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.