I got flowers yesterday -- ROSES even! (white ones) from my youngest boyfriend ever. He was lovely. He's the nephew of one of the ladies I was working with yesterday (I also know and work with his Mum). I helped him on the pc/scanner in the morning (he's really into Yu-Gi-Oh, which I found out is pronounced You-Gey-Oh with the G sounding soft like in Green and with Gey rhyming with key instead of You-Gee-Oh with the G sounding like a J and with Gee sounding like oh gee, that's neat!).
I really embarrassed him though-- not on purpose! It was just my natural reaction to say "Aren't you sweet!??!" Only in that library, with the way there is a second floor but that the area above the checkout desk is all open all the way to the top, the sound echoed and came out WAY louder than I had intended! The poor lad went 6 shades of red all the way to the roots of his hair.
What a cutie.
Thank you Michael for making my day!
about being a librarian is that you get to talk to people about books sometimes.
And sometimes those people are only 4 years old and cute and curious and not shy at all.
Today I had a delightful conversation with a 4 year old girl in a really sweet pink jumper with fluffy cuffs and sparkly sequins on the front-- we talked about the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. It's a fabulous book if you haven't come across it-- a picture book with holes in the pages where the aforementioned caterpillar has eaten through all the various different kinds of foods. She was really cute.
Speaking of having conversations with youngsters-- it reminds me that I've been meaning to blog about the children who live in the house over the road. They have a wonderful habit (not!) of standing on the windowledge (on the inside) and opening the top window in the living room and dangling their arms out the windows (I'll try and capture them doing it sometime and post the picture!) and shouting out at anyone who passes or stands outside their house.
The funniest thing is when they shoo the cat from next door out of their garden-- it's really hilarious to hear them calling out "shooo!" and seeing the cat looking around trying to figure out where the voices are coming from and then giving up and running out of the garden because of the "ghosts".
I can't believe what I've just seen on the internet...
a smashing quote from Hugh Grant (whom I cannot stand in films-- ugh!) about why he's ready to have children... and around the edges of his foot you can hear exactly how LITTLE he really knows about children and exactly how he's NOT ready!
what a dolt.
This morning I phoned the embassy and found out that:
a.) I am not on the special list of names of people whom they can tell things about Andy's visa application. (which really honks me off as I'm his flippin' sponsor and wife!)
b.) The embassy let the phone ring huge amounts of time to rack up the money...
and
c.) Even though the lady on the other end of the phone wasn't supposed to tell me anything, she let slip that all our paperwork is indeed filed and on record and that all we need to do at this point is wait for that all-important letter that tells us when to go down to London!!!
If it's 4-6 weeks, like everyone keeps saying, that means the interview could be as early as 20th November or as late as 11th December... going to be cutting it close to be in America for Christmas...
Specially with what the estate agent said tonight about the housing market being really quiet at the moment, and only going to get quieter as Christmas approaches.... :(
Nevermind.
The house is on the market!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
whohoooo!!
After huge amounts of hard work (and aching backs) and a nice weekend away, I was back to work today to get the last few things done on the house before the estate agent came around to take the photos of the house for putting it in the papers.
Great and HugeHug thanks go to Bjorn for all his painting and handyman helps! Dave Long helped Andy fix the tiled kitchen floor and now you look at it and you can't even tell it wasn't always perfect!
Andy put in a huge day of work with me on the Thursday before the cleaners came and all of those things added together meant that when the estate agent walked into the house this afternoon...
he was stunned.
And that was worth all the hard work just there.
Well almost.
It'd have been even more worth it if he had been a buyer and walked in and been that pleased!!
Nevermind.
Watch this space for updates on how things are going!!!
I learned a new word today, but I'm not sure if I like it or not... it sounds a bit painful!
the word is excoriating and it means to tear or wear the skin off, or to censure strongly... denounce.
I learned it by reading that the new musical about Oscar Wilde has been pulled after just one performance. Apparently the reviews were excoriating and it only sold 5 seats for the next day's performance! More info can be found from the Yahoo news article here.
You have to wonder now... just how bad does a musical have to be to be called excoriating....?
the reason I've been so quiet lately, is because I've spent several of the last few days de-cluttering our house so that it would be ready for today.
Today is special because Merry Maids came to do a "spring clean".
I'm so knackered-- just absolutely exhausted from all the preparation. They came and went and now the house is lovely and clean and organised and smells of cinammon!
