Update!

I just got an exciting email, and because I know that all 4.3 of you that read this blog care, I thought I'd share the news. Remember when I told on our Copier/Printer Machines-of-Torture? Well, they've really done it now. They have overstepped their boundaries, and pushed even The Guy too far. As of October, they will be replaced. All 5 of them. We're not going to tell them, because then we'd have nothing to threaten them with. Even The Guy would lose his effectiveness, and they'd probably declare an all-out war with the reference staff. And when humans and machines battle, the machines always win. So for the next few months, we'll just continue to wage the battle, breathlessly waiting for the day when our machines will be replaced. Replaced with new Copier/Printer Machines-of-Torture.

Memorial Day

Over at ScrappleFace (which is one of the funniest blogs I read on a regular basis), Scott Ott has one of the most hauntingly beautiful tributes I've read.  Take a moment to  go read it, and say thank you in your own way.
And have a great holiday!

Florida Vacations

We're here in Florida! We left Thursday afternoon - I got home from work a little early, and we were able to get on the road a few minutes after 4. I convinced the hubby that we didn't really want to spend the money on a hotel room - and so we drove straight through. StepSon is the only teenager I've ever met who doesn't take advantage of those hours to sleep, but since he has good taste in music we sang through all three of Billy Joel's greatest hits albums and then threw in some Grateful Dead, Tom Petty and Simon & Garfunkel. Told ya he had good taste in music. We got to Florida at about 1 AM, much too early for me and sis to go to sleep. So we cracked open a bottle of wine while Hubby headed to his favorite place in the entire world: My sister's hot tub. He'll spend 75% of the next three days in there, but he'll be happy. And when he's happy, I'm happy. Especially when Sis is making Pink Lemonade Margaritas - which is my new favorite summer drink. There's Pina Colada's waiting for us, but we can't get away from these Margaritas long enough to find them. And of course we had to make a stop at the wine store today. Got Hubby a special birthday surprise there, too. So it's been an all around great day. Tonight, we head to the beach to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then back home, to the pool, the hot tub, cheesecake and wine. Life is good....

Advertising

We see product placement in movies and TV shows all the time. But have you ever considered having it in books?

From BoingBoing:

BMW has commissioned four short stories that feature their cars andproduced audiobooks of them, which are available as free, non-DRMedMP3s on their site (you do have to give them an unverified emailaddress to get access, though). Presently, they're featuring stories byDon Winslow, James Flint, Simon Kernick and Karin Slaughter.

Excuse ME!

Schools crack down on inappropriate blogs

So now, school boards are going to start policing what students do in their spare time. Because school boards don't have enough to do already. I mean, you would think that banning Harry Potter and Judy Blume would occupy the vast majority of their time. And you would think that parents would be the people responsible for what their children do in their spare time. And you might possibly think that it would be the police department's job to investigate anything that might be illegal activity. But you'd be wrong. Or at least, that's what a school board in Chicago thinks:

Illegal or inappropriate blogging or social behavior over the Internet is now a violation of District 128's student code of conduct at both Libertyville and Vernon Hills High Schools and can lead to denial of extracurricular student privileges.

Ok,if the kids were doing this in school, then I could see the school getting somewhat involved. But this code of conduct means that what students do from home is now the school's business. What about letters they write to their friends? What about if they sneak into an "R" rated movie? What if they have a sexy phone conversation, the NSA gets a tape of it and turns it over to the school? What if they write a journal on their computer then let other students read it, but don't publish it online? Why is this any of the school's business?

Library Humor

Cat Blogging

We got our second cat last summer - he was a stray in my sister's neighborhood that we brought home. The vet estimated that he was about 6 months old at the time, and he was - and is - one of the sweetest cats that I've ever seen. He loves people, animals, inanimate objects.... But he's always had some very distinctive physical characteristics. His tail is very bushy and long - and it looked very funny when he was smaller. He's kind of grown into it now, but it's still larger than most cats. And he has the longest tufts of hair growing out of his feet. People have assured me that if he were an outdoor cat then this hair would probably disappear, but this isn't usual cat-feet-hair. It's a couple of inches of hair on each toe. And he has really long ear hair too. Then, a few months ago, my hubby was watching TV and a cat flashed on the screen that looked amazingly like Lucius. It was an ad for an organization that rescues Maine Coon Cats. The TV cat had the same pointed ears, the same hair - and most importantly the same freakishly long and bushy tail. Ever since then, Hubby has called Lucius "Maine Coon" (instead of the usual "Fluffball" - Hubby likes to come up with his own names). So what do you think? I'm pretty convinced that Lucius has some - ok, more than some - Maine Coon Cat blood in him. I found some pictures of Maine Coon cats with the same coloring as mine. So here's a picture of Lucius and two other cats. Tell me if they look similar to you. I wish I had a good picture of Lucius' back, because those markings on that professional picture are exactly like his.

