We saw Golden Compass today. Before I give my opinion of it, I should preface by saying that I've only read the first book of the series and that was at least five years ago so my memories of more than the broad details of the plot are pretty sketchy. That said, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I've heard complaining that it felt like the plot was too crammed trying to get all of the plot of the book in a two-hour movie, but it seemed fine to me - easy to follow, good pacing, no weird jumps. The visuals were fantastic.
I think Golden Compass falls into the rare category of movies I liked better than the books they were based on, usually because putting the book on screen takes out what I didn't like about the book and lets me enjoy the story.* In this case, I ground to halt because the narrative voice just felt too negative - barely anyone was likeable, almost none of the adults could be trusted, the main character was a little brat. I think the movie was an improvement because it's a lot easier to like Lyra when you can't hear her inner monologue. The movie version of Lyra came across as plucky and endearingly contrary, not bratty and oppositional defiant like her book counterpart. They also wisely ended the movie before the book ends, which left it on a much more positive note and made it easier to walk out of the theatre feeling good about what I had seen, instead of the somewhat depressed feeling I had putting down the book.
In any case, His Dark Materials is going back on my reading list, hopefully to make it all the way through this time. I keep finding myself wondering if I would have liked the books better if I had read them when I was ten. At that age, I was a lot more oblivious to the things that bother me now. Certainly seeing children in danger didn't bother me nearly so much, and I think I wouldn't have disliked Lyra nearly so much when I was a child myself.
I've been thinking again about the odd experience of rereading childhood books with adult eyes lately because I've been reading the Little House books. I discovered a while ago that while I had read the rest of the series many many times, I never read Little House on the Prairie. I think maybe my elementary school library didn't have that book for some reason. Goodness, it's much harder to enjoy a book when you're much more aware of racism and the devastation that Western settlement caused to the Native Americans. I suppose it was gracious of Pa Ingalls to disagree with the idea that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, but his airy assurances that the US army would move the Native Americans who were inconveniently inhabiting the land they had stolen and that white people deserved that land more than the people who had just lived on it for the past thousand years or so are more than a little appalling, and dampen my enjoyment of the book, to say the least.
And yet I'm still reading the series. The books are mostly about Laura, after all, who was innocent in what her parents were doing (well, until she grew up and settled her own stolen land). I enjoy the stories (that don't involve Manifest Destiny or naked racism) and the historical detail is fascinating. One thing you have to be prepared for when reading historical books is encountering historical attitudes that were the prevailing opinion of the day, so this sort of thing is the price of admission for this sort of book. You can either put it down in disgust or take it as an object lesson of how far we've come and a reminder of our not-so-glorious past. And most of the Native American stuff is concentrated in the one book, so once you get past it, it's not so bad.
Still, this reminds me a bit of a couple years ago when I was looking for a book to read while I was in Michigan and decided to reread Narnia before I saw the movie. I had read them again when I was twenty, but clearly the years since then have changed my perceptions. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe wasn't so bad, although the sexism made me sigh resignedly and for the first time, the shallow, hand-waving nature of the ending really bothered me (they lived entire lives in Narnia, and then just left them to go back to our world without a second thought? No homesickness on either end or mourning for the adult live they had left?). Prince Caspian was fine. And then I read The Horse and His Boy, which was my favorite, and ran aground on the rocky shoals of the book's naked racism. Do I condemn C.S. Lewis for the obvious prejudices in his books? No, because like Laura Ingalls Wilder, he was a product of his times and I don't generally condemn people for being unable to see past the values of the times they lived in. C.S. Lewis was a generally good man who had the somewhat congenial racism and sexism common to British men in the 50s, and I don't really expect much different out of him.
At the same time, it's hard not to let it affect my enjoyment of the books, and I'm now planning to have some discussions with K about these issues when she's old enough to read them. I'm pretty sure my reaction to the movie of Wardrobe was influenced by my new perceptions of the book. I found it disappointing, largely because I think I wanted to see the movie as a ten-year-old, and instead I got a movie that stuck most of what bothered me about the book up on the screen and emphasized it.
It's a dicey thing, revisiting the things you loved as a child. I'm certainly a better person for my increased empathy and sensitivity and being more aware of my cultural assumptions and trying to see past them, but occasionally I miss being able to read with the uncritical eye I had when I was ten.