Think I need a vacation.
P.S. The house goes on the market on Monday!! eEEEEEk!
Andy had to do a CineCheck at the Odeon theatre in Stoke this weekend, so I decided to go with him. He got to see the movie for free but I had to pay.
It was Shark Tale, an animated comedy that pokes fun at the mafia movies (Godfather, Goodfellas, Untouchables etc.) and we both really enjoyed it!
As with most American comedies, I was the only one laughing in the theatre at certain points (they really spoofed a lot of things -- my favourite was how they gave the shark that Robert DeNiro voiced a mole on his right cheek!! Too funny).
As with all silly comedies though-- you have to be the right combination of relaxed, giggly, and in the mood for a comedy. Otherwise you wouldn't enjoy this movie. It was definitely in the "leave your brain at home" category. But as I said, we both laughed a lot and came out of the theatre giggling about it. And it's the first film I've been to in a long time where people have actually clapped for the film at the end when the credits roll.
Wordorigins.org has loads of meanings and histories of phrases and slang words...
go have a browse!
you might accidentally learn something!
Have you ever used the phrase "red herring" and known what it meant but never knew where the phrase came from?
me too!
So I looked into it.
Apparently it goes back to the old hunting traditions (here in England) and poachers would drag a ripe red herring (smelly!) across the fox's trail to throw the dogs' noses off the scent. According to Wordorigins.org "A red herring was chosen because dog trainers often used the pungent fish to create a trail when training their hounds. The dogs, upon encountering the herring scent, would follow that trail as it was the one they had been trained with."
so there you have it.
that coffee break must have worked-- i've just fixed a problem to do with printing date labels (jamming) and the SLA has said that one act alone has made all my overtime worth it....
i'm calling this "rollercoaster Friday".
today is one of those days where i should not have even bothered getting out of bed.
everything i've touched so far this morning has gone wrong-- and it's been my fault...
oy vey.
i've just come back from a coffee break and hopefully that will have helped slough off the cloud around my head.
How fabulous is this picture??!
Completely staged, I admit it, but really cute, eh??
On Monday I had dealings with one of the most horrible women I have ever met.
I couldn't believe how petty a human being could be over 75 pence!
Here's how it happened.
She came in and was horrible and nasty to the poor counter staff-- who having been to the customer care courses know that the next step is to bring me into it... giving the woman a few seconds to calm down after her rant.
So they brought her round to the Enquiry desk.
She sat down and proceeded to dump all over me on how the book we'd obtained for her via a reservation wasn't fit for the bin in her house! I just let her rant (I didn't think the book was THAT bad, all it needed was a new cover!!). The book was more than 50 years old (and if you're not aware of it, most books that are made these days fall apart and look manky after 10 years, much less 50!!).
So she was one unhappy bunny.
All she kept saying was "I want my money back. I want my 75p."
Herein lies my predicament: CCC policy is that we don't issue refunds-- we obtain like for like (and there was a 2000 edition reprint of the exact book) or we put a credit on the borrower's ticket for a future reservation choice or money off a multimedia loan. Some libraries don't even do the second part-- they just say "tough luck" and that's that.
So I calmly search the catalogue and explain that we have newer copies of the book in the county and that I can do a reservation for one of them but she cuts me off and says "I don't WANT another copy of the book, I WANT my MONEY back -- so I can go buy my own copy!"
So I take a deep breath and calmly explain that we don't issue refunds that I can only offer her another reservation instead for any book.
She then rants on about how she never ever does reservations and how she doesn't want another reservation-- she wants her 75p -- why is it so difficult for me to understand she says....
Meanwhile I'm thinking-- YOU DOZY COW-- YOU'RE THE ONE WHO AIN'T UNDERSTANDING HERE!!!!!
So I realise she's just going to sit there and cause a scene, and so I go into the workroom to bring out the Group Librarian (my boss's boss). I give her a brief explanation of the scenario in the workroom and she follows me out.
She sits down and puts her best "calm the customer down" voice on, and starts "First of all, let me just explain to you why this book is in the condition it's in..." at which point the cow jumps in and rants that she doesn't care how it got that way, it isn't fit for the bin, the county council should have thrown it away long ago etc. etc. etc. (her face was going really red by this point, so I was keeping near the phone in case I had to call 999)
Group Librarian then tries to explain that we don't give refunds. Cow rants "of course you can give me a refund, don't be stupid. I want my 75p!"