Spending Money as Fast as They Can

There are children who do not have health insurance. There are elderly who can't afford medications to keep them alive. There are people lost in the middle who only need to be taught a few valuable life skills in order to keep them off the streets. There are crack babies born that will never make it to childhood, because there is no money to get them the treatment they need. There are teenagers lost in foster care, convinced that no one gives a damn what happens to them. There are people dying of diseases that we can cure, dying because they can't afford medical treatment and don't have insurance.

And this is how our government is spending our money (from MSNBC.com):

• $66,000 for the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation in DC
• $387,976 for Manure Management research (National Swine Research Center) in Ames, Iowa.
• $16 million on southern pine beetle forest health initiative
• $2.5 million for cotton research in Texas.
• $940,000 for brown tree snake management in Guam.
• $373,824 for Grapefruit Juice/Drug Interaction research in Temple, Texas.
• $390,101 for Honey Bee Research (Varroa Mites) in Baton Rouge, LA.
• $1.5 million for construction of an entrance off Bladensburg Rd for the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.
• $1 million for Florida Department of Citrus Abscission Chemical Studies.
• $1 million for Iowa State University project on mitigating emissions from egg farms. (my note: are they talking about bird's passing gas here?)

I'm not pointing fingers at either side on this one, because Democrats are just as good at getting money for their pet projects as anyone else. And some of the projects on the original list are worth funding.
And some of them are just a way to get money.
The 10 items I listed above total $24,157,901. What could you do with that kind of money?

New Shoes and Lots of Caffeine

Last year, I got a great pair of beige sandals from Wal-Mart.Only $6 and they had a heel. I love these shoes, so this year when I saw them in black - for the same low price - I couldn't pass them up. Yes, I already had 3... oops - forgot about the other strappy ones - make that 4 pairs of black sandals. What can I say? A girl can never have too many pairs of shoes. Tuesday mornings are my worst mornings. I don't get home til about 11 PM on Mondays, and I have to leave by 6:15 Tuesday morning. Since I am not in any way happy about being awake before 8 AM, I usually sleep til the last possible minute and wake up in time to throw clothes on and lunch together before pouring caffeine into the largest cup I can find and heading out the door, praying all the way down the interstate that I get to work before my cup is empty. This morning, the caffeine held. And I had the added bonus of not having to decide which shoes to wear - I had new sandals and they were already in my car. It gave me an extra 45 seconds of free morning time. When I got to work I slipped them on (HA! You thought I was going to say I left them at home, didn't you?) and dashed inside, desperately hoping that someone had already turned on the coffee. When I got inside, I realized that although the coffee was brewing, I had left my cup in my car - which meant another 1/4 mile walk to my car to get it, then a 1/4 mile walk back inside(that counts as exercise, right? Because when I go to my car to leave, I'll have walked an entire mile just from the car to the building). By the time I got back to the library, my feet were killing me. My new sandals- which are {theoretically} the same as my old ones except for color - have now rubbed the outside of my foot raw. As in, there is an entire layer of skin peeling from the side of my foot. Since I used the extra 45 seconds this morning to slap some pretty red nail polish on my toe nails, I was not happy that I had wasted time making my feet as pretty as possible only to have it all ruined after 30 minutes of wearing my new shoes. I'd better get another pair of black sandals to keep at work for emergencies like this....

