Guess who's freaking out right now?

About a month or so ago I mentioned that my husband and I found a house we might be interested in buying. Well, we put an offer in on it, and the seller accepted! But of course, it couldn't be that simple. The property is a short sale, so the seller's bank has to approve our offer, which was originally submitted almost 4 weeks ago.

Nothing is definite yet, but things are moving along and it's looking good. Of course, there's still a chance that it won't work out, that either the bank won't approve our offer or a better offer will come in at the last second. Very frustrating.

So now I keep going back and forth between being really happy and optimistic, to being terrified that either someone will make a better offer or the bank will reject our offer or we won't get approved for a mortgage, to worrying about whether we'll have trouble keeping up with our expenses if we DO get the house. My thoughts alternate among these 3 scenerios about every 30 seconds. Right now all we can do is sit tight while we wait to hear something and hope for the best.

I usually read my horoscope each day, even though I don't really believe it most of the time. Once in awhile, however, it really hits the nail on the head. Yesterday I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by the house situation, as well as taking lots of extra hours at the library lately and trying to keep up with housework and getting ready for the holidays. Here's what my horoscope had to say:

"If you are feeling overwhelmed right now, you need to let some things go. These things could be hopes, work projects, relationships, or even goals. The fact is that you are only one person -- you can only do so much. So you cannot beat yourself up if things do not go according to your master plan or if you feel like it's your fault things aren't happening the way you think they should. Admitting you are powerless isn't always fun, but right now it may be necessary."

I hate being powerless!

"Mischievous Kitty"

I can't believe I didn't think to do this sooner.

Tonight when I was at the library, a patron asked to see a bunch of old high school yearbooks, which we keep under lock and key in the periodical room. I got the yearbooks he was looking for, and after I brought them out into the reference area, I decided to find the yearbooks from my grandparents' (on my mother's side) senior years.

Here's my grandmother's picture:


How cute was she??

And beneath her photo was this:


That's right, my grandmother's nickname in high school was "Mischievous Kitty." Granted, the "Kitty" part is short for Catherine, which was her (and my!) middle name. But I find it most amusing, nonetheless.

And while I'm at it, here's my Pop-pop's yearbook photo:


Now it doesn't say it here, but I kid you not, his nickname was "Whitey." It's hard to tell from this picture (between being photocopied and scanned it got a lot darker), but people called him this because, despite being Sicilian, he had blond hair and fair skin.

That's all I have time for right now because I didn't eat much dinner and my stomach is grumbling at me quite angrily... but I think I may be taking advantage of the library's subscription to the genealogy database and learning more about my family, so expect more interesting stuff in the future. Maybe I can find some information about my dad's side of the family, including my [I forget how many "great"s go here ] Aunt Edna, who did a dancing horse act for Buffalo Bill's wild west show!

Neglect

I haven't written anything in more than a month. Awesome.

Honestly though, I haven't had much free time, it's been an eventful month. I've been working extra hours at the library because one of my coworkers passed away very unexpectedly a few weeks ago and all of us part-timers have been filling in on the weekend and evening hours. It feels very strange to go in for my regular 5-9 weekend shift and not see Lorraine at the reference desk.

I've been busy just about every weekend with various social stuff whenever I'm not working... Gallivanting around NYC with the college roomies, going out with friends from home, and yesterday was my Uncle Joe's 90th birthday party (two weeks after he had major surgery, I swear that man is magical).

Also, I don't want to jinx anything, but Glen and I found a house that we're interested in... it needs a little work, but it looks like it would just be minor cosmetic stuff that we could do ourselves. It's a cute little 3 bedroom ranch with lots of neat architectural details, a decent size yard, a huge front porch, and a hot tub!! So we're keeping our fingers crossed that we get approved for a mortgage and that it passes inspection, and also that no one else swoops in there and makes an offer before we get a chance. At this point I'm thinking we'll either have to buy a place soon or accept the fact that we need to suck it up and get a bigger apartment to live in for awhile. We're going to take another look at the house with our parents in tow this weekend so we have a few sets of more experienced eyes looking for advantages/disadvantages... keep your fingers crossed for us!

I won the prize!

One day last week, I (diligent employee that I am) checked Taylor Mali's blog during some downtime at work. He had a trivia question up there and offered a "silly prize" to the first person to answer it correctly I ventured a guess and I am now the proud owner of his CD, Icarus Airlines. Good stuff. :-)

I ought to get some sleep now. I work 12 hours today and another 12 hours tomorrow. Half day on Friday, then Glen and I are off to the Poconos for a wedding this weekend... Thank goodness for mini-vacations!

