If you see people taking their shirts off, it's time to leave the party

People taking their shirts off
2 steps away from orgy

White guys talking like they're gansters
2 steps away from fight/orgy

WTF AIG??? W... T... F...

Consumerist reports that AIG has "fought every request from John Woodson, a man who lost a leg, an eye, and 70% of the vision in the remaining eye while working in Iraq" where he was bombed.

You guys are winners... not.

You guys are not winners.

People driving cars into stuff

We were so busy dealing with the flooding catastrophes that we forgot another scourge to fear: people driving into your building.

This morning an elderly couple was woken up by a dude driving into their house:


"Harold Patterson and his wife were sound asleep when a car on Ness Avenue ran over their neighbour's lawn, through their back fence and rammed into their home, coming within half a metre of their bed." Cont here.


Yesterday a lady drove into some guy's new meat shop. (Picture from WFP website).


"Marcello Castellano surveys the damage after a car crashed through the windows into his soon-to-be Marcello's Meats store in a strip mall at 200 Meadowood Drive Thursday. He was the only person in the store when an elderly female driver drove into the building. The woman was taken to hospital for observation. "

And I remembered seeing one from not long ago where an out-of-control car drove into a closed garage. One of the women in the car later passed away: read about it here. (Pic WFP website).

Were these accidents always so frequent, and I'm just suddenly noticing them more?

Or are people just spring feverish and testing their luck on the newly ice free roads?

Oh, my!

Refgrunt from Tuesday the 7th.

Refgrunt inspired by Ref Grunt.

Garfield
Star Wars graphic novels
How to print
Learn Turkish cd
Computer’s frozen
Supply management (nothing, had to show her Ebscohost)
Fern Michaels on cd
Road atlas for Saskatchewan
How to print
Trying to find phone number of someone who called me from Afghanistan on Saturday, but I don’t remember his name.
Automotive
How to photocopy
Computer’s frozen
Sketches by Walters
Schooled
List of 8 other kids or YA titles for her kid

1 pm and I am done!

Rude Mountain Climbing Book Reader

Lady: What’s the number for mountain climbing?
Me: (Smiling) I don’t know of the top of my head but I’ll look it up.

I look for a book on mounting climbing but we don’t have any in. We only have two biographies with climbing or mountain in title: the Kirk Douglas biography, Climbing the Mountain, My Search for Meaning.

Me: It doesn’t look like we have any mountain climbing books in.
Kinda Rude Lady: Just type in Everest. It will be under Everest.

I love when people tell me how to do my job.

Me: Are you looking for a book where someone climbed Mount Everest?
Lady: No. I just need a number.
Me: (Confused look)
Rude Lady: I know what I’m looking for.
Me: What are you looking for?
Rude Lady: I know what I’m looking for. I know exactly what I’m looking for. (Like, I don’t need your ineffectual help.)
Me: I’m not sure if it will be in.
Rude Lady: (Exasperated) I don’t need it to be in. Just give me a number.

I decide to be amused and not horrified. I tend to smile when confronted with rudeness, which may be a mistake and make rude people more annoyed with me, but it's a defence mechanism.

RL: In 600s, right?
Me: Well it will probably be with sports in 790s.
RL: That’s fine.
Me: Do you need a more specific number?
RL: (Walking away.) No I don’t need a more specific number. I can find it.

I find the exact number anyway.

Me: (To colleague N) Wow…
Colleague N: (Chuckle)

I go find the lady, expecting her to tell me off again.

Me: There should be some here on this shelf if you’d like.
RL: Thanks.

A couple of minutes later she walks back past the desk with an armload of books. Looking back, I think maybe she thought I was making fun of her from the beginning, because I made a joke of not knowing the number off the top of my head, and that’s why she seemed to become so testy so fast. But I really have no idea.

Winnipeg flooding once again.

One spring day in 1997 my mom showed up at my school in the middle of the day to tell me that we were going to have to spend a couple days out of our house. It was the Flood of the Century, but we lived blocks away from the roaring Red. Yet we were out of our house, and it turns out it was because when they had connected the sewer from our house they had attached it to the storm sewer, and not the proper one. So unmentionables were backing up into our house.

I remember walking to the front lawn and looking down, down, down, into a two-storey plus deep hole to see the top of a workman's head.

You remember these things when events come back around, and the city floods like a village by the Nile.

The Red River is, after all, the second longest north-flowing river in the world. The longest? The Nile.

Chronicles of house selling - the middle part

We've been trying to fix up our house to sell. In essence doing this makes you look at your house and where you live as a stranger, and requires you to distance yourself from it emotionally. Now, as you may or may not know, I am a very emotional person so this process has required a great deal of effort from me, on top of the physical stuff required in painting, fixing, sorting, packing, and moving heavy objects.

Now, all the crazy wall colours we went overboard with have been neutralized by what I call parchmenty. The devastatingly stained linoleum has been unceremoniousely ripped out and replaced -- by virtue of my own sweat and a little blood -- by fabulous peal-and-stick black-and-white vinyl. And on and on. And yet, there is more to do.

Ah, well. Suffer on I will.

