Cathy the Librarian

I was trying so hard to keep up with my blog, and I thought that I was doing pretty well, until I received an email from another fellow librarian and blogster, Adrienne. She asked me why the heck I wasn’t posting. So just now, I finally looked and realized that I haven’t posted in almost a month. Jeeze. I do have a few posts that I started and never got to finish. I don’t know what’s taking up all my time. Hmmm. Maybe its my 8 month old baby boy. It would still be nice to have a little bit more me time. I really need some now.
In one of the posts that I started, I mention another thing that has been taking up a great deal of time. Teenagers. Although I think that they’re really not even in high school yet, so they might be those dreaded tweens. Anyway, thanks to these tweens, I have had to call the police twice, I have banned three tweens from the library for six months, I have cried a couple of times, I have been called a fat bitch. I have gotten so mad that I get pale and quiet, which was always a bad since when my mom got that mad you really knew that you were in trouble. I had to put an out of order sign in the women’s bathroom, because one of them smeared pooh in the sink. I have wanted to hide in the staff bathroom on more than one occasion and (1) not tell anyone where I was and (2) lock the door and not come out. The worst thing is that I like all these teens, and I want them to stay, if only they could be respectful. It broke my heart having to ban one of the kids from the library. I think he’s only in sixth grade. He’s really sweet, but very active and difficult to keep entertained. He looked at me when I told him that he couldn’t come back for six months like I was kidding. When I stood there waiting for him to leave, he seemed shocked. Unfortunately, I just don’t know what to do anymore.
For Adrienne, I thought I’d mention this incident, because I know that she’s going to get as mad as I was. However if anyone out there can give me ideas for how to handle this, I’d really appreciate it.
We have a mother who comes to the library all the time with her three year old and six year old. While she goes on the internet to check email or whatever, the kids go crazy through the library, running through the stacks, getting really loud, jumping in the bean bags. I have tried a couple of times to give them dinosaur books to look at, which has calmed them for a little while, but not nearly enough. Sometimes, they want to play games on the internet, and because the six year old can’t read at all, he needs help to play the games. We try to help, but we really have other things that we should be doing. We have all tried to help as much as we can but it only helps so much. Anyway, a couple of days ago, one of my co-workers saw the three year old leave the library. The mother said “Stay in here!”, but she didn’t check on them. So he left the library. To which she said, “Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a couple of seconds. More than one of my co-workers and I wanted to throttle her when she said that, but we aren’t allowed to do that.
Then today, no one saw the boy leave, so he managed to get to the parking lot, and no one knew until another patron came to the desk and said “You know that there is a child wandering in the street. ” The mother finally came to and went to check on her kids. Fortunately, it was not before one of my co-workers went out there to check on the kid. She saw him looking through the car window and duck down. So, she stuck her head in the car door, but then right at that minute, the mother came out and said something like ” what are you doing to my child” or something, but then she saw that it was my coworker, and she said “Never mind”
God. This makes me so mad, I can’t even countinue. Maybe, I’ll be okay to finish tomorrow. Plus, I’m really sleepy.

To Savvymoo, I don’t like shushing people, and I wasn’t the one in that circumstance doing the shushing. It was the mother, but only because she couldn’t be bothered to speak directly to her children. I don’t feel that it should be my job to shush. I don’t like continuing the very old fashioned idea of librarians. Librarians, in fact are very cool PEOPLE. 🙂 They are not little old white ladies in sensible shoes who want to be able to hear a pin drop. On the other hand, I want all people who come into the library to respect others. This past week there was VERY LITTLE respect held by any of the people under 18 that came into the library. Wednesday and Thursday’s antics continued on Friday, so by the end of the week I was very sad. So I had a Japanese beer. It was yummy.

To Adrienne, thank you. As an uber librarian (not me, you), I value your opinion beyond words.

To Patty, I was at Ogden on Thursday and Anne told me about the mother allowing her child to climb on the puppet theater (and laughing about it). To make matters worse, it sounded like they didn’t even apologize for breaking it. I think there must be something in the water on that side of the city, or disrepect was just floating in the air. Sad really.

Even so, I LOVE being a librarian. The hugs that I sometimes get (when parents are in the room) from story time kids make everything better.

(1) I had to kick teens out of the library for being way too rowdy. I hated doing this, because it made me feel like that cranky old librarian, shushing people and running anyone who couldn’t be absolutely quiet out of this library. This is not the type of person that I am, but they were driving everyone crazy. It made me feel weird, but it had to be done.

(2) There were two small children who insisted on yelling at each other and jumping on the new bean bags we got about a week ago. The mother did NOTHING AT ALL about it, SHHUSHing ocassionally, but never leaving her spot at the computer. After asking them not to bounce on the bean bag chairs one last time (of about literally 10 times), I noticed that they had mananged to bounce some of the bag beads right out of the bean bags. I was so mad that I had to leave, and luckily it was time for me to go anyway.

