Holy Sara Palin on a skateboard, Batman, it’s 2009 and the second semester is already here! Somebody please tell me how in the world that happened when I hadn’t gotten a quarter of what I needed to do for the FIRST semester done.

Okay, I need some reassurance here that I’m not the only person who feels like an old dog used to lying in the sunshine on a country road who is suddenly wrapped around the axles of a flying Ferrari from far away nowhere. See, I have all these ideas . . . really I do. I came back to school this year FIRED UP! I was going to do this and I was going to do that and brothers and sisters, I had a PLAN.

Yep, that lasted about fifteen minutes. Then stuff started tearing up, computers started crashing, SMARTboards needed setting, MAP needed administrating, and here come all my pretty ones in a row ready to check out books. By the time I had time to pick my head up, it was Halloween so I took a quick breath and dove back in again fixing this and helping out with that and in no time at all, Joseph’s your uncle and Mary’s your aunt, it was Thanksgiving.

Then the textbook audit hit me blindside like a cut rate doll prop in a sadistic Whac-A-Mole game from Hell. Between trying to figure out how in blazes the State Department came up with the numbers they did, keeping my building full of Triassic Age computers running and checking out books for all my lovely ones, it was Christmas. Of course, my AP and I did manage to find the flaw in the audit. I think the auditor got her numbers with some unholy combination of goat blood and chicken bones.

Still, FIRST SEMESTER IS OVER!! I didn’t get what I wanted to do done at all. Jeez ma-ninny, y’all, I just TODAY found a home for the last of the “material” that came with the consolidation of our sixth grade center with my middle school. I’m still getting five or six books a day that aren’t in the catalog and have to be entered with zMARC. I just need one of those “Time Turner” things Hermione had in Prisoner of Azkaban so I can go back to August and do what I wanted to do this year.

Of course, that’s not going to happen, so I’ll just have to do like a losing football team at halftime and regroup, readjust and try to make the best of the second half. Still, it’s unnerving to hear everyone already making plans for “what we need to do NEXT year.”

So tell me, am I out here alone or is the world just flying by a WHOLE lot faster than it used to? I mean, wow, I remember when Christmas took at least a decade to get here and summer lasted slightly longer than the Laurentide Ice Sheet from the last great ice age. Now, well, like a sign I saw online today said “only 358 shopping days ’til Christmas!” I may seem crazy, but that’ll be next week the way things seem to be going.

I guess that’s just about enough time for us to wash our feet, y’all!

In any event, I hope all your New Years’ resolutions last past Valentine’s Day and that 2009 brings . . . well, brings y’all something good. 🙂

Saw something right unusual yesterday afternoon and I wanted to share it with y’all. I expect it’ll be about as divisive as most of my opinions tend to be.

Budge and I were going to lunch on one of the busiest roads in our area and as we passed “the” Super WalMart, I noticed a guy standing on the sidewalk with a sign. Now that in and of itself isn’t unusual for that stretch of road because the homeless of the area often ply this particular region with “will work for food” signs and the like. Luckily, I didn’t dismiss this sign as “usual” and as we got closer, I noticed the holder wasn’t usual either. I’m thankful for the heavy traffic or I might have missed the whole thing.

Turns out, this was a teenaged boy and he was holding a hand lettered poster that read “I stole video games from WalMart. I am a thief.” I looked down below him and saw a woman in dark sunglasses sitting on the hood of her car, arms crossed, ill look on face. I pointed this scene out to Budge and she said, “I’m pulling in and talking to that woman. She is my new best friend.”

Well, we did. The boy was this woman’s 17 year old nephew. She has custody of him because his mother is a drug addict. She’s raised him all his life. From the looks of the pair’s clothes and the Lexus she was sitting on, she had the means to provide for him. Seems the young man celebrated his birthday by shoplifting two expensive video games from the store he was now unwillingly advertising. “Aunt Jane” (identified as such by interspersed tearful, plaintive cries from the sidewalk above) asked (probably more like pleaded with) the store manager not to press charges with the understanding that, “Aunt Jane” would handle it. This sidewalk show, scheduled to last two hours, was step one. A day spent touring our local maximum security prison’s general population was step two.

