Day Trips

Mark and I went on a couple of day trips recently. The first was to the zoo. Our local zoo is very bird friendly. The city where is live is a migration point for many different types of birds, so the zoo just leaves open habitats for them. There are a lot of cranes and pelicans, but also a lot of parrots and flamingos. One surprise was a bald eagle. The eagle had been wounded and could no longer fly, so he was walking around in an open habitat too.

He's somewhere in here:

My favorite animal is the cat. We were lucky that so many cats were up and awake, the jaguars and cheetahs, and almost the lions.

Our other trip was to the Texas Renaissance Fair. We saw jugglers and jousting and lots and lots of weapons and jewelry. Mark got a private sword lesson and we both practiced our archery. I managed to hit the dragon, and the ceiling. The best part of the birds of prey show. Owls and hawks are gorgeous birds. I wish I had some better pictures, but these will have to do.

Changes to come

In case you haven't heard, or haven't noticed the nifty new gadget I just installed, Mark and I are going to have a baby! We're due on June 21, 2011.

Answers to questions I'm sure you have:

I'm feeling fine. I've been a little more tired then usual and have had some morning/afternoon queasiness, but other than that, I'm good.

No, we don't know if its a boy or a girl yet, but we will be finding out. Whether or not we're going to tell everyone else is another matter.

I've gained some weight, but am not showing yet. Although with how quickly I'm gaining weight, it probably won't be much longer until I start.

No, its not twins. We've had an ultrasound, there's only one baby in there.

Reading Plan Complete

The last two books I read for my chick-lit reading plan were not really chick-lit. They had some similar appeal factors but were not mainstream chick-lit books, but were more like appendage's. The first was Bitter is the New Black: confessions of a condescending, egomaniacal, self-centered, smart-@$$ or, why you should never carry a Prada bag to the unemployment office: a memoir by Jen Lancaster. (Great title, eh?) The second was Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner.

Bitter is the new Black is non-fiction. A memoir to be precise, about a 30's something woman who is living the life. She's got a job that makes her oodles of money, a fabulous apartment, and has a committed boyfriend. There are things she would like to change, like she would like to move to New York, but otherwise, things are good. Until she looses her job. And then her boyfriend looses his job. And they have to move. And their car gets reposed. And you get the picture.

The author has a lot in common with many characters I see in, or associate with, chick-lit. She has the big-paying job, and all the latest fashions, the monthly hair appointment with the best stylist in the city. She is not currently looking for a man, because she already has one, but her mother does occasionally bug her about when she's going to marry the guy. The tone is light and snarky and fun, despite the huge life crisis she goes through. And it is a crisis. It takes two years before someone offers her a job. But despite the snarkiness, you can see how her attitude towards work and money and life change. She starts up as the stuck-up princess type and ends up as the funny, blunt, girl-to-hang-out with type.

I'm not sure which category to put Best Friends Forever. It could be women's fiction, or chick-lit, or mainstream fiction. Addie has always been shy, and lately, she's become something of a recluse. After high school, her father died suddenly from and aneurysm and it was left to her to care for her ill mother. Val is a mix of dare-devil and beauty queen. If you cross her, she'll get you back. Addie and Val have been best friends since they were nine. But an incident in high school caused a falling out between them. Now, the night of their high school reunion, Val is at Addie's door, asking for help.

There is a little bit of mystery in what actually happened at the reunion and back in high school, but it is the relationship between Addie and Val that really drives the novel. The mystery is actual a bit anti-climatic, but it does allow Addie to get together with the cute local sheriff, so I suppose it serves its purpose.

So that's it. My 2010 reading plan is complete. And I still have a whole month left over.

Fuzzy's Journey

Mark and I like to go on walks on Sunday afternoons. We may not live in a neighborhood, but there are several nearby that are good for strolling around. Today we went a road that went behind some of those neighborhoods. On one side of the street were fences and the other side were fields. While we were walking, we saw a fuzzy caterpillar. It was pretty big and it moved very fast. Well, fast for a caterpillar. We named it Fuzzy.

