Archive for January, 2010

Winterpocalypse Notebook: III

The next morning

The next morning I woke up at 8
Annoyed about going to work on a Saturday
As I am every Saturday
I got dressed and went downstairs
I looked out the window

WHITE

I was not going to work today.

I ran upstairs and jumped on Steven.
“SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW!”
“mmrrrhhhmmmgoaway”
“GET UP! LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!”
“mmmrrrhhhdontwanna”
“WE’RE GOING OUTSIDE TO PLAY!”

I dragged Steven outside
He said he would get pneumonia
I told him it was good for him
Then I found a trash can lid and tried to sled.
Read the rest of this entry »

Winterpocalypse Notebook: II

The Night it Began

The night it began I was at
Harris Teeter
Because Steven had discovered at the last minute
That our milk was bad
and he needed it to make tortillas.

There were so many people
(I parked across the street)
It seemed like everyone was a college student
Buying beer and wine
Or a mom buying cat food.

I stood in line for the self check out
With my one bottle of milk
In the middle of the shampoo aisle
When from the front of the store
We heard someone shout
“It’s snowing!”

And getting home was a bitch.
Read the rest of this entry »

Winterpocalypse Notebook: I

Food Lion

Food Lion was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it today
though still not in Florida Hurricane Preparedness Proportions.
It’s next to a sad Burger King, the wrong side of a disregarded exit
Off 54
Everyone was buying:
Their weight in cans
Bottled Water
Candles
Bread and Milk.
Children bundled tightly in snow suits, staring at the sky
Waiting

There was only one man ahead of me
In 10 Items Or Less
He was buying:
A container of chicken wings
A case of beer
Eight frozen pizzas.
He looked like a man who knew he was prepared
In a way the Weather Channel would never think to advocate.
I was buying:
AA batteries
Powdered sugar
Chocolate chips (the two things I’d forgotten for baking)
A giant candle in a glass holder with Arch Angel Michael killing some demon.
I know it was somehow Catholic, but they were the only candles left
It was either Michael or a dead Jesus
And I thought defeating demons was marginally more cheerful
Than to have the eyes of a sad Christ look on
As I try in vain to complete the World’s Largest Crossword after the power goes out
By the light of a candle meant for religion
But somehow next to beer and chicken wings and chocolate chips on the conveyor belt
Just the same.

Reasons I Do Not Update My Blog

1. I am in grad school

I spend all of my time in a building designed by M.C. Escher hearing people who haven’t worked in a library in 10+ years prattle on about “What IS information” and “the philosophical meaning of the public library” and how we decide what’s GOOD for our patrons, as if the very fact of BEING a professor in library science weren’t elitist enough. Sometimes other people talk and it is interesting. Most of the time other people talk and they are either A) trying to impress the professor and therefore incomprehensible, B) telling meandering and irrelevant stories about their personal lives, or C) both. When I am not there, I am at home reading the same thing but in written form, and pretending I agree for grades. Sometimes there are also practical assignments, which tend to take three weeks and twenty-five group meetings.

2. I have a job

I get paid to part-timedly do a full time job. It’s like being a public school teacher, but with even more complainy parents and way less vacation.

3. I AM IN GRAD SCHOOL

I don’t think this can be stressed enough

4. The Winterpocalypse is coming

The Weather Channel’s headline this morning was “Winter Misery”. I have decided to just prepare for a hurricane while wearing three sweaters.

5. You can’t believe everything you read

Interesting story: the runner up for the title of my blog was “The Daily Narwhal”. The joke would be that it would neither be daily, nor a narwhal. Hilarious!

Now I am going to read 100 pages of something about how “people negotiate their information needs”, buy batteries, and go to sleep for the first time in like two days.

Possible Job Ideas: My Reading Class Decides

Me: Okay, this is just a pretest, so don’t freak out if you don’t know all the answers. If you got them all right, you would have nothing left to learn and I wouldn’t have a job.
Boy 1: Don’t worry, Miss Trish, I will get every other one wrong just for you.
Me: Thanks, way to take one for the team. Of course, I will be sharing your scores with your parents.
Boy 1: Never mind, I’m going to get them all right. You can be a janitor or something.
Me: What if I’m terrible at mopping? You don’t know my cleaning skill set.
Boy 1: Okay, a window washer.
Me: Those are robots now!
Boy 1: A WINDOW WASHING ROBOT!

