Thanksgiving

In honour of it being the day after Thanksgiving, here is a look at one of the projects that the Children's Librarian at one of the branches did with her kids:




Apple Turkey!

Materialism rocks!

I have now found my favourite shoe store. I was at Franklin Mills on Sunday and bought the cutest boots in the world (at least for now).

The Clarks/Bostonian Outlet sells Clarks (and it's sub-brands) at about 50% less than list price. They're still expensive, but oh so worth it. Clarks are the most comfortable shoes I've worn. I bought a couple of sandals at the Clarks store in Scotland, and they were the first sandals that I have bought that I have not had to break in. From now on, I'm buying Clarks (or Merrells) Cute AND Comfy! A great way to follow my father's rule: Always wear comfortable shoes.

Unintentionally funny book cover of the day

Um, is it about a handyman who can't reach the ceiling? Possibly his shirt is stuck up there.

No! It's about some pro wrestler. Check out the leather pants - not the most practical attire for a handyman. Wouldn't want to spill paint on those puppies (or cows, whatever).

Actually, I'd probably want to read the book more if it was about a handyman.

Oooh, Shiny!

A group of us went for drinks and barbeque the other night, which is not the important part of the story. Liz and I were offered rides home, and we were walking through the parking garage to the car when Ernestine noticed a really classy car. We looked closer and realized it was a Rolls Royce. I have never seen a Rolls in person, so it was really cool. It was a Silver Spur, and it looked like the passanger door was actually monogrammed (I know some car afficianado will now tell me that that's some standard Rolls thing, but I was impressed). Talk about conspicuous consumption.

New addition to my reading list

I just picked up the new book by Lynne Truss. She's the author of Eats, shoots, and leaves - which is supposed to be a really good an funny book on grammar (which I haven't read, but Lucie would probably encourage me to do so). Her new one is called Talk to the hand: the utter bloody rudeness of the world today, or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door.



UPDATE

I finished the book last night (Monday) and spent the rest of the evening being hyper-polite to everyone. Cute book, easy and fast to read. I like her writing style. She is very self-deprecating and funny.

Cool stuff being made

My dad loves going on tours of factories. He's been to paper factories, cement factories, a strip mine, a shellfish factory, a hydroponic tomato factory, and tons of others. In honour of my dad, and all the other mechano-geeks out there, here's a great website that has videos of things being made.

Want to see an aluminium can being made?

How about Campbell's Potato Soup?

Sit back and enjoy the show!

Strike, Day 7

No more strike! Just as I was beginning to enjoy my walk into work, SEPTA and the unions settled and I can go back to being a lazy bus rider. Yay, I guess.

The end of a season

You know it is fall when the fruit carts pack up for the season. My fruit girls near the library left last month, and I believe that today was the last day for the fruit salad and smoothie guy down on JFK Boulevard. In honour of this sad occasion, I trekked down to the cart to get my last strawberry/banana/pineapple smoothie of the year.


Goodbye, beloved smoothies and fruit salad. I will try to eat healthily during the cold and bitter winter months, but I can't guarantee anything.

Strike, Day 3,4, and 5

As promised, I have been walking too and from work for the past few days. It's actually a really nice walk in - Rachel and I meet up at Broad St and walk up together, so I have a very chatty walking buddy. It takes about 45 minutes, I get in at the same time as the shuttle from hell, and it's a much nicer experience. On the way home I walk with Micaela, and occasionally (ok, once) her boyfriend picks us up halfway home bearing Godiva chocolate. Yum.

Yesterday I ended going up to a branch in North Philly to help weed, and on the way back a drive that usually takes 20-25 minutes took about an hour due to the massive amount of traffic. Because so many people are driving instead of taking the bus, the whole city gets completely backed up. Walking is easily faster than driving in Center City.

And it's going up to 23 this weekend! I must plan outdoorsy things to do.

Strike, Day 2

My well intentioned plans to walk to work every morning fell by the wayside today when I decided to take the library shuttle in to work. Of course, you're now picturing a van or a bus or something, right? Well, the library shuttle is neither of those things. It is one of the library delivery trucks. When it pulled up to the corner I was waiting on, the driver hopped out and went 'round back to open the door. By door, I mean the sliding door on the back of delivery trucks. Because it's a delivery truck. There was a wooden plank bench along each side of the interior. We all sat along the sides, laughing about how bad it was. Then the truck started moving. This thing had no shocks - it was like taking a very fast wooden wagon ride over cobblestones, and with every sudden stop and start, we were thrown about the back as there was nothing to hold on to. At least there was some light because the roof was translucent. It felt like a prisoner transport. It's really nice that the library is providing shuttle service, but I think I'm done with it.

I believe that tomorrow I will walk to work. I'm pretty sure it will take about the same amount of time, and be much more comfortable.

These boots were made for walking

SEPTA has gone on strike as of 12:01 this morning, so now I will be walking the 45 minutes to and from work for the forseeable future. It's not that bad, as I typically walk home anyways, but I am a lazy girl and like taking the bus in the mornings. I'm sure all this extra walking will be good for me, as long as the weather doesn't get crappy. This week it's gotten nice again, so that's good. I, at least, have the option of walking, which is so much better than poeple who are now stranded without bus or subway service.