But, isn't it the wrong of year for Fuzzy to still be a caterpillar? Shouldn't he be in a cocoon by now? Yes, we asked ourselves these same questions. We found out that Fuzzy is the last of his kind. The rest of his clan was destroyed by Grackles and he is on a quest to find a new homeland and rebuild. He cannot start his cocoon until he has found a safe place to call home.

We wished Fuzzy luck and went on our way. We did not see him on the way back.

Book Suggestions

As part of my work duties, I get to review the titles that our patrons request that we buy. I really enjoy this part of my work because it means I get read reviews and buy books. A lot of what gets suggested are the blockbuster bestseller authors whose next book won't be out for three months, but they have to have it now anyway. Those request I just toss because our vendor sends those to us automatically. No request needed.

There's been a lot of requests for out of print romance titles, in large print. I've been getting the same three or four titles over and over again, all by the same author. I may have inadvertently encouraged this person to submit titles by actually buying one of his/her requests. Sometimes I wish I could contact patrons like this to tell them to "Give it up!" Their beloved romance author is no longer writing and no one wants to print their books anymore. Its time to start hunting the used book stores and Amazon because the library is never going to get it.

Of course, if I ever did run into the person requesting these titles, I'd never have to courage to tell them that.

Internet is Evil

People who are used to doing the same thing every day have a hard time noticing when something chances. This morning at work, our Internet management system went down. It was having trouble all weekend and it turns out that there's something wrong with the hard drive, so our IT department had to take it away. We find all this out a few minutes before we open, so we have some time to get ready for manual sign up. We print out our sign up sheets and post all our "Please sign up at the desk" and "No printing today" signs.

The first rush of people are easy to catch because they come in sign file, so I just stood by the first Internet computer and took names. After that, things were not so easy.

We are suppose to have 15 minute express Internet computers, but with the name taking, that gets too hard to keep track; so, when the system is down, all computers are equal. Getting people to come and sign up when they're used to just sitting down and taking one is next to impossible, no matter how many signs you have up.

About a half hour after opening, I spot someone on a computer who did not sign up. I take my clip board and pencil and walk over to him to get his name.

Me: Excuse me, can I get your name? Our sign up system is down so we're taking names to keep track of computer time today.

Guy: (checking his gmail) Oh, is that why I didn't have to enter my library card?

Me: Yes.

Guy: You should really put up a sign about that.

Me:(pointing to the two signs on either sign of the monitor) We have. So if I could just get your name so you can continue using the computer.

Guy: (closing his gmail) That's okay. I'm done.

Luckily, this conversation didn't repeat itself often, but I did have to nab people from the express area several times to explain what was happening.

An email went out to all reference staff about the manual sign up. This is standard procedure for computer meltdowns. Of course when my relief comes, she doesn't know anything about it and immediately starts telling some poor visitor about 15 minutes express computers. Which don't exist today. Which she passed on her way to the desk, with all the signs.

The good and the bad

Good news and bad news everyone.

The good news is that Mark is no longer working graveyards.

The bad news is that Mark is no longer working.

*sigh*

Earlier this week the company he works for changed his schedule unexpectedly to an earlier time. Of course he didn't find out about this until after he logged on to work his shift and saw that he was supposed to have been teaching several hours earlier. This change was rather last minute and no one attempted to contact him in any way to let him know. So he emailed the scheduler and his HR contact to ask what happened and to apologize for not being on. And because he's up at 3 am and has nothing better to do he blogs about it. He didn't name any names, but apparently the company's CEO found about it somehow and decided Mark was giving him negative PR. He then sent the order down to have him let go.

So we're back to searching for teaching jobs. We've given up on San Antonio and are looking at Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. If you know of any school districts looking for biology teachers, let us know. 'Cause if we don't find anything by March, we'll be off to Japan, because Japan loves Mark.