Group Librarian then tries to explain that we can only reserve a different copy of the book; Cow interrupts and says she doesn't want this and that she's very careful how and where she spends her money and she never ever does reservations etc. so this is no use to her.
GL then tries (and I do mean tries-- she only managed to get a few words out each time before Cow started on another tirade) to explain that she can put the money on cow's "account" on her ticket. Cow then snorts and says "I don't have an account here-- you aren't a bank, I don't want you to have my money, I want my money! I want my 75p back!"
Finally GL realises that Cow is just going to be a cow until she gets her money back and so makes Cow promise she won't ever do it again saying that she's basically breaking CC policy to do this and gets Cow her 75p.
At this point I am just gobsmacked-- Cow has been in the library arguing (for 75p!!!!) for about half an hour!
Most hilarious and ironic thing about this whole scenario: The title of the book in question was Bitter Lemons.
Having been here for more than 5 years now, I thought I had heard most all of the slang terms for household things.... well I was wrong!
The other day Andy used the phrase "bog roll" in a sentence to me and I was in fits of giggles... he was talking about toilet paper, toilet roll, loo roll. I just had images of bogs in my head and laughed and laughed. He couldn't explain to me why it was called bog roll though.
(((I've since looked it up and apparently "bog" is one of the words for the toilet from the 1800s...)))
Another funny englishism that came out yesterday in our staff meeting at work-- several of my colleagues had been to a couple of seminars on how to get more people in the doors of libraries and how to make libraries more effective etc. and one of the main topics was the whole marketing issue-- especially with book displays. They were talking about selling an image... because it's all about making a library's displays like a bookshop's displays-- to sell the books to the borrower to take them out and up our issues statistics.
So they were talking about how one of the seminar speakers had used the phrase "Sell the Sizzle" (not the sausage)... to mean selling the whole image of a lifestyle that you're meant to have if you read this book etc.
load of rubbish really, but hilarious imagery... and great phrase.
We're still hanging in that "waiting for the embassy's letter" bermuda triangle of the process, and yet life is changing around us.
I feel like several people have kind of said their goodbyes already-- even though we haven't gone yet, and it's really depressing.
Don't get me wrong, I know that relationships do change when life changes, but I guess I was just caught by surprise by the sadness of it all.
I thought I wouldn't be feeling this sense of loss until after we were in the States.
I can't talk about it much because it really upsets me when I think about it.
Yesterday the word "overtime" lost all its positive and desirable connotations.
I had been confused because I'd done 32 hours of "overtime" back in August (hoping to offset the radical drop in my hours in moving from Crewe Library to Congleton Library). I was also hoping to have a nice healthy paycheck for buying things in America!
When my paycheck arrived on the 18th, I was really stunned. It wasn't anywhere near what I thought it would be, and on top of that, the hours listed as my cover for Alsager weren't paid at time & a half, as I thought they would be-- my perception of "overtime" meant those hours were worth time and a half rather than just regular pay time.
Last week I did another large batch of "overtime"-- in the span of the 5 working days, I went to 4 different Cheshire libraries--- Congleton, Crewe, Wilmslow & Sandbach. So I wanted to make sure that this time the "overtime" was paid correctly-- and wanted the August hours corrected-- I spoke to my boss' boss and she made some phone calls looking into it.
The result is that I had it all wrong. The only definition of "overtime" for Cheshire County Council is that it means you worked more hours than you were contracted for, and you don't get any different wage than usual unless it was a Saturday, a Sunday, or more than 37 hours in one work week. My "overtime" was none of the above.
Can you just imagine how disappointed and tricked I felt after having that news?
Gutted.
Absolutely gutted.
Felt like a big sheepish gob for having been taken advantage of. But in all fairness, they hadn't taken advantage-- I'd just not clarified what I'd be receiving at the end of the day. Because I'm a big trusting-thinks-the-best-of-everyone dodo. I believe there's a phrase for me: people-pleaser. Can't say No, (not without major guilt and second thoughts anyhow!)
To add injury to insult, just minutes after hearing that news... I got a papercut that is STILL stinging.
to 0870
when using 18866, you can't ring 0870 numbers... but here's a way around it...
gives alternative numbers and ideas for how to get around that problem.
very helpful-- and money-saving too!
