care about them that I made something unique and just for them.

On a humorous note, the Christmas displays have been going up everywhere (not funny) and I’ve asked Jack what certain things are. He knew snowman, penguin and reindeer, however whenever I point to Santa Claus, he says, “CLOWN!” I love kids.

Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise”

I will thank the LWTeens (a teen library blog) for providing our entertainment for this evening, with the added bonus of driving me OUT OF MY MIND!! 🙂

BTW, I don’t know why my blogs hosted by wordpress can show the video right on the blog, but this one can’t. If anyone out there can explain it to my feeble little mind, please let me know.

I changed my blog theme. You can’t imagine how difficult it was sifting through all the themes, but I thought it was time. The previous one was okay, but it cut off my pictures, and frankly, I was getting tired of it. This one is light and fresh, just like a daisy! … okay, maybe not, but I needed something new. So here it is.

I just lost 2 hours and 23 minutes watching one of the worst movies ever. (Jeff says that it can’t be the worst ever because I didn’t realize it was over two hours until just now. I think it was mostly because I spent the whole time screaming at the screen.) Unfortunately, not everyone believes me. I cannot believe that on Rotten Tomatoes it got as many good reviews as it did. Curious yet? It was Transformers.

My sister and I spent most of the movie hiding our faces and making fun of them. The transformers were all idiots, the government was full of idiots,
Shia LaBeouf was an idiot, his parents were idiots, and I was an idiot for watching the whole thing. There were soldiers too, and they were about the only intelligent people in the whole movie. Even the people who were supposed to be smart didn’t seem too smart.

The whole movie was unconvincing, and I’m not talking about two opposing groups of autonomous robotic life forms coming to earth and killing each other in order to get this special cube that is host to extraordinary amounts of power. Enough to destroy earth. Of course, before they destroy the earth, they want to steal all the earth’s knowledge… hmm, if I’m a robot with the ability to cross the galaxy and the ability to harness incredible amounts of power that humans can’t even begin to understand, do you think I’m going to care what a race of measly humans know? On the other hand, if these robots are smart enough to traverse the universe, wouldn’t you think that they would be reasonably intelligent? Even the robots are idiots (which I said before, but I want to repeat my point). Their mannerisms are silly, they say completely silly things and they behave like 11 year old boys. Of course, that could be their target audience. Who cares about the 28 year old woman who remembers watching it when she was a kid? Its not like she is very likely to buy transformer toys or anything… (well, not anymore, anyway).

The cube that the transformers are looking for contains UNIMAGINABLE amounts of power. And yet, the robots need a pair of glasses with the cube’s coordinates etched into them in order to find it. Don’t you think that if something has that much power within it and you were a robot with some pretty impressive powers yourself, that you would be able to sense the cube?

I mean even us pathetic humans radiate heat energy and we’re nothing. Don’t you think that something that powerful would release some energy or leave a mark somehow? I know that I’m thinking too much, but I really hate it when movies treat us like we’re all idiots. Sometimes movies play to the lowest common denominator. I guess that if situations are unrealistic within the real world, I get distracted and can’t get into the movie. As I said before, I can believe the autonomous robots from space. What I can’t believe is that soldiers would be allowed to use video instant messenger in order to talk to family members. I know I know. Nit picky stuff. But that kind of stuff bothers me, when you know that rather than taking the time to do a little research and find out the truth, they go the route of sentimentality. I know I know! Stupid! Why can’t I just enjoy the movie? For the same reason that I had to do some research on my own to make sure that soldiers really couldn’t do something like that. As far as I can tell, they can’t. They can send videos, but no real time videos. I found a couple of sites that help you do that: Army FRG and My Army Life Too, but nothing beyond that. I am willing to take a big leap and say that they probably wouldn’t allow stuff like that because of two big things: security and trauma. If their camp gets bombed while the officer is talking to his/her mom and they die, what kind of effect is that going to have on the family?

Anyway, its things like this that ruin movies for me. Not the extraordinary stuff, but the little things that they didn’t take the time to make realistic. I’m sure other people will like it.

I think I’ve even forgotten what I’m trying to say, so I’ll end with this. Transformers was a stupid movie. Not a fun stupid like Evil Dead or Pecker. A stupid stupid like, well… I’ll have to think about that one.

Good night. I’m off to read some scary kids books now, and not STUPID scary. 🙂

Naylor, Phyllis Witch’s sister (kids – scary)
Snyder, Zilpha The trespassers (kids – scary)
Thompson, Richard The follower (kids – scary)
Hurst, Carol Otis The wrong one (kids – scary)
Block, Francesca Weetzie Bat (teens – surreal contemporary )
Moriyama, Daisuke Chrono crusade 1 – 5 (teens 0 manga)
Morgenstern, Julie Organizing from the inside out for teens (teens)
Morgenstern, Julie Organizing from the inside out (adults)
Morgenstern, Julie Time management from the inside out (adults)
Zevin, Gabrielle Memoirs of a teenage amnesiac (teens – book on cd)
Caroline Murmurs (music cd)
Sakaki, Ichiro Scrapped princess 1- 2 (teens – manga)
Pearson, Ridley Peter and the Starcatchers (teen – downloaded audiobook)

I’m on a kids book committee to create a scary stories book list, so I should have more scary stories checked out, however I really want to read the books to teach me better organization and time management skills. Plus, I always need to keep up with my manga reading, much to my husband’s disgust. 🙂 When I was looking at Amazon for the books, the scary ones received some pretty good reviews from School Library Journal, which is very encouraging.

