Rawr, and so forth

So I thought that when SRP ended, things would finally settle down.

Ha ha ha. Ahahahahaha. Ha ha ha haaaa...

Boy, was I wrong.

Due to some exciting and dynamic happenings at work, we've ended up short-handed and overworked. I can't go into the details, but suffice it to say we are short three employees and it's really hurting.

So, the good thing is, once we have replaced them we should have a really awesome staff.

The bad thing is, until then we're going to pretty much be going crazy. We're all having to learn new things, and fast. I've taken over Interlibrary Loan and a book club until we get a new librarian in. This is in addition to be on the reference desk for longer periods of time, which means less in general is able to get done.

So yeah, good times.

"If we make it through December/everything's gonna be alright I know"--only Merle Haggard song I know, but boy does it seem apt for this!

So today was Wacky Wednesday. Wacky Wednesday is my branch's way of fighting off the urge to go 100% looney due to Summer Reading. I think we end up looney anyway.

Every Wednesday we do different things...Tiara Day, baseball cap day, s'mores day. Today was Chocolate Fountain Day.

However, this day did not turn out as intended. It sort of turned into...fondue day. The chocolate fountain didn't want to ingest the chocolate to enable the fountaining effect. (I found out later, upon cleaning, that apparently the first bunch of melted chocolate I put in apparently instantly solidified, despite having the heat on in the fountain for 15 mins.) But anyway, fondue day turned out well. I probably had too much chocolate today.

I will probably have strange dreams, a la Homer Simpson in Candyland, tonight.

Yesterday I also realized what my biggest pet peeve is.

"Hi. You ordered a book for me last Tuesday. You probably remember..."

No, I don't remember. I don't remember what I did this morning. (Okay, on that I lie. I know I leveled two night elf druids to 65. Beyond that, I don't know, though. I think I may have eaten ramen noodles for brunch.) But the point is...I'm lucky, at work, knowing what I did the last hour. Don't expect me to remember anything relevant beyond that. I'm too busy to remember much that I've done while at work, aside from know I'm busy doing something.

I'm more of an oracle who sees the future at work, mostly because I work on news releases and newsletters. Ask me what's going on the last week in August, and the Oracle Librarian can probably tell you. I already know what's going on in September now. But last Tuesday?

Not a chance.

Alas, my poor blog has been neglected, again. I think this is 99.9% due to it being summer and absolutely crazy.

Today is Sunday, and I am at work. You may be saying to yourself, "How do you have time to blog at work?!" This is due to the odd fact that on weekends, we are nowhere near as insanely busy as during the week. (This will change once the school year begins anew, of course.) So for now, the weekends are the rare time we can get stuff done.

The fact that our libraries became official cooling centers didn't really help matters. This meant that we had to open earlier on Mondays and Fridays. Which also meant that we can now no longer have staff meetings, or in generaly get anything accomplished. Que sera, sera. However, they also said we could go casual every day because of this. So I am taking extreme advantage of it. Jeans every single day? Oh yeah.

Goodbye, khakis...see you this Fall!

So last week I had an unusual encounter with a customer. Get this...

The gentleman's last experience with computers was 1985. Our government's lovely Social Security Administration told him that he had to go online to do...something. I was never clear on what. So he came to the library and explained he had not used a PC since 1985.

Yeah, things have changed a little since then.

I had to show him how to use a mouse (did mice exist in 1985? I do not recall...), what internet explorer was, how to type in the address bar--along with what an address was, and things like how to click and what left clicking and right clicking meant. Phew. I also directed him to our free computer class on Tuesdays. If anyone ever needed one, he did...

So when he finished with the computer, he walke dup to my desk and announced "Well, I've tried that internet thing. I don't think I'm going to use it anymore."

Huh. That was my first experience with anyone who had decided to never use the internet again.

Me? I think I'll continue to use the internet.

So, I finally compiled the whale watching video, as promised. Never mind that I did it in the middle of an Ulduar raid because Freya's trash makes me want to smash my face into the keyboard. Not sure what it is about a room of plants we have to kill...maybe it gets to me because of the drought being rough on our yard? Maybe!

Anyway, without further ado, here is the whale watching!

So hubby and I had a very nice time on our min-vacation. Aside from the waking up obscenely early to make flights part, anyway.

We arrived at Boston just in time for lunch, and had a nice meal at a place called Buggaboo steak House. I had some really good grilled chicken covered in BBQ sauce and cheese. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

We took it easy Thursday, though we did see Transformers 2. I was pretty sick of sitting, so the long movie was not as exciting to me as it might have otherwise been. And I got a little bored with what seemed to be excessive fight scenes. "Omg look Optimus Prime is like 2 miles away from us let's go!" Yeah it looked like a half mile on the movie screen.

Afterward we went to an art opening for a friend of the brother-in-law's...it was, oddly enough, at an upscale beauty salon. They were doing free chair massages. I took advantage of that. Then we took advantage of Dunkin' Donuts afterward--it was right next door. (And one of 98 in Boston.)