*The other movie/book that falls in this category is Lord of the Rings, which was able to correct Tolkien's inability to grasp the concept of "Show, don't tell." I had always wondered why I couldn't get into the books more, until the last time I took a stab at them after watching the movies and discovered that it was all of the pointless detail. He took three pages to describe what happened to the hobbits' ponies after they ran away in the first book. Three pages. Good Lord, nobody needs that level of detail. No wonder I had trouble getting into the plot. (Note to rabid Tolkien fans: please don't hurt me)
Friday, January 4, 2008
Monday, December 31, 2007
Happy New Year!
This past year was simply awful, in a way it hasn't been since the horrible duo of 2001 and 2002 where I lost my remaining grandparents, my father was diagnosed and my mother had her accident. This year was lonely and depressed, and was rather hard on a number of friends as well. So phooey on you, 2007. We won't miss you one tiny little bit.
It would take a significant amount of work for 2008 not to be better than 2007, so I have high hopes for the coming year. I wish nothing but happiness and good cheer for all of you in the next year, and a reversal of fortunes for those of us who have been on the receiving end of too much bad luck.
It would take a significant amount of work for 2008 not to be better than 2007, so I have high hopes for the coming year. I wish nothing but happiness and good cheer for all of you in the next year, and a reversal of fortunes for those of us who have been on the receiving end of too much bad luck.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
We are now somewhat moved into the new house. Well, our furniture and a lot of our clothes are moved into the new house, and our old house bears a suspicious resemblance to the floor of a teenage boy's bedroom, with lots of stuff strewn haphazardly over the floor but hopefully less mold.
I do quite like the new house. For some reason, it was always smaller in my memory than it actually is, so the past day has been spent feeling pleasantly surprised at how spacious our new surroundings really are. Our bedroom is smaller, but we had more room than we needed and in all the wrong directions before. K's bedroom is bigger and the guest room is about the same size but a better shape. The same goes for the kitchen, which is no longer so narrow that if two people want to pass each other in it, they really need to be married for it to be moral. The dining room is smaller, but we can say a cavalier "Pshaw" to that little detail because of the basement rec room, which is huge. We have all of our living room furniture in it, the tv and entertainment center and all of K's toys, including the sizeable train table she got for Christmas, and it still doesn't feel crowded. The upstairs living room is going to hold most of our bookcases and serve as a library, and if the table feels too crowded in the dining room, there's enough room to put it in there as well. It's all the same room, really, just in an L shape (the kitchen-living room-dining room are basically a big square room with a wall between the the kitchen and living room. I think if I owned this house, I would knock down the wall and put up an island so the entire area would be open.
Hopefully our process of ant-like ferrying of our stuff from one house to the next will be efficient enough to have us out in the next two weeks (with a five-day chunk taken out for a trip to Michigan for Christmas. I keep forgetting about the little detail of a plane trip this week, or at least I remember it, but not that it's this week. When my mother told me tonight she would see me in three days, it came as a big shock even though the logistics of the trip were about half of our phone conversation. My brain, it is mush). We are at stage two of stuff, the three stages being:
1. The things you absolutely need to live in your house in any sort of reasonable comfort (i.e., not just sleeping on an air mattress and eating sitting on a folding chair with your plate on your knees)
2. The things you don't need right away but are still nice to have
3. The crap you should have thrown away five years ago but still inexplicably carry from house to house, sometimes not even bothering to take it out of the box in between
I am not yet sick of moving. I expect I will be singing a very different tune around December 28 or so though, so stay tuned.
I do quite like the new house. For some reason, it was always smaller in my memory than it actually is, so the past day has been spent feeling pleasantly surprised at how spacious our new surroundings really are. Our bedroom is smaller, but we had more room than we needed and in all the wrong directions before. K's bedroom is bigger and the guest room is about the same size but a better shape. The same goes for the kitchen, which is no longer so narrow that if two people want to pass each other in it, they really need to be married for it to be moral. The dining room is smaller, but we can say a cavalier "Pshaw" to that little detail because of the basement rec room, which is huge. We have all of our living room furniture in it, the tv and entertainment center and all of K's toys, including the sizeable train table she got for Christmas, and it still doesn't feel crowded. The upstairs living room is going to hold most of our bookcases and serve as a library, and if the table feels too crowded in the dining room, there's enough room to put it in there as well. It's all the same room, really, just in an L shape (the kitchen-living room-dining room are basically a big square room with a wall between the the kitchen and living room. I think if I owned this house, I would knock down the wall and put up an island so the entire area would be open.