My New Buddy

Yes, my new buddy is a bug. A praying mantis to be exact. I'm not sure what species it is, since the the only ones I've seen before were green, and I'm too darn lazy to either look it up (I started, but quickly learned there are more than 2,000 species!) or send the picture to whatsthatbug.com. But he's been hanging out in my garden the past few days. I hope he sticks around, he's way cooler than the cicadas that apparently love to molt on my petunias.

I'm a Miracle Worker!

That's what one of my library patrons just told me after I helped her track down a fairly obscure news story with minimal information. I'm like a newspaper archive ninja. Seriously though, this is why I love this job. Helping people find stuff they're looking for makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. ;-)

It's been a pretty good night for getting substantial, challenging reference questions. Of course, now it's slow and I left the book I'm currently reading in my office at the courthouse. If it stays this quiet, I may need to take a walk over to the magazine section and see what I can find. I need something to help me stay alert when I work these long days.

In other news, my husband first asked me out 10 years ago today! It made me feel really old when I first realized that, but then it occurred to me that we were 15 when we first started dating (that was round one), so I guess I'm not really that old. :-P

Ok, I think the magazines are calling me now...

My Apartment Smells Like Curry

Four days later, too. I made shrimp curry on Saturday night (it was a spectacular success, Glen had three helpings of it!) and delicious though it was, it's mildly disturbing that the smell is still so potent.

Oh well, guess I'll just have to find something else to make to replace the smell!

Shopping on Sunday was also a spectacular success. For not very much money I managed to add 8 shirts, a pair of shorts, gym pants, a nightgown, and a bunch of earrings to my wardrobe.

I've got a busy couple of weeks coming up, with family reunions, concerts (playing in and going to), and gatherings with friends from both undergrad and grad school. And hopefully a trip or two to Musikfest to drink beer, eat fried food, and watch the Cast in Bronze guy play the carillon.

Where to begin...

I think I may have slacked off a bit too much here. It's been almost three weeks and I don't even know where I should start!

Hmmm... Most adorable news first: I finally got to spend some quality time with the first two JASSPAC babies, Ben and Sophia. That was a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven't put the pictures up on my Picasa site, but that's on the agenda for this afternoon. It's still completely weird to me that my friends have babies now, it makes me feel so old... but it was a fantastic afternoon.

I got an email about a job posting for a medical research library in Philly, so I applied for that this week. I don't have a clue how good my chances of getting it are, but it never hurts to apply, right? Plus, I just found out this morning that one of my favorite professors from grad school said he would be one of my references! Yay!

Finally got my hair cut. It was long enough to donate, so now it's chopped up to my chin and I have bangs again. I've been getting a lot of compliments on it, and so far it's been really easy to take care of (particularly in regard to the fact that I can now dry it without breaking a sweat and feeling like I have to take a shower again!), so I think I may have to keep it this way for awhile.

I've been getting more into cooking lately too. I took a Thai cooking class at the community college with Hannah, and I'm going to try a couple of the recipes we learned for dinner tonight. Glen and I are both going to be around this evening for a change, I think I might even get out the good china! I made black beans and rice for myself last night, and it came out really well. It's easy to make, I know, but it was a step up from boiling pasta and heating up the sauce and some canned veggies, so I felt rather accomplished.

Shopping at the Jackson Outlets tomorrow with the former college roomies, I think we'll be doing some damage. I've barely gone shopping in about 6 months, I feel like I'm going through withdrawal. Also in the plans is tracking down somewhere to eat a cheesecake in memory of Estelle Getty.

Well, this post has been all over the place, so I think I'll end it by continuing on that trend. I saw this video on YouTube the other day and really liked it. Even if I never end up working in a school library, I took away a lot of valuable things from my field experience in one, not the least of which is an appreciation for Taylor Mali.

Field Trip

I haven't been to the Liberty Science Center since maybe 5th or 6th grade, and recently some of my college roommates and I decided it would be fun to go. We met up for brunch at a diner in Jersey City on Sunday first, and then after a few wrong turns managed to find out way into the Liberty Science Center parking lot.

Sadly, the Touch Tunnel is a thing of the past, but we still had a lot of fun.


Jency climbed in a tube...

We built a bacterium...

There were some semi-failed attempts at self-portraiture in the IMAX...

And we saw a crazy fish that scurried around the bottom of the fish tank with little legs.

It was definitely a good time, even without the Touch Tunnel.