Then they made plans for my future career as a window washing robot (one girl wanted me to be a Roomba instead) and it took so long to get them back on task that they rushed the test and got a bunch wrong. Ah, job security.

Possible Job Ideas

Every time we have a guest speaker in one of our classes, I become more and more convinced that my Master’s degree will make me less qualified for gainful employment. It doesn’t matter what they’re supposed to be talking about; it always devolves into “You poor suckers, you’ll never get a job, and certainly not around here where there are more librarians than environmentally-conscious hipsters (and there are A LOT of environmentally-conscious hipsters). And ESPECIALLY not if you want to work in youth services or at a public library. You are screwed with a capital S.” The situation is pretty dire. Especially now that I find out I have to compete with degree-holding pets too. Can you imagine going for an interview against Oreo Collins the tuxedo cat? You’d be all “I wrote my Master’s paper on–” and he’d interrupt with “I AM ADORABLE! PET ME! PET ME AND THEN HIRE ME!” and start to play with your shoelaces.

Anyway, since I am nothing if not organized, I’ve decided to plan ahead and think of other possible awesome job ideas. To help me, I’ve assigned all my fifth graders to write five paragraph essays about “What would the best job ever be and why?” But so far all I’ve gotten were doctor and astrophysicist. I know, lame. When I was in fifth grade I would have totally written about either water slide tester or Disney princess.

Although I’m not entirely without hope:

Boy: Can it be ANY job?
Me: Anything. Even water slide tester.
Boy: I don’t know if that’s a real job.
Me: I think it is. But even if it wasn’t, made up jobs are okay too.
Boy: Alright, I’m going to choose shark.
Me: What?
Boy: Shark.
Me: Ummm… can you think of three reasons to write paragraphs about?
Boy: OF COURSE! You get to eat people, you get to swim around, AND you get to BE A SHARK.
Me: I know this class doesn’t have grades, but you just earned an A+.

So yeah, so far it’s looking like shark is the best bet.

First Day of Class Poetry

Do Not Buy Book
Bookstore doesn’t have it
SWEET!
We read 1/3rd of the pages
violate copyright law
wee little things
Sakaipilot
Shan’t
Yahoo!Answers for a grade!!!!!!!
The Wild West of Reference
laugh in the face of danger librarianship
only librarians like to search everyone else likes to find

I decided, since first day of class is never about anything you can’t look up online later anyways, to take notes in the form of a poem. I bet you can tell everything we talked about just from that. Two cool things:

1. He decided we didn’t have to buy the book because the bookstore didn’t order them. Once again my lack of initiative pays off!

2. One of the assignments is to answer questions on Yahoo!Answers and other social Q&A sites. I realize it will probably be impossible to limit myself to anything involving the Jonas Brothers and inane dating advice (preferably both), but a girl can dream.

Reasons Bova is Amazing!!!!

Tomorrow is Bova’s birthday, so I’ve decided to compile a list of some favorite Bova memories/reasons why Bova is amazing!!!! In honor of Bova, this post also has 30% more exclamation marks!!! These are mostly in the order I thought of them while driving home from work, and should not be considered a comprehensive, authoritative, or even factual list. Since there are way too many things that are amazing about Bova to fit in one blog post, I’ve decided to simply use some of the lesser known ones that I, her fellow THE 434 member, have special memories of.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. Night of the Comet

You seriously do not even know how amazing this is

You seriously do not even know how amazing this is

Night of the Comet is your typical sci-fi disaster post-Apocalyptic zombie movie mixed with a sassy coming of age story all set to a ironically awesome 80’s soundtrack. I was skeptical in the beginning too, but Night of the Comet did not disappoint. Every time I thought it couldn’t get even more awesome, IT FOUND A WAY. Another amazing movie I would never have experienced if Bova hadn’t taken her D3 professor’s derisive comments about its lack of scientific accuracy to heart and ordered it on impulse from Amazon Marketplace. Not only do I think about Bova every time I remember how great this movie was, I also learned from her and it the valuable lesson that impulse purchases of questionable taste are ALWAYS even more amazing than you could ever expect. For instance: the time I rented Santa’s Slay.
Read the rest of this entry »

Site and contents are © 2009-2024 Patricia Ladd, all rights reserved. | Admin Login | Design by Steven Wiggins.