Questions du Jour

I need to start compiling our favorite reference questions. So far we have:

"I need a wordless picture book... in Spanish."

"Do you have an English-to-English dictionary?"

"Do you have Like Water for Elephants?"

"How long is a sentence?"

"I know I can't check out this reference book, but can I print it? Do you have all your books online?"

[VERY non-excited voice] "Do you have any biographies of famous accountants?"

"I don't know the title or author or what it's about, but what's that book written by that guy that was on oprah? It had something to do with Anne Frank or something." [Night, by Eli Wiesel - CLICK!]

"Does the library have an email address? I want to order some catalogs and stuff online."

"Do you have a printed list I could have of all your nonfiction books? could you make one?"

"What's that poem about mothers and tea bags?"

"Who is a person who changed the world in some way? I have to dress up as them." [... me?]

"Where are the fucking books on fucking spain, spanish, like, fucking history and shit?"

"Where are the books about ligers?"

"My son needs five books about the lady who invented washing machines."

"I need a book, I can't remember the name or who wrote it... it had "the" in it."


and a short email from my outbox:

Question du jour: "I want a book with lots of photos of STDs. I'm doing a unit and want to scare the bejeebers out of my students."

surprisingly, we don't have a lot of photos of infected rooster- and hen-bits. Hmm.

on a related note, don't ever google images of "tissue"

Ramble on

In my dream I was curled in front of the computer, dark and weepy and locked in a cycle of searching - and then I was standing on a white swath of beach. I had a sword in one hand and my shoes in the other, and as I walked I began to sing opera; squeaky and soft at first, then in full Valkyrie bellow, and suddenly I was flying. My song turned to soft kisses, and I woke with the very real sensation of warm lips on mine, though my eyes cracked open and nobody was there.

An hour later I had purchased one-way plane tickets back home, paid in full with my debit card. We came here for good reasons; we're returning for even better ones.


The Tooth of Doooom

In other dramatic occurrences this week, Gavin lost one of his crowns at preschool. Not a discreet rear one, but one in front, leaving him looking a bit like a scurvied pirate - or Gollum. The tooth was nowhere to be found, though a chorus of little people (and preschool teachers) helpfully proclaimed "I didn't do it!" and pointed wildly at one another. (One tot then screeched, "Are you PREGNANT?!" and I was subsequently dogpiled by belly-rubbing 4 year olds.) The dentist informed us that he could replace it for free with a silver cap, or we could pay $300 to get a new enamel one. Sadly, they did not have gold caps, which could have really made the boy pirate fabulous. Gavin, upon being asked to describe the events leading up to the discovery of the lost tooth, was delighted to give an animated narrative of the best possible way he could have lost it; including cartwheels, aerodynamics, head trauma, and light sabers. Mike concluded that he had eaten it at lunch, chased him into the bathroom with a plastic bag, and came back with the fruits of a $300 poo. I was less than convinced that this was worth the price tag, but nonetheless allowed him to scrub it out, soak it in peroxide, and give it to the dentist to glue back into place. We tactfully suggested they sterilize it properly, with a suggestive waggle of eyebrows. And thus our week of dental adventures came to an anticlimactic, if slightly disgusting, end.

IKEA = love (and non-buyer's remorse)

Woke with another damp pillow. This nightmare business is getting tiresome. The person in question never even appeared this time, I just sat in Arrivals waiting for someone who never showed up and pulling windows out of an advent calendar. Stupid.

backing up to Saturday
Seeking weekend adventure, I packed up the boys on Saturday and we headed down to Santa Clarita to visit the LIS posse. Mike, rattled from a week of late-night studying for the RSCDS dance instructor exam he took earlier that day, was looking forward to having a drink with friends - since I have of late become a craptastic drinking companion - and Gavin anticipated a full evening of wrestling the resident house pets. We found ourselves sitting in front of the locked community gates, my precious pink phone plugged piteously into the wall back at home, 150 miles away. Mike's phone coughed and wheezed ominously. We finally managed to squeeze enough life from it to relay a message to Hawaii to send an email back to California to notify Yuri that we were across the street - and lo! hail technology, 10 minutes later we were pushing through a crowd of margarita-pitcher-waving CALarts students and eating fajitas in a nearby tex-mex joint, feeling suddenly old and not at all bothered by this fact. Were we so hamsterly in college? I suspect so. After dinner, Yuri taught Gavin how to play lotto, we picked up booze too high-brow to warrant a carding (old old old), then spent the evening consuming forkfuls of fancy desserts with M&M while watching Eddie Izzard as Gavin crawled around after Pele the Pampered Cockapoo.

On Sunday we deflated the air mattress, walked to the bagel shop for egg sandwiches, and fwooshed over to IKEA to run ourselves ragged and consume lingonberry products. After walking several miles through the maze of goodies, I spent only $30 (on puppets. PUPPETS.) and felt very sorry for myself. Yuri packed us up and drove us into the high desert in search of the mythical pie milkshake, which we found at a roadside attraction in a carnie-cobbled building flanked by life-sized fiberglass dinosaurs and cows. We crammed our way through the heavy line to order our milkshakes (made of pie!) and oggled the displays of kangaroo, turtle, ostrich, and other exotic meats (here "exotic" means "foods one would normally only eat under desperate conditions", see also "canned spotted dick" and "bagoog"). Outside, we made Mike finish both milkshakes (vair girly and delicate are we) and let Gavin distrustfully eyeball the dinosaurs (and cows), agreeing that we would buy a farm and populate it entirely with life-sized fiberglass animals.