I should mention that the entire time “Aunt Jane” was explaining all this to us, tears were streaming out from under her Gucci sunglasses. She said, “He thinks I’m a monster, but I have to make him realize what stupid choices can lead to. I’ve taken the day off work to put him through this.” She even asked Budge and I if we thought she was being too harsh. We both told her that, as a pair of educators often working with undisciplined children, she was our newest hero. She smiled at that.

As we drove away, I looked back and saw her climb the bank and stand beside her nephew. She didn’t hug him or pat him on the head and she made him hold the sign up where its big black letters were clearly readable, but she stood beside him in her beige business suit and pumps. To my mind at least, she was doing what Papa called “raising” the boy.

Personally, I thing she was doing something worthwhile and effective. The lad will not likely forget his two hours on display, as Mama would say, “In front of God and everybody.” I know of other parents who wouldn’t have cared that the boy shoplifted at all. I know of others who would have stormed WalMart, retained family of lawyers in tow.

I don’t have children of my own. I have cats and they, by their very nature don’t listen to me because, for those who don’t know, 6000 years ago in Egypt, cats were worshipped as gods. They, as a species, have never forgotten this. I do work with children though and I can say that those with parents who make and enforce rules usually do better than those with Devil-may-care guardians.

I do have one concrete example. My beloved neice who I see entirely too little moved to live with her father, my B-I-L, for the 2007-2008 school year. She was a rebellious 16 year old and somewhat violent towards her stepfather and mother and she’d managed to fall in with a bit of an unsavory bunch. Her grades were Cs at best with more Ds and Fs. She was already a grade behind. She had NO curfew and basically did as she pleased. By the end of the year with her father and stepmother, she was in honors classes, playing varsity soccer, holding a steady afterschool job, and generally showing signs of having her head on straight. She had even started contacting colleges.

Then, she spent two months back with her mother and found out her despised stepfather was going on a six month overseas tour of duty. She promptly moved BACK to her mothers. I spoke with her father at Christmas while she was down visiting. Her grades are in the toilet, she is in general track classes with her “friends”, she’s been caught smoking pot in the back yard twice, and she’s setting her sights on “a local community college or something,” assuming she graduates.

I love this child dearly and Budge hates me for saying this, but I foresee her, barring a miracle, with a GED (maybe), married to and abused by one of the local riff-raff, living in some sort of “project” housing, with at least two children and no future. All because her mother wants to be her “friend.” Well, I realize there’s more to the situation than that, but I do know my niece needs a PARENT not a 30something “BFF!”

So, back to our young man on the street. Is his aunt a monster? Is this a form of child abuse? Is his self-esteem irreparably damaged? What should she have done? What could she have done? What would Dr. Benjamin Spock do? What do y’all think?

I don’t have the answers.

I just know that boy is DEFINATELY going to need to wash his feet!

Okay, since one of my best buds, Cathy Jo Nelson, tagged me for this meme, I suppose I’ll take my best shot at it.

1) I’ve been engaged six times. Budge was my sixth fiancee’ and wears the third diamond ring I’ve purchased. Hers is hers alone. I didn’t try to recycle with her. That may be why we’ve lasted so long, going on 13 years as of this writing, while six of the seven other couples married the same year we were have already divorced.

2) I can’t swim AT ALL. Whoever said fat people can float well are either full of poop or they don’t know many fat people. I float like a ’59 Cadillac carrying six rhinos and a baby elephant. Since I can’t swim, I don’t particularly like water, the lone exception being rivers (ironic, isn’t it?), so when I have to attend pool parties or lake outings, I wear the loudest colored neon swim trunks imaginable. That way, when I go under for the third time, I’ll be easy to spot from the surface . . . I hope.

