Library Ninja
Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
Syndicate: Atom
RSS
Merry Christmas!
(First: I know the archives aren't working. I switched to Blogger's new system and it ate my archives. After the holidays, when things slow down a bit, Alexander has promised to switch me over to WordPress. Then my archives will work, and--I hope--my comments, too.)
All that said: Alexander already posted this, but we have different readers, so I'm posting it, too. We have no space for a tree this year, so we had to improvise. Merry Christmas!
God bless the library (amen)
A woman was in here using the computer. She finished up a little while ago and dropped a printout on my desk.
“Here,” she said. “Someone here can have this. I have, like, a hundred of them at home, so if someone here needs it, you can have it.”
I thanked her and returned to what I was doing. I only just now looked at it. It’s a full page long, single-spaced, and it’s apparently the text of a forwarded email. It starts with “Please take a moment to relax your mind and humble your heart to focus on Christ. Allow God to be the only person on your mind while you read this prayer. If we can take the time to read long jokes, stories, etc., we should give the same respect to this prayer. Friends, who pray together, stay together.”
I don’t think I need to continue this. For the really curious, it’s roughly this, though with some minor changes to verbiage and punctuation. Like the superfluous comma in “friends, who pray together…”
And some stranger thought I needed this dropped on my desk, because she has a bunch of copies of this prayer at home. I guess she recognized me for the godless heathen I am.
Hope, @ Your Library
**I posted this a few months ago, but took it down for privacy reasons. I think by now enough time has elapsed that it's safe to post again.
Today is my morning on the reference desk. A woman came over and asked if we had a section of Christian books. “Fiction, or non-fiction? We have no specific fiction section, but I can show you where the books on religion are.” She's looking for non-fiction. Specifically, she's looking for self-help books. So I showed her where those are, and asked if there was a particular category she was interested in--there are relationship books, money-management, self-confidence, etc. She started to say no, she'd just look around, and then changed her mind. “Well...” She gave a short laugh, the I-shouldn't-even-need-to-ask kind of laugh that’s little more than just “ha.” She paused. “Abuse.”
In the interest of a thorough reference interview, I probably should have asked “child, alcohol, domestic, verbal?”--but in the interest of helping someone who was obviously uncomfortable asking, I showed her to the section that has abuse of all types, and explained how they're arranged (alcohol, then drugs, then verbal, then physical, then books like Ditch That Jerk!), and invited her to ask again if she needs anything else. She thanked me for my help and bent down. Domestic violence (and the self-help Ditch That Jerk!) was at the bottom. She was at the circ desk with three books a couple of minutes ago.
These are the kinds of things that make my job really, really worthwhile. I actually feel like I helped someone today, instead of just handing over the latest cat mystery.
Yikes
Okay, so I’ve been off the planet, apparently, for coming up on three weeks.
Surely I’ve been doing something fascinating, something exciting, something so amazing that it’s cut into my blogging time!
Nope.
I’ve just been lazy and trapped in my own headspace, haven’t written a damned word and haven’t really had words to write.
I had a bad cold that knocked me flat for Thanksgiving, then just got busy in the usual mundane crap of everyday life.
I promised I’d post a full report once I finished
Peter Pan in Scarlet, and I finished that a couple of days after I posted the beginning there.
Overall, the book was really good, even if the denouement read like “HaHA! ‘Tis I, the villain!
Allow me to explain my treacherous deeds! Marvel at my villainy!”
Laughable, but really, the whole book held together very well and maintained the spirit of the original.
I’ve rediscovered
Fraggle Rock, and it’s reignited my love of Jim Henson.
I should state that my love for him has never really subsided, but when you’re not watching things regularly it’s easy to kind of forget.
But I’ve watched the first three episodes, and I’m hooked again.
I’m waiting on the beginnings of the first season on DVD to arrive now.
Let the Fraggles play!
It’s hard to remain sad and mopey while there are Fraggles on the TV.
Last Thursday I had a cool program here at the library—a chocolate-dipping program. I bought for about 10-15 people, plus a little extra in case they went through a LOT of stuff, since getting even 10 to a program is usually a major accomplishment. Yeah. I got 31. We stretched the materials as far as we could (made some popcorn to supplement the pretzels, marshmallow, cookies, and candy; melted down some Hershey kisses we had around) but still had to stop a half-hour earlier than intended. Just as well since it gave us some extra time to clean up. I sugared them all up and sent them home to their parents, and I’m sure their parents loved me for that.
Now I’m just gearing up for the holidaze: mostly candy, so my kitchen will be chocolate-covered by the end of the week, if all goes according to my plan.
And before I can post this, Blogger is updating my site to their new system. Not sure there’s any real difference, but maybe I can get comments working, finally. [edit: it seems not. Weird. Well, you can still click on the timestamp and that should work...]
After three weeks, this is the best update I can manage. Certainly worth the wait, huh?