As the sun slipped down, we made our way back up through the mountains, admiring the splashes of purple and yellow flowers that blurred the hillsides like bad photoshop cloud filters. Gavin ate all my nutritional snack bars, and Boyfetus woke from his day-long nap to throw a tantrum against my seatbelt. It was a beautiful weekend, in all.


this week

Realized belatedly that we had missed two whole weeks of the new season of Battlestar, after complaining an entire year about having to wait for it. We pulled it up on the computer, instead. And so Starbuck goes nutters and Apollo digs out. Of course. At least she got a good snog goodbye. I snarled up my knitting and had to pull a few rows out.

The week rolls on. I am sleepy, I am waiting for news from my new job, I am out of pants that fit, and I am pretty happy.

night and day

The nightmares abandoned me for a few weeks while I fought unconsciously with my Nazi sleeping postures, dreams scattering like leaves whenever I became aware of Mike's hand gently pulling my arm out of the air in the middle of the night. Then a few nights ago something worse happened; my nightmares have devolved from heartbreak to resignation and now to nostalgia, and I had a happy dream instead. This did not save my pillow from sleep-sobbing. Stupid brain.

This weekend saw in the Highland Games. Our dusty town did well for itself, coming down upon the museum's park with blaring troops of bagpipes, thunderous cannon fire, galloping Clydesdale horses in battle armor, vendors hawking haggis, meat pies, celtic jewelry, kilts, and swords. We picked up a new kilt and peasant shirt for Gavin, who leaped up on stage in his regalia and danced reels with our Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. His presence emboldened a handful of 3-year-old girls to run up during the audience participation numbers to dance. By the end of the day, Gavin was wielding a new wooden sword, shield and a pvc marshmallow shooter against a pack of 12 year olds with real swords (here I covered my head) and complaining (not without some pride) that his dad had embarrassed him by wearing a giant hat and running around shirtless with felt eyeballs taped to his stomach. I ignored all this and lay prone in the shade of the clan tent, spent. In the evening, Mike kindly dumped us off at home before returning to the ceilidh for beer and ear-shattering music with our dance group. Gavin looked like he had crawled from a mosh pit and was entirely enchanted by the dirty boogers he sneezed out. Nice day, really. :)

no showers for April

All the cars are brown. There is no rain, no wind, just layers of dust that settle in dime-sized blotches over every surface. My belly rubbed a clean spot on the back of the car as I squeegied off the rear window at the gas station this morning, a bright green splotch in a sepia world.

- The days get longer and the nights smell green.
I guess it's not surprising but it's spring and I should leave.

I like songs about drifters - books about the same.
They both seem to make me feel a little less insane.
Walked on off to another spot.
I still haven't gotten anywhere that I want.
Did I want love? Did I need to know? -

Oh no! Even Modest Mouse has turned against me! I need to bring home the stack of Hap Palmer discs that are sitting beside my work computer and spend my time flicking imaginary flies off my nose to jangling banjo music instead of wringing the juice out of my steering wheel every morning.

Back up to Friday...

Friday

Our small group of children's librarians shivered around a county van outside headquarters in the pre-dawn, waiting for the rallying cry from our coordinator to launch ourselves up to Fresno for the day. I huddled in the middle. When the van door swung open everyone suddenly scampered to the sides, leaving me alone in front of the empty vehicle. This is the same thing that happens at buffets. I took my cue and climbed into the back corner, leaving everyone else to shuffle into place according to their window and legroom preference. We bobbed silently for two hours as the sky brightened, heads lolling sleepily. There was nothing to see. The winds had dried up and the smog was an opaque streak of ocher across the horizon from one end of the valley to the other. Fresno looked like New Jersey, rows and rows of brick buildings against vast yards of shipping containers and trucks, dotted optimistically with faded trees and the odd attempt at modern architecture. The GPS intoned directions in an Australian accent, eventually devolving into a mantra of "recalibrating... recalibrating..." as we wheeled randomly down side streets toward the library. We filed out in the parking lot, slapped our name stickers on in the meeting room, and cozied in for lessons on infant story times.

At break I hopped a wall with one of my colleagues and headed for the much-praised corner bakery. We goggled at the $6.50 loaves of challah before buying an overpriced cinnamon bun and a scone. Two of our party fell asleep in the second half of the morning session, making a brilliant impression on the sniggering Fresno librarians. At lunch we ventured as a group into a nearby Mexican restaurant, where we all agreed that the enchiladas tasted liked burning tires, which was really a remarkable culinary feat. On the way back I was fantastically excited to buy a fancy candle in the stationary boutique that was labeled "DIRT" and reeked strongly of potting soil.

We spent the afternoon wagging puppets at each other and squealing nursery rhymes, then clamored back into the van, angered the Australian GPS, got lost heading toward Oregon, turned full about to ask for directions from a startled [and suspiciously guilty-looking and sailor-hatted] man on a dirt road, and managed to get 20 minutes in the correct direction before I made them pull over to use the bathroom. We finally got home just before dusk. All in all, not a terrible adventure. The boys cooed over their miscellaneous souvenirs (yay floppy frisbees and lip balm!) and I dropped like a stone into bed, cursing my twitchy limbs. Why can't I develop Restless Whatsits Syndrome in the middle of the work day, when it might spring me athletically into action instead of sagging sleepily over my summer reading press releases? Banana and milk regiment has failed me (although it might have helped if I had actually stuck to it).

Woefully short on adventures these days, except for the Grand Scheme and Effing Taxes sort. I am a bit on the moody end of things as the summer warms before us again. Raise your drinking glass, here's to yesterday.