Thursday, February 25, 2010

Library Ninja

I do the interlibrary loan handling for my library, as some of you may know (little though anyone cares.) A week back, a guy asked me to get him some books about the history and practice of ninjitsu. It is astounding (okay, no, not really) how few serious books about becoming a ninja there are. One book that I did find was called Secrets of the Ninja from the Citadel Press. If you can't trust a name like Citadel Press, who can you trust? So I ordered that book.

The way interlibrary loans work (for us 'Tuckians, at least) is that I search for the item on an interlibrary database called Firstsearch, then apply to a queue of five libraries to send me said item. Usually someone sends it, but occasionally it goes through five lenders who all tell me to buzz off. Such was the case with Secrets of the Ninja. The responses I got were as follows:

20100223 FTL No - Not On Shelf/Missing
20100224 DZM  No- Unspecified
20100224 ZGN No - Not On Shelf/Missing
20100224 LEB No - Not On Shelf/Missing
20100225 LFY No - Not On Shelf/Missing

To me, this begs the question: Have all of the copies of this book been.....
STOLEN BY NINJAS!?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Charlie-isms, Snow, and Zombie Roosters

A couple of new Charlie-isms:

I can't believe I forgot this one. This has been a favorite of ours for as long as Charlie has been talking. One day Daddy came in from outside to find Charlie snacking on a small bowl of minimarshmallows. Charlie looked up and said in tones of great triumph, "I got snows!"

Likewise, I came home from work on Friday to find Joe still working on the truck and Charlie watching "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" for the hundredth time. Charlie, it seems, had largely fended for himself as well as a five year old can for most of the day, as he announced to me when I walked in the door, "I ate a hundred gorilla bars today!"

And when we were out playing in the snow after dark last night (Weird things happen to second shift families. 7:00 p.m. is the middle of our afternoon...), Charlie turned to me and said, "Kids, don't try this at home!"

That brings me to the snow. They keep threatening us with 5+ inches of snow, which, for a small town librarian translates to 100 old ladies completely depleting the Christian romance section because they've got to have something to read while we're "snowed in." In this case, we did actually get the snow, and it did actually close some things: the schools and the library. So I guess it's a good thing that the ladies stocked up on books, eh?

The cold temperatures have driven our remaining to roosters to spend their nights snuggled up on the potting bench Joe built me two summers ago, which in turn has driven Joe to call it the "pooping bench." Red is looking much the worse for wear. He appears to have frostbite on his comb and wattles. The combination of the two above facts has led us to decide to put Red out of our misery. Joe decided to do this the other day when Charlie and I were out getting groceries to spare us any possible trauma. While I would've expected him to just shoot the dodgy bird, Joe decided to get old fashioned and break Red's neck. A quick snap, and Red looked quite sufficiently to have joined Earl in the Great Corn Patch in the Sky, so Joe laid him to rest in the woods across the street from our house where, hopefully, there was too much underbrush for Lucy to decide to bring him back. Turns out that was not what he should've been worried about. The next day, Joe called me up on my cel phone:

Joe: You'll never believe who is outside the window pecking at corn.
Me: You're kidding.
Joe: Nope.
Me: I thought you were sure he was dead.
Joe: He looked dead.
Me: Maybe he's a zombie.
Joe: How can you tell?
Me: Well, go out there, and if he looks at you and says, "Bok bok bok bok braaaaaaains!" run for it!