Cathy the Librarian

I FINISHED three books:

Runaways (2 & 3)
Little Long Nose

I read, but did not finish:

Abarat
The Summer Tree
A Dogs Life
The Ordinary Princess
Jennifer Government

I love the Runaways series, and you can read my review here.

I also loved Little Long Nose. The book itself was in a compact format perfect for a pocket. The illustrations were gorgeous although tiny. The plot was neat and made me glad that I still read children’s books.

The book is about a young boy who helps his mom at her vegetable stand. He will help people bring the vegetables to their houses and in turn will give him eggs, flowers or whatever they can manage.

An old woman comes by, checking out the herbs and vegetables and complaining loudly. The young boy yells at her for her opinions and also makes fun of her appearance. She tells him that he will regret his words, and makes him carry six huge cabbages to her house. He takes them in and she offers him some delicious soup, which he greedily eats. After that things get pretty crazy, and not in a good way.

I’m listening to Jennifer Government, and its the next book for my teen book discussion group. It’s VERY interesting. Its a futuristic book where large companies have taken over and people are basically “owned” by the company they work for. If you work for Nike, your name would become, Cathy Nike. Since I work for a government agency, my name would be, Cathy Government. The USA is the most powerful nation in the world, but the government is nearly powerless. In order to do anything, you need money. Lots and lots of money.

The Summer Tree and Abarat are both fantasy, which I must say, I’m quite partial to. I actually read The Summer Tree years ago, but its one of those books that you remember vaguely and want to read again.

The Summer Tree is a alternative universe kind of fantasy, in which some college students are transported to a magical world of kings and umm.. magic. They find themselves in a world in turmoil, and learn that they each have their own purpose to set the world right.

Abarat is about a teenager that is unhappy with her life in a hog farm dominated town. She’s tired of the desolate area, tired of the smell, and tired of being lonely. She goes off into the desert to find something interesting, and gets more than she bargained for. She helps a strange skinny man, and an ocean appears, taking her to unusual places.

A Dog’s Life is a book as seen from the perspective of a dog that grew up wild and travels in order to find a place that she can call home. The book is well-written and you truly feel like the dog is talking to you. I’ve had it for a while now, and I am amazed that I haven’t finished it yet, because I really do like it.

Unlike all the others, which I have almost finished, I have only read about one chapter of The Ordinary Princess, so I don’t think its really fair to you to even talk about it.

I really enjoyed the weekend, and even though I didn’t get to read as much as I hoped, my family knew that I was taking on this challenge, and they would call me and make sure that I was actually reading like I was supposed to. What a supportive family I have!

I’m making a few really really late new year’s resolutions.

I’m going to:
1) try and update this blog more often
2) practice yoga more often
3) DDR more often
4) read more often
5) watch less tv
6) get more organized at work, so that Sally isn’t embarrassed of me
7) learn how to play the guitar (darn you Jason!)
8) learn how to do string tricks (double darn to you Adrienne!)=
9) take more courses at RRLC
10) make new year’s resolutions when I’m supposed to… at the beginning of the year!

I guess I’ve just been in a funk recently. Over the past two days, I’ve deleted about 500-600 books, and there are still more left to delete. I’ve felt really disorganized at work, and I’ve been falling behind on keeping track of my spending. I’m really awful at keeping records, which is appalling. I’m more the freespirited kind of person that goes around with the chicken puppet and the stickers making kids smile. Its really shameful. If they teach courses about time/money management at RRLC, I’ll have to take them. Immediately. Plus, I’ve been thinking about having another kid, and I’m no lightweight anymore. I need to lay off the fancy coffees. Too many calories. Double plus, a librarian that doesn’t have time to read, is like a firefighter with no time to fight fires. Can’t be allowed.
Wow. Time to go to bed. I’m getting too old for this.

BTW. I love driving my new car!

Okay, so maybe not extravaganza, but at least its sort of interesting. I read this blog called Momchops and she mentioned that we should do this 48 Hour Book Challenge so I took her up on it. This weekend, June 16 – 18, is the Book Challenge. I don’t have time to read normally (due to the 14 month old) but I am going to push myself to read something. Anything. I’m a librarian for goodness sake! Unfortunately, timing couldn’t be worse, because Sunday is Father’s Day, so I’ll have to spend a little time honoring the fathers in my life.

