Austen in a Box

Happy dance! Two new book order boxes arrived today. All of the books shown below were purchased with the help of my friend Jessi and her awesome book reviews. Book reviews are a big part of collection development and I'm reluctant to buy a book without one (unless it's already on the bestseller list).



The last picture is all the 'Diary' books by Amanda Grange. I ordered several new books to create a Jane Austen book display. These will be a great addition to the usual volumes of her work. I am so excited about all of these and I can't wait to read them.

My Lazy Activities

We got some more new books in at work recently. I read two in as many weeks and I thought they were both great. The first was a young adult book: The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks.

This book is a mystery with a very different view of what it's really like to be a vampire.

The second book I read was a memoir (non-fiction, don't read those too often): I'm Down by Mishna Wolff.

I added the book to our order list based on the cover. This memoir started off extremely funny but it did get bitter-sweet toward the end. I think most people would get a kick out of both books.

I'm trying to get in the Halloween spirit by watching scary movies. I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey (1995). The oddness overpowered the scariness. Tonight will be The Haunting in Connecticut, not to be confused with A Haunting in Connecticut. I'm going to watch it at my friends house so I don't get too scared. Next will be The Last House on the Left. I have a few more horror selections in my queue (no Saw movies though, I have to draw the line somewhere) so I'll keep you posted on my mental state after a week or so. I also made a Halloween book display at work (vampires, zombies, spooky stuff, etc). I'm hoping the books will fly off the shelf but I doubt it will be that successful.

Something Funny at the Librarian Conference

During one of the ump-teen sessions I had to attend during my Savannah conference I read something funny. Some teachers are attempting to revitalize the research paper assignment by requiring their students to post their as a blog. Each entry is a new paragraph or section. One teacher displayed this definition before getting into the meat of her presentation.

Everyone in the room slowly started to giggle more and more as they finished reading the definition. If you've ever heard of/visited urbandictionary then this colorful definition of 'blog' is no surprise. If you haven't visited the site then I must warn you that several entries are rather crude and vulgar. Though I've never blogged about sleeping until noon (because I've never done that in my life) I think I may have blogged about homework.

Sandi's Favorite Thing

Sandi loves to play frisbee. Actually her frisbee is called a flippy-flopper. Walmart used to sell them but now you can only find them on eBay. She tears them up after a few months. This is not just from catching them in the air, it's from thrashing them about in her teeth. I think she's been through about 4 so far. Her specialty is jumping high to catch the frisbee mid-air. I've tried to get shots of this x-treme-dog-jumping action but it's hard to time it just right. Here are some pictures of my attempts from yesterday.

This is how it starts. She looks pretty innocent but then she gets her chompers into the fabric and the thrashing begins.

Then...the fury is released!

I know some of the pictures are blurry but she's fast and my camera is not the best quality.

She gets pretty tired after about 15 minutes and usually plops down where she stops in the grass, goes and rests on top of the AC vent in the house, or on the couch (like this picture).

Birthday Cake

My birthday was a couple weeks ago but I just celebrated it with my family this past weekend. I did buy myself a mini-cake from Piggly Wiggly on my actual birthday so don't worry about me missing out on all those empty (yet totally delicious) calories.

I'm a huge fan of the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. This summer I read the latest in the series Finger Lickin' Fifteen. If you've ever read any of them you know that Stephanie loves her mother's cooking and especially her pineapple upside down cake. I've never had it before so I requested that as my birthday cake. My mom made it from scratch in her cast iron skillet. It was yummy and came out picture perfect.

I'll lay off the baked goods postings for a little while.

Work in Savannah

Several colleagues and I traveled to Savannah a couple weekends ago to attend an Information Literacy conference. It was sponsored by Georgia Southern and here is a picture of the view from the conference center.

This is the Talmadge Memorial cable-stayed bridge.

As my sister's roommate said, "Oh, it's a librarian conference? That's got to be boring!" He was right. It was nice to get away from the office for a couple days but I didn't really learn anything. Basically, we attended several sessions and they all pretty much said the same thing; 1. The one-shot library visit cannot possibly teach students how to properly conduct research, yet no one could offer a working solution and, 2. Statistics may seem interesting on paper but spouted out during a presentation they have the same affect (effect?) as sleeping gas. The food was bad too. Also, I realized that I do not like your typical librarian. They are very pompous and rude. I didn't get their jokes and they asked questions they already knew the answer to in an effort to make the presenter look stupid. I hope that won't be me in a few years and I really hope that's not me now.

