Fabulous Birthday

It's fabulous to have a birthday dinner cooked by your daughter, who is a wonderful cook.


It's pretty fabulous to have a birthday meal cooked by your daughter, who is a wonderful cook, who also has the most perfect son on God's green earth.


It's pretty damn fabulous to have a birthday dinner cooked by your daughter, who is a wonderful cook, who also has the most perfect son on God's green earth, whose house is only ten minutes from your house.


It's pretty damn frackin' fabulous to have a birthday dinner cooked by your daughter who is a wonderful cook, who also has the most perfect son on God's green earth, whose house is only ten minutes from your house AND BE ABLE TO WEAR YOUR SLEEPING PANTS THERE.


Man, what a great birthday.

Do You Feel Lucky? Well, DO YOU PUNK?

Flash Back Friday

When my daughter was in high school, she hurt her wrist. I can't remember how she did it. I remember she gave herself a mild concussion by slamming her head on the tampon dispenser in the bathroom (and, oh, what a lot of laughs we have gotten from that story!) but I can't remember how she hurt her wrist.
They called me from her school and I went and picked her up and took her to the emergency room. The wrist was pretty swollen, she was in pain and I was thinking an x-ray would be an excellent idea. When we finally reached the check-in desk, the receptionist called our pediatrician to confirm that she could, indeed be treated but, here's the kicker. The woman she spoke to said we had to go to the pediatrician's office first. Before they would do the x-ray. She hung up and informed me of this.

"Are...are you sure?" I stammered. I couldn't believe it. I had to drive across town before they would fix her wrist? But, being the good and obedient person that I am, who bows before authority, I bundled my crying daughter into the car and we drove across town.

We were seen immediately. As the doctor was examining her wrist, she said casually "Why didn't you just go to the emergency room?" I stared at her, stunned. "I was told we had to come here!". "Oh, no", she replied. "That was a mistake. You should have been seen at the hospital."

I could literally feel my mothering instinct sweeping over my body, like an alien invader taking over as puppetmaster. "Well, who told them that at the hospital?" I inquired politely, not letting her know the heated anger that was raging through my body. "It must have been our receptionist", she replied. And she sent us to yet another location to be x-rayed.

But on the way out, I stopped by the office. "Who?" I asked in a deadly calm voice, "Who did I just talk to on the phone who told me we had to come to this office from the hospital?" One of the women in the office looked up. "Oh, that was me. Ha, ha, my mistake."

And the heated angry alien mother let her have it. I yelled at her that I had just driven my daughter all the way across town with a broken wrist (actually, sprained, but we didn't know that then) and it was all her fault and she should know her job better than that.

The office was right by the waiting room. It was full of parents and children. They were all watching. I didn't care. I don't care.

I'm still glad I yelled at her.

Beep and Tilt

I think my blog post title sounds kinda like a kid's book. Maybe one about a little truck and a bulldozer. Get it? Beep?

But, in reality, it refers to the way I am now spending my days. Everyone has gone home for the summer. Everyone but me. I'm here all alone in this quiet library, taking an inventory of our entire collection.

All the librarians in my county work an extra ten days to do a variety of tasks, one of which is inventory. We have a little handheld gizmo that beeps the bar codes on every single item in the library. If it doesn't beep (actually beep-beep), we have to tilt it to look at the screen and find out why it didn't beep, but instead gave a rather obnoxious honking sound. Depending on the message, I might have to re-beep, realize it just found something that had been marked lost, or go to my computer and put the item which has somehow disappeared out of the system, back into the system.

It's a little boring, to say the least. And my back starts to hurt. And I can't easily sit on the floor like I could when I started this job twenty years ago. And my hand starts to ache from beeping and tilting, beeping and tilting. But you know what? It's a whole lot better than the alternative.

When I first started working as a librarian back in the ice age, we had card catalogs with actual, paper cards. Remember those? None of my students do. And I had a shelf list with a paper card for every single thing in the library. When I took inventory, I had to take a drawer of cards and match each card to every single item on the shelf. It was absolutely horrible, back-breaking, monotonous work. But I didn't know any different. My children often came to work to help me with inventory, since it was much easier with two. My daughter came more often, since she is older. I'll never forget one time when she dropped a drawer full of hundreds of cards on the floor and they all spilled out. I wanted to cry. Instead, I yelled at her.

You know that mother's guilt? That guilt over every, single mean thing you have done or said to your children? That guilt that you keep in the mother's file cabinet in your mind that is full, full, full of drawers of file folders, each one with a different guilt in it? That file cabinet that comes out sometimes when you are trying to sleep and you agonize over it and think "If only I hadn't...If only I had...If only I never...If only I..." Yeah, there's a file in there about that day when she was trying to help and I yelled at her. Those damn cards.

The electronic gizmo may be annoying. It may be boring. It may hurt my hand and make it ache. But at least I'm not yelling at anyone. And that's a plus for that mother's guilt file cabinet.