Archive for the ‘General Rantings’ Category

I just have to share this with you guys

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

I’m looking for a crocodile cake design for Jack’s third (gulp) birthday, and I came across this recipe for carrot cake from the Crocodile Cafe. On the left is all the nutritional facts. OMG. You consume all but 93 of your daily recommended calories in this cake! Check it out here. Its ridiculous! Its CARROTS. Well and 5 eggs, a POUND of cream cheese and 1/2 cup of butter. But still! 1907 calories in one piece of cake? … I guess its probably not that unusual though, is it? Gah. Makes me wish I couldn’t read… well maybe not, but it makes me wish I could burn off calories as fast as the hubby.

CARROTS!!! They’re good for you!?!?!

Those shameful teens.

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

I just realized that after the two last posts, one might think that I hate teens or something, when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. I mean, I’d be lying if I didn’t say they don’t drive me crazy sometimes, but I love their free spiritedness, emotions and individuality. I think that teens are so often given the short stick, because people just expect the worst. Here’s an example (and then I’ll get on with my reason for the post): on Saturday the page that was working (high schooler) said that one of the older patrons kept following her around and giving her dirty looks. She was furious, and rightly so I think. She went on to say that she’s on National Honor Society, she does extracurricular stuff and she gets really good grades.

Why should this older guy think she’s up to something? And really, why should he? 1. She’s in the library (of course, that often doesn’t mean anything anymore). 2. She was hardly dressed like a gangsta or other kind of hardened criminal, unless you count a gray sweatshirt and jeans gangsta material. 3. She was quietly putting books away.

Sometimes I really don’t understand adults. Its like as soon as they hit a certain age, the forget what it was like to be a teenager. They forget that you don’t need to talk to small children like they are completely mindless… you know what I’m talking about. Loud, high pitched and slow. Sometimes with that cutesy sing-song voice that I absolutely abhor. When I write it out, I realize that people do that with old people too. Talk to them really loud and slowly. I guess that’s why I like working with old people too. I like working with those people that really appreciate what you do for them, because the vast majority want nothing to do with them.

ANYWAY. After all that, all I really wanted to say was that on twitter, one of the people I follow is “youthlibrarian” and she found this site called lazy library. Its a site that finds books on different topics under 200 pages. Any more than 200, it won’t be on their site. They even rate it, tell you how much it costs and where you can buy it. Of course I had to look up librarian. High schoolers around the world rejoice.

NKOTB

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

I have been composing a post on my vacation… which will come soon. However, today while I was working on adding (a gargantuan amount of) rss feeds onto my yahoo page (I was actually quite pleased with the turn out), I found a news article about New Kids on the Block. That’s right. I just said news and New Kids on the Block in the same sentence.

It turns out that according to this yahoo article they may be getting back together. Of course, most of their information is based on their extremely cryptic official website.

Do I want to believe that kids fifteen to (gasp) twenty years younger than me will be screaming over the guys that I liked (and bought those huge buttons, tons of posters and books, a couple of t-shirts and lots of other random things) when I was in middle school? Do I think thirteen year olds will find mid to late thirty year olds dreamy? BTW, Jonathon is the oldest at 40 and Joey is the youngest at 35. I suppose its more likely that it’ll be a bunch of thirty year old women throwing their bras and panties at the stage, rather than fifteen year olds.

Hopefully I won’t need to worry about this, because according to Danny’s myspace page, he’s not positive that they are getting back together… of course this probably means that they are getting back together. Yeesh.

I guess I sort of view this thing in the same way I view Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, Transformers, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These were all things I had when I was a kid, and I don’t like that companies are bringing them back to make tons of money off of all us reminiscing children of the 80s. I also think that there should be a certain point where you need to say, “Hey! I’m an adult. I probably shouldn’t be in a boy band.” Jonathon sells real-estate for goodness sake. To me that doesn’t scream boy band.

But hey, more power to them, I guess.

Everyone loves Star Wars

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Its practically unAmerican not to like Star Wars. Then I came across this blog post. There is this neat thing on wordpress.com, where I have all my work blogs, that shows a smattering of interesting wordpress blogs whenever you log on. Which is how I came to read the article. I think its an interesting take on Star Wars, and so true.

In the original series the Rebels destroy the Death Star and are awarded medals for bravery. But what about all the regular people doing their jobs. Taking care of the park, cleaning toilets, doing laundry, or serving food in the cafeteria. Its no different than when Darth Vader blew up Alderaan… well except that Alderaan couldn’t blow up planets. Also, when Luke blew up the Death Star, shouldn’t he have felt all those people dieing? Isn’t that what happened when Alderaan blew up?