Next time, we're planning on a considerably less nerdy afternoon of shopping at the outlets by Sara's boyfriend's house. Hopefully I won't come back from that one completely broke, but I haven't done any serious shopping in awhile, so no promises. ;-)

He's so romantic :-)

When I came home from work one day last week, this is what I found on the bed:


It's a bunch of origami cranes arranged in a heart. It made me smile. :-)

The cranes themselves are nothing new, Glen's been folding them for me for a little over a year. Part of his gift to me on our anniversary was that he was going to fold 1000 paper cranes for me, about one a day. There's a Japanese legend that says if you fold 1000 paper cranes you'll be granted a wish. He said that he had already been given his wish, but he thought that he should earn it.

So for awhile I'd get one crane on my nightstand each morning. Then they sort of stopped for awhile, but I didn't really question it. When I came home on Christmas Eve our apartment was FILLED with paper cranes. On the coffee table, the TV, the kitchen counters, the bed, the desk, even all over the Christmas tree. He'd been hoarding them in the trunk of his car for months!

So basically the plan is that now, to keep things interesting, every once in awhile I get some sort of romantic surprise with origami cranes. My husband is pretty much the best.

And what are we going to do when there are finally 1000 paper cranes sitting in my closet almost two years from now?

Send them to Sadako Sasaki's monument in Hiroshima, of course.

A Moment of Extreme Nerdiness

Remember the movie "Awakenings"? I remember watching part of it when I was really young, but it didn't make much of an impression on me, except that it involved Robin Williams with a beard.

Then my junior year of college, Oliver Sacks was the speaker at the convocation. I don't know that I'd have bothered to go, except I was in the choir and we sang a few songs at the event. Oliver Sacks is the neurologist who wrote the book Awakenings and the person on whom Robin Williams' character is based. And he was both adorable and fascinating.

I later read Awakenings (which he signed for me!) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I forgot to bring a book with me to the library tonight (which for the most part was not big loss because I was incredibly busy, and with some good reference questions, too!) so I found the library's copy of An Anthropologist on Mars. I haven't even finished the first of the seven stories, but one of the footnotes describes Anton's syndrome, in which individuals lose their sight but are completely unaware of the loss. It's as if they forget what vision even is. So weird.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, other than that Oliver Sacks has taught me that the brain is incredibly complex, confusing, and amazing. And if you're anywhere near as nerdy as I am, you should read his books.

As Promised:

Here are some degu pictures! I can't take credit for them, my husband was the one who actually took the pictures back in April. So Eric, you can stop bugging me now. :-P

Ahh, Nostalgia :-)

Yesterday I came across a music video on YouTube that features some of the stars from Nickelodeon's good ol' days... It made me smile, and it also made me wish they'd released "Salute Your Shorts" on DVD. ;-) Check it out:




P.S. Eric, I promise I will put up pictures of the degus soon!

More Procrastination

Yup, definitely should be working on my final project for grad school during my lunch hour, but that's absolutely not going to happen. Instead, I think I'll spend my lunch hour extolling the virtues of my new job, which include but are not limited to:

• Higher pay (duh)
• My own office (nevermind that it's the smallest in the department!)
• Windows (2 of them!)
• A closet (which happened to come with 3 men's suit jackets)
• Flex hours
• I can play music in my office. As in my own music, not the crappy stuff on the radio station that gets played throughout the rest of the courthouse!
• Mileage reimbursement
• The opportunity to be promoted on my own merit, instead of waiting for vacancies in other departments.
• A door to close when I don't feel like being bothered
• Fantastic coworkers who actually get me (though I don't know exactly what that says about them!)

Yup, I think I'm going to like this job. Still going to keep my eyes open for full-time library jobs of course, but this is certainly not a bad place to be in the meantime!

And on a completely unrelated note, I was looking into getting new speakers for my computer at work since my current speakers are old and don't work very well. And I came across these:

Awesome, right? Probably not exactly high-quality though... Maybe I'll go for something a bit more practical. ;-)

One Month Left...

Exactly four weeks from today, my final semester of grad school will be over! I am one revised PowerPoint and one three-year strategic plan away from being done. Oh yeah, and a whole bunch of reading and discussing of YA books, but that's the easy part. ;-)

Still confused about where I ultimately want to end up, although there are some potential opportunities in school libraries that I am considering pursuing. I start my new job as an auditor at the courthouse on Monday, and part of me is so tempted to just settle into that for awhile... but can I really pass up the chance to pick up where a really fantastic school media specialist left off? Granted, this is assuming I am even offered the position in the first place, and my lack of experience may be a bit of a detriment there... So perhaps I should wait to muse over this issue until I find out whether I even have a shot at that school job.

On a different note, I'm still trying to adjust to the concept of having free time. Part of me is really excited, but part of me is actually a little scared. I've always been depending on having to be at a certain place at a certain time and having deadlines. I feel like I need external motivators in order to get things done. Will I turn into a lazy bum when school is over? Have I maybe earned the right to be a lazy bum? What if I completely lose my momentum?

