Monthly Archives: March 2011

Library events, Summer reading

Super duper summer

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Summer?  You bet!  I just booked the last remaining performer for the summer reading program, and I am PSYCHED!  It is going to be another awesome summer!  And those of you who read this blog are going to find out right now which performers are coming to the library this summer (and no, you can’t register for the programs yet!):

Davis Bates and Roger Tincknell – two of the town’s and my favorites will be returning for a mid-July gig, full of music and storytelling.  These guys are true professionals who always “bring it.”

Trevor the Games Man – I’ve always wanted to do a New Games-type program at the library, but I’m definitely not the person to run a program like that…and then I found Trevor, the answer to my cooperative games prayers!  He’ll be doing his “Outdoor Special,” which sounds like an absolute blast; and after that, he’ll do his Ribbon Dancer project with the kids so that they each have their own ribbon dancer to take home.  Cool.

Robert Rivest, Comic Mime – When I saw Robert’s video of his show, I knew it was exactly the right thing for the town in which I work – and I also thought that I might enjoy his show a lot, too.  He’ll be bringing his “Humorous Stories From Around the World” to our library.

Mike the Bubble Man – When I was tearing my hair out a week or two ago trying to figure out how to top last summer, Jennifer suggested a bubble man.  What an awesome idea!!  And once I got reassurance from his agent that Mike puts down tarps and brings plenty of towels, it was a go!

Audubon Ark – I haven’t finalized which of their great programs will be coming to the library this summer, but Audubon Ark never disappoints with educational and fun animal programs that allow the kids to see a couple of animals up close and personal. 

And, of course, there will be storytimes and book groups, the Ice Cream Social and the Finale Picnic, and the Tie Dye Extravaganza.  I’m also cooking up a plan to do a puppet making workshop based on some cool new puppet kits from Folkmanis, and I would love to squeeze in an origami program, too.  And hopefully Winston the therapy dog will have time in his canine schedule to do the ever-popular “Paws and Read” program.

See?  I told you it’s going to be a great summer!!

Book groups

Procrastination

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I’ve been avoiding a book – a book that I have to read for an upcoming meeting of one of the library book groups.  It’s by an author who just doesn’t, shall we say, “do it” for me.  I’ve read one other book by this author, also for a book group meeting, and finishing it was pure torture for me.  Why this second book by an author I firmly dislike, you ask?  Because the book group members suggested it and then voted on it, and it received a lot of votes.  There was no avoiding it: after the vote, I knew I was going to have to read it.

So it’s sitting on the arm of my comfy Ikea chair right now, all 581 pages of it, sitting heavily and glaring at me as I write a post to avoid the inevitable reading.  Obviously, I’m not going to identify the book or the author, because that would just be mean-spirited, but I will say that one reason I struggle with this author’s body of work is that this author uses an awful lot of detail, so much detail that a reader can’t even begin to skim for fear of missing something really important.  I tried to skim the last book, and sure enough I’d miss something key, then have to backtrack and find out what I had missed and then go forward again – ultimately taking more time than if I had just read carefully from the start.  Actually, the detail wouldn’t be such a problem if I enjoyed the genre and the author’s style; but I don’t, at all.  Torture, I tell you, torture.  I’ve allowed myself three full weekends to read this book; but so far I’m only on page 25, and one weekend is now officially over.  Not promising!!

But oh, look!  It’s bedtime.  No more reading tonight!  Instead I’ll just procrastinate until next weekend…

Book groups, Young adult book review, Young adult literature

Jessica Day George Visit

It’s been a long day (a very long day), and I’m so exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open, but I really want to write this post tonight, so have patience with any upcoming slight incoherence…

Today the Teen Book Group had a fabulous experience – a Skype visit with author Jessica Day George, author of many books, including Dragon Slippers, Princess of the Midnight Ball, and the book that the group had read for today’s meeting, Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow.  I’ve read and enjoyed two of Jessica’s books prior to this book, the two Princess books, but I absolutely love, love, LOVED Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow.  As I got towards the end of the book, I found that I was reading slower and slower in order to extend my reading pleasure… and once I had finished the book, I felt that deep sense of loss of having finished a wonderful book.  It’s not often that I have that feeling of loss after reading a book anymore, and it was delightful (and sad) to experience it again.

So, needless to say, I was looking forward to today’s Skype visit, and I know all of the teens in the group were very excited about it, too.  And Jessica did not disappoint – she was charming, funny, cool, and incredibly intelligent as she answered the group’s questions for her.  And patient, too, since a certain amount of shyness came over everyone once Jessica popped up on the computer screen, and all those well-thought-out questions disappeared from everyone’s minds in a poof of starstruck awe. 