Right now here are the books that I have checked out on my card. You will notice that most are children’s and young adult books. There may be one adult book in there, but I doubt I will get time to read it.

Time out by Helen Cresswell
The ordinary princess by M. M. Kaye
Hope by LouAnn Gaeddert
Little Long-nose by Wilhelm Hauff
Falcon and the Charles Street Witch by Luli Gray
Jennifer Government by Maxx Barry
Abarat by Clive Barker
Snow flower and the secret fan : a novel by Lisa See
A dog’s life : the autobiography of a stray by Ann M Martin
The summer tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
Runaways (vol 2 & 3) by Brian K Vaughan
Teach yourself visually crocheting by Kim P. Werker

After the 48 hours are up, as per the rules of the challenge, I have to give descriptions/reviews of each book I finish.

As a side note, I’m going to post this on my kids and teens blogs and offer a prize to those who read and send me reviews of what they read. Of course I’m sure that nothing will come of it, but we’ll see.
Wish me luck!

As I type this I am in Durham, North Carolina, in my sister’s very awesome new apartment. She is going to be starting research at the University Of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Physics Department. Since she is going to get her PhD, she also gets to be a student professor (ack). I was pretty nervous to be going south. I know, I know, I should be stereotyping people, but with all my anti-Bush stickers and all, I figured that people might not approve. So I scraped all my stickers off as soon as I could the night that we got here. Today we went out and about in Chapel Hill and to my suprise… ther were tons of John Kerry stickers on cars! Turns out, after we talked to a woman at the visitor’s bureau (who happens to be from Long Island!) that Chapel Hill is like a small haven for liberals in the south. She said that even the Mayor is gay! The area is beautiful and there are tons of shops and places to eat. It was warm, but there was a nice breeze. We didn’t get to explore the campus much, but what we did see was GORGEOUS!

Unfortunately, Sam was completely freaking out about being so far away from the rest of our family. My family is what you would call… homebodies. None of us has moved too far away. My mom and dad moved a couple of miles away from my mom’s mother, and about twenty minutes away from my dad’s (now deceased) mother. Jeff and I live ten minutes away from his parents and sister and twenty minutes away from my parents. We stay put. This is why I am SO proud of Sam for getting the courage to move and study here. She is an incredible young woman, and I am POSITIVE that she will go very far in the world.

ANYWAY, its 11 PM and I have to drive **KOFF*jeff*KOFF** early tomorrow, so I’m going to cut this short.

Very important however, is that I CAN DRIVE AGAIN!!! Double-yippee! It is very insane, and I know that everyone will think so, however the day that I learned I could drive again, I test drove a Mazda 5, and I will be picking up my new car on Tuesday. I love my Forester, but the Mazda had more seating, so I had to give in. I was tired of having three people (one of them in a car seat) squished in the back and unable to put seat belts on, Jack was completely safe and strapped in, but Jenny and I would be projected out of the car into the windshield and to our deaths.

Okay, I think that’s basically it, so I’m off to bed! Oh, I miss my son SO much, and I can’t wait to get back to Rochester so I can give him a big hug. I bet my parents can’t wait to give him up. I heard their pretty exhausted. Oh well. I am too.

GOOD NIGHT!

This morning I had a dizzy spell of some sort. I don’t think it was your run of the mill dizzy spell, but I don’t want it to be something more than just regular dizziness. I sort of felt the blood drain out of my face and while it wasn’t like the aura visions that I had been before my seizure, it wasn’t like a regular feeling of dizziness. Of course, I tried to make it go away, because I didn’t want anything to be wrong. Unfortunately, I don’t really know exactly what happened.
If you are one of the five people that read my blog, you will understand my concern. If you just happened to stumble upon my blog and are wondering “What the hell is she going on about?” let me explain.

January 1st of this year, I was enjoying dinner with my hubby, my second set of parents (err… in-laws) and my son. All of a sudden, my mother-in-law noticed my face had gone all funny. I then started shaking and doing all sorts of strange things. Of course, I heard all of this second hand because I wasn’t there at the time. That’s right, I don’t remember a thing. It was like my brain just went on a mini vacation.. in a blender. What I had was a grand-mal seizure. (I did NOT lose bladder control thank god).

