wine, sun chips, and my new favorite series book

i am in fairly good spirits for a woman on the brink of extinction. although last night i had a bit of a relapse into bad behavior and i drank a few glasses of wine (even though i am not supposed to be drinking this month!) and a large bag of sun chips which i dipped into that preservative-filled gelatinous onion dip that they sell in bodegas that is so full of chemicals it doesn't even need to be refrigerated. yeah, i ate an entire tub of that stuff. but it needed to be done! i did all this while watching the first disc of season 3 of 90210 (donna and brenda are in paris!). anyhoo, it needed to be done. i feel better now. i will not eat anything with hydrogenated oils for a while. let's move on.

here i am back at the library on a saturday morning. a 6th grade girl came in to tell me she lost her card. when i looked her up it turns out she owed $70 in late fees. $70! turns out she took out 2 dvds in december and never returned them, so we are now charging her the full cost of the dvds (plus a processing fee). she tells me she doesn't remember taking out the dvds. so i tell her to go home and look for them because if she finds them and returns them then she will only have to pay late fees, which will be WAY cheaper than paying for the cost of the movies.

i would like to take this opportunity to tell you that this girl used to have a serious attitude problem. i have kicked her out of the library in the past. but then one day she came to a craft program and we discussed the story of hanukkah and we made paper dreidels and i gave out chocolate gelt and now she has turned nice. you see that! you see the power of hanukkah and crafts! anyway, back to my original story.

she leaves and comes back about 15 minutes later with both dvds. turns out her sister "borrowed" her card and took out the dvds. never bothering to tell her or return them to the library. sadly, i see this all the time. its worst when the parents do it to their kids because they've messed up their own card and then move on to mess up their kids' cards. nice!

anyway, now i have her reading down her fines so that she can just read in the library instead of pay money. i asked her "do you know what 'rounding up' means?" she said yes and i explained that i would do a considerable amount of rounding up so that she could get extra credit for her reading time, since it isn't her fault.

i tell her to go get a book and she immediately walks over to the picture books even though she is in 6th grade. urgh, i am so sick of these kids reading below their grade level. so i take her over to the fiction section thinking i will try to sell her on the Sisters Grimm series which is about two sisters who fight fairy tale crimes with their feisty grandmother in upstate ny. i LOVE these books and i can never get anyone to read them. so i ask her, "what types of books do you like to read?" and do you know what she said? do you? can you guess? she said "fairy tales." well, i was so excited. i explained the whole thing to her and now she is sitting reading the sisters grimm.

but these things are not important. why? who cares that i got an inner city girl with low reading scores who used to have a bad attitude but is now a productive polite child to read an age appropriate book?! the real problem is that two weeks ago i missed a day of work due to laryngitis. that's the real crime here.