3) In my younger and wilder teenage years, I was involved in a couple of high speed chases in Marilyn, my ’69 Super Sport Chevelle complete with a 396 ci big block engine. One time, I thought I’d gotten away scott free only to sneak home and find the trooper in the front yard waiting for me. He was my mom’s second cousin and knew my car as soon as I went by him at, well, at pretty high speeds. He didn’t even bother chasing me; he just went home and told Mama and the two of them waited for me to get home. One look at how Mama looked at me and he didn’t even write me a ticket, even though I asked him to take me to jail. It’d have been better than what Mama had in store.

4) I was the final recipient of the “Silver Flounder” trophy after my freshman wrestling season. This award was given to the worst wrestler on the varsity team and, believe me, I was the worst wrestler on the team. My record was 1-24 and the lone win was by forfeit because my opponent-to-be tripped getting off the team bus and knocked himself out on the pavement. Other than that, my “best” match was getting pinned in 45 seconds. Most of the time, I didn’t make it past 25 seconds.

5) I have a ginormous indented scar on the outside of my left thigh where a piece of wooden jeep bumper went through my car door and into my leg down to the bone. I was on the way to visit my grandparents when I ran a red light in my ’79 Mustang. My thought process was interesting, but much too involved for such a short blog post.

6) I once rolled my own arm up in the electric window of my wife’s car. She was standing outside the driver’s side door talking to me and anyone who knows me knows I talk mostly with my hands. So I had one arm out the window and was rolling the electric window up with the opposite hand until I realized that I’d pinched my upper arm in the rising window. It was bad enough that I had a red welt all the way around my left arm. Budge maintains it is the dumbest thing she has ever seen me do.

7) I am an ice cream addict. I’ve managed to give up my other, multitudinous vices, most of which wouldn’t do to elaborate on in a family oriented blog, but I’ve not quite managed to kick the ice cream monkey off my back. People ask me what my favorite flavor is, but that’s an impossible question. No such thing as “bad” ice cream exists. ANY ice cream is better than NO ice cream 🙂 Budge knows of the other vices I’ve managed to overcome, some with her help, so she indulges my ice cream habit.

So, there’s seven things you probably could have led a wonderful and fulfilling life without knowing. Let’s see, Cathy Jo has already tagged most of the people I know, so I’ll tap three people and, actually, only one of them knows I exist. Picachu I choose Doug Johnson, the Blue Skunk; Scott McCleod, of Dangerously Irrelevant; and Rob Darrow, of California Dreamin‘. Now, I know Doug is spending the week South of the Border like a good Minnesotan should so he’ll probably get this late. Hopefully, the other two will have something set up that alerts them that they are now “it.”

Well, I hope right now you are either enjoying or recovering from enjoying the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth around 2008 to 2011 years ago. I shy away from religious discussions like the plague because, regardless of my reputation, that is one sensitive area I prefer not to insult or challenge people with. All I’ll say on the matter is regardless if you are atheist, agnostic, or true believer in something, one could do much worse than trying to build a life around the teachings of the humble carpenter from Galilee. My only wish is that more of the world believed his message of peace, if not his path of salvation.

It’s been a good holiday season here in the grocery store world 🙂 We got the library closed down and cleaned up in time to leave at a decent hour last Friday. Budge and I have been to three wonderful Christmas parties thrown by the various important people in our lives, and last night Mama had the annual Christmas Eve gathering at her house. It was a bit more poignant this year. When Mama started the tradition fifteen years ago, we would stuff nearly thirty-five people into the house. This year, however, we have dwindled down to ten. The rest we have sent on before us into whatever lies beyond.

In just a bit, we are on our way to Budge’s family dinner and then we’ll finish our Christmas obligations for this year at my daddy’s house for supper. Hopefully everyone will be in a good mood and the day will go smoothly, but experience has taught me that this is not guaranteed.