Working

Mark has got a job!

Yeah! *clap hands, jump for joy, do a little happy dance*

He's teaching English online to Korean students. He's teaching high school and elementary school kids. These are like extra credit, after school program, classes, so the classes are smaller. The high school students are one on one and the elementary schools kids are three at a time. And the lessons are short, too, only 15 to 20 minutes a day. He started training Monday morning and taught his first group of students Friday.

The only drawback is that after school hours in Korea is the middle of the night here. So that Monday morning was technically Sunday night. Yep, he's working midnight to 8:00 am. Its very much like when we were dating, with my rushing home to be with him for a few hours before he has to go to work and I go to bed. Only instead of him being in another country, he's in the living room. And I'm learning how to sleep with the lights on.

The Marriage Post

This post has been a long time coming. Sorry for all of you out there waiting to hear about it. It took a while to get the pictures (I'm still waiting for some) and then the time to write. Apparently marriage does stuff to your time. My days are now split up into two categories: work and Mark. Everything else has been pushed aside. But he's a Sunday afternoon napper and I'm not.

We were married on July 23, 2010 in the Ogden Utah temple.

All our parents and siblings were able to come, which was a great blessing. I haven't seen all my siblings in the same place at the same time in many years. After the ceremony the photographer took over. It was a bright sunny day and we were facing the sun and in many of the shots you can see us squinting.

We actually had some extra time between the ceremony and the reception. We had so many people helping us set up that we had time for a game of Munchkin. If you do any sort of role-playing, you have to play Munchkin. Its a card game that has elements of role-playing, but instead of everybody working together to defeat monsters, its every man for himself.

We only had two little problems the entire evening. The sugar jewels on my cake melted, so Mom spent most of the afternoon fixing that instead of relaxing and playing games and eating pizza. Not that you can tell that anything was wrong with the cake. Mom is brilliant that way. And the button hook on my dress ripped during one of the photos. The photographer had the groomsmen make a chair out their arms and put me in it. The dress ripped as I was getting in. (Sorry I don't have a picture of this yet. Its on its way.) But a safety pin kept everything in place for the rest of the night.

We had a pretty good turnout for the reception. My friends from high school came, and Mark's cousins, and a bunch our parent's friends whom neither of us knew well.

And here are some random pictures from the reception. Sorry about the quality of some of these. You know how disposable camera are.

Canstruction

Every year the Society for Design Administration has a contest called Canstruction. Its a food charity donation program where groups of architects and engineers form teams to build sculptures out of canned goods and other non-perishable food items. I'm not sure what the teams win, but at the end of the contest, all the food is donated to local food banks.

San Antonio has been a participating city for several years. One year the sculptures were assembled in the Central Library, which is how I became aware of this project. This year they were displayed at a mall. Mark and I went this afternoon to see them, and, unfortunately, we were not impressed. I remember the sculptures as being very colorful and whimsical, but the ones out there today were not nearly as good. Its possible that food labels have changed so that they are not as colorful. Perhaps the manufacturers are using more white space then they used to; I don't know. I do know that the sculptures were mostly blocky, dull blobs, except for the Norte Dame remake, which actually had some shape and color to it, but was still not quite live up to my expectations. I hope there's better stuff out there next year.

PS We don't know where the sculptures on the Canstruction website were hiding. We didn't see any of the ones posted there, except for Norte Dame.

Its done

All the wedding stuff is over with. The planning, the traveling, the ceremony and receptions are finished. Yesterday was our Texas open house and it was the last wedding party we had. So in total we had:

2 bridal showers
1 bachelor party
1 work luncheon/pot luck
3 flights
1 rental car
3 photographers (1 for Engagement photos, 1 for Bridals, and 1 for the wedding)
1 Temple ceremony
1 reception
3 days of open sea travel (with 1 day of semi-sea-sickness)
1 day of snorkeling
1 day of site-seeing in Nassau
1 New York City off- Broadway show
2 days worth of sunburn
1 week of peeling
and 1 open house

Now maybe I'll have some time to blog about all of it.

