Sisters

What are sisters for, if not to flog you verbally about not blogging often enough? (Non sequitur: I almost said "to verbally flog" in that sentence, a split infinitive that suggests that, indeed, I am not writing often enough and my grammar is suffering). Thank you for the nudge, Schwester.

I work tonight, and so it is my morning off. Once a week, when this happens, I take Sprout over to daycare and come back to clean my house. It is my tiny bit of alone time, where I can pretend I am unencumbered by the grown-up responsibilities of having a child. Part of me vaguely remembers sleeping in on my morning off, but those days are long gone. I must content myself with lazy newspaper-reading, interspersed with high-speed vacuum sports and laundry hauls.

I'm having memory/spelling problems this morning - just had to pop out of here and assure myself that I can spell both 'sequitur' and 'vacuum'. Stumbled across the website for the "American Vacuum Society" while I was there, which made me giggle. ('When we get together for a conference, we REALLY suck.')(Okay, it didn't actually say that.)

This squirrel is scampering from tree to tree at a fast pace. I taught 'Microsoft Word for Beginners' on Monday, for the first time with my colleague. It was exhausting, mostly because Word 2000 has that annoying feature where it hides some of the toolbar icons from you. We hadn't anticipated this, and so every workstation in the lab had a different set of icons on the toolbar! If I said, "Okay, now we're going to cut and paste this word somewhere else," then half the people would have the scissors icon in front of them, and half would have to be shown how to find it in the hidden menu. Grrr. The class booked full in half an hour on the first day of registration, so we're going to offer it again in the Fall, but we're going to do some serious revision of our training plan before then.

Tuesday, I taught the second half of "Absolute Beginners for Seniors" (I love teaching that class - the people who take it are so great), and then I spent the afternoon in a staff training seminar, leaving me minutes here and there to keep my workload moving. We are in the phase of submitting proposals for new furniture, so I am shopping in furniture catalogues for shelving to meet our needs and to get a price quote. I enjoy small projects like this; who knows why. Perhaps because they are small, finite projects, and I can feel satisfied at the end of a few days because I got something completed.

Jim and his colleague just performed the first staging of their program yesterday. They have been working on this program for weeks. When the Children's Department here develops a program, they go all out. They make their own sets, they make their own puppets, they use spotlights and black lights, they wear microphones. It's amazing. I don't know who raised the bar on performance to this level at our Library, but childrens' programming here is one of our shining stars. Few other libraries even touch what happens here. Because of the creative elements in his work, Jim loves his job. He can work in the Library and still use his professional art training. For a few years, I tried to talk him into going to library school so I could live in Vancouver or Montreal for a time, but this job is so perfect for him that he'd probably never get anything that rewarding at a librarian level. And job satisfaction is what it's all about, right?

I'm enjoying my own job a lot. Many people are retiring these days, and there are job opportunities popping up everywhere, but I haven't finished having all the fun I can have in this job yet, so I don't think I'm going anywhere.

Our big plan for the Summer, as Bean mentioned in her nudge, is that we're working on a fence and deck in the backyard. We don't have a fence to speak of, and there is a friendly but BIG pit bull who lives next door. He could possibly eat my child, so we really need a fence. Jim is so funny when he gets started on a project like this. We're scheduled to build in late June, but every night even now he sits on the back porch smoking cigarettes and building decks in his head. By the time we actually pick up the tools, he should know where every bolt goes.

I am going to sign off - I have to do that mad vacuuming before I take my bath and become a grown-up. I can't compete with tiny wooden tables that look like jewels, but I hope that this blog gives you some reading pleasure, Celine-Bean.