And we still do not know where we are moving to, so this may all just be an excersize in futility. In better not be. Hmph.

Hatebook.org

Has everyone heard about this yet?

I call it Evil's Answer to Facebook; a whole community devoted to disliking stuff together.

Something funny from work.

I had found this awhile ago, but just rediscovered the pic in my stash.

The title reads. Competing with Class: A Guide to Women's Fitness. And yes, those are horns on her head.

Lena - a fragment

I could smell books. Old books, like the ones on the storage shelves behind the Micromedia desk that are too old to be trusted to the public. Musty, yellow, smell.

Peeking one eye open I follow a pile of books up up up, reaching like a tree toward the dim yellow of the grime covered lights on the ceiling. Like Jack’s beanstalk. My mind cannot comprehend what I am seeing.

Am I in heaven? With both eyes now I scan around me and see the neglect with which these books have been treated. The lie around me like casualties in the war on literacy. They are piled in high precarious haphazard piles, Plato with the Outhouses of the North mixed with Italian cooking mixed with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Am I in hell?

I am on a very hard bulgy couch. I am a little cold. And surrounded by books. It doesn’t feel like hell.

My head begins to swim and I lay back down and the bulges of the couch remind me of a dream. In the dream I see a shape above me, with wild hair and big round eyes. It’s saying, what is your name? Joseph needs your name!

I hear myself say, hoarsely, “Le – Lena…”

The shape says “Leda? Like the girl with the swan?” Suddenly it seems to grow bigger, it’s eyes closer. I feel my arms wrapping around myself like a shell.

“No.” I say. “Not like her. Lena. With an N”.

I remember now that before that I had been at work. It had been a very slow night, as most Mondays are, unless it was school project time or Oprah had just mentioned a book on her show. I remember watching a group of kids playing games at a computer, clustered around saying “Get him, no get the green one and you’ll get seven stars” Or some such in louder and louder voices. I remember trying forever to find the right book on the theory of relativity for a patron who ended up wanting a novel called the Theory of Relativity. Kind of an off night for me. But I got lots of shifting done, reorganized the graphic novels and put the Christmas books out of the display shelves and back to their regular spot at the back of the library.

And I remember a wild haired man seeming oddly interested in Christmas books for mid January.

“Just want to get a jump on things” he says with an odd high-pitched laugh. He asks me how long I’ve worked there and what my job is like. I assume he’s homeless or crazy or both and in the library for a break from the world, and so I humour him, cause that’s what we do here.

He asks me if we have any Proust books in and show him where they are, but he just goes through them one by one, laying each down on top the previous one in a pile on the shelf instead of putting them back in their row standing them up in a row. Apparently he’s read them all, so he thanks me and walks away. Sighing, I scoop them up and have them in order and tidy by the time I’ve done exhaling. Not that I’m bragging, but I have been doing this for a long time. As I turn I see his wild hair duck back around the corner of the shelves.

(Continued...)

to the sceptics out there:

To quote an anonymous poster on one the million comment boards:

"If I may so observe, rationality no more leaps to unfounded disbelief than to unfounded belief."

Let's look death in the face and say "Whatever, man!"

After months of sweat and toil the agent came to the house today and gave us good news. He liked the changes that we'd made and the new shmancy peel-and-stick vinyl I'd sweated and toiled over so much that he upped the price he thinks we can ask. Woop! That means our next house might be half-decent; a dream come true.

***

Also, seems as though I was accepted into an online Masters program in Library Sciences that I had applied for. I haven't received an official letter yet but on my account one their site it says:

The status of your application is: Accepted-Classified Graduate

Which apparently means:

You have been admitted in clear standing to the university and to your Graduate Program.
-You have no conditions or outstanding documents required.

So now I just need some thousands of dollars and I am on my way to being a liberrian.

Yes, I am cool. Thank you for noticing.

Do you read AND want a laugh?

Check out this section of librarything.com where people try to describe books they don't remember the title of but want to find again. Most are vaguely remembered children's books. Post title gems include:

"60's(?) Y/A Single Mom runs apt bldg, kids fry egg on sidewalk"

"YA Anastasia who likes roller skating"

"Time Travel, baseball, and a watch"

http://www.librarything.com/groups/namethatbook

don't you read?

PA announcement at the liberry:
“Would the patron looking for a video on how to write a book please return the Special Services desk on the second floor…”

What??

People you meet along the way.

A lady came up to me at work asking about the right food to eat to get rid of gout. Her sister has it in her feet. Her sister has had everything go wrong. But this lady is 75, apparently, and has nothing wrong at all. She could beat up any man, she says. I also learn that she hates pretty much all men. This is because she was married to a Greek man who slashed her hand with a butcher’s knife and pointed a shotgun at her back and had pretty nasty friends. She left him when she was 33. Stay single, she says, stay single. I tell her they’re not all like that, and she looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.

Letters to Lippy - by shmerica

Welcome all to my new grab-bag of a blog.

It will contain anything I fancy; bits of my own writing, news articles I find, weird things that happen at work (a public 'liberry' is always full of weird), etc. etc. and so forth.

Hope you enjoy, but if you do not, that is ok too.

shmerica.