In any event, wherever you are, Merry Christmas from Budge and me. Thank you for reading this modest little blog for the last few months and I hope the new year brings with it all the joy and promise you could ever hope for.

And of course, since this IS Christmas, wash your feet, y’all.

Love to you all, peace on Earth 🙂

This post arises from a meme, Paul C at Quoteflections “respectfully” began this meme: Life is One Big Top Ten (2008). Doug Johnson and Cathy Jo turned me on to it, so I had to come up with something of my own. I picked mysteries. I am facinated by what cannot be explained and the following is a list of what interests me most, in no certain order.

I’ve added a link for each, but the links are by no means exhaustive. Enjoy and debate if you will. I love this stuff and half the time, I can’t tell you what I believe about them from day to day.

The 1908 Tunguska Event. http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/04/tunguska.anniversary/index.html

The Nazca Lines http://www.crystalinks.com/nasca.html

Coral Castle http://www.coralcastle.com/

Crystal Skulls http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_6_1.htm

Ark of the Covenant http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/ark.html

Cryptids http://www.cryptozoology.com

Easter Island http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html

Roswell Incident http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/roswell.htm

Supernatural Entities http://library.thinkquest.org/27661/docs/supern2.htm

The Marianas Trench http://www.marianatrench.com

Wait’n on a train and that train may be about to hit us square in the mouth.

That train has a name and it ain’t “The City of New Orleans” or “The Orange Blossom Special.” It’s a freight train of budget cuts, recession, and assorted other economic woe. It’s headed this way and it’s moving at express speeds.

So, in light of this coming misery, I’ve got another one of those nasty questions for y’all to ponder, namely, how likely is your program to go under? Think about it very rationally and dispassionately for a moment. Throw all the studies out the window. Get your nose out of Information Power for a minute and go over to Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog and read the memo he just had to send out to his constituents.  If that doesn’t chill you with a Minnesota blue norther, check out Rob Darrow at California Dreamin’ and see that the Left Coast libraries aren’t faring much better than the Midwest or the South.

I don’t care if the pundits on Wall Street don’t have the guts to say it . . . I do. We’ve passed “economic slowdown” and are firmly in a recession and if things don’t get better pretty fast, well, I’ve always loved the stories Papa and Granny told about the 1930’s. Looks like I may end up with some of my own. Take a look around, folks. As my beloved Waylon Jennings used to put it, “This here outlaw bit has done got out of hand.” Read this article from the Associated Press about the latest on the government bailout of the banks. Over $700 BILLION of our money is going to try to act like Liquid Plumber and unstop the credit clog that has effectively shut down our economy. I may not be popular for saying so, but I’m all for it because if we have many more crashes like WAMU or Wachovia, well . . . I don’t know what’ll happen, but it sure won’t be good.

Oh yeah, now there’s this little matter of the Big Three car manufacturers asking for a bailout as well or they are going to have to file bankruptcy and most likely go under themselves. That is going to draw another massive amount of money — I’ve seen figures from $8 billion all the way to $25 billion. Should the government refuse to bail Detroit out this time, the recently released 6.7% unemployment figures for November will be a pleasant memory.

So what does all of this mean to us in libraries, especially school libraries? Simple. When the well runs dry them what depends most on the water dies first. I’m already hearing reports from colleagues in other parts of my home state that funds have been frozen. One librarian posted on our state association’s listserv that, “I’m not planning on being able to buy ANY books this year.” The district where my wife works (incidentally one of the richest in this state) has suspended all travel and professional development conferences indefinitely. Budge and I always attended our state technology conference together as sort of a working vacation, but not this year. I’m lucky our state’s association conference is near enough for me to drive to every day so I can stay home or I wouldn’t be going to it.

