ALA

Weird people go to ALA. I'm sure that's not a shock. It's just a VERY odd mix of people.

I was one of them today.

I met a good friend for the first time and we hit it off immediately. Gawd, I love teh internets!

I ran into two old friends by happenstance. And they wouldn't go away!

I chatted with another good friend whose going through...Major Stuff. She said kind things to me, which may or may not be deserved, and I worried about her. Still am. Still will be for awhile.

And I came home with four new cloth bags--only one of which was, at most, half full. (The six new books don't count--they were in the bag I brought with me.) Now that I've been home for awhile, I'm down to a stack about 6" tall of materials to deal with at work this week.

And I spent about $65, which I won't be submitting for reimbursement. I mean, really, what's the point? It was worth every dime to be on my own dime today.

Humor

So I Facebooked a link to this video:

I find it hysterical, primarily because I've been to Russia and this kind of get-together is normal...until I recognized the song.

Holy cow, these people know Britney Spears?? I'm ROFLing all day thinking about it.

And then I get slapped down because it's, apparently, demeaning to old people.

WTF? It is? OK, maybe, but could this person's timing have possibly been worse? As if I'm not aware that we all get old? I think it's awesome that people "of a certain age" are rocking out and having a blast and singing...Britney-fucking-Spears.

Some people...I'm telling ya, I know it's been a rough couple of weeks for the person who smacked me up, but, yeah, of course, MY last couple of weeks has been so DAMN MUCH FUN.

I actually think it's kind of demeaning to think that old people aren't insanely goofy sometimes. And, in this case, I'd think they were pretty well lubricated too.

Oh how I hate flurries!

Doesn't it always seem that bad news travels in a pack? I've certainly seem my share of personal (i.e. family) bad news, but when I broaden the scope, here's what I see scattered around:

• A dear friend whose doctor needs to have evil things done to him for ignoring her phone calls for weeks until she showed up in his exam room in early-stage organ failure because of medication he prescribed! [this brings up ghosts from my childhood and freaks me way the fuck out in very abnormal ways]
• Someone who is hospitalized tonight because of a fall a couple of days ago.
• A coworker who's father died just under a month ago.
• My sister needs a tuneup in her brain electrodes, but there are some issues there. Long story. Of course.
• Another friend who's mother died about 10 days before mine.
• And a couple of others' whose parents are at the stage my mom was at about 5 months ago.
• People forgetting the whole "innocent till proven guilty in a court of law" thing. Accusation doesn't equal fact.
• Ongoing medical issues with another friend who has, essentially, had a headache since November. Every day. Can you imagine dealing with a three-year-old 24/7 with a headache? Yeah. Doctors have no idea. Doctors suck.
• Gout in another family member. Though that's easing due to--of all things!--cherries.
• Stupid men involving themselves in extramarital situations and having their lives destroyed over it (not to mention the lives of their wives and families). Guys: KEEP YOUR DICK IN YOUR PANTS, and your pants zipped/glued shut!
• The legal maneuvering over my mom's broken leg is still hanging fire in our family. See footnote here.
• The economy is hitting home in libraries across the country. Ohio is slashing and burning its way through their astoundingly fabulous libraries. Our city is sending ominous links via email to articles about other communities' belt-tightening as we approach the budget planning sessions for 2010-11.
• Schedule Nazi just doesn't seem to understand that some of us never want to see her again.
• PTF pissed me off this week in a way that he hasn't achieved for months. Possibly over a year, in fact. Over something insanely stupid. Of course. What else is new?
• [whinge] I work Tuesday-Friday this week. I'm going to ALA on Saturday--just for the exhibits--all day. I work Sunday; Sundays S U C K! And then I work Monday-Thursday next week. So basically I'm working 7/7-16 every day.[/whinge] The problem is exacerbated by the feeling like I'm at work for 7 or so hours daily and get virtually no cataloging done. Since that's the part of my job I love the most, I'm getting whinier and whinier about it, not to mention behind-er.
• Our super-wonderful senior shelvers will be leaving for college in 5 weeks or so. WAAAAAHHHH!!! Am so sad about this. For me; not for them, of course.

There's also the fact that the new director, while starting to get her legs under her as far as the job goes, is still needing a LOT of information regularly. And we've undertaken to make some rather ginormous changes in some of of our major work procedures...there's a lot of stress. I like change. These will be good changes when they are all in place and understood...but it's hard.