Although the hardest part, the degree-getting part, will be over. And even if I don't find my dream job right away, at least I can be assured that as of this Monday I will have a good job, instead of the mediocre stuff I've been dealing with until now (please note that the job at the public library is excluded from that statement, it is far from mediocre).

Seriously now, how sad is it that I feel the need to rationalize my right to take a little break this summer, to enjoy my semi-cushy job with my very own office (which, lets face it I probably won't have in most libraries), actually spend quality time with my husband, to have a nice garden instead of the half-assed one I've planted the past two years, to read my fill of recreational books (anxiously awaiting the publication of such non-fiction titles as American Nerd: The Story of My People and The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in Our Commercialized World, as well as the chance to read a plethora of shallow chick lit and at least one big, thick classic), to actually keep our apartment nice and clean and maybe even consider starting a real house hunt depending on where our lives take us this summer. What a concept.

The Loquacious... Auditor??

That's right... I'm taking a small detour on the way to full-time librarianship.

Since I realized there's no guarantee I'll immediately get a full-time job as a librarian as soon as I graduate, I figured I may as well go for a promotion at work. I ranked first on the test, and they offered me the position. Since it comes with a hefty raise, my own office, and the opportunity to get promotions based on my own accomplishments (rather than waiting for the next job vacancy to be posted), I decided I'd be foolish not to take it!

Fortunately, I've still got my part-time public library job, so even while I'm waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along I've got that job to keep me from feeling like I'm wasting an MLS. Besides, I'm so unbelievably exhausted from these past few years that I'm not ready to launch into a full-fledged job search just yet. For once in my life, I'm taking a little time to just breathe and enjoy life.

What ever will I do without all that schoolwork hanging over my head?

Impromptu Storytimes

Who says a librarian's job is boring?

Not me, that's for sure.

I had kind of a long day at the courthouse, and I still had a ton of schoolwork to do, but I also had to work at the library from 5 - 9. I was scheduled to be at the children's desk, which was kind of a relief because there are fewer interruptions (since we only have 2 public computers in the children's room, as opposed to the 13 or so in adult reference) and I'd probably have more time to catch up with schoolwork. Boy, was I mistaken!

I asked if there was anything going on tonight, and was told there wasn't. Things were reasonably busy, but nothing extraordinary. Until about 6:50, when some folks came in and asked where the storytime would be.

...What storytime? I checked the calendar, and sure enough, there it was: Storytime: 7 - 7:30.

Great. I'm only here one, sometimes two times, a week. So I started calling some of the other children's librarians to see if maybe someone was just running late, but no one picked up their phones. Even better.

So next thing I know it's 6:58 and I'm scrambling around the library trying to find spring-themed pictures books for the rather large crowd of preschoolers and their parents gathered at the back of the library. I eventually settled on When Will It Be Spring? by Catherine Walters and Wake Up, It's Spring! by Lisa Campbell Ernst, partly because they looked cute, but mostly because they were two of maybe four or five spring-themed books that weren't already checked out.

I didn't have the key to the storytime room and didn't want to waste anymore time looking for it, so we had to settle for pulling together a bunch of chairs in the back of the room. Amazingly enough, the storytime went really well, with kids commenting on the pictures and getting so close to the book that I actually had to ask them to back up. A much better problem to have than a lack of attention.

I didn't have enough time to plan any activities, but the stories took up most of the half hour, and the parents just seemed grateful that I was able to pull something together for them.

And to think, last summer I was absolutely terrified of doing a PLANNED storytime. My, how this librarian has grown. ;-)

Procrastination?

There are so many things I should be doing right now.

Working on my journals for my field experience. Reading for YA Lit. Updating my resume. Posting in discussions for one of my three classes.

So I guess technically this is procrastination. But I've been talking about starting a blog for months now, so I suppose I could rationalize this and say I'm actually putting an end to my procrastination. Yeah, that's what I'll tell myself.

No guarantees that I'll keep this blog regularly updated, at least for now. For the next two months I'll be juggling a full-time job as an HR specialist (or maybe an auditor, depending on how things go this Wednesday!), a part-time job as an intern at a library, my last 9 credits toward my MLIS, field experience at a high school media center, and looking for a job as a real librarian!

But I feel like I need somewhere to put my thoughts, share my adventures, complain about how stressed out I am even though I'd be much less stressed if I was doing what I should be doing instead of writing blog posts...

Well, the library will be closing soon, so perhaps I should consider getting things straightened up and start kicking people out. ;-)