I know lots of you are in the same boats. What are your plans? Like I said before, look hard at your program. Can you justify it? Can you even justify your job position in the face of massive budget cuts across many boards? (Our state funds were slashed 3% at the beginning of the year and then by 3% more six weeks later.) Put yourself in an administrator’s shoes for a bit. The DO has been informed by the state DOE that X% of funds are GONE. Since poop has always flowed downhill, the DO goes to the principals with the message, “cut deep and cut now then plan on cutting more soon.” How safe are you in your library office? Can you REALLY put together something for your principal or school board that will sway them enough to keep you in business when every dime counts double?

Let’s face it, huge chunks of our jobs that the public sees can be done by someone else for cheaper. We don’t want to admit it because that’s just the way we are, but lean times have a way of punishing the type of hubris I’ve seen in many of my colleagues. Aides can open and close the library and check out and shelve books. A computer lab monitor can take care of the lab and, whether we like it or not, the teachers can teach research and information skills. I know I taught all the facets of the research process in my ten years as an English teacher. I had to because my school’s librarian was a Library Dragon who seemed appalled by the sight of children near “her books”.

Answer this question HONESTLY, brutally honestly, What do you do in your position that, given the present economic circumstances, NO ONE ELSE in the building can do? What makes you INDISPENSABLE? Don’t even bother saying something like collection development because if the district and the state are broke, nothing is going to be available to develop a collection with. Face it, our specialties are not tested on NCLB high stakes tests so in these lean times, our programs are dangerously close to being considered very expensive luxury liabilities.  Say I am a traitor to our profession. Call me a rank pessimist if you wish. Just remember that pessimists are very seldom blindsided since we always expect the worst.

Speaking of “the worst”. Let’s talk “Worst Case Scenario.” Your principal comes to you and says, “Ms. Smith (or Mr. Jones), I’m sorry, but we can’t afford a full time librarian next year. The budget cuts are just too much. Your aide will run the day to day library next year. Since you have so many years of service, we’d like to offer you a position back in the classroom. You’ll be teaching _____ next year.”

What do you do? I’d collapse into the fetal position and cry since one reason (far from the only and definitely not the most important reason) I became a librarian was to leave the classroom and still be able to help children and students. I haven’t had to deal with testing pressure and the daily grind of grading essays, checking homework, and lecturing and planning three ninety minute blocks of instruction in four years. To have to go back to that would be, for me, horrible to contemplate. Of course, I wouldn’t have a choice since I’ve grown accustomed to running water, inside toilets, and hot food. I certainly wouldn’t like it. It would be an emotional blow. How about you? Could you stand losing your office, your position, your program? If you don’t think you can, you’d better find a way TONIGHT to make yourself and your program so valuable AND so COST EFFECTIVE that you can weather the storm when the budget axe starts to fall. Otherwise, it could be a long road ahead.

Wash your feet while you’ve still got a tub to wash them in, y’all.

I submit to you a simple question . . . is any other profession in the world as rife with frustration as being an educator of any stripe? Do lawyers and doctors ever want to go home and bash their own foreheads repeatedly with an aluminum baseball bat? Do clerical workers or truck drivers go into paroxsyms of despair at the sight of a certain name on an email or a caller ID screen? Most of all, does any other profession’s accomplishments and standards of excellence depend so much on THINGS COMPLETELY BEYOND THEIR CONTROL!!!!

I spent six hours yesterday with an auditor from the state department of education counting the textbooks in my building. I recommend this experience to everyone! It is slightly less invasive than a routine pelvic exam and about as pleasant as a colonoscopy performed with a six D-cell MagLite and a 25′ garden hose with sprayer nozzle. Come to think of it, when she finished totaling up the deficits in our textbook inventory, I actually felt as if the aforementioned sprayer nozzle might have come unthreaded and been left behind.

