Evil Wrapped in a Fangirl Disguise

So the bad thing about snow (one of them, anyway) is that people track it in in the stupid treads of their stupid boots. Then some poor, unsuspecting person (ME) goes about in their stocking feet and BAM! Warm, fluffy, comfy socks become receptacles for ice-cold water. :(

It doesn't help that our floors are white where they're not carpeted. So you either don't see the snow or you don't see the puddle until you're hopping on one foot across the room because, Jiminy Christmas*, that's really fucking cold.

I'm going to have to mount an expedition under my bed for my slippers.


*One of the people I talked to for my feature yesterday said variations of this the whole time. He also said something else that was delightfully odd and character-like, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.

I don't like that in our little no-traffic-lights town kids are afraid of gangs following them. Yesterday I finished the day at the library and had a group of kids ask me what they should do if they are followed. It makes me really worried for them.

Especially since last Thursday something almost went down in the parking lot across the street from the library. I only worked part of the day so I missed it, but I heard all about it from the regular librarian yesterday. She called me after it happened, too. And Mom saw part of it.

You've got the gang sporting red surrounded by the gang sporting blue and their both across the street posturing in the bank parking lot. So the librarian called the police department and got the police chief and told him he should check it out. At this point the two 10-12 year old boys in the library looked up, noticed what was happening, and bolted.

The police chief and several others showed up. It was all moved to the park.

Nothing happened. There was talk that they'd been rousted out of another local town. But just because nothing happened then, doesn't mean it won't. And that scares the crap out of me.

I know what I'm supposed to do if something does happen. That doesn't make it any better.

Other than being a nice person in general, this is why I am nice to all of our library patrons. Especially after that newspaper tagging incident.

Friday was National Youth Service Day. AmeriCorps came out and painted a mural. The entire kindergarten in Royal came out (about 120 kids) and got to play games and add their handprints to the mural.

I got to spend the whole day outside talking to neat people and snapping photos that will hopefully be included in the paper.

I had to share these two. I mean, just look at how green that tree is! And the sky, so blue! It was a gorgeous day, especially considering it snowed/sleeted the day before. (Though only for a very short time.)



They did this mural in less than six hours. It was an amazing thing to watch.

Thursday I checked out Stephen Colbert's I am America (And So Can You!) from the library. I was straightening and remembered I'd shelved it the day before and it helped me pass time until closing. Well, until people came in five minutes before closing. Geez.

I'm loving it. But what scares me a little is that I'm fairly certain several people I know would agree with some of the things that are in the book with absolutely no sense of irony. The chapters about family and religion specifically remind me of at least one person I know.

ginnith got to hear about this yesterday when I texted her because I was mildly freaked out, but I'm going to post about it here now.

Yesterday I covered the library for three and half hours, from two until closing, because the regular librarian had an appointment to go to. When I got there, she first told me about some trouble they had in one of the other branches in which a patron became angry over the wireless internet situation and got so agitated they had to call the police. Apparently he was arrested.

First, it's just the internet. Calm the fuck down. Second, apparently the first mistake made was that the person working that day was a sub and told him so. Because if you don't know procedure, generally it's okay to say, "I'm just the sub, I'm not familiar with that [whatever]." So what we're supposed to do is just call the IT department and get them to take care of that. Because we're not allowed to touch laptops or look at them without permission as that opens us up to lawsuits.

Anyway. That was sort of no big deal to me. But then I hear about how our library was tagged. One of the gangs tagged one of the newspapers on the computer desk and left some not very nice things aimed at the librarian. The regular librarian and I both think that this was probably aimed at the other sub, since she'd mentioned three teenage boys coming in and using the computer that she kind of butted heads with. Not too surprising since she can be...kind of grating. And I can't imagine anyone thinking horrible things about the regular librarian.