PS. A big "Thank You" to everyone who came, wished us well, and helped with the wedding madness.

Poetry depression

At my library I run a poetry open mic night. I started it in 2007 and it went really well for a long time. We didn't have oodles of people, but we had a good variety every month. This past year has been really rough though, with only 2 or 3 people coming in. And tonight we had no one, not even our one faithful regular who has come every month for the past year and a half.

There could be several reasons for this. The economy may be playing a factor here. People are more concerned about their jobs then about the arts. The library is also undergoing repairs, so there's scaffolding outside and occasional banging, which could be keeping people away. Also, we're downtown. For some reason people do not like to travel downtown unless they absolutely have to, or they're a tourist. But we're out of the way for tourist too because we're not right in the middle of the tourist attractions. *sigh*

I don't know what to do. I don't know whether I should just give it up or try to change something. I hear of poetry programs in other libraries that are really successful and I wonder what their secret is. What are they doing to get people into their programs? What sort of incentive would you need to go to participate in a library open mic?

Princess for a day

This past weekend my sister came down to help doll me up for my bridal pictures. We spent Thursday night and Friday morning doing my hair (overnight curlers) and then rushed to the studio in the morning.

I normally don't like getting my picture taken, but this was an exception. After the photographer took some studio shots we headed to an outdoor location, the Landa library. The Landa library is gorgeous. It looks like an old mansion, it may very well be an old mansion, with a marble porch and columns, a massive ornamental lawn, and dark wood doors and stained glass.

As we were taking pictures two little girls walked by with their mothers, and they got so excited when they saw me. Their conversation went something like this:

"Look, its a princess!"

"Do you think she's a real princess?"

"She has to be one, she's so pretty."

I wonder what the librarians would have thought if they told them there was a princess on their side porch?

Reading plan update

So out of the 8 books that I've picked out to read for my chick lit reading plan, I've only managed to read 2 so far. All my reading time seems to have disappeared into wedding plans, my fiance, and facebook. Not that I'm complaining about the wedding plans or the fiance. Oh, and all the other books I'm suppose to read for work but can't read on work time. But never mind that.

The books I've managed to read are Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding and Bookends by Jane Green. Bridget Jones was what I expected from chick lit. A single 20-30 something looking for love and dealing with parents, jobs, and the single scene. There are a couple of possible love interests, one is a player and one is not, and you wonder if Bridget will get the right guy. But of course she does in the end.

Bookends was not so typical. Cath is a single in the city, but she's not looking for love. She has her best friend, Simon, and a group of other best friends that she's been with since college. What more does she need? James is an artist who doubles as a real estate agent and is obviously interested in her. They would have gotten together sooner if not for all the Drama happening in her friends' lives. This book started out as a fun light read, until the Drama happens. The abrupt change of tone was a bit jarring and completely unexpected. It tries to get back to being light and fun after, but it doesn't quit succeed. Considering the nature of the Drama, its possible it wasn't suppose to.

Overall I give both books 3 stars. No, I take that back, Bookends gets an extra 1/4 of a star for mentioning the TARDIS.

Cats and Ladders

Over the past couple of days Mark and I have been trying to fix my accent wall. A seal near the chimney became unsealed and water would run down the wall every time it rained. So its taken some time, but the sealed is resealed and we've now got supplies to make the wall look better. One of the supplies is a ladder. This morning Max decided to explore the ladder.

Max has always been a climber.

Sleeplessness

All week I've been waking up in the middle of night, with no idea why. I think this was all in preparation for what I experienced last night -- a 4 AM FIRE ALARM!

