TwentySevenLetters / B

Renovations

Way back when I first interviewed for my job at this library, one of the things that came up was the as-then-hypothetical renovation. Because I can't help myself, I started making suggestions on the spot about tearing out some shelves, putting up others, getting better tables/chairs/seating, maybe a coat of paint... I only just barely stopped myself from drawing up plans then and there, as I suddenly realized that you don't go redecorating someone's house before you know them well, and even then you only do it if you're going to live there.

It worked out for me, though, because last week--about a year and a half after I first gave words to my sweeping vision--we renovated the children's and teen areas. Why did it need to be renovated so badly? Well, here's the "before" picture:

It should be pretty clear why I've been so eager to do this. Those stacks in the middle of the room! The galley kitchen appearance! And oh, those paperback racks on the wall, with little organization (alphabetical by the first letter of the author's last name--ugh!) and racks that chew up the bottoms of the books! Of course, we can't forget the institutional-white walls, and who doesn't love that hand-me-down index table from Tech Services in the middle of the room?

Well, it took a while, lots of brainstorming and floor planning, paint samples, and catalogs up the wazoo, but we have our renovation. A fresh coat of paint (yellow), new shelving (perimeter), tables and chairs (cafe style), and comfy seating (beanbags, plus floor rockers pending). We're waiting on new computer tables (with a mid-January ship date), which will replace the table in the middle of the room, and we'll have 6 computers on it once the electrician comes to rewire (the neon sign will be moved and plugged back in then, too). Take another look at the picture above for comparison, then look at our new room:

Thanks to the Friends, the town, and a whole bunch of volunteers who painted the place (under a grant that the children's side got for their renovation), we actually look good! Teen response has been positive so far--I've overheard things like "I love the new tables!" and "it looks so cool!", and witnessed a few girls race each other to the beanbag chair in the back. It's amazing how much of a difference this made--I'm very excited about it, and so are the kids. Hooray!

Monthly report

I’ve been somewhat remiss in my blogging. I’m okay with it, and I haven’t heard any complaints from readers, so I guess it is what it is. I’m thinking of hanging up the whole work-related blogging thing anyway—when you have some measure of job satisfaction, it’s hard to come up with things to say. It’s so much easier to complain than it is to make the mundane, everyday events interesting.

I’ve started working on the grant, now that we have it and have to implement the crazy things I said I’d do. I’ve been meeting with school representatives on various issues, most notably the head of the science department, to get him on board with the sci/tech component. One of his teachers has already volunteered to do a session on aquaculture using the high school’s lab. I have no idea what aquaculture is, but we’re going to set that up as one of the early sessions—early, because she’s the only one who’s volunteered so far. I’m hoping she enjoys it and spreads the word.

We’ve had a couple of meetings of the new advisory board. Not surprisingly, the middle schoolers are a much bigger group than the high schoolers, who aren’t even a group, because you can’t have a group when there’s nobody there. One interested ninth-grader asked that the meetings be moved to evening, since lots of kids work in the afternoon—but lots of them work at night, too, so there’s not really a time that’s great for everyone. I had split the groups into middle school and high school, but I think it might be better to just recombine them, since the high school group is so non-existent. The middle schoolers have had some really great ideas, though, and with their input I found which of my own ideas aren’t so great. Oh, they have some misses, too—the boy who suggested an ice-sculpting workshop, for instance, admitted that he didn’t think it through when I asked what kind of tools we’d need for it—but on the whole, they’re a great group of kids with great ideas, and I’m looking forward to really getting to know them.

Last night I brainstormed with one of our pages to come up with ideas for crafts that aren’t the same things we’ve been doing. Mostly it’s been “here are materials (beads, wire, pipe cleaner, paper clips); make something!” and we’re looking to break out of that mold. I think we might end up planning a trip to AC Moore, and just see what looks fun while we’re there. And different. Fun and different, because as bored as the attendees are with what we’re doing, Kate and I are just as bored. (Kate is the best page ever and I’m very sad that she’s off to college next fall. In the meantime, she and I are of like minds when it comes to crafts, which is a negative insofar as we can’t even muster the energy to do crafts one of us hates—because we hate the same ones, so neither of us can “carry” the other in running a non-craft like decoupage.)