I’m trying to get through Peter and the Starcatchers, but I can’t get into it as much as I thought I would. As I speak, I’m downloading The Immortals, Book 1: Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce. Hopefully, it will be better than the other one.

I guess maybe I should actually read some of them now. 🙂

My mind was just reeling after the NYLA conference. It was almost too much to take in. At first, I wasn’t so sure if I was taking any of it in, although now I think I may have just been in information overload. That, and driving overload (600 miles in four days. Egads!)

Thursday I went to a special day long continuing ed program called “Get with the YA Program“. It was a real eye opener… mostly because if I had a population of a quarter of a million and staff dedicated to helping me specifically and oodles of money, I could do so much more. As it is, I serve a population of 15,000, have a total staff of about 12, and a programming budget that is shameful. Kevin King, from the Kalamazoo Public Library came to talk to us about the four s’s: Support, Staff, Space, and a Stash of cash. The presentation gave me a lot to think about. I realize that I need to work on my time management and organization skills. When this is accomplished, I need to write a couple of grants that give me lots of money so that the teens and I can create zines to distribute throughout town. We’d need lots of cash for a digital camera, scanner, laptop, collating printer/copier and lots and lots of paper…. actually the zine idea came from Zahra Baird, who works at the Chappaqua Public Library. I also realized that I need to take a more active step in working with the schools and in the community. I need to work with social groups and people in power to get what I want. Kevin explained that one of the more important things about being a librarian is to be able to communicate well with others, to work well in a group and to be a good listener. He talked about how teens brains are literally made up differently than the adult brain. They think and act differently, because that’s the way their brain works. Luckily, I think I still have a little of that teen brain left so that I can talk to them pretty easily.
Kevin gave me lots of ideas for programming… now I just have to get going on them! One of the easiest things, I thought, would be to start programs for “tweens”. I’ve found that people all define tween very differently. One program I went to determined that tweens are kids in 3 – 5 grade. I thought, “ah-roo?” Umm, I don’t think so.

According to a Business Week article:

A tween is vaguely defined as a prepubescent between the ages of 8 to 14, 9 to 12, or 8 to 12, depending on whom you believe. (Some industries, such as the wireless sector, categorize the age as an unbelievable 6 to 12 years old, prompting one to ponder, “in between” what?) Regardless of the exact age definition, most agree that the breaking point of a “child” becoming a “tween” is by the American fifth grade (approximately ten years old), when he/she rejects more childlike images and associations and aspires to be more like a teen.

I would like to think of tweens as people in (5th?) 6th grade to 8th grade. I know that 8th graders would like to think that they are teens, but middle schoolers and high schoolers are SO different, maturity wise.

I think the idea that a SIX YEAR OLD is a tween is ridiculous. However, if you take a look at some of those Halloween costume ads, maybe it isn’t (I’m being sarcastic, BTW.)  Some of these costumes try and tart up little kids. Its disgusting. Why can’t we let little kids be little kids? Why can’t they just have fun doing little kids things?

Anyway. I would like to start doing some “tween only” programs, similar in style to what I do for the kids and teens. Once a week, all month long, I’d do a program for tweens only. I thought I could call it “Tweensdays”. Goofy, I know. So sue me… no don’t. I have to save up for my girls-only cruise (WOO HOO!) in January.

Welp. Its after midnight and I’m tired. I have so much more on my mind that I want to tell you!

A couple highlights:

• YSS wanting to recruit me for committee work, and a local librarian trying to push me into their clutches :0
• Even more NYLA fun… such as winning a set of diseases!
• Calling the police on the teens because they are out of control, scare the kids and adults (and even some of the other teens) and having them swear at me so that I have to go all alpha dog on them. And belief me, I can if I need to. I know ghetto neck and I’m not afraid to use it.
• Grants grants grants. I have so many ideas for grants my head may explode.
• Jack mishaps in Wegmans. Blood, screaming and a mommy trying to stay calm and she looks frantically for daddy.
• DDR madness at the Kyle household and CALVES OF STEEL!

I think that’s it for now. I will try and cover all of these topics (and more) in the next couple of days. I can’t believe that so much has been going on! Eek!

You wouldn’t believe this, smelling my kitchen sometimes and considering where I work (libraries can be notoriously stinky) , but I’m addicted to smell. About a week ago, my friend Adrienne went to Chicago for a blog conference. When she got back, she brought me some soap. It smelled great, but I didn’t realize HOW great until I got back home and used it for the first time. The whole room smells great now! She got the soap from Lush. What a great friend she is… now I need to go to Chicago!