I think it makes a great comparison to what’s going on in society right now. There are tons of regular people living in Iraq, and yet often times I think people forget that. They also forget that not everyone is an extremest. They are just trying to survive…

Anyway, I loved the article, because it makes us think of Star Wars in a whole new light. Plus it had a link to a great Star Wars Lego’s video. Perfect!

There’s one thing I need to get off my chest. When I was looking up the spelling of Alderaan, I came to this great site called Wookiedpedia. One thing led to another, and I looked at the bio of Padmé and they claim that “a medical team tried to save Padmé; sadly, they discovered that she was dying, having apparently lost the will to live.” Oh, come on now! Sure her husband has turned into the ultimate form of evil, but she just gave birth to twins! — Although, I’m sure that my husband would think that it would cause him to lose the will to live. I’m sorry, but one look at my newborn children would give me a new lease on life. I don’t blame her though, Star Wars was written by a man who didn’t know any better and thinks that us women live and breath for our men. I DON’T THINK SO. Small babies that we have just spent months carrying and hours delivering outweigh any crazy lunatic husband that has gone to the darkside. I am not losing the will to live for no man… and I’m just a regular chick, not a QUEEN who has fought in wars and argued with powerful politicians. I DON’T THINK SO. Well, I guess you know how I feel about that. Couldn’t there have been an assassination at least? I think this is just a slap in the face for women all over the world.

Oh and I watched Snakes on a Plane last night. It may have been the worst movie ever made. I don’t know if it even deserves another sentence, but maybe later. All I need to say for now is RUN AWAY! More to follow.

New Years Resolutions

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Everyone has them and everyone breaks them. I’m just going to pretend for a while that I won’t break these ones, because I think that they’re pretty necessary in my life. And no, its not “I will lose weight and exercise more”… blah blah blah. We all do that one, and break it as soon as we think it. So maybe if I don’t think about losing weight, it’ll happen. Right? Oh, well. At least I’ve cut out the bagels, and I try to DDR.

Here are my real new years resolutions, and honestly, these may be even harder than saying I’ll lose weight or that I’ll write more blog posts. Here it goes.

Time and Organizational Management. Yup I said it out loud. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m pretty scatterbrained and unorganized. Even my day planner looks like it was hit by a twister. Auntie Em wouldn’t be found for years. (BTW, I am once again trying to make use of my PDA) I do try. I think its pretty funny that I’ve chosen a field that prides itself in being organized into categories and yet…

If I’m being honest with myself (and you guys too) I really didn’t become a librarian because I liked the Dewey Decimal System or even Library of Congress for that matter. I became a librarian because I like being a little social butterfly. 🙂 Plus I like programming. I like playing Cranium with seven year olds and watching a nearly three year old play DDR and come racing up to me and say “Miss Cathy! Miss Cathy! I beat it!” In this high pitch ADORABLE voice, that makes you want to eat her up. She is this adorable little blonde who is incredible bouncy and adorable. Did I mention adorable? As the program was ending, her mom said that she (the little girl, of course) and Jack should get married, because then they would have the MOST ADORABLE CHILDREN IN THE WORLD!!! Mwahahah! Okay, tangent.

I like being a librarian because I like programming (when people come). I also like talking to people and being there when needed. Organization Goddesss I am not, and its not really high on my list of most important qualities, although I logically know that its important.

I also want to work on time management, because this is not a Kyle skill. We are still working on our “Fashionably Late Kyle Christmas Cards”. We still have a graduation card for a high schooler at our church. We still have a sympathy card for a friend who’s mom died, umm a couple of months ago. Granted, her mom was turning 105 in a couple of days, but that’s really not the point. And yes, that is her mom. My friend in question is in her 70s.

I have checked out the series on time and organizational management, but I haven’t managed to read them.

There’s just so much to think about! So much to read, so much technology, so many PSP games, so much DDR to play. So much coloring and puzzle putting-together to do with my son. (And then there’s the cleaning, which we don’t need to talk about right now) How do people find time to do anything?  I find it absolutely HYSTERICAL that I have an obsession with watches and (to a lesser extent) calendars. This should be telling me something, shouldn’t it?

Anyway, what are some of your guys’ new year’s resolutions? I know, don’t all answer at once. I’m sure I’ll get quite a few resolutions to enlarge something or other, or to be better at “something else”. That’s okay, I know that you’re still thinking about your resolutions.

Another resolution. Go to bed earlier. Good night.

What a way to waste 2 hours and 23 minutes

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

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. 🙂

Drowning my sorrows in strawberry rice krispies treats

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I’m glad that I decided to buy the Rice Krispies and strawberry marshmallows this past time I went grocery shopping. They were delicious!

