Get Halloweenie!

Happy Halloween everyone. I hope you have a fun party to go to or a nice neighborhood to trick-or-treat in. I wanted to give an update on my horror movie fest. The list goes as follows:

The Orphanage (a foreign film written by Guillermo del Toro--who is kind of like the M. Night Shamalan of Spain)

The Haunting in Connecticut

The Last House on the Left (not really a horror flick but still scary)

Wind Chill

The Omen: 666

For a bit of fun I watched Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, a little of The Burbs and I hope to watch Hocus Pocus sometime today. I also watched bits and pieces of Friday the 13th and Halloween but I've already seen those. All the scary movies were pretty scary except Wind Chill. It was just kind of dumb.

I bought this for myself at Wally World. It's a little ceramic jack-o-lantern with a tea light candle. Very cheap and very cute.

I also picked up this temporary tattoo. It's on my forearm. I was going to put it on my neck but I decided against it. Anyway, enjoy the day. And night....(scary laughter in the background).

Way Too Much Fun

People Magazine online has a really fun instant makeover section. I played around with it some this week using my blog profile picture and these are my final results...

I stuck with the 'star styles'. If you can't read the names below the pictures, here's a list:

Vanessa Hudgens and Freida Pinto, Demi Moore and Eva Longoria, Sarah Jessica Parker and Rachel Weisz, Miley Cyrus and Nicole Richie, Jennifer Aniston and Katie Holmes, Angelina Jolie and Carrie Underwood, Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan, and the last one is Ashlee Simpson-Wentz (I've got purple eyes in that one). I think I like the Rachel Weisz and the Freida Pinto ones the best. Anyway, when you have some free time and want to play around then this a fun site to visit.

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."