(3) I have decided that because of this, I am going to ask Sally (the director) if we can put some “rules” up. I think I want them to go something like this…

RESPECT…

(1)Each Other
No yelling, screaming or fighting in the library
(2) the Library
Throw away your garbage, don’t jump or put your feet on the furniture
or in anyway purposely try to damage the furniture.
(3) Yourself
Don’t act in a way that you know is inappropriate,
you are only disrespecting yourself by doing these things.
(4) Library Staff
Treat us as you would want to be treated, we are only here to help.
Thank you!

I’m going to try and get another grant… or two. I can’t remember if I posted earlier about this, but I was involved in a homeschooling grant with Cathy Henderson, the librarian from Greece, Jennifer Lindsey, the librarian from Chili and Adrienne Furness, the librarian (or uber as I like to call her) from Webster. So we officially got this grant for $35,000. Woe. Anyway, each of us was supposed to specialize in a different area. Hilton was going to specialize in the Arts. Then I found out about the grants available through the Arts and Cultural Council for Greater Rochester. There’s two of them: one for specific programs and one for advancing a cultural institution. Both sound great, but I’d have to have them in their office by November 10 at 5 PM. This does not give me much time to get everything set down on paper and completed. EEK! Needless to say, I would have to get started on this, whatever I’m going to do, almost immediately. I would like to do some Art History or Art classes for people that would relate to the homeschooling program. I would also like to get money for classes for one of the staff members to learn html, so that our website can be better developed. I just need to start writing everything on paper and sorting it out in my head so it makes sense.
Okay. Time to go to sleep. I can worry about this tomorrow.

I just looked up uber in wikipedia and found out quite a few things:

1) uber should have an umlaut, which, imho is pretty freaking cool
and
2) it means super in Latin
and
3) it means over or superior in German
and
4) it means super cool in English
and
5) it means awesome librarian in Rochester…

Okay so I made that last bit up. Who cares.

Good night again.

Banned Books Week

Today started banned books week, and I thought that each day, I would talk about a different banned book that I have read… I just came up with that a second ago and I love it! I had some of the pages and one of the clerks go through the list of banned books from 2004 and find the ones that we had in the library for a display I wanted to put up. My director and I decided that we would put all the books in some sort of cage or chain them up somehow. We wouldn’t let anyone check them out, to give them a small taste of what it would be like to be told you couldn’t read certain books. Unfortunately, while we were looking for the books we couldn’t find quite a few. They were supposed to to be there but no one could find them. People looked about five times, but no one found them. Personally, I think it was because people didn’t want us to find the books, which included: Doing It, It’s Perfectly Normal, and Holly’s Secret. SEX, SEX, SEX. People want to “protect” their children from everything. Teenage sex, their own sexual organs and homosexual sex. Anything to do with sex is out of bounds for these teens, and their parents are going to make sure that no one else gets to see them either. Or else its just some crazy teens who were too embarrassed or wanted to keep the books for their own collections. Needless to say, I’m pretty ticked off. I thought I would go back through the list of banned books and make a list of all the books that are “supposed” to be their, but aren’t. I thought it would be a good way to show everyone that a few people had to ruin everything for everyone else and now no one can read it. BTW, if you haven’t guessed by now, I’m pretty ticked off. I am all about parents monitoring what their kids read, and if they don’t think its appropriate, not letting their kids read certain books. However I am NOT for a small group of people deciding what everyone reads. That’s why when I purchase books for the library, I buy christian fiction, science fiction, mysteries, war fiction, romances and lots of other kinds of books. I try to take into account that there are lots of different people with lots of different tastes and I need to respect everyone’s opinions. Whew! Now that I’ve got that off my back, I can go on with my life!

We spent most of the day today at the Riverside Convention Center watching Battlebots! My tushy hurt after a while, because the seats were REALLY uncomfortable, but the robots were pretty awesome. There were a few good fights, but quite a few fights ended really quickly. At about 1 pm we took a lunch break and went to Bennigan’s Restaurant. Our food arrived, and after the waitress put my salad on the table, Jeff’s hamburger somehow flipped over off the tray and fell on my jeans and my nice new soft sweater. The rest of the day I walked around with hamburger greasy clothes. Yuck. They didn’t even give us a discount or free desert or anything. It took us almost an hour and a half to get out of the restaurant. Beh. Oh well. Jeff and I had a lot of fun watching robots kill each other. Oh and one of the teens from my library was there too, so we got to chat for a little while too. Fun, fun!