I'm the "nice" sub. There was one incident a few months ago where one of the semi-regulars was in and he told the librarian, "I'll see you tomorrow." She said, "Actually, it'll be my sub. I have two of them, and one of them's a bit harsh and the other one's nice. She'll be in tomorrow. You'll like her." Unfortunately, she'd forgotten to ask me to work, so the other sub came in. When the man came in the next week, he said, "If that's what you call nice, I don't want to meet the other one."

So, yeah, I'm the nice one.

I'm hoping that's enough to save me from anyone tagging newspapers with horrible things regarding me. I am clinging to my tendency to be too nice.

I also explained to the librarian that I feel safer at that library than I do down in Mattawa, since down there the library is kind of out of the way at one end of town should anything happen. Except then she just had to say, "But we're perfectly situated for drive-bys here."

::facepalm::

The bank across the street got robbed a couple of years ago. By two guys on foot. That they never caught.

::double facepalm::

When I was telling Neesha this yesterday, she pointed out that a drive-by would take out half the town. We only really have the one main street.

I know it's a stupid kind of fear because the chances of it actually happen are, I'm hoping, relatively small. But it's still there.

Today I taught Spanish at the high school.

Sometime after 8:30 this morning, I got a call from the high school secretary asking me if I could come in and sub today since the sub that was supposed to be there never showed up. So I dragged myself out of bed, rushed through shower and toast (not at the same time), and got to the school about a quarter to 10. I got to sign in for the whole day, which means a bonus two hours when I wasn't actually there! And then I finished second period and took on the rest of the day.

First, I called the teacher because she'd requested it and because I had no freaking clue what was going on. She'd left notes, but they were specific to the sub she was expecting. Talking to my old English teacher after school, I found out that the expected sub had actually been paid to come in for a day and learn all of the ins and outs of that particular classroom as well as the specific computer programs they're now using to teach Spanish. Of course, none of that knowledge is any good if the lady doesn't show up to use it.

Anyway. I was instructed to let Spanish 2 do whatever and have all of the Spanish 1 classes watch a video on either Peru or Argentina. Since I could only find the Peru video, that meant I watched the same 39 minutes of tape for three hours. Basically. Oi. I am kind of curious about chifa now. According to the video, it's Peruvian Chinese food. And the whole video thing was questionable anyway, since the sound quality wasn't great. I kept telling the kids I couldn't do anything about it, but they still grumbled.

It was an interesting day. The first full class period I taught (third) had my brother's girlfriend in it, so that was a little weird. But I got an hour and a half lunch since the teacher's prep period was right after lunch, so I harassed my mom at the flower shop for a while.

I hope the expected sub shows up tomorrow. I know there's always the possibility that I'll be asked to sub someplace else, but it'd be nice if this person who had a responsibility fulfilled it. I wonder what happened to her? I was going to complain that some people are just lame, but what if there was an emergency? Even so, a call to your employer isn't out of line.

"Library" is a really funny word if you think about it too hard.

One thing that I dislike is irresponsibility. When I make an appointment, I do my best to keep it. When I schedule work, I do my best to be there. And when I'm there, I do my best to complete the job at hand. Most of the time anyway; we all have our off days.

Today was hectic at the library. They've been working to upgrade the circulation system since last Thursday, meaning that nothing can be checked in (boxes of returned items piling up) and all check-out is done by hand (off-line circulation being unreliable, imo). I was asked to sub, which I didn't mind because I've dealt with the system being down before and, really, if I can deal with finals week in a university library I should be able to deal with books and DVDs piling up.

That wasn't so bad. (I was three sentences past the beginning of this paragraph before I realized I'd written "That was so bad" while thinking "wasn't." Heh.) Especially since Shannon told me to keep trying the circulation system until it let me in. When it popped up with a box asking me if I wanted to upgrade, I said, "Sure! Bring it on!" And all seemed to be well.

No, what really pissed me off, and I'm willing to admit I was probably overreacting, was when the other sub who was supposed to come work four hours with me called and said, "Shannon said she'd leave a note if she wanted me to come in. Did she leave a note?"