Hopefully our process of ant-like ferrying of our stuff from one house to the next will be efficient enough to have us out in the next two weeks (with a five-day chunk taken out for a trip to Michigan for Christmas. I keep forgetting about the little detail of a plane trip this week, or at least I remember it, but not that it's this week. When my mother told me tonight she would see me in three days, it came as a big shock even though the logistics of the trip were about half of our phone conversation. My brain, it is mush). We are at stage two of stuff, the three stages being:
1. The things you absolutely need to live in your house in any sort of reasonable comfort (i.e., not just sleeping on an air mattress and eating sitting on a folding chair with your plate on your knees)
2. The things you don't need right away but are still nice to have
3. The crap you should have thrown away five years ago but still inexplicably carry from house to house, sometimes not even bothering to take it out of the box in between
I am not yet sick of moving. I expect I will be singing a very different tune around December 28 or so though, so stay tuned.
Friday, December 14, 2007
I talked to my boss today about getting catalog cards that could go through the printer, and while I had her blessing to make free with the Gaylord catalog, talked her into spine labels for the printer as well as more book tape. Christmas gifts for the geeky librarian!
I completed my campaign to pull the library into the 20th century by making my best pitch for putting the catalog on the computer, and I think I've talked her into it (as far as I can tell, her hesitation is due to the number of staff hours it would take to do the data entry. But the museum worker there and I pointed out that it was the sort of work you could do during quiet times and pick up and put down. Plus we have a couple of new volunteers just ripe to abuse with a stultifying project). And it's a good thing I did because I discovered a couple powerful new reasons to have the catalog on computer.
First, I dropped an entire drawerful of cards. Fortunately, they dropped in a clump and didn't get out of order, so it was easy to clean them up. But that wouldn't happen with a computer. Of course, dropping a computer would have much more disastrous consequences, but I don't think I would have as many occasions to be carrying around our desktop. Also, electronic records are much easier to duplicate than five hundred billion catalog cards.
Then, I was filing cards and discovered a problem I hadn't thought of before but is an obvious issue in any library with records going back far enough: outdated subject headings. More to the point, outdated subject headings that use terms that are now considered offensive. Specifically, I was in the N drawer and found the section of cards for the subject headings that start with "Negro." Erk. I pulled them all as quickly as I could so I could update them to the current term and went through the rest of the catalog to get the other related cards that might have those subject headings on them.* And while I was at that tedious task, I thought about how easy it would be to simply call up on the computer all the records that use that term and change them in one fell swoop. A five minute job, which will take me much longer since I have to retype all of the cards and then file them again. I can't wait until we move our level of technology into the 1980s.
*If reading about this makes you want to rant about all of the PCness rampant in the world today, please don't bother sharing it. While on the one hand I certainly have my eye-rolling moments and occasionally want to point out that changing what you call yourself isn't necessarily going to leave behind the baggage of prejudice you experience, it seems to me that an awful lot of what people call PC is common politeness. And it seems like an awful lot of the time, when I see people ranting about it, what they're really saying is that they don't want to interrogate their internalized racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., and they resent being made uncomfortable by you bringing the topic up and making them think about it.
I completed my campaign to pull the library into the 20th century by making my best pitch for putting the catalog on the computer, and I think I've talked her into it (as far as I can tell, her hesitation is due to the number of staff hours it would take to do the data entry. But the museum worker there and I pointed out that it was the sort of work you could do during quiet times and pick up and put down. Plus we have a couple of new volunteers just ripe to abuse with a stultifying project). And it's a good thing I did because I discovered a couple powerful new reasons to have the catalog on computer.
First, I dropped an entire drawerful of cards. Fortunately, they dropped in a clump and didn't get out of order, so it was easy to clean them up. But that wouldn't happen with a computer. Of course, dropping a computer would have much more disastrous consequences, but I don't think I would have as many occasions to be carrying around our desktop. Also, electronic records are much easier to duplicate than five hundred billion catalog cards.