I went to see the neurologist and as we talked, I realized that for the past year, my brain had been working itself up to the seizure. I was having seizure auras, which caused me to have a strange sense of deja vu. I would have these at the strangest times, sitting eating dinner, at the end of the summer reading program pizza party, typing on the computer, going to the loo. There really didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. All I understood was that they were happening too much and freaking me out. Unfortunately I didn’t realize until after the seizure what was going on.

The doctor then told me that there really weren’t any outside factors that had caused my seizure. Turns out (as my mom finally decided to tell me the day before) that my father and his mom both had seizures. Therefor I can blame it all on genetics. Which doesn’t really make me feel any better, but I know why it happened.

So now I’m on medicine called Lamictal (which also treats bipolar disorder). They slowly increased it, and at one point I was taking 200 mg (?) a day, but then I broke out in a rash, which if it goes on too long, can send you to the hospital. So then I had to start all over slowly. There are quite a few side effects, and I’m pretty sure that I have a couple of them: dizziness, headaches, blurry vision. Before the seizure, I actually had very few headaches. Now my head never feels like its screwed on just right. I sort of feel like the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Stuff just keeps falling out of me. Plus I’m pretty paranoid about every strange feeling going on in my brain. Of course I don’t usually want to tell anyone about it because I don’t want to cause trouble, and I really hate being a burden, since of course:
I can’t drive. I can’t drive until I’ve been on the medicine for six months. If I hadn’t gone on the medicine, I’d have to wait a year before I could drive. Granted, I don’t want to have a seizure while in the car, because I could kill someone. I also hate being such a burden on people.

Next Wednesday I have an appointment with the Neurologist. On the one hand, I don’t want to tell her that I had a strange dizzy spell. But, on the other hand, I don’t want to have another seizure. I don’t want anything to be wrong with me, if we’re going to be honest, but since its too late for that, I just want to be healthy enough to enjoy being with my son and husband. Plus I’d like to start in on making another baby, and I don’t want to be a wreck for that. My neurologist says that its okay to have babies while on lamictal, but upon looking at side effects and such, its not very comforting. I’d like to have one more kid, but I don’t want him/her to have health problems because of me.

My mind has been pretty crazy lately, but it feels good to get all this out. I really wish that I could be “normal” in any sense of the word, but it looks as though I’m destined to something different.

Oh dear, and I have to be at work tomorrow. I was going to try and get there at nine in the morning, but now I’m thinking that I’ll just take some cataloges home and go through them for an hour after work… a librarian and her cataloges are never parted, although I wish we were, because I’m afraid a stack of them are going to cave in on me and kill me.

And now for something completely different! One of my co-workers has been crocheting purses. If you know ANYTHING about me, you know that I absolutely LOVE purses. I love these purses that she’s been making, and I know for a fact that she sells them, but for some reason, she won’t sell them to her co-workers. She’s just evil!
I tried to find a pattern that looked similar, and this is the closest I could find – here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here plus directions on how to make it here. Well anyway, you get the picture. If you google buttonhole bag, you get pages and pages, and they’re all cute.

Hmm. For a minute it made me forget how sucky it is to have had a seizure. I love bags. (Don’t tease Jeff. I know you’re going to read this. You just don’t understand. You’re a guy.)

I am still amazed, although I probably shouldn’t be anymore. It is so easy to get trapped in the blog world. Skipping from blog to blog, reading random people’s random thoughts and next thing you know, its midnight, you realize that you’re older than you’ve ever been and you have no idea how you got to a blog written by a crack whore (do crack whores really keep blogs, do you think?)

Actually I found a couple neat blogs. One from the YA librarian from Webster, one from a local DJ/Librarian and one from some person that “claims she’s a nice person“. Of course, sometimes I go onto myspace and whole days could go by before I realized what was happening.

One really neat blog that I’ve been trying to keep up with is my friend Clorida’s. She’s living in India for three months and trying to find some way of using her studies in social work. She’s really intelligent and easy to talk to. She gets sleepy between 8:00 – 9:00 pm. She really likes helping the less fortunate, partly because she’d been through a lot when she was a kid but mostly because she’s a really good caring person. I really can’t speak more highly of her.