It wasn’t so much the audit itself or even its unfortunate outcome that frustrated me the most. What basically burned my biscuits and bacon was the assumption that keeping up with every single textbook was “easy” so long as we “insisted on holding the students accountable for their actions.” This from a person who has neither taught in a classroom . . . ever . . . nor had any children of her own to raise. It was the kind of well-meant but slightly clueless remark that hits me right at the coccyx and runs in a cold electrical frenzy up my spinal column to sink its frozen fingers of condescending smarminess right into the core of my medulla oblongata and in the process awakens all those sleeping dwarves of primitive rage that reside therein. However, my new-mommy-to-be AP had asked me to be very nice, so I blinked the dwarves back into a managable state of impotent inquietude and breathed long and deep before I replied.

In the course of our conversation, she had expressed a desire to be an accountant so after I’d calmed myself considerably I interrogated her opinions along those lines by way of analogy. “Ma’am,” I said, “suppose you were a first class accountant in a nice office. Then suppose one day the head of the firm came in to your corner office and said that you were going to be in charge of a new, very important account. You’d be psyched, correct?” She nodded and I continued, “Now, imagine that your boss then told you that your performance would be judged by how well the three accountants working on the project with you performed. Oh, and you can’t pick your team and the ones the client has picked for you are the three worst accountants in the history of accounting. But YOUR JOB depends on their performance.”

She looked puzzled so I went on, “One of the accountants is a reckless gambler and a night owl. He sleeps when he should be working and is always preoccupied with what he’s got planned tonight. The second member of your team doesn’t show up much so you don’t know about him. Strangely though, he always manages to stumble in on the day of the big presentation just so he can take part in something he knows nothing about. Finally, your third colleague’s wife has cancer and his house is being foreclosed on. Now, do you have a good mental picture?” She smirked and said she did so I finished up my parable with, “You can guide these three. You can choose when and where y’all meet to work on the project and total the figures, but you can’t actually write anything down. They have to do all the work. You can’t fire them, you can’t cut their pay, you can’t reduce the number of breaks they get or increase the hours they work. All you can do is try to help them so you can try to look good to YOUR boss. If they screw up the account, they keep their jobs and move on to work for the next project manager, but you get FIRED. Would you say that type of accountability is EASY?”

She just shrugged so I gave up. It’s not her fault. She’s just doing her job and with the present climate of budget cuts in my state, it’s a job she may not have much longer. But her reaction is telling in so many ways. People outside of education seem to think we have it made and our jobs are soooo easy — especially with those THREE WHOLE MONTHS OFF in the summer! What they don’t realize is those three months are the reason anyone with an iota of sense teaches or librarians or does anything else in education. How many times have you heard a coworker say or maybe you’ve even said it yourself “Come June, I’m done. I’m going to do SOMETHING else because this was the worst year I’ve ever had!!” See, that three (more like two) month vacation gives our brains time to forget the horrors of the previous year just enough so that we don’t all quit before the middle of August rolls around and we think, “Aw, it wasn’t so bad I guess. Besides, what else would I do? I’m a teacher,” and we come on back for another round of “Once more into the breach.”

Nothing about being an educator is EASY, least of all accountability in anything. Take those textbooks. Okay, you know little Johnny is a high risk of losing or damaging beyond recognition that brand newly adopted $65.92 math book. If that textbook gets gone, that nice auditor lady is going to charge your school $65.92. BUT, the law says Johnny has to have a book even though the prospect of him doing any real work in that book is slim to none and slim is leaving town at sundown. So you give him a book and he promptly loses it. What do you do? Charge him of course. If he doesn’t pay? What then? We cannot legally hold his records or prevent him from moving to the next school or grade. Mama says she doesn’t have the money for the book. Take away a privilege? Well, we can try, but Johnny isn’t very involved in much of anything the school has to offer so he’s not likely to care what you take away. Detention? No recess til the money’s paid? The legal waters get murky there as well. In the end we all know what’s going to happen, you eat the cost of the lost book and $65.92 that could have gone in the library collection goes to the state department.