I loved that the teens got to talk with someone who is clearly very intelligent (Jessica speaks Old Norse, for heavens sake!), and well-educated, but also fun and cool.  What a great role model for them, someone to show that it’s ok to be brainy and enjoy learning.  And that through hard work and persistence, you can achieve your goals; Jessica talked a bit about how many rejection letters she had received from publishers prior to having a manuscript accepted, and I could see the budding writers amongst the teens first look deflated, and then empowered by the thought that a writer can survive rejection and achieve success.

After we ended our forty minute or so conversation with Jessica, I handed out paper and pencils and asked if everyone would take a minute to write a thank you note to her.  Twenty minutes later, the notes were just getting finished, and they were really, really nice thank you notes: heartfelt, detailed, and sincere.  After reading these great notes, I felt bad that I’d only passed out pencils as writing instruments – I wish I’d had some pens and nicer paper on hand so that the end products were as visually beautiful as the words on the page.  The notes will be going into the mail soon, along with one of my handmade bracelets as a thank-you gift, though no notes or gift can fully thank Jessica for taking the time out of her day to share such wisdom and wit and sage advice with the group.  I know that they’ll remember their visit with her for a very long time, and that is a thing of immeasurable value. 

Thank you, Jessica!!!!!!!!!!

Pop culture, Spare time - Culture

Seen

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I watched a lot of movies last week (well, a lot of movies for me), mostly on my laptop so I could sit in my comfy chair by the cozy woodstove while I watched.  And, once I started feeling better on Friday, I picked up books again and buzzed through a couple of good ones.  So here’s the brief list of what I watched:

The entire series of “Manor House,” the reality t.v. show about modern people trying to live as servants and masters in an Edwardian manor house in England; all participants were required to live as they would have done in Edwardian times.  I enjoyed the series, but there were a couple of aspects that bothered me.  While some of the participants were heavily featured in the series, others were hardly mentioned, most notably the groom, Tristan.  I would have loved to have heard Tristan’s take on the experiment, and to see more of what his daily duties were.  And to see more of the horses, of course.  In addition to not enough coverage of the groom’s duties, and no coverage of the third housemaid’s life, I also felt like there was something lacking in general in the series.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I finished watching the three DVD set with a sense of wanting more – more footage of what everyone’s duties were, more insights into what people thought of their new lives (apart from the soap opera dramas, which got a bit boring), and more history of people who really did live in Edwardian times in manor houses.  I would have loved some primary sources, photographs and such, to give me more context.

On to a silly movie that I watched:  “Bride and Prejudice.”  As a Jane Austen junkie, I was worried that I’d hate this movie, a modern adaptation of the classic Pride and Prejudice, set in India, but surprisingly I didn’t hate it.  It’s fun and cute, with lots of gorgeous brightly colored clothes.  But some parts of the story don’t translate well to a modern telling:  Mr. Wickham as a hippy-ish backpacking guy who had gotten Mr. Darcy’s sister pregnant – well, that just doesn’t work as well as Mr. Wickham the status and money seeking creep who almost gets away with wreaking the reputation of the youngest Bennett girl.  And I thought the chemistry and conversation between Lalita (Elizabeth) and Will (Mr. Darcy) just weren’t crackling and feisty enough to carry the story.  Not a terrible movie, though, and not a waste of time to watch.

Then I watched “City Island,” a funky, funny, cool, and insightful movie about a part of the Bronx that I never knew existed, and a family that lives there along with their secrets.  If I say too much about the movie, I’ll wreak it for you, so suffice it to say that I definitely enjoyed it and do recommend it.

I started watching “The Secret of Kells” the day after my oral surgery, and had absolutely no patience for it that day; after five minutes of Celtic music and the whispering fairy voice and the animation, I gave up on it in disgust and annoyance and tried something else.  Happily, though, I gave the movie another shot on another day, and really really enjoyed it.  It’s smart, creative animation for grown-ups, well-drawn and conceived and totally engrossing.  Once again, I don’t want to say too much about the movie, since I enjoyed it all the more for knowing nothing about it prior to seeing it.

And, last but not least, “Megamind.”  I love Will Ferrell, which helped me to like this particular movie more than I might have otherwise.  It’s not fabulous, and I don’t like it nearly as well as the conquerable “Despicable Me,” but it was a good way to spend the morning on Friday; “Megamind” was the Family Movie Night choice for Friday night, and I was working the door and knew I’d miss seeing about two-thirds of the movie if I didn’t preview it ahead of movie night.  So it was worth seeing the whole movie, but I don’t think I’d go so far as recommending it.