I think it’s really interesting to point out that I’m also friends with her sister, and they are like night and day. They are SO completely different. There are a couple of things that are the same: 1) they are the truest friends you’ll ever have and 2) they CANNOT under any circumstances live together. We lived in a house for a year, and while for the most part it was a lot of fun, I realized that their is NO way that they should EVER live together. They got on each other’s nerves all the time. Separately, they are the most wonderful people I know, but when they get together for any length of time. Yee Gods. Trouble comes a brewing. I think that they most put off conflicting pheramones or something. I really have no idea how to explain it.

Well, its way past my bed time and Jeff wants me to move to my side of the bed. So I bid farwell to anyone that’s reading. Have a good night and don’t let the bed bugs or the head lice bite!

**Update** This post was started on May 29, 2006

I really want to write. I’ve always know this. I was going to get a creative writing degree in college, and was discouraged from doing so (by my parents of course) so I went into journalism, which I didn’t like and changed to English Lit, which was equally, if not more useless. Although the English professors at Geneseo are really neat, so far, I have not had a chance to make use of my knowledge in Elizabethian and Jacobean drama. If you care, here is a list of the English courses I took while at Geneseo:

18th Century British Literature
American Voices: African-American Migration Narrative
Drama: Elizabethan & Jacobean
Exploring the Renaissance
Major Author: Momaday & Silko
Modern American Literature
The Practice of Criticism
Senior Seminar: Sentiment & Scandal
Shakespeare I

I actually have a whole list of my undergrad courses here and my grad courses here.
So far the only really useful course was the Children’s Lit course I took at MCC. Of course it was fun taking weird courses like the Sentiment and Scandal course, in which we read books like Pride and Prejudice and one of the Marquis de Sade’s books. (I’ll have to look at my books to remember which one).

**Update #2** Around here written around May 30, 2006

What renewed my interest in writing were two things:
a BBC original movie about Shakespeare
and an interview in the School Library Journal with the author Lynne Rae Perkins.

I just think that its great to have such an intensity for something. I think I’m pretty intense about being a librarian, but sometimes I don’t get much personal satisfaction from it.

**Update #3** Here is what I actually wrote today, May 31, 2006. My god, is it almost June already?

Great Honk! It’s taken me three days to write this post (I bet you can’t guess why). I have absolutely no idea how I’d write a book.

Oh well, I better just finish this thing (finally) why Jack manages to entertain himself. Damn-it! Already into stuff he should’nt be.

Okay, really quickly. One of the blogs I read, by Patty Uttaro, the director of one of our local public libraries has put forth a challenge (or rather, another librarian blog she reads has)… to read as many books between June 16 – 18 that we can. After that we talk about each one on our own blog. She calls it the 48 Hour Book Challenge. I call it well-nigh a damn miracle if I could even read one book! But anyway, I accept the challenge, and even if I read nothing but children’s books, its still more than I’ve read recently. Plus I really need to get back to reading again.

In closing, I’d better go. Somehow Jack found a tampon and decided that he should give it to me as a gift. What a sweet boy… or something. (I do love him. I just need to find that patience that seems to be missing right now.)

I feel like a horrible mother. I don’t keep track of each time a tooth breaks through, when he starts eating a new food, when he sat up by himself or when he first laughed. I haven’t had any professional pictures taken (and he’s almost 14 months) or taken a lot of videos. I love him so much, but when he gets older, I’m sure he’ll ask why I didn’t keep track of all that information… well, on the otherhand, maybe he won’t, he is a guy after all.

Every day is a new day that is just so much fun now that he’s around. I think I look forward to getting up a lot more. I look in his face and I feel so good, like everything is at peace with the world. What a wonderful feeling.

Still. I can’t even remember if we took pictures at his first birthday, or the first time he unwrapped a present or ate a piece of chocolate cake… hmm, I’m pretty sure Jeff wouldn’t allow that. Jeff’s a little bit of a neat freak when it comes to Jack. The rest of the house could go to pot… which it does somewhat. Not totally. I’m not a complete mess, but anyone who has seen Jeff and I, knows that we aren’t Mr. and Mrs. SQUEEKY Clean. We probably are more likely to resemble… Sorta Clean Gene. Okay so I have no idea what I’m going on about, but we are not the cleanest people in the world.

One trouble with not being neurotically clean is that we have a vomitty cat who vomits in places that we can’t see. Now we have little bugs everywhere. I think that I may kill my cat… okay I probably won’t kill my cat, but I’d like to. We have her on drugs, food that costs more that the food I eat, and she drinks water out of a little fountain. And yet, still she vomits. And I want to kill her.