Is it just me or do parents who don’t have the money for books or gas to come to parent conferences always seem to have the money to keep a lawyer on retainer to sue the school district? THAT’S the kind of frustration I’m talking about. We can’t make our student learn, we can’t make them care, we can’t give them lives good enough so they would WANT to care . . . and yet our salary, our careers, our promotions, and, let’s face it whether we want to admit it or not, a great chunk of our self-esteem rides on and depends on those students learning and caring and passing a test that is totally irrelevant to their lives at present. Then, to make matters worse, we get gigged by people telling us how easy our jobs are as long as everyone is accountable. Frustration.

It’s enough to make a body not want to wash his feet forever!

Well, for reasons I’m not totally clear on myself, I got the urge to go out and check on some of the bargains in yesterday’s paper. So about noon today, I saddled up the Element and headed out. That was a stupid idea.

I stopped at Staples and picked up a digital frame and that went easily enough. The store was busy but not full. Once I finished there, I went to PetSmart. Again, not too bad. Busy and more crowded than Staples, but not packed. Still, I was feeling a little faint. Normally, I don’t go out in big crowds or traffic alone. Budge almost always goes with me and as long as she’s with me, I do fine . . . sort of.

This would be a good time to tell y’all that I suffer from recurring panic attacks and some pretty nasty claustrophobia, to the point that even crowds can trigger an attack. Right now, I was doing okay. I was looking for a new tank for Comet, our five year old painted turtle. Unfortunately, my mind started getting a little “spinny” so I figured it’d be a bad idea to try getting what I needed right then because I’d ended up spending too much. So I headed for the next stop . . . Best Buy.

Now THAT was a real genius move for a claustrophobic panic attack sufferer. I finally found a parking place after a white knuckle drive of one hundred yards. Walking into the store was like wading through a river. The temperature inside had to be over 90 degrees. Budge wanted a new pen drive so I steeled myself and swam back to computers. I couldn’t go three steps without bumping into someone. I felt like a pinball.

Well, I found the pen drive she wanted and tried to find me a case for my iPod and a few DVDs that Budge mentioned wanting for Christmas. I couldn’t. Too many people. Thought my heart would beat out of my chest. Yep. Full blown panic attack city.

I sucked it up and went to the checkout line. That’s where I almost gave up and fled. Everyone was bellybutton to behind for three laps around the checkout stands. I felt nauseated, lightheaded, and really clammy, but I kept on. It was the longest fifteen minutes of the day. The most excruciating part was the final turn where I was backed into a corner, no air, and no windows. Again, I almost broke and ran, but I finally got through and hustled out to the Element.

I’ve never been so happy to get home in my life. I fixed a bowl of soup tonight rather than go out into traffic again. Budge will be home tomorrow evening and we may go get some shopping done. Until then, no way am I venturing out. I’m going to do my shopping online!

Well, it’s about time for me to turn in. Budge just called from my brother-in-law’s house where she helped put our brand new nephew (born Monday) to bed. I’ve been batching it for the last two days, which is a scary thought, but someone has to take care of the fuzzy babies.

In any event, I wanted to take the time to give thanks to everyone who reads B,B,&GSF . . . all 3 of you 🙂

I’m also thankful for the usual things that too many of us take for granted like family, friends, and freedom. It’s good to be a librarian in this country. I’m thankful for Budge, Mama, my brothers, and the rest of my family. I ate Thanksgiving dinner with Mama and Pa tonight and the crowd around the table has thinned considerably over the last few years, but I’m thankful for the presence of those who I still have with me and I’m thankful for the legacy and love of those who have begun their journey to the great unknown. This old life of mine has endured its share of ups and downs, but taken as a whole . . . well, as the movie says, it’s a wonderful life (not that I’ve had another life to compare it to, but hey.)