The last strike here was in 1998 and lasted 40 days. Hopefully this won't last as long.

Important invention honoured

My friend Liz can sleep through anything. That's a good thing, when it means that she can sleep through sirens and loud drunk people outside her window. It's not such a good thing when it means that she sleeps through her alarm clock.

A few months ago I found Clocky, an alarm clock that hides from you so you have to get out of bed to find it and silence it. This would be perfect for Liz!



This month the creator of Clocky, Gauri Nanda, won an Ig Nobel Award in Economics.

From the Ig Nobel website:

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Gauri Nanda

Four Blanket Night, Part 2

Well, there was no heat after work on Thursday, even though the landlord had been by to bleed the radiators. My upstairs neighbor was freezing too. I called again yesterday morning, and we finally discovered that it wasn't a bleeding problem, but the fact that the pilot light on the hot water heaters in the basement had blown out sometime over the summer. Easily fixed, so now it is toasty warm! Yay!

Four blanket night

It's cold down here! For the third winter in a row my radiators need to be bled, and I still don't know how to do it. This means that I have no heat in the apartment, even though my thermostat is set to 75 (I have no idea what that is in Celsius, but it's nice and warm). I talked to my landlord on Sunday about it and he is supposed to come in today or tomorrow, but until then it's been downright chilly in my apartment.

I come home from work and put on my wooly robe and fuzzy slippers and wrap myself in an afghan (blanket, not nationality). I light candles and pretend that they are giving off heat. Last night I put yet another blanket on my bed, bringing the total up to four. I'm practically living in my flannel jammies. And it hasn't even dropped below freezing - my place was 14 degrees Celsius this morning.

Hopefully I will have blessed, blessed heat when I get home tonight.

Skinny equals happy

A few weeks back my friends adopted a new catchphrase. It came about because Karen caught her boyfriend Steve admiring his behind in the mirror, thrilled that he'd been losing weight. He delightedly proclaimed that "Skinny equals happy!"

And it has been a happy, happy week in skinny world. All the girls will get it
(and Steve). I've been a size 10 for years. As long as I can remember, I've been a 10. A couple of weeks ago I went shopping for jeans at the GAP because they were having a great sale. I think they are being all screwy with their sizing all of a sudden, because now I fit quite comfortable into a size 8. Not only that, but I went shopping today for some more jeans (because I'm bored of my clothes and am doing a wardrobe purge and replace), and I fit into a size 6! I know that I haven't lost that much weight, if any, so this must be some "let's make the women feel good about their weight and change all the sizes" thing, but hey, I just bought a jeans in size 6!! Hee!

And on that note, take a look at an open letter to the totally impractical size chart for women, which Judy blogged a few days ago and I'm shamelessly stealing.

This one is for the librarians

The reason I haven't posted in a few days is because on Tuesday we switched over from DRA to Sirsi, so the past three days have been a combination of staff training (as I am evidently the department expert on everything from Sirsi to making a printer work), damage control, soothing patrons, and catching up on a two month backlog of processing.
In fairness I can say that Sirsi does not suck as much as I was dreading. I don't understand, however, why I could not for the life of me find a copy of Bernard Corwell's "The Last Kingdom" on cd in Workflows, but it popped up no problem on the web catalog. I had to get the database control number from the web catalog, and then plug that back into Workflows to find it. And there are other irritants, but hey, we can check in and check out and put things on hold, so it's a start.

Nature, it's a wonderful thing - especially if you can eat it.

I went apple picking this morning. The last time I did this I was knee high to a grasshopper, so I don't remember anything about it (although there are pictures of me in a very fetching apple-picking outfit). This time a group of us drove out to Media (yes, it's a place) and picked a bushel of apples (four different kinds). We even had a little red cart to pull our boxes of apples along in.

Of course, none of us brought a real camera along, but my cell phone has a crappy-ass 640x480 camera.


Look, I'm communing with nature!

The orchard also has a pumpkin patch, and a store where I bought peach butter and strawberry-rhubarb butter and a huge bread stuffed with sausage and peppers and cheese and onions (lunch for the next to days). And there were fried mushrooms and apple-cider doughnuts and soft pretzels and caramel-chocolate covered apples.

And when we finished Micaela and I went to a mall and bought pretty new clothes.

It was a very good day.

Yup, it was good!

Saw Serenity last night - and yes, it was worth the anticipation. So good!

Fall!

Yes, today is the official first day of fall in my mind. I put on a sweater AND a jacket this morning before leaving the house. Yay!

Also, I'm going to Serenity tonight, so my joy is unbounded.

I'm looking for a book, it's got a red cover...

All librarians and bookstore clerks probably have had to deal with the person who comes in to find a book and all they can tell you is the cover colour. If it hasn't happened to you, I'm sure you've at least hear stories about it.



Last year, San Francisco's Adobe Bookshop was the place to be for these colour seekers. For one week it shelved all its stock according to colour. Check out the NPR interview on the project.