I did get to hang with my sister for a couple days so that was nice. She let me crash at her place and I had my own personal tour guide of the city. She bought some cupcakes from a local bakery called Back in the Day Bakery. I think the owner was on Paula Deen's FoodNetwork show once.



They looked very pretty but the cake part was very bland. My sister, who is an accomplished cook and baker, could have done way better. The icing was fantastic though (except the chocolate--way too intense). In conclusion, I'd rather skip the conference next year and hang out with my sister instead.

Business Card

I now have business cards. This is a first for me. It's like I've finally arrived (career wise anyway). I'm experiencing a moment similar to one in The Jerk. It's the scene where Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) gets ridiculously excited about the arrival of the new phonebooks because he's in it for the first time. He screams, "The new phonebook's here, the new phonebook's here, I'm somebody now!" That's me folks. I'm somebody now. Watch the clip here. I doubt I'll use all 500 of them but someone did show me that you can make an origami shapes out of business cards. They even have step-by-step websites for such a task.

Lost In Austen

I just finished watching a miniseries called Lost in Austen. I'm not really sure how I missed seeing this (or even hearing about it) but it was released in 2008. I ordered it through Netflix and all parts of the miniseries are on one disc. For those of us obsessed with all things Austen any adaptation can be appreciated in it's own way. Though I've read almost all her books and seen at least one movie version of each I still get excited when another adaptation is in the works. Books with their own spin of the stories or different adventures of one or more of the characters can be fun as well. Lost in Austen creates a different outcome for all the characters in Pride and Prejudice.

It wasn't terrible or wonderful and I won't be visiting amazon.com to see if I can order a cheap copy but it was worth watching and indulging in a different story line for 3 hours of one of my favorite tales. It combines a lot of the things that people love about the book and about the 1995 BBC miniseries version with Colin Firth. I laughed during some of it but mostly I was just wondering where the storyline was headed about every 10 minutes. It can only be enjoyed if you watch it with an open mind. In my Internet searches about this movie I came across this blog: Jane Austen's World. I'm very interested in reading this to learn more about "Jane Austen, her novels, and the Regency Period."

Another One Down

Today is my 29th birthday. I looked in the mirror this morning and said to myself, "Almost 30." Then I said a choice 4-letter word and headed out the door to work. Twenty-nine seems like a really boring number to me, as does 39, 49 and so forth. I'm going to need to do really adventurous things this year to make it momentous. I'd love to try zip lining (or ziplining; depending upon which site you visit) so maybe I'll look into that. They make zip line kits for home but I'd like to try it in the rain forest or something like that where I have to dodge spider monkeys as huge leaves slap me in the face.



These were taken in Costa Rica (from a website search). Yep, that's a three-toed sloth (on the right). Pretty cool.

Also, plans are underway for a week long trip in January to Paris and London with my mom. I'm getting more excited as the days pass. It will be cold but that might not be so bad. We'll be in a mad rush to see as much as possible but I'm up to the challenge. Mom is working on figuring out the flight/tube/train travel and hotel arrangements. I've been focusing on more important things; my outfits. I'll be packing super lite so every garment counts. We took a trip to REI in Atlanta recently and I got the best hiking shoes ever. Actually, I love all my purchases. Anyway, Happy Birthday to me!

Nothing To Report

Well, you'd think after a month I would have loads of things to post about. Wrong. Not a lot of spectacular stuff going on with me. The junior college students will be starting classes next week so things are still not up to the usual pace at work yet. I've got some classes scheduled for this month already so that's a good sign.

I went out on the kayak last weekend and hopefully will get out on the water more often now that it's a little cooler. The weather has been a little inconsistent. It cools off and then gets hot. It looks like it's about to storm and then nothing. Here's a picture of Sandi hiding under the bed just before a thunder storm. She hates thunder.


I've done a good bit of reading and movie watching in the past several weeks. I finally finished the Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. I have now read something by each of the Bronte sisters. Tenant was really very good, the story was intriguing and the vocabulary was far superior to the books I've read lately. I also watched the movie and it was close to the book but it still had some cinematic embellishments. I recommend both but you should read the book first. I finished a very short book called Genesis by Bernard Beckett. This was kind of a sci-fi book and I totally didn't anticipate the ending so I'd recommend that one too (again, it's short so not much commitment needed there). I watched a newer version of Jane Austen's Persuasion that I enjoyed very much.


A colleague notified me about this new board game called Liebrary. It's similar to Balderdash but with a literary spin.





I think the spelling of the game is the best part. This might be fun for the holidays. My family usually enjoys board games like Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit and Scattergories.