So now I and the fuzzies will head off to bed, probably to awaken early enough to ride out and see the insanity at the local shopping centers. I just go for the fun of watching. No sale is good enough for me to brave those hardcore shoppers who have camped out all night. One thing I missed about Budge not being home with me today was we didn’t get to ride by the nearest Best Buy and look at all the fools, um, hardy shoppers camping out in the cold to get one of the two cheap computers on sale 🙂

In any event, the holiday season is upon us and here’s wishing each and every one of you a happy holiday season, whatever holiday you may celebrate. Love y’all, and remember . . . wash your feet :)!

True story from today.

Okay, so I’ve never had an author visit my school, either as a librarian or as a teacher. Now two years ago, we had Mrs. Marion Blumenthal Lazan, a renowned Holocaust survivor, visit the school and speak to our parents and our students, but even though she did publish her memoir, Four Perfect Pebbles, with the assistance of author Lila Perl, Mrs. Lazan does not consider herself an author. She is a repository of memory and, incidentally, one of the most precious ladies I have ever met, but I digress, as usual.

As I said, never had a bona fide author come to a school where I taught or librarianed. I figured I would attempt to change that this year and so I cast about for who to invite, or rather try to invite. Well, my wife is a huge Twilight fan, my principal is a Twilight mom, and well over half the girls in my school are little rabid Twilight groupies. [Just to throw in a little factoid here, I am relatively certain I could stock less than twenty titles in my library and please over ninety percent of my clientele provided fifteen of the titles were the Bluford High Series from Townsend Press and the other four were the four Twilight novels.] Anyway, with being surrounded by all these Twilight people I figured, “ahh, what the hey, I’ll call and see if Stephanie Meyer will come speak to us.”

Now, I’m not insane or stupid. I do happen to know that she has a MAJOR movie premiere tomorrow night at midnight and personally, I’d love to go to the midnight showing at our local theater just to see who and what shows up. Midnight showings are what my right hand Chris calls “exquisite movie going experiences.” I mean, I attended the midnight showings of all three Lord of the Ring movies and I saw elves, orcs, and at least two Nazgul at each one, and let’s not even talk about the three Star Wars prequels Budge and I scoped out together. Grown men as Darth Vader and Stormtroopers, anyone?

Anyway, so Stephanie Meyer has the movie event of the fall if not the year on Friday, she’s authored the most wildly successful series since another certain seven book series I won’t mention, and she’s rolling with celebrities and possibly even royalty. But hey, Daddy always said, “Son, if you’re going to bother to dream, you might as well dream really big.” I didn’t have anything to lose by calling. So I looked up some contact info on her publisher and gave them a call. As soon as the nice lady on the other end of the phone recovered her composure at my audacious request, she graciously informed me that Ms. Meyer is on sabbatical from the speaking circuit for the foreseeable future. Well, I was bummed but not totally surprised. I hadn’t told anyone else of this flight of fantasy because I wanted it to be a surprise.

So, I was sitting at my desk scratching my head and generally feeling sorry for myself. Looking for a bit of sympathy I leaned back and spoke across the office aisle to our school tech coach and Chris about my failure. At the same time, one of my little Whamsters was cutting out some display pictures right in the path of our conversation. When she heard of my thwarted plan, she turned to me and, putting one hand on her hip, said with that utmost confidence that only a sixth grade can possess, “Well, duh, Mr. Wham, she has a mo-vie coming out Friday and she’s only like the richest writer in the country. She’s not going to come here! We could never afford to get her here!”

Well, I thought, “Out of the mouths of babes springs forth wisdom.” So I asked my ertwhile aide who she would suggest that I call up and try to get to come speak to us. Who did she think the students would appreciate seeing? Again with the hand on hip, again with the el supremeo confidence, this time with an added extra air of authority, she says,

“Well, if it was me, I’d call J.K. Rowling and have her come speak! She’d be great.”

If you go to see Twilight at the midnight showing, don’t forget your garlic and crucifixes (yes, I know her vampires aren’t bothered by those . . . I’m not totally obtuse), but most of all, don’t forget to wash your feet, y’all 🙂