This is the sort of mood where I probably could use a large glass of wine (or two), but I'm too afraid of using alcohol as a crutch (family history + ) so I probably won't. But the inside of my skin itches from all this drama and angst and things to think about that I don't even know where to start. Gah.

Morality Play at Midnight

(which sounds like one of those paperback mysteries that generally rely on puns or onomatopoeia to attract readers, like a light attracts bugs)

A couple of nights ago I woke up with cold feet--welcome to the North!--and eventually staggered out of bed to the closet to grab a pair of socks. I grabbed blindly, and heard a pair slide off the shelf onto the floor. {shrug--sigh--oh, well} When I got back to bed, they turned out to be the only pair of socks I own with toes. Did I stagger back to the closet? Nope. I sat there figuring out which foot matched which sock and slotted my toes in. And then I keeled over and went back to sleep. My clearest thought was the fear that I'd rip off my anklet when I toed off the socks later.

Moral #1: Put the winter socks away. Better idea, in fact, is to put the CHRISTMAS winter socks away well before July. There are boxes in which the socks are supposed to live, but there are always socks stacked on top of the half-full boxes.

Moral #2: Grope more carefully. The socks that fell (thinnish trouser socks) were better-suited to summer cold feet than the ones I returned to bed with.

Moral #3: Rather than going to the closet...in fact, rather than getting out of bed at all...reach into the nightstand (top drawer, in front) and snag a pair of footies that I keep there for this very purpose! These would also have caused me no worries in the anklet-ripping-off department.

Moral #4: Rather than going to the closet, turn off the overhead fan. Which the eye doctor told me not to have on at night. Which was the reason there was a chilly breeze blowing on my feet on an already-chilly night.

Mind you, I thought of NONE of these at 2 a.m. or even the next day. It was finding the trouser socks in the laundry basket yesterday that caused me to rethink my brain damage.

Too many times

I've heard this song dozens of times without particularly listening, even though I know what she's said about the background of the song. Today, naturally, the chorus hits home particularly hard:

You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there

Sarah, you have a lovely voice.

Know It All

Somehow, my gene pool is rampant with people who like to expound on their knowledge about random things. Maybe it's not just my gene pool; maybe every family is like this. It makes me crazy, so I know two things from that: 1) I am probably overly sensitive about people in general who are self-proclaimed fonts of knowledge; and 2) I probably do the same thing more than I'd like to think I do.

On the "overly sensitive" front, I posted something today on Twitter about people getting a clue on Facebook. I was being snarky, and I posted on Twitter specifically because the person to whom I was alluding on Fb doesn't follow me on Twitter. Just venting, right?

Then a colleague who is 97.3% annoying at all times came back on Twitter with a comment to the effect that "Fb sux" (paraphrase) followed by the 'enlightening' comment that he only uses Fb because some people don't know how to upload photos anywhere else. Niiiiice--we're all just morons, those of us who use Facebook. It's not even remotely possible that people upload photos to 16 other sites and don't tell him for any one of many reasons. Oh, wait. I do that: Fb, Snapfish, Flickr, etc. Is there a need for him to know this? Not really. He just assumes...a lot.

The silver lining is that I'm not anywhere near as annoyed with the original clueless Facebook thing; the rest of the thundercloud is that I want to snag a specific ponytail in a woodchipper and turn up the power level.

One of these days, I'm going to turn to him--either physically (in a meeting) or by email--and seriously ask him how he got to be so much smarter than anyone else on earth. The unfortunate thing is that He. Will. Answer. The. Question.

AAARGGHHHHHHH!!!!

[But really people: if you want to say something about someone's status on Facebook, would you PLEASE leave the comment on--or even NEAR!--the status to which you are responding; it's not that complicated!]

!!!!!!

Happy Anniversary to us!
23 years??
We have now officially been married longer than we were single.

To celebrate, we're going to Katherine and Alan's for a family cookout. It'll be interesting to see if they realized that two couples attending today have anniversaries (the other one is Tuesday); maybe she ordered a cake.

More likely, pigs will fly.
I am SUCH a bitch...

See ya soon, Mom

Mom found her escape from pain at about 9:15 p.m. last night.