And next blog post I’ll write about the books that I read…

Etc., Spare time - Culture

Ugh (a potentially boring post about a tooth)

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Here is the tale of my now-departed lower left wisdom tooth, a tale that will probably bore everyone but me, but it’s what I wanted to write about today:

On February 12, I finally figured out that the weird sensation I’d had in my mouth for several days was actually an infected wisdom tooth.  (I’d had a bad cold, and thought that the weird sensation was related to the cold.)  So I called my dentist, she put me on antibiotics and referred me to an oral surgeon for a consult, and within a few days I’d met the oral surgeon.  Nothing urgent, she said, but that wisdom tooth should be removed within the next six months, and I should expect to miss a week of work when it was removed.  Ok, I thought, I can handle this; I looked at the library calendar and talked to the library director, and decided that Friday, April 1, was the perfect day for me to have the surgery.  The current session of storytime for 2’s & 3’s would have just finished, the Lego Expo would be over, and it would be easy to cancel storytimes for two weeks at the beginning of April so that I could fully recuperate.

And then the left side of my face swelled up to freakish proportions, and the dentist had to put me on a much stronger antibiotic.  She also told me, “You know, this infection will never really go away until that tooth is removed.”  Change of plans, quick about face, and I took the first surgery appointment that they offered me, which was a week ago yesterday.  Lots of people offered me advice and stories about their own wisdom tooth removals, but I’ve learned that the only people who were really honest with me were my brother, who said something along the lines of, “Ugh, that was awful when I had my infected wisdom tooth out,” and Jim, who said, “You’re going to hate it.  I was swallowing blood for a week when I had mine out.  It was gross.” 

Everyone else sugarcoated it, and I think that they either have really, really poor memories, or they’ve been brainwashed, or they were lying.  Because this has been a miserable, rotten, yucky, awful week.  The anesthesia knocked me on my rear end Thursday night, and then I learned quite definitively that vicodin and I are not friends.  At all.  Admittedly, I did feel better Friday morning than I had in a while, and I cockily thought that I’d avoided all those nasty problems that come with wisdom tooth removal.  Not so much.

Because I woke up early early in the morning on Sunday with some of the worst pain of my life.  Oh, so bad, so bad.  And then the ibuprofen kicked in, and I thought everything was fine, other than the nasty taste in my mouth.  And then the pain crept in again, and receded again, and then hit with full brutal force again in the wee hours of early Tuesday morning.  I put up with it as long as I could, but finally called the oral surgeon’s office and persuaded the rather snotty young woman who answered the phone that I needed an appointment, today. 

Not surprisingly, the oral surgeon told me that I have the dreaded “dry socket” that she had warned me I was at higher risk for due to my age.  If you haven’t had dry socket, thank your lucky stars.  It’s pure, unadulterated pain, pain that saps the life out of you, leaving you just enough energy to watch a DVD or nap, nothing else.  If you look up “dry socket,” you’ll see all sorts of suggestions for how to avoid it, and I’d just like to make it very clear that I did all of those things – and still got dry socket.  What is dry socket, you ask?  Basically, your body is supposed to produce a nice blood clot to fill in the empty socket where your tooth once was, thus protecting the never-before-exposed bone and nerves.  In dry socket, the blood clot either doesn’t form, or dissipates too early, leaving the bone and nerves open to air and food and hot and cold.  And, as I’ve learned, you also get the nastiest imaginable taste in your mouth, partly from food catching in the socket, and partly from the putrefecation of the blood clot. 

So here it is on Friday, a week and a day since the surgery, and the pain is getting a bit better, a bit, and the taste in my mouth isn’t totally foul (but pretty close), and I’ve done absolutely nothing fun or productive with my time off from work, which feels like a dreadful waste of vacation time that could have been used for better purpose.  Two surgeries in seven months, and my last vacation well over a year ago – not the ideal.

But I do remind myself that I’m damned lucky to have dental insurance, which covered all but $206 of the procedure, and to live in a part of the world where quality dental care is readily available.  With an infection like I’d developed, if I’d lived in a part of the world where health care was hard to come by, I might well not have lived to tell my tale of woe.  And that’s just wrong; the technology is there to cure such things, and everyone deserves to benefit from it.

And now I think I’ll go take another dose of ibuprofen to curb the swell of pain that I feel coming on me.  Maybe I’ll have a mint, too.  Blech.