"Well, no. Not really. But she did say she had a project you could help with. They want to incorporate the non-cataloged paperback juvenile fiction with the cataloged hardcovers..."

"Oh, yeah, we've talked about that. But that's not really important."

That really annoyed me. Because, what? It needs to be done but you're feeling lazy so I'm going to be the one that does it?

She then asked if the computers were still down and I said it was kind of iffy at the moment, though they seemed to be fine. She said, "Well, I don't want to show up if there's nothing there for me to do."

So I told her, "If you have other things you have to do today, you go ahead and do them. I can take care of this on my own."

She said some more things after that, and I just repeated that a few times. At one point she kind of laughed after I said it. I think she caught my fed-up tone. You know the one. Everyone has one. The one where you're not openly angry, but it's clear that you think time's being wasted and so you're being sort of...professionally nice. If that makes sense.

I feel a little bad about it now. Mostly I feel bad that I feel like I should feel bad. How's that for convoluted?

She did tell me that I could call later in the afternoon if I needed help. I could have used helped later (I could have used help then), but there's too much going on to go looking for a phone number and I like working alone. Plus, this particular person has a really grating voice. And personality. The first time she called this morning, after I hung up all I could think was, "I'm going to have to listen to that for four hours." But then, of course, she didn't come in.

And then there was the part of me that didn't want to call because I wanted to prove I could handle the big scary day all by myself. So take THAT.

I did have a slight moment of panic, though. I called the tech people because transit slips weren't printing when I scanned material that was supposed to be sent elsewhere. When they called back and I said I was using the system, she said, "You're using it? Did we walk you through the upgrade already? If we didn't, then everything you're doing isn't being recorded." I was like, "It asked me to upgrade, I clicked 'okay.' I thought it was all right."

When I called her back after dealing with patrons, she apologized for panicking and said that I was fine. When I told Mom this, Mom asked, "So you did something that they didn't think you were capable of?"

Sure. What I'm thinking is that I'm one of the younger people working there, ready and unafraid to click the upgrade option when a computer presents it. Not that the older employees aren't, but they're the ones that are benefiting from the tech/web related information sessions while I'm sitting there semi-bored because I'm already familiar with it.

So that ended well. I didn't screw anything up. And by closing there were many things to shelve, but it was all generally tidy and not completely chaotic. Which is a win in my book. Even if I am generally frustrated by some of the people involved.

I am going to use my "people:idiots" tag and not feel like a horrible person.

Last night I kept getting picture texts on my phone from some random person. The first two times I texted back with "Wrong number," at which point they sent the first picture twice more and then a blank and then tried to call. I didn't answer because I didn't want to potentially be harassed on my phone.

Anyway, finally looked up the area code and whoever it was had a phone number in Georgia. I'm hoping I don't get anymore now. Because there's nothing I can do about it except repeat, "Wrong number."

I'm not what you would call an American Idol fan, but I love watching the audition episodes before the season really gets going. I think they're hilarious and the people always amaze me, either with their talent or their complete and total delusion that they're talented.

One of my favorite things tonight was the guy who said, "Simon didn't come down on me too hard, really. And he goes down on everybody."

I laughed so hard. And then told Mom and she laughed and said, "Oh, Simon, you whore."

I made money at mass this morning.

The last few weeks we've had no one to play the piano or the guitar, which means that as a congregation we stumble through the music and sound a lot like Eddie Izzard doing, "Hallelujah, hallelujah, joyfully we lark about." (Clip on YouTube.) The whole thing leads to us singing a lot of the same songs over and over, more so than would usually be done in a church.

Today I turned to Dad near the end. "Five bucks says we sing 'Immaculate Mary' as a finish," I said.

He chuckled, stuck out his hand, and said, "You're on."

And, lo and behold, "Immaculate Mary." Five dollars in my pocket. Then I had the giggles and couldn't get through the first two verses of the song.

I should maybe feel bad about gambling not only in a church, but actually during the service, but I don't. ;)