Quiet Night

It's a quiet night around here. Our "big three" schools have collected the final papers from their students - and those students have had enough library time in the past 6 months to tide them over til the next time they get sent here to go through another school. Even the smaller schools don't seem to have much going on right now - no frantic searching for facts on little-known or understood countries, no biographies to research and write. Tonight, all we really have are the die-hard researchers - those trying to get something together to publish - and the ones that are only here temporarily (TDY) that come in the library to kill the boredom by playing on the internet in between emails to their family/friends/wives/boyfriends/children etc.. The Die-Hards generally know what they're doing and don't ask for much. The Bored Ones only want to flash ID's at me so they can get online (they don't really need to flash the ID's, but I've stopped telling them since they've already flashed by the time I do). It's calm and quiet enough to drive a girl insane. So I sit here reading National Guard Magazine. Not, as you may think, because I want to, but because it's one of the titles I index. I'm trying to weed through something on the National Guard Association's legislative objectives for FY2007 and budget preparation...hey - are you still awake, or did you nod off for a second? Told you it was quiet around here tonight. And then, the one thing happens that I personally dread, each and every time that I work the reference desk. It makes me feel helpless - and lets me know that my quiet night of peace is over. Oh sure, it may only happen a couple more times tonight - and it might not happen at all - but now my nerves are on edge, anticipating that every patron that walks anywhere near the vicinity of the ref desk will have the same question/problem for me: "Do you know why Printer 5 isn't working?" The copiers/printers are the least understood part of our entire network. There's 5 copiers, all of which serve double time as printers for our 40+ computers. They seem like marvelous machines - you can do all kinds of fascinating copying on them, turning things backwards, blowing up a picture of the president's nose so that you can see all the tiny blood vessels (umm...not that I would know...), shrink the president's head so that it's a tiny dot on his over-padded shoulders (ditto); double-sided printing, legal-sized printing; double-sided-legal-size printing; collating, stapling, scanning....our copiers do many marvelous things. What they do not do well is act like they are printers. Sure, we may occasionally force things to print from them - but they let us know, every day, that it is not by their choice. It is only because we know The Guy. The Guy has a tool belt, a tool box, and even a small cart on wheels that he can use to move the Copier around when it's not acting correctly. And the Copier knows that if it misbehaves too much, The Guy will be called. We, like the Copier, do not know for sure when The Guy will arrive - but we all know that he carries things on his tool belt that will make the Copier scream silent cries of agony. So the Copier takes us to the edge of insanity...and then backs off, waiting for another unsuspecting moment when it can randomly feed paper through places where no paper should be fed. Did I mention we have 5 of these Copier/Printer Demons? All on the same convoluted network. In theory, when one of them is too busy/lazy/broken to handle the work being sent to it another will pick up the slack and have the queue cleared out in a jiffy. In reality, half of the papers never print. And the ones that do print never get claimed, because the patron gets tired of hearing the librarian mutter under her breath as she takes another misfed piece of paper out of the bowels of the machine. Tonight, it began with Copier/Printer 5. Someone tried to print something, and the Infernal Machine refused to print without jamming. After the same document jammed 4 times (and I cleaned out the Printer 4 times), I turned it off, hung a "sorry we can't control the Printer" sign on the front of it, and made everyone print to one of the other 4 Printers. I told the Printer, quite loudly so that the other machines could hear, that The Guy would be called first thing in the morning. The sign was not a good idea. When Printer 5 doesn't work, it should send stuff to one of it's buddies to print up. That is NOT what happened. Instead, I now had people asking where their stuff was. The sign on The Printer From The Devil's Workshop tells them that they should select another printer if it doesn't print up somewhere. This makes them angry - most of them have closed out of whatever it is that is so important they must have it RIGHT NOW. Then, this really nice girl comes up and says she's having problems with Printer 4. I go in to take a look...and find that paper has jammed in it, too. Only this young lady thought she was smarter than the machine - so she started opening flaps and doors to pull out the misfed papers (If it's a long enough document, there are places where 5 pieces of paper can get simultaneously stuck. I learned to count how many pieces of paper I had pulled out before I assumed I had them all). Anyway, this Young Lady just yanked the papers out, instead of turning the knobs politely as you must do with our Spawn of Satan Printers. So what do you think the Blasted Machine did? It ate a tiny sliver of paper. A piece of paper so miniscule that three flaps and one drawer had to be removed before it could be seen. Needless to say, my fingers are not quite dainty enough to grasp this paper. Just as I started to get up from the ungraceful position in which I had had to contort myself to see this scrap of fiber, I hear the Wonderful Girl say "ohhh..I thought I heard something rip when I tugged on that last piece...." In the interest of keeping my job, I tell myself over and over that I didn't hear her. That she hadn't really meant to imply that she had opened the machine and just yanked on a piece of paper. I start towards the front to get the pair of needle-nose pliers, with her behind me asking if she can help. Taking a deep breath - and reminding myself that I hate the machines, not the people who use them - I ask her to reprint to another machine. 10 minutes later, I feel like the Empress of the Universe as I stand looking at the 1 inch by 1/2 inch piece of paper in the nose of my pliers. I pushed the machine back together and watched it start printing. I walk from the room, feeling that, for once, I have won over The Machines From Hell. And I desperately wish for a quiet night.