keepin' it old school

so i just couldn't resist bringing this clever cleverness to your attention ... another highlight of the party was the "take your picture with edward" photobooth (faces have been changed to protect the innocent).

now, i did this at our last twilight party and someone asked "how'd you do that miss dewey decimal? did you use photoshop?" no. i don't know how to use such complicated things as photoshop. i bought a poster of edward and bella and then cut bella's head out and encouraged kids to put their face in the hole where bella's face once was. anyway, it works quite well and even the boys enjoyed it once i explained that they could just make scary goofy faces. oh, there is no end to my awesomeness.

it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life

ok beloved blog readers, i am back! (don't believe a word i say) no, really, i am. i am totally going to write this blog again. i swear. really.

so yesterday in honor of everyone's favorite vampire werewolf love-triangle, i threw a New Moon party at the library. let me tell you, throwing these parties is hard work. and sadly, a lot of the work needs to be done on my own time. like baking these "vampire bites" sugar cookies. get it, it's like they were bitten by a vampire? so clever.

so two nights this week instead of finishing the first draft of my novel (so close!), i spent preparing for this party. which leads me to believe that if i didn't have a full time job, i would totally have enough free time to do what i need to do to get my job done. huh? dizzies the mind, doesn't it?

the first night of non-writing i spent baking. however, i was very efficient and i spent the baking downtime listing items to sell on amazon. i am trying to rid myself of unnecessary items and live a more monkish lifestyle. except with lots of drinking and fab outfit changes.

then the second night i spent making iron-ons so that i could create twilight themed t-shirts as prizes for the kids. these actually turned out really cool. but time consuming.

the day of the party was total chaos. the devoted teen helpers we have here at happy shiny new library were all at meetings or otherwise engaged, so it was just me and my fab co-librarian in crime. we had a bella scavenger hunt, in which the kids were released into the library to solve clues all based on books that bella reads in the series (bella is a reader, i'll have you know.) do you know what i learned from this dear blog readers? the children have idea where we keep the books. and even when i was following them around giving them extra hints they were pretty abismal at finding stuff. even when it was right in front of them and i was screaming, "hot! hot! you're right there! look right in front of you!"

we had several other games, like a bella bandage wrap up relay and an unwrap bella's birthday present "hot potato" game. and lastly we also played Twilight Scene It?

now, you are probably asking your self "self, how did miss dewey decimal possibly afford to buy Twilight Scene It? on her measely budget?" well, the answer astute blog reader is that i didn't. i bought it with my OWN MONEY. but here is the clever clever part. since it has only been played one time and it is oh so perfectly still in tact, i am going to try to "flip it" on eBay! maybe you would like to purchase it? it was been touched by your beloved miss dewey d! if you buy it, maybe i'll make you a special crafty card or something to show my appreciation.

two months of silence and now this

here's what i would look like if i were a mermaid made out of a popsicle stick. enjoy!

i'm leaving on a jet plane

it's been so long since i've complained about my general maladies. hasn't it? i know you all are dying to hear about some maladies. well here goes ...

first off, with the rigorous summer reading schedule i really wore myself out. all those programs, and then us being down a manager ... it was tough. and for the past two months i've been getting sick fortnightly (i love the word "fortnight") ... so at first i tried to rest in my down time and take it easy. this of course was very boring and i missed out on lots of fun summer activities. and wouldn't you know it? it didn't even work anyway. and it was so boring.

so last weekend i decided i would ride in the nyc 20th century bike tour, even though i was recovering from illness. of course, i decided that since i was not in tip top shape the best thing for me to do would be to sleep late. so my friends began the ride at 7 am up in central park at 110th street, while i slept all cozy cuddly with the bolshevik. then at around 9:30 i got a phone call from miss fifi who had made it to prospect park already, and was politely asking me where the hell i was. oh miss fifi! so i finally emerged from bed, bid the bolshevik adieu, and got on my bike. by the time i got to propect park the riders were long gone, but then i booked it to coney island in record time and was able to reunite with miss fifi at marine park! i am SO good. and then we had a lovely time riding off into the sunset together. all in all, i rode 40 miles of the 55 mile ride (fifi rode even longer since she had riden about 10 miles just to get to the start line!)

but then dear blog readers, as i was tasting the sweet taste of success, i began to feel this strange pain in my knee. oh the pain! i've never been injured before due to sporty sporty-ness. ouch. even my free finish-line massage didn't help. so i've kinda been hobbling around ever since, applying the tiger balm and keeping it elevated and all that.

so then this week, my stupid sore throat came back AND i was hobbling around and it was all very sad. but the show must go on!

so yesterday we did something quite fab, despite my maladies ... at boy's club i decided to have a paper plane competition. i printed up a bunch of different paper plane templates from the internets, and set them up at various parts of the room. i gave the boys about 30 minutes to make as many planes as they wanted, telling them they would be judged on flight distance as well as plane style. so they had a fine time making the planes and coloring them with markers yada yada yada. i noticed a lot of them had some trouble following the basic directions, the trouble being that they refused to read them. so i think we will do more things where they have to read and follow directions. then we had the flight competitions where they threw their planes onto the "runway" and i placed little masking tape pieces where each plane landed. it was very exctiting and our top winners all received prizes. afterwards one of the boys came up to me and said he had so much fun and he didn't even mind that he didn't win a prize. ah, super sweet.