I’ve been plugging away at the summer reading list. At last check, there was some discussion of giving a choice of books for each grade level, which I think is a great idea. So my annotated list keeps getting longer. I also have an obsessively-detailed spreadsheet, broken down by grade level and then color-coded by genre (speculative fiction, historical, mystery, realistic, non-fiction). I am a big nerd, but it was very helpful to take a quick glance at the spreadsheet and realize that, right now, 8th grade has nothing but sci-fi, and the bulk of the 7th grade list is historical. So I know I need to mix that up a bit, and add more 7th-8th grade titles in general. 10th grade? Not so much, because my 10th grade list is huuuuuuge.

Not much happening on the non-work front. Halloween is tomorrow, and with it comes the start of the holiday season for me—which means I need to get cracking on all the Projects I’m planning to do for Christmas. I’ve already requested 2 days off in December to give myself a 4-day weekend, which will be the big Candy Weekend, but I also have a couple of quilts to finish and other miscellaneous projects I’ve wanted to get to and haven’t had time for. It might end up being a less-handmade Christmas than I’m hoping, but that makes me a little sad. Dammit, I want some time to play with art supplies!

I’ve been losing a lot of my free time to the Y—stupid exercise eats into my reading time, my crafting time, my cooking dinner or watching TV or otherwise being-home time. The scale believes I’ve only dropped 3 pounds in the month I’ve been going, but all my clothes are looser, so if nothing else I’ve redistributed the weight I have. And I’ve been feeling a little better now that I’ve been moving more, so that’s a win, too. (I’m feeling like a slug now that I haven’t been in a week, but that’s because I’ve had a stupid cold that left me short of breath at the best of times; vigorous exercise didn’t seem the best plan.)

So, work, Y, eat, sleep. That’s about the extent of my life. Reading has finally picked up from the summer, though not a the breakneck pace I’d accomplished back in the fall. Full log, with reviews, is at GoodReads.com. (I’ve read 165 books so far this year!)

Overheard

A kindergartener telling the children's librarian what he learned in school today:

"Everyone thought the world was flat, and they would fall off the water. But Christopher said 'I'll fix that!' and bought three sailboats--at a store, I guess--and sailed to America, where he didn't even know there was. And nobody fell off the water anymore."

Summer Reading

As a quick wrap-up, the teen summer reading program had 141 people signed up and 160 folders given out. Everyone's pretty happy with my numbers, me especially. Yay!

A week or so ago, I got a call from the newly-appointed head of the English department for the local public schools. She's looking to revamp the entire summer reading list, and wants my suggestions of what books should be on there. I already have a pretty sizable list (I'm always very excited to push books on people, and freak that I am, I like making annotated booklists), but I'm having trouble adding to it. I need to find books appropriate for grades 6-11 (12th grade gets to pick something off the NYT or Boston Globe Bestseller lists), ideally that isn't already on the list for the school year.

That said: Hive mind! What books do you wish you'd encountered in high school? What books are you happy you did? What should be avoided at all costs? (I promise not to get into my rant on Why Assigned Summer Reading is a Bad Idea.)

Best Mini-Reviews

As part of our summer reading program, teens submit mini-reviews of books they've read for our weekly drawing. Some of my favorite reviews so far:

Title/Author: Magic's Child / Justine Larbalestier
Comments: An okay ending to a bad series
Would you recommend this book? yes!

Title/Author: Out of the Dust / Karen Hesse
Comments: This is the best book in the history of life.
Would you recommend this book?YES!

Title/Author: Spiral Bound / Aaron Reiner
Comments: This is the perfect graphic novel (unless you like swears and violence)
Would you recommend this book? Of course!

Title/Author: Crash / Jerry Spinelli
Comments: This story is very nice. The author has an imagination.
Would you recommend this book? Yes, I would.

Title/Author: The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Milan Kundera
Comments: I'm reading this book, I don't know if I'll like it, but it makes me seem like I am cool like Harold Bloom, who is my hero.
Would you recommend this book? Sure, why not.

Happy birthday to me!

