Dilemma.

Should I bitch about Apsco and complain about how they haven't delivered a working fridge since we ordered one Feb. 8th? Or should I stay with the book and hook theme? I suppose I could talk about being so mad I might crochet myself a fridge. I could keep things warm instead of cold....wait, that's an oven and I HAVE ONE OF THOSE. Perhaps I can read a book about something cold, I hear Looking for Alaska by John Green is wonderful, but isn't Alaska a person in that book?

Instead of gnashing my teeth, I will do the opposite and laugh in the face of extreme rage. I will share my librarian jokes. If you aren't a librarian, you probably won't find these jokes funny, but trust me, if you are a librarian, you will howl! At least all the librarians I have shared these with have howled.....anyway, on to the jokes. This first one is from my friend Kittly who went to graduate library school with me and now is at Queens Borough Public Library. She tells this joke to the non-professional staff and gets blank stares and then tells it to librarians and gets laughs:

How many librarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

IDK. How many?

What kind of lightbulb?

HAHAHHAHAHA....oh my. I'm crying here!

I gave a really short presentation today with my colleagues Katie and Pat and Jose. Katie and I are librarians and we came up with (ok, Katie thought them all up) these great jokes:

How many of you have heard of twitter or flickr?

Wait for show of hands and then call on Pat, our plant, who is supposed to say, "I don't know about those, but I love my swiffer. It really picks up the pet hair!" Yea. We rock. We also had another one about blogs, but unfortunately, Pat told us that our very humorous librarian jokes were only humorous to us and that we needed to be serious. Sigh. Foiled again.

Teens Do Read and So Should You!

Shame on you, American Media, for proclaiming that teens don't read. The media needs to come over to my school and check it out. I was recently handed a book by a young lady whose reading tastes I very much admire and told, "You must read this book!" So I did.

AMAZING. The book is Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto and you should just go to Amazon now and order it as Borders and B&N don't stock it. Normally, when given a choice of reading material, I favor fantasy fiction, preferably long, serial fantasy fiction, so it is quite unusual for me to read novellas. Kitchen is two books: Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow. Both quite different, but still capturing Yoshimoto's spare writing style, which is elegant and evocative. They are surprizing stories, deeply touching. I was surprized because something so small shouldn't be so powerful. It's like silk long underwear. They say it will keep you warm and yet when it arrives at your door and you hold it up to the light, you think, "Surely not. This thin thing will never warm me." Yet, you put them on and slowly, creeping warmth steals over you and soon you are looking out on the snow from an insulated cocoon of comfort.

Read Kitchen. Be warm.

First and Searching

Seems a good way to start is by talking about the name: book and hook nomad. Book, well, as a high school librarian I have them all over my house, in my car, in my office and in my library. The hook, that's a horse of a different color (which according to AMC movie slide shows was made a different color using sparkly gelatin, but the horse kept licking it off, so they had to shoot the film quickly). It's for crochet, a much prefered art form than knitting as I can actually do some crochet and find knitting to be completely mindboggling. Seems like I can teach myself crochet (thank you Stitch and Bitch Crochet! and Aunt Helen), but knitting escapes me. Crochet just seems friendlier to me. Although I find that many of the LYS (that's local yarn stores for those of you who like the books and not the hooks) are prejudiced against crochet and in fact the owner of the closest LYS (where I got the cool yarn in the header photo) to me actually started to diss crochet even after I had stated that I do crochet and prefer it to knitting. Really chapped my hide! Consequently, I won't go back there (unless they have a REALLY good sale! ;-) and have made the Fiber Arts store in Odessa my new favorite LYS (http://029c546.netsolstores.com/).



I'm in the process of crocheting scarves for my graduating seniors. But I have a birthday coming up and have detoured to making a Solomon's knot wrap for a friend's bday on April 18th. Not much time, but the Solomon's knot is a pretty quick stitch, once you get going. Although I must say that I had to pull the whole thing out twice to figure out what I was doing wrong. Very annoying. I've had my eye on the Solomon's knot for quite a while so I am inordinately pleased with myself for learning it. The photo to the right is a close up of the SK. It is a long loop and is very lacy and delicate.