(Damnit! My computer died and I lost my post. Now I have to remember what the heck I was writing. Feh)
Once a month all the j librarians in my library system meet for “discussion”. I try to keep up, but mostly I like to listen to them spout their beautiful and maniacal mouth music. Today, I was lucky enough to sit near the uber-librarian, Adrienne, who has a blog of her own. I think that at once point, I decided that I would much rather live vicariously through her blog than write in my own, disappointing blog (and in turn, life.) Anywho, it turns out that sometimes she looks at my blog. Needless to say, she was a little disappointed in me because I hadn’t posted anything since coming back from California. I did try though! Last night I stared at my computer, asking it what there was that I could write about my trivial and boring life… Obviously, by the lack of a post last night, my computer was little help. I’ve recently been physically sick and thinking that compared to all those poor souls in New Orleans, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I’d actually been meaning to muse about my personal feelings towards New Orleans, but I haven’t decided how to put my thoughts together. (Don’t worry Adrienne, there will be a post!) I’d also thought that maybe I’d write about how I wanted to buy a Play Station, two dance pads and Dance Dance Revolution for the library.

All those thoughts went out the window, when I came home and smelled poop (so strong that I could smell it immediately, even though I’ve got a cold and can’t smell a damned thing).

We put our dog Buster in his crate when we aren’t at home, because if we don’t, he has a tendency to eat books, Jack’s clothes and toys, video tapes and DVDs, or anything else he can get his lips around. At first we tried to let him stay out on his own, because we thought it might be a little cruel, but our greyhound group explained to us that they spend quite a bit of time in their crates, and feel safest in their crate. Please try telling that to Buster. He hides upstairs when we try and get him to go in his crate. He howls when we are coming home. He is not a happy dog, one way or another.
This is where the poop comes in, he has no qualms about pooping and peeing in his crate. This is a weird thing because it would be like you pooping (on purpose!) in your bed. So tonight, we came home and he had pooped and peed in his crate, then sat in it and got the poop nice and deep into his back paws. I really don’t know anymore.
After all this, plus having Jack who is only about 6 months old, plus a cat that likes to vomit everywhere, plus having a job that causes me to run about like a chicken with its head cut off quite a bit, I don’t know if I can handle the whole dog thing. I really don’t know if Jeff and I have a life that supports a dog, especially such a high-maintenance drama queen kind of dog such as we have. I’m really at the point where I think we need to give him up back to the group, where he can go to a family that deserves him more. Unfortunately, part of me is really concerned with what other people think of us. I know it seems pretty shallow, but I don’t want people to think that I’m shit. But then, I really want him to be somewhere he would be happy. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO FREAKING DO! We’ve already agreed that we are never ever getting another dog, but other than that… I’m sad. Now he cringes and whines when we try and pet him, plus he puts his tail between his legs ALL THE TIME (like now).
OKAY explain this to me. He poops in his crate when we aren’t home. This says to me that he DOESN’T like his crate. Then, when we’re home, he keeps going into his crate. This says to me that he DOES like his crate. ARGH! What the hell!
Cats, I understand. They come to you when they want to be petted or want food. They piss in front of the litter box when they want the litterbox cleaned. Thats about it. Dogs, I don’t understand. I think that they might be too complex for me.
Okay, Adrienne. You wanted me to post in my blog. PLEASE HELP ME! I promise that my next post will be happier… or at least more entertaining.

I’m still pregnant. I can think of quite a few other states I’d rather be in right now, and pregnant is not one of them. Jack seems quite content just hanging out right where he is, but for me I think I’d like him to come out any time now. Like maybe right now. Nope. Guess not.

The mystical “they” say that there are things that can encourage the baby to come out. Spicy food, long walks, and doing things that got you pregnant in the first place. Well, I’m still pregnant. So there goes that theory out the window.

Friday was my last day at work. I sort of wish that I had stayed a little bit longer, but my boss didn’t want me to go into labor at the library. I must imagine that wouldn’t be a pretty sight for all my co-workers and the library patrons. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I started having contractions when all the kids were in the library for story time! What fun! “Mommy, why is the librarian crying and screaming?” Unfortunately it means that I’m home with not much to do. I’ve already cleaned up most of the house (although I could mop the floors) and I still need to finish writing thank-you notes (sorry everybody) but I feel very restless. I take naps, but they don’t last too long. I guess I should be taking advantage of this, considering that at the latest life will be changing very drastically on April 6, when the doctor is going to induce me (and which happens to be my mother-in-law’s birthday!)The doctor asked me if I wanted to wait until my birthday (April 18) and suprise suprise, I infatically stated that under no conditions would that be happening.

I went back to work today. It was really pretty exhausting to start working again after lying on the couch for two weeks. Still it was nice to be able to do something constructive. Everyone at work was pretty great about me taking it easy, however I’ve started to feel like I’m nothing but a fetus carrier, and not a person anymore. This is a feeling that I get not just from work, but from everywhere: doctor, friends, family, strangers. I’m just a belly with legs… its pretty creepy, I know but then again I am pregnant and therefor crazy.
I’ve been feeling quite panicky recently. I can’t really imagine why, but there you go. I’m really scared that after the little guy is born, there will be lots of people who want to visit him and hold him, but bit by bit, it will be like I’ve dropped off the face of the earth and swallowed up into a cavernous black pit. I’ll end up spending all my time caring for Jack and forgetting to wash my hair or change my clothes and I’ll begin to (or continue to, depending on who you talk to) lose my mind.