oh, and on the subject of planes i will be going on a TWO WEEK vacation very soon to argentina, accompanied by my beloved bolshevik. ay ay ay!

fall is here ... thank fucking god

that's right ... today is the first day of school. yay! the children are no longer here 8 hours a day. yay! oh sweet relief. guess what? it's quiet in here! like a library or something.

let's see my poor forsaken blog readers ... what has been going on?

i went to honduras to visit my beloved bolshevik for a few days. that was lovely. i will not summarize it for you, but i will instead quote the bolshevik .... "that image of the man at pico bonito hotel, walking up to us as we arrived and offering us rum drinks in coconuts ... that will stay with me until the day i die." indeed, bolshevik. indeed.

also, the manager of happy new shiny library has sadly retired. we all loved her so. and now we are awaiting the arrival of a new manager. this is a little frightening since we do not know who said manager will be. shhhhhh. it's a surprise! i typically love surprises. but not this one.

anyhoo, now that it is fall we get to go back to our regularly scheduled programs, which means anywhere between 1 to 3 programs a day instead of the intense summer schedule of 3 to 5 programs a day. phew!

our highlight this month is the girls club & boys club. do not let the name fool you. it is not "boys and girls club." the boys and the girls will not be mingling. instead we do girly activities with the girls and boy stuff with the boys. we are imposing strict gender roles! but it's so fun. the kids really get into excluding each other. is that wrong?

anyway, yesterday at girls club we made these fab bracelets out of toilet paper tubes. we had some fun fabrics that we got from Materials from the Arts and we used them to cover the toilet paper tubes (you can see how this was accomplished with the bracelet on the right). then we glued on all sorts of bling. oh how i love bling! we used glitter foam shapes, beads, rhinestones, feathers, sequins ... anything that could be glued down. i must say that i had insisted on purchasing a bunch of glue guns with our grant money, and it was one of my most useful acquisitions.

and that's the story for now.

awesome and exhausted

so i've been fighting off this cold for the past few weeks and because the library is short-staffed and we have anywhere between 3 to 5 programs a day, i have been working non-stop. in my free time i lie down a lot and try to rest and obsess about not getting more ill. it's all very tiring.

but this week we did two very cool things.

cool thing #1 - we had a teen Name that MP3 competition. now, i have about 7,000 songs on my iTunes, so i figured it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a sizeable list of songs that the young whipper snappers might know. and the bolshevik is always sneaking hip hop onto my iPod, so i figured i was all set. but alas, that was not the case. i looked over my extensive music library and realized that i have quite an oscure collection of music. why, certainly inner city teens would know such bands as Dirty Projectors, and Belle and Sebastian, and Fleet Foxes and Sleater-Kinney. who doesn't know them? so then i had a little panic about this program totally bombing if the teens didn't bring their own iPods filled with music that is actually popular.

but lo and behold the teens actually brought in their iPods and they all got very excited to pick out songs and try to stump the other participants. any time someone got one right we would throw them a hershey's kiss or one of those little "fun size" candy bars you give out at halloween.

then, every so often i would pick a song from my own iPod and try to challenge them and expand their minds with my musical trivia. for instance, i gave them the following hint: this song was the first ever video played on MTV. well that got them excited. of course they had no idea who the buggles were but they found it interesting all the same.

cool thing #2: today we had our teen iron chef competition in which 4 teams competed to make the best smoothie. we provided them with all sorts of ingredients, and told them they would be judged on the following criteria:
1. taste
2. attractiveness
3. creativity
4. viscocity (we did this just to teach them a new word. it's a library!)
pretty much, instead of looking at the options and picking several ingredients that actually go together, most teams just took a bit of everything. which was ok, but after a while i had a kind of icky feeling like i was filled with smoothie. not pleasant. but a good time was had by all, and the winning team actually did make a good smoothie.

now i am exhausted again, but i must press on and bake cookies for tomorrow's rock star party. and then saturday i am off to honduras to visit my bolshevik. ahhhhh mi amor.

the ultimate visual dictionary

i was going through our big ol' stack of donated books, and i came across this visual dictionary. now, i love it that people want to donate books to us. it's the thought that counts, and that is very thoughtful. oh shucks. but it is important to remember dear blog readers that "donating to the library" should not be synonymous with "throwing out the trash." i don't need your outdated encyclopedias, archaic textbooks, or old national geographic magazines (unless they have cool pictures for collages) .

now, there are several key ways (beyond looking at the publication date) to see if a reference book is outdated. does it make mention to such modern labor-saving devices as computers, cell phones, or the internets? (have i ever told you the story of my grandfather's old dictionary from the 40s that listed the definition for computer as "one who computes." see? useless.)

anyhoo, upon looking up the word "computer" in the index of this book i happened across an entry for "clitoris." say what?! i thought this was a kids book. well ... i had to check it out. get your mind out of the gutter, dear blog readers, it was totally clinical. although, surprisingly unclear if i wasn't already quite familiar with that portion of human anatomy.

alas, we shan't be adding this book to the collection. why? not because of a clitoral pictoral. but because in the "visual definition" of a computer, there is detailed depiction of an external CD-ROM player. seriously people, what am i supposed to do with that?