Friday was probably my favorite day...whale watching! We drove out to Gloucester for our departure with 7 Seas Whale Watch. It was really sort of eerie as we made our way to Stellwagen Bank (which is where the whales go to eat). We had fog rolling in from time to time, which made the trip rather...ghostly.

All in all, we saw 7 humpbacks (Pinpoint, Lavalliere, and Cajun were the names of 3 of them), 3 fin whales, and a couple minke whales. It was really very neat and I plan to do that again next time I'm in that neck of the woods...here are some photos to enjoy! (Video will be forthcoming once I've wrangled that mess together) An amazing shot of a humpback's tail!

Cajun comes up for some lunch. She had her own way of catching her food, which was different from Pinpoint's!Cajun again, getting lunch. The seabirds went absolutely nuts while the whales were hunting, and sometimes looked in danger of being snapped up accidentally!

We went to the town of Rockport afterward, which was not very far from Gloucester. They had many neat shops for us to peruse, and we also had dinner there.

Saturday was, of course, the Fourth of July. And Boston was pretty much nuts because of it. We went and had lunch at Cheers. They had really, really good burgers--definitely recommend them for a good meal!

We also went to the New England Aquarium, which is very nice. Their penguin display was extremely cute!

After the Aquarium we headed back to the condo...because luckily it was within walking distance of all the evening festivities! The Charlies River was just a stone's throw away (well, maybe a little more) so we walked there. It was nice weather--I wore a light jacket. How often will I ever say that about the Fourth of July?

And the fireworks were stunning. We could hear the music thanks to some walkmen radios that the guys ingeniously thought to bring along.

The next day, we had brunch at The Top of the Hub, which is the top of the Prudential building. We had a really, really nice view. I also had a chance to attempt to taste new and weird foods like duck quiche and creme brulee. (Duck quiche was okay, creme brulee I am not a fan of.)

Here's a view from the Top of the Hub. This is showing where we were along the Charles River the night before...we were to the right of the boat house.

We also managed to get a view of Fenway Park...and if you squint, you can tell there are people in the stands!

Later on Sunday, we took a duck tour. The duck vehicles are authentic WW2-era vehicles, some that participated in D-Day!

Our duck tour took us around Boston by land...and then by water.

After our duck tour, we had dinner (with our niece--she's so adorable!) and then headed to the Improv Asylum for their "Lost in Boston" show which was a mix of skits and improv. They were actually very funny, well mostly funny--with improv it's hard to be funny 100% of the time, but they were good at what they did.

All in all, we had a great trip...look for those whale watching videos soon!

So today was a technology day for the hubby and I. It started off with me playing with our digital camera and taking a short movie of Rose with her new toy. I uploaded it to youtube so the world can see our silly dog "in the flesh" (or pixels).



I had been thinking more about our trip. We'd been planning to take hubby's ancient laptop with us, but I was thinking more and more that it's cumbersome and not very easy to lug around and...well, an ipod is.

After much online research, I decided that an ipod touch might be nice to get. So the hubby and I set out to Best Buy and did some in-depth shopping. I ended up taking home a new toy. So far it's been pretty neat to mess around with, and has handy things like a Safari browser for whenever we're in a wi-fi area. It may possibly even have GPS, I'm not 100% sure on that.

We also ended up heading home with a new Wii addition, the Wii Fit. We tried it out this evening, and I must say we did get a pretty good workout from it! We got it on sale and so far I think as long as we use it even every couple of days we should make it worthwhile.

Oh, and at long last here is the picture I promised a while back of one of my birthday gifts lounging in our garden!



The garden is looking much rougher now due to the 104 degree heat...hopefully everything will pull through!

So it's Saturday, and I'm sitting here at work. The positive thing is that means I was off yesterday, and sometimes it's nice to be off on a Friday/ On the other hand...I still wish I was off on a Saturday! Oh well, I'll be off on Saturdays again in July. Silver lining to the cloud.

And in other news, next weekend is Fourth of July. Not only does that mean we're celebrating our Independence, but hubby and I are also going on a trip! We're going up to Boston to visit hubby's brother for the weekend. It should be a fun trip, we're scheduled to go whale watching. I'm only slightly nervous about the actul flight to and from.

I remember a time when I actually liked to fly and thought it was pretty cool. Now it sort of scares me a bit, perhaps because of all the recent plane problems. But thousands of flights happen every day and they're just fine, right? I still can't shake a dread for flying. Not to mention hubby and I don't get to sit together on the trip up since the flight is too full. Hopefully I don't have to sit between two large, smelly people. Or next to a kid who screams the whole time. I think I might prefer a busy 3 hours at work during Summer Reading to that--at least here I can tell a screaming kid to tone it down.

So cross your fingers for pleasant flights for us and a nice trip. :)

Also, tomorrow is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary! Wow! Congratulations to them, and many more to come. They're celebrating in Vegas!