Rhubarb!

Harris Teeter had rhubarb!

RHUBARB!

I think the produce manager was a little alarmed by the two women standing in front of the case with their jaws about on the floor, looking back and forth from the pretty pink bunches to each other and saying things like "can you believe it!" and "holy cow!"

The produce manager, it turns out, had never seen rhubarb before, either, so the mystery of how the heck it got to Blythewood only deepens. Rhubarb doesn't grow in South Carolina. Heck, people in South Carolina have never even heard of rhubarb. And it definitely does not ship well. So why would HT have it, and how did it get there?

I'd be more perturbed by this, but I get to go home and make strawberry rhubarb pie.

More Things I Have Learned

This is our crazy busy season at the library. Things have been complicated by the fact that one staff member got shingles last month and that I am gone for half of this month at various conferences and meetings and oh yes, helping my mother move.

However, all this chaos has been very educational. Things I've learned this month include:

• If you buy one head of lettuce, one tomato, one cucmber, and twenty-two large bottles of salad dressing, the checkout lady at Wal-Mart gives you a very strange look. When you pay for all this with a business credit card, the look gets even stranger.
• Our patrons are an unflappable bunch. When a procession of library staff marches through the computer area carrying carving knives, no one even blinks. They do seem a little more aware of the staff member carrying the HUMONGOUS bowl containing enough lettuce for a hundred people, though. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they were actually startled, or even interested, by this, however.
• Librarians - or maybe just library school grad students - are a bloodthirsty bunch. If you post a message about a sword to a listserv, you get fifty responses in fifteen minutes. Some of them will be from other libraries wanting a nice big sword to hang over the circulation desk.
  
• Legal advice is better when it's free, but the little old ladies who frequent the library think it is best when delivered by a good-looking male lawyer. (Actual quote from an evaluation form: "Very informative and knowledgeable. Also good-looking.")
• The general public does not seem at all perturbed to see their librarian roaming around in a t-shirt with the logo of The Guild of Radical Militant Librarians. They are much more bothered by giant temporary tattoos of sparkly fairies with purple wings applied to the librarian's face.

I will be taking a brief break from the insanity here to head off to a conference in Charleston this week, where I plan to use my avoiding-work-while-looking-busy skills to duck out of the more boring sessions and go on a search for pants that fit. I will then head to Columbia to help unload boxes for my mother - and incidentally try and find a new home for that sword. Which leads me to one final lesson from this month:

• You really should clean out your closet often enough not to be completely baffled by the things you find in it. Like the bundle of swords and box of knives and daggers in the back corner.
  

[Foodie] Meme

Okay, this one made me laugh (I saw it at Married...With Dinner):

1. Pick up the nearest [foodie] book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag 5 other people* and acknowledge who tagged you.

So, here goes. I decided (since I am sitting at my desk at the moment) to ignore the thousand or so foodie books out front and see if there were any in the bags in the workroom. Which there was.

Unfortunately, there aren't any words on page 123 of Hello, Cupcake! And the page before it has a list of ingredients. But it's a fun book anyway. Even if it does have me craving cupcakes.


This meme reminds me of the essay question on the UC application, which gave quotes from certain pages in a particular book and asked you to write something using them all. And if you didn't like those quotes, you could use quotes from the same page numbers in the book of your choice. (And no, before you ask, I did not choose that essay option. I don't remember what the heck I wrote about, but I know it required a lot less effort than that.)

Headlines

I never thought I would see the day that Chesterfield County was in the national news. And I really never thought it would be because of this.

Things I Learned Last Weekend

• Purple frosting is harder to make than you might think.

• You can't expect a bunch of kids to sit still for more than thirty seconds. Just leave the movie playing and accept the chaos.

• When putting sprinkles on five dozen cupcakes, put the cupcakes in the sink first. Sprinkles have amazing and mysterious aerodynamic properties that cause them to end up everywhere if not carefully contained. (See picture above for the results of sprinkles properly contained.)
  

• The color pink has a sneaking fascination for every girl everywhere.

• There is absolutely nothing that should not be in a librarian's job description. Give "pony rides" to shrieking little girls? Check. Simultaneously keep an eye on ten preteens with bottles of colored sand and ponder the question of what on earth makes Patrick Dempsey so popular? Check. Bake and frost five dozen cupcakes? Check.

• There is a princess for everyone. (We had a Mulan, a Belle, a Cinderella, a Sleeping Beauty, two Jasmines, a Tinkerbell (we'll leave aside the question of whether she is actually a princess), and three generic princesses in attendance on Saturday.)

• Everyone should have a tiara. (Mine is purple - thanks G!)

• If you're going to bake and frost five dozen cupcakes, you really ought to do it more than twelve hours before Passover begins. And not schedule a Princess Party between the baking and sunset.
  

On being a historian

Well, the footnotes are done.

Now, if I can just get the historiography added to the introduction.

And do something about my tendency towards passive dating style in my citations. (Passive dating style. No kidding. I didn't even know there was such a thing, but if David Carr says my dating is passive, then it must be passive.)

And if The Historian actually accepts this for publication this time around, it might even be worth it.

Celebrities

From my friend Shay's blog (which is here):

I was recently asked the question: Name three celebrities (alive) who you would like to meet and three celebrities (deceased) that you would have liked to meet and the reasons why for each one.

First the alive group:

Shay and I agree on Vincent D'Onofrio, at any rate. The man is brilliantly talented, and also the cause of much useless speculation which keeps me entertained between meetings (and sometimes during them).

The ladies over at RBEB would think that Robert Beltran ought to be on my list - which he would be if only so I could ask him why on earth, with his talent, he appears on-screen so little. If I could actually act I would be flaunting that talent to everyone who held still long enough. (And now aren't you all glad that I can't?)

And then, er, how about James Billington? Okay, so he isn't a celebrity outside of my little world. But I mean, come on, the Librarian of Congress! I need to meet him and then hold him hostage until he agrees to name me as his successor, or something. Or maybe just toss him out the nearest window and casually take over his job. Do you think anyone would notice?

And three dead celebrities:

Do presidents count? Because I've always wanted to meet Martin Van Buren. I know, trust me to choose a president no one has ever heard of for my favorite. But just look at his portraits. There was a man who was not afraid to stand out in a crowd.

Katharine Hepburn. I don't think I would have liked her much, but I admire her tenacity. And I want to thank her for playing the only non-frumpy, non-bun-wearing librarian in all of moviedom, in Desk Set. (Not to mention for her performance in The Lion In Winter, which is one of my all-time favorites.)

And let's see. A third one. Er... uh-oh. I think I'm stuck. How about Jane Austen? Or Charlotte Bronte? Or better yet, her sisters. Or Charles Dickens. Or...

Yup, it's official. I am such a library geek. Sigh.