I’ve had the worst turnout for my story times. In fact my best story time turnout was 14, which included parents, and someone else had actually done it for me, because I had to work at the first tech camp in my library system. Just so you know what a tech camp might entail, I talked about DDR and Guitar Hero and encouraged libraries to make it a part of their own libraries. Anyway, I’ve had terrible time trying to get people to go to my story times. Then to make matters worse, I read this article.

Okay, so maybe Webster is “a little bit” bigger than Hilton (2000 census – Webster 37,926 Parma 14,822). But still! Then of course, I could decide not to have story time next spring. But what would happen then? People would complain, just like they complain that I don’t have story time all year round. Ugh. I love doing story time, even if there are only two adorable little kids that I read to, but its sometimes distressing with all the preparation I have to put into each story time session I do.

Then I made the mistake of trying to do an educational program for Columbus Day. I called it “Discovering Dewey Decimal”. I had three kids, all in one family. My one homeschooling family that comes to all my programs. I was quite proud of the program I had put together; a tour of the library, with me asking questions the whole time. Then I had the kids go through a bunch of Jack’s clothes, toys, books and food and organize them into categories and sub categories. I think the kids really enjoyed this, and it made it easier for them to understand how dewey decimal is organized. After that I had them do a dewey decimal treasure hunt. I guess all that was important was that the people that were there had a good time.

If you look at the D&C’s website, Hilton has been getting quite a bit of publicity. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been all good. The town and village are fighting over where the library should be. Many residents want to keep it in the village. Everyone has a position and they’re all being very loud about it. Personally, I don’t care where it is, I just want there to be more space so I don’t have to continually shift books, so that I can have more programming, so that the teens have their own space with their own computers that they can feel more comfortable and adults don’t yell at me about the “hooligans”. Part of the reason people want the library in the village is so that the students can walk right to the library after school, however once they get to the library people complain because they are in the library and taking over the computers and being noisy. Recently, due to all the newspaper press, people have been coming up to me daily to tell me that we better not move out of the village. I’d love not to move out of the village, but someone better give us space to build a nice cozy (but big) library. Parma keeps growing, even if some people would rather not admit it. We need to have a library that is big enough to provide the services that a larger community expects.

Another fun topic. A patron complained that we did not monitor what movies kids/teens take out, because we should not allow them to take out PG-13 or R rated movies. Now we have forms parents have to fill out before kids/teens take out movies and we put stickers on their cards to show what rating they can take out. But that’s not good enough. According to a certain member of the community, the murders in Rochester are comparable to the atrocities going on in the public library… the filth and violence we allow people to check out is deplorable… I guess we shouldn’t have the Passion of the Christ, Schindler’s List, or Saving Private Ryan. Those are all R rated movies. Shame shame on us. I’m a mother first and then a librarian, and I am OUTRAGED that they would compare us to the atrocities going on recently. I do not encourage kids to check out these kind of films. In fact, should you look at our kids collection, we have every single Elmo, Dora and Veggie Tale movie in existence. However, I have ONE child. Not 5,000. I am not going to monitor what everyone else’s child is taking out. Not only is that not my job, its also illegal. There is this thing called Intellectual Freedom. I think its important to let parents do their job. They need to take responsibility for their children’s well being. This is not to say that I don’t care what happens to these kids. If someone was trying to rape a kid, I would do what I could to stop it. However I don’t think its my place to tell kids what they can/can’t check out. I’d be pissed off if someone told my kid they couldn’t check something out. That’s why I went through the hours of labor. So when he gets home with it, I could yell at him and tell him he’s grounded. Also parents all have different limits for their kids. Some parents are okay with sex but not violence. Some are okay with swearing but not sex. Some are okay with the horror movies but realistic violence. Some don’t want their kids watching any of it. What are we supposed to do? Get rid of the DVDs? But what about the huge percentage of people that come to the library just to get movies? What are we saying to them?

I am sure that there is going to be LOTS of arguments and bloodshed over the next few months over these two topics, and the library will not go anywhere, and the boss lady will stress out more and more until they push her over the deep end. I don’t want to see that… wait maybe I’ll video tape it and put it on youtube. 🙂

Irondequoit may have it even worse though. Poor things. Our prayers go out to you… wait I shouldn’t pray should I? I’m evil and corrupt and the spawn of satan, or something like that.

Irondequoit Libraries Top Ten List

This kind of thing just shouldn’t happen

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Check out this news article.

I was out to breakfast this morning, with the ladies in my life and Jack. Jenny had been watching the news and they had a spot about a group of gay people who were attacked early in the morning. They called the police, and then the police came, let the attackers go, attacked the gays and then brought some of them to jail.