Ah well. What can we do.

BTW, I really wish that I had more times to read books. What good is a librarian that has no time to read books?

I NEED TO READ!

I couldn’t remember the lyrics to the Looney Tunes cartoon with the frog that was found in a box. I thought that the lyrics were something like good night or good bye, so that they would be appropriate now, but then I found out that the lyrics are HELLO. Damn. Well, I used them anyway.

Hello! (GOOD NIGHT) ma baby, Hello! (GOOD NIGHT) Ma honey, Hello! (GOOD NIGHT) ma ragtime gal.

So GOOD NIGHT!

My husband has a discussion board, and somehow, one thing led to another and they ended up talking salaries. Oh! I know. I think that some union employees in Delphi were complaining because the company wanted to decrease their wages (if it was me, I think I’d want to complain too) from $27 an hour to $16.50 an hour. Right now, I make about $16.50 an hour (or about $31,000 a year). I found an article that stated that in 1998, in a medium sized library, a beginning librarian made an average of 28,767 a year. That means that 8 years later, I’m only making about $3000 more a year than those librarians.

I try not to be upset about this.

I try telling myself that its only money and that when we die that we can’t take it with us.
I try reminding myself that I like working with kids and teens and the rest of the public (sometimes).
I try reminding myself that its a worthy cause to be a strong advocate on behalf of the youth in my town.
I think about when the kids are excited because I found them a book they had never heard of but were excited to read.
I think about when the kids are *so* excited to shake their wiggles out at storytime that they can’t stand still.
I think about when the kids want to give me a hug because they like having me around.

I *really* do try and remind myself of all of these things.

And then…

I think of the teens getting in my face and calling me a fucking bitch.
I think about the guy who hovers and won’t leave you alone.
I think of the old guy who leaves boogers on his books and asks you to put holds on fifty things and changes his mind a couple of days later and the stuff has already come, and he doesn’t want to pay the fees.
I think of the people that think I’m personally out to get them when I tell them:
*turn off your cell phone
*your children need to stop climbing on the shelves or running through the aisle
*you can’t use the internet and type a paper at the same time
*you have to pay for that print out even though you didn’t mean for 20 more pages to  come out of the printer (usually they run out of the library)
*I’m sorry I don’t know which book you are talking about that has the blue cover that is about this thick (shows with fingers extended) is about some kind of war and has the word “the” in the title
I  think of all the programming that I have to do because not only can’t they afford to pay me well, they can’t afford to hire another librarian to do either teens or children’s services, because I do both.
I think about how I have four story times, yet people complain because we don’t have as many story times as *that* library. Then, after preparing for those storytimes, only one person shows up, or sometimes none, and everyone who signed up doesn’t bother letting me know if they’re sick or dead.
I think about how people complain because we don’t have enough general programming, enough educational programs, or we show too many movies. Then I plan a poetry program and NO ONE shows up.
Alright, so I know that I shouldn’t be jealous of Jeff’s friends who are making $55,000 – $65,000 or more. I know that I should accept the fact the librarians are typically women, and women usually make less than men. I should be glad that in the next 20 years or so my undergrad and grad loans will finally be paid off. I should be glad to have a job at all! But that doesn’t make it any easier to know that a manager at Wilson Farms makes about $2.00 an hour more than I do. I’m greatful to have these people here, but what kind of message are people trying to send. I shouldn’t both having gotten a 6 year college degree when I can go to Wilson Farms with a high school diploma and make more money.

This F’ing SUCKS!…. Nevermind the fact that I drive past three other libraries on the way to get to my library.

I guess its just because I’m tired from working hard. I just can’t understand it.

Okay, I just found this article, that has updated median salaries.

Here are some of the results:
Librarians who do not supervise, make an average of $47,246
Beginning librarians make an average of $36,486

I’d say that I’m below that by quite a bit.

“I can bear no longer! Goblin King! Goblin King! Wherever you may be take this child of mine far away from me! ” – Sarah
Just had to type this down somewhere. Its a quote from my favorite movie in all the world, Labyrinth.
If you haven’t seen it, you need to. David Bowie with big hair and tight tight pants… priceless!