Don't panic, there was no fire. The alarms simply went off, and off, and off. Even though the fire department is only 2 minutes away, it took them over 20 to show up. Apparently the company that monitors our alarm system did not notify the fire department when the alarm went off. They didn't have a clue that anything was happening until a neighbor called them. Good thing it wasn't a real fire, eh?

After about an hour of standing around outside, talking to my neighbors, the firemen, and the police, the alarms finally got turned off and we all got to go back to bed. But my mind wasn't ready to forget about the false alarm. I dreamed I was still outside, waiting. But it was okay because David Tennant was there to entertain me.

Wildlife on the River

Yesterday Mark and I took a stroll along the Riverwalk. People say that the Riverwalk is a major tourist attraction, but we disagree. We think its a convenient place for tourists because part of it is downtown amid the hotels and restaurants and the mall. So its something nice for out-of-towners, but its not something that people travel here for specifically, like Sea World or the Alamo.

We started at the mall and went north for a couple of miles and then circled around and went south, ending up in the King William district, before we headed back to our starting point. We saw several birds that we could not identify. One was crane-like, with a long body and legs, but black with a shorter bill. The other was red, with a face like a cardinal, but with black wings. Unfortunately, neither one of us remembered to bring a camera.

Other spotted "wildlife" included a cat, two dogs, multiple pigeons, sparrows and grackles, and, my favorite, a river snake. Which was actually swimming.

Young Women's Surprise

Tonight at Young Womens we had a lesson on positive attributes. Sister H. told stories about girls who were alternately picked on and ignored by their peers and what it did to their self-esteem and self-image. Afterward we passed out paper leaves for the girls to write positive things about each other on, which we then attached to silk flowers. So at the end of the night each girl had a bouquet of flowers that said good things about them. Because we didn't know how many girls would come, we ended up having extra leaves and flowers. One girl, who is kind of quiet, asked if she could use the extra leaves to write something for us. All the other girls got in on it too, so Sister H and I got to go home with a pocketful of leaves telling us nice things about ourselves, just like all the girls did.

The girl who started it is so sweet and nice. She is always giving the class massages, usually during class, and she looks out for others. It'll be fun to watch her grow up.

Self-check out as a Family Affair

At the library we have self-check out machines so people don't have to wait in line to check out their books. They can do it themselves. Today a family gathered around the machine with their library cards and books. The mother scanned the card. The youngest put a book on the scanner. When it scanned, the oldest picked up the book and gave it to their dad. After all their books were checked out, the middle child took the receipt. So everyone got to do something.

The Reading Plan Plan

After browsing through several librarian Reader's Advisory books and guides, and asking people about what they're reading, and taking RA tests, I've discovered that my worst genre is the Action Adventure/Thriller. But, after last years Suspense/Thriller plan, I'm tired of the thriller genre. So I'm going with something lighter and doing Chic Lit.

Here are my selections:

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding - a classic in chic lit

Restoring Grace by Katie Fforde

Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner - I've read good reviews for this

Bookends by Jane Green - it has "book" in the title

Do you have any chic lit favorites that I should read?

Reading Plan

Since I joined the Fiction Team at my library a couple of years ago, I have been doing yearly reading plans. A reading plan is way to become more familiar with genres or trends that are outside of your normal comfort reading zones. You can put however many books you want on it, but there should be enough for you to become familiar with the genre. Suspense/Thriller was my genre of choice last year and I read a romantic suspense, legal thriller, a psychological suspense, and a literary thriller.

I've decided that Suspense is not my cup of tea, but now I'm more familiar with it and, hopefully, will not get a deer-in-headlights reactions the next time someone asks me for a good suspense/thriller book. I'm not sure where to go next. I've done a Romance plan and the Suspense, and Fantasy is my comfort genre. I've been thinking about doing Chic Lit or Mystery. Or maybe I should a type of book or topic, like graphic novels or poetic novels.

Any suggestions? Recommendations? Comments?