Does this really happen here?  I thought we were supposed to be a gay friendly city. Maybe its just because I surround myself with gay friendly people. It really makes me sick just thinking about it. What’s worse, is that more immediate action should have been taken, and it wasn’t.  I am ashamed of the police department for allowing this to happen. If it had me in that situation, and if the police who came didn’t like women, would that be allowed to happen? I thought the police were supposed to keep everyone safe. Obviously not, I guess.

Well, here’s one librarian that wants to see that justice is done swiftly.  Goodnight. 🙁

I need a book on…

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

uncluttering and organizing my mind. I have all these things that I need to do and need to get off my mind and onto paper, but there’s so much, I sometimes can’t remember what I need to do. Or even who I am. Well I guess I know who I am.

I do want to try and do more book reviews on my book and comic blogs, plus I want to use librarything more often. Oh and I want to spend more time learning my ukulele and playing ddr and reading to Jack and reading my books and cleaning and blah blah blah.

Anywho. Here’s a poem I wrote on my kids blog:

single blade of grass
tickles my delicate nose
Achoo! Goodbye grass!

“Hey There, Hi There, Ho There”

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

The quote is from the Mickey Mouse song, although what it has to do with my post, I do not know.
Anyway, long time no see.

Lots has been going on.

1) School has started. THANK GAWD! I love those teens, but they were so bored, they were driving me mad. Leaving butts all over the library, throwing food and paint at the building, beating each other up. You get the idea. I really try to stand up for them and listen to them, but sometimes its REALLY hard.

2) I went to Webster for a staff exchange day. It was so great! I love that Adrienne (kids librarian) gets to lie on the floor of her office to look at books and prepare for story time. One of my co-workers said I could do that, but I’d get rolled over or stepped on. The library is gi-normous! You need to call people to talk to them, not just holler or twirl your seat around. There are three people at the Reference desk (we don’t even have a reference desk). Everything is bright and clean. Adrienne has her own story time room, and TONS of crafty stuff. She has a dedicated staff just for children’s services, plus there are two (ish) teen librarians. Sigh. It was a lot of fun and interesting.

On the other hand, I REALLY like where I’m working. Everyone is really close, there is no reference desk (which is good because it gives me more ordering/programming time, but bad because I don’t have much reference desk experience), everyone knows eachother. They like me (they really like me).

This does lead me to some other things I’d like to talk about:

3) Sometimes I feel VERY overwhelmed, like I’m definately taking on too much. There is a class for librarians on managing stress. I may try to take that. Maybe they will teach me how to meditate…  Unfortunately, this is completely my fault, because I added all the new programs. The only one that was in place as a yearly continuing program was story time. I sometimes feel that I have too much on my plate and it makes me frazzled. Double unfortunately, I want to make everyone (except myself, it seems) happy. I’m a people pleaser, or try to be. I have a couple big projects that I’m doing now that have a deadline. Plus there are other little projects that I have taken on, never mind ordering books and programming. Especially the story times. I’ve been wanting to explore new ways to do story time. Which leads me to story time.

4) I love story times. I put out surveys to see when people want story times, I advertise within the library and one of my coworkers puts notices in the newspapers. I HEAVE fliers at them. Everyone calls asking about story time. Begging for story time.

Four kids signed up for the 3 – 5 years and four kids for the 1 – 2 years. I asked one woman with small kids and she said “We don’t do story time.” Well fine. Neither do I. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll give it a couple of weeks.

I also did a drop in, evening story time. EVERYONE was begging me! “Why in God’s name, don’t you do an evening drop in story time? We don’t want to sign up. We work, and we want it at night.” So, I do it and how many people show up? ONE. And the only reason she showed up is because one of my co-workers drove her to the library (she was her granddaughter). Sigh.

Finally.

I have been having more dizzy spells again. I keep trying to forget about them, mostly because I’m really scared. Of course that’s probably the last thing I should be doing.

These spells are strange. Someone will say something that’ll get me thinking and suddenly the dizzy spell will come on. I don’t know if its because I shouldn’t be thinking too hard, or what. I get a dry throat flushed in my face and I get sweaty. Plus of course the dizziness. Jeff says I should be keeping track of them… and not like the time I said that I was going to keep track of everything I bought and post it here. Maybe next year. Anyway, I’m going to call my mom and then the doctor next week. Jeff’s orders.

I guess that’s it.

Oh, wait. I want to get a custom made earring known as a twister from Primitive Impressions. I’ve seen them and they look really interesting. However, they need to be custom made because they’ll be going through all the holes in my left ear and the holes in my left ear are a little different from the holes in someone else’s ear. Curious, and interesting. We shall see. Got to talk to the hubby, although I’ve mostly convinced myself. The only thing that’s holding me back is the PSP. I’m going to get one so I can play Loco Roco, show pictures/video and listen to MP3s. Fun!

Now I’m off to Slumberland.