knitting librarian

I’ll need to dig through the piles on my desk to figure that out! I really hoped I was going to get around to this today but there were too many carts of books to organize and get ready to shelve. They’re an extension of my desk, right? Does that count? I’ll take a before picture soon and then an after picture—when I finally get to it, oh, say about June!

The problem with having such a huge desk that 80-160 of my favorite teens touch every day is that 80-160 kids touch my desk. They move things, they hand me papers, they leave papers un-retrieved in the printer, they mess with my mess!

One of my co-workers went to ALA’s midwinter conference in Philadelphia this past weekend. She kindly entered my name in a drawing and I won a pop-up post-it desk station. She also brought me several ARCs: one by Paul Volponi about a young man in the Superdome in the days following Hurricane Katrina and another by Sarah Dessen. I’d seen a pre-review of the Volponi book a few weeks ago and heard it’s wonderful and awful at the same time. Dessen I always enjoy so I’m looking forward to that as well. I finished Jodi Picoult’s Perfect Match over the weekend and started another of hers Vanishing Acts. Both were generously shared with me by another co-worker. I love co-workers who share book stuff!

With time off from school and the traveling we did over the Christmas to New Year’s week, I just haven’t been in touch much lately. We went to SC to visit John’s mom and family and had a chance to catch up with a few of our friends as well, which was nice.

We took Monti with us which slowed our trip down considerably—not only because we had to walk the dog, but because I couldn’t sit in the back row of the van and feed Zoe while we drove. A trip that took us about 11 hours in May took us 14 on the way to SC. We were on track to get home a bit quicker (maybe in 13 hours) but a combination of bad weather and 4 year old bladder put us back on that 14 hour schedule. It rained from the time we left Columbia until we were into PA where it changed over to sleet and snow. In what should have been the last 2 hours of our trip, we stopped for dinner and three additional bathroom breaks for AJ. I don’t know if he really had to go or if he was just bored and wanted out of the van, but he did manage to slow us down!

We got in about 9:30 Sunday night and made arrangements to get together with my friend Susan and her family at Reptiland on Monday afternoon. The boys had a good time looking at the reptiles and amphibians and touching two snakes and an alligator. AJ is under the illusion that one of the adult alligators (the male, Rocky) is his pet and we pay Reptiland to keep him and take care of him for us. John told him that when he bought our membership last spring, so everytime we drive by, AJ hollers “Hi pet!” John finds this amusing, however, when I picked AJ up from a play date this fall and the mom asked me if we had a pet alligator, I had a lot of explaining to do!

Susan and her family came to our house to visit and for dinner and we had a great visit. It was good to see them all. It’s probably been 5 years since I’ve seen Mark and a year and a half since I’ve seen her sons. John and Mark hit it off and Susan’s oldest was thrilled because John had him leveling some Pokemons on our Nintendo DS.They headed back to her grandmothers to spend time with her father before the new year’s drunks were on the road.

John and I put AJ to bed about 9 and watched the Survivor finale and reunion because we didn’t have anything else on TiVo that we were interested in. We’re probably some of the last people to still watch the show and we thought we’d heard who won on the radio the day after it aired originally. Our local stations had ice damage that took down their broadcast towers and we had no signal that night so we missed it, but they did a re-broadcast toward the end of the week which the TiVo did catch for us. It was a big surprise for us because when we watched the last vote, the person we’d heard won was voted off. Watching the twists from there kept us more entertained than we might have been otherwise.

We spent New Year’s Day cooking and eating pork and sauerkraut and watching college bowl games. Wednesday John and the kid went back to their regularly scheduled lives while I had one last day of vacation. I did some gift exchanges that I hadn’t had time for because we left bright and early on the 26th. (And got to sleep in and have lunch with John.)

Thursday, I went back to school and tried to get back in school mode. I think it’s harder for adults than it is for kids! Friday was nice because it was already the end of the week.