I have 365 more days to do all the things I planned to do before I turned 30. Luckily, I don't think there's anything on that list, because I've never really been much for setting arbitrary time frames. At least, I never made an official to-do-before-30 list, so, okay, I guess I can check list-making off the list. (Did that sentence make any sense? It did in my head.)

The week leading up to my birthday was pretty good. In work news, I found out Tuesday that my library won the Serving 'Tweens and Teens grant I wrote back in February, so the state is going to give me $20,000 for teen programs and services, and limited remodeling of the Teen Zone. Not only will this look great on a resume, but I now have at least 2 years of job security, because nobody in their right mind will want to implement my Grant Year Two project, in which I outlined a plan for a semester-long marketing/consumerism/visual literacy program, which will culminate in having the teens develop their own print and (local) TV ad campaign to promote the library in general and Teen Zone in particular. Hell, I'm not totally convinced I want to take on this project!

Wednesday we found out that we're also being given a $20,000 grant via ALA to renovate the whole children's room, and everything needs to be picked out by the end of August. It's not really my news, because I'm not in charge of the children's room, but WOOHOO $20,000 to bring the room out of the 1980 orange-and-mustard color scheme. Hooray!

Thursday was my director's birthday and I took Friday off, so YAY birthday cake in the staff room.

Friday: we found an apartment. It's in Central Square, which is further in than I wanted to be (we were mostly looking around Porter) and we'll have to get our own laundry machines (there are hook-ups) but the place is huuuuuuuge. We had to sign over our souls, and some big checks, with the tentative lease, but it looks like a go pending income verification. So unless the management company thinks we three--a bookseller, a librarian, and a teacher at a tech college--look like utter deadbeats, we should have a new address come September 1.

Following that good news, we went to see Harry Potter. A good adaptation, but man did they hustle through the first, I dunno, 200 pages or so. Come to think of it, the whole thing felt a little rushed--it could have used another hour or so--but the cuts they made were understandable. There were still little glimpses of the character development I wanted to see, so it's not all bad. The casting was fantastic--Umbridge in particular was so amazingly, pleasantly awful, and whoever designed her office, covering every inch of every wall with decorative plates of meowing cats was a freakin' genius. I have read some people commenting that the movies are starting to lose all intelligibility to people who aren't already well-schooled in the PotterVerse, and that's probably right. Not a problem for me, and the very reason why people should be READING BOOKS instead of just watching the movie.

We finished the night at Buddha's Delight in Chinatown, which was, as usual, really enjoyable. That they can turn soy protein and wheat gluten into such a range of meat-like foods is amazing in itself, but its also amazingly good and dirt-cheap to boot. And you can't go wrong with the pineapple milkshake made with condensed milk. Oh, I swoon thinking about it, but yum. We rolled home, and then my birthday was pretty much over.

Today I mostly stayed on the couch, watched junk TV, and finished the really boring phase (unfolding corners of blocks) of the quilt I'm working on. I really want to finish this quilt, because it'll be much easier to move a blanket than it will 168 squares of fabric.

Harry Potter and the Huge Page Count

First: Summer Reading sign-ups continue apace, and I'm up over 100 teens registered already. I think it helps that I put a sign up on the shelves that hold their required reading, telling them that if they have fines on their cards and can't check out their summer books, signing up for the program gets them a Free Fines coupon. I have 108 teens so far. Hooray!

Second: Tonight is the All-Ages Harry Potter Discussion/Predictions/Support Group. I have no clue how many people to expect. All I know is that we've told a bunch of people about it, lots of the tear-off slips are gone from the library flyers, and a reporter with the Lowell Sun was mentioning the group in the article he's publishing today. We're serving up butter beer (chilled, because it's 6:30 and still 92°--and because we bought cold cups instead of hot), chocolate (to ward off Dementors), jelly beans, and Weasley's Ton-Tongue Toffees (actually just regular butter toffee, but eat at your own risk!). Wish me luck!

Third: in preparation for tonight's festivities, I just re-read the series thus far. I started last Monday, and finished at 12:30 last night, meaning I read close to 2800 pages in 8 days, while also doing crazy things like going to work and museums and having friends over for meals and making jam. Current read: Joey Pigza, because my brain REALLY needs a break.