Then, I was filing cards and discovered a problem I hadn't thought of before but is an obvious issue in any library with records going back far enough: outdated subject headings. More to the point, outdated subject headings that use terms that are now considered offensive. Specifically, I was in the N drawer and found the section of cards for the subject headings that start with "Negro." Erk. I pulled them all as quickly as I could so I could update them to the current term and went through the rest of the catalog to get the other related cards that might have those subject headings on them.* And while I was at that tedious task, I thought about how easy it would be to simply call up on the computer all the records that use that term and change them in one fell swoop. A five minute job, which will take me much longer since I have to retype all of the cards and then file them again. I can't wait until we move our level of technology into the 1980s.
*If reading about this makes you want to rant about all of the PCness rampant in the world today, please don't bother sharing it. While on the one hand I certainly have my eye-rolling moments and occasionally want to point out that changing what you call yourself isn't necessarily going to leave behind the baggage of prejudice you experience, it seems to me that an awful lot of what people call PC is common politeness. And it seems like an awful lot of the time, when I see people ranting about it, what they're really saying is that they don't want to interrogate their internalized racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., and they resent being made uncomfortable by you bringing the topic up and making them think about it.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
I think we are in complete denial about the fact that we're moving in THREE DAYS. Currently, I'm sitting here working on the sweater for K that has consumed my brain lately; I don't want to do Ebay stuff, I certainly don't want to pack, I just want to knit. Our books are about half packed right now, and I threw some bathroom stuff in a box earlier today. We have a bunch of stuff that never really got unpacked which has mostly been moved over to the new house, so it can sit mostly unpacked in _that_ garage. But other than that? We're woefully underpacked when you consider that we rented a truck for Sunday.
The problem is that we've been lured by the siren song of the fact that we're only moving two miles and we have an entire month of overlap between leases. Theoretically, this means we can take stuff over in stages in a leisurely manner, hopping and skipping all the way. But I'm starting to be afraid what will actually happen is that we'll find ourselves late on December 30, shoveling our crap into the car for trip after endless trip as our belongings mate and multiply before our very eyes.
It's not too late to avoid this dire fate. I could start by closing the laptop and getting up and packing more books. Did I mention we discovered this week that there are built-in bookshelves in the rec room downstairs of our new house? And a totally cool fold-out desk in the wall.
The problem is that we've been lured by the siren song of the fact that we're only moving two miles and we have an entire month of overlap between leases. Theoretically, this means we can take stuff over in stages in a leisurely manner, hopping and skipping all the way. But I'm starting to be afraid what will actually happen is that we'll find ourselves late on December 30, shoveling our crap into the car for trip after endless trip as our belongings mate and multiply before our very eyes.
It's not too late to avoid this dire fate. I could start by closing the laptop and getting up and packing more books. Did I mention we discovered this week that there are built-in bookshelves in the rec room downstairs of our new house? And a totally cool fold-out desk in the wall.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Sisyphus at the Typewriter; or, Keep Your Wooden Sabots Away From My Computer
We recently got a huge donation of cat-themed mysteries at work. This is great since we have a high little-old-lady quotient among our patrons, so books that combine mysteries AND cats are the intersection of perfect.
But I have begun to feel like if I go to purgatory when I die, I will be required to type "Lilian Jackson Braun" over and over for the rest of eternity, probably on a typewriter where every third key sticks.
I don't mind using the typewriter for cataloging, even the days like yesterday when I'm clearly too tired to be operating heavy machinery* and I wind up awash in correction fluid. What I mind is typing the same thing over and over and over again on each of the minimum of three catalog cards every book requires, and the fresh hell that breaks loose when a book has subject headings assigned, which each need a card of their own.
Today I realized that while we don't have 3x5 cards that can go through the printer, we do have card stock and a paper cutter. So I took ten minutes and set up a template in Word. And then I cataloged nine books in 15 minutes through the magic of cut and paste when yesterday it took me an hour and a half to get through 6 books. Behold the power of library automation.
*You don't think a typewriter is heavy machinery? Then I invite you to come try to pick up our venerable IBM Selectric, which as far as I can tell is made from a cross between concrete, anvils and pure malevolence. Always assuming you're not scared off by the way it squats in the corner of the room, humming threateningly and radiating evil, of course.
But I have begun to feel like if I go to purgatory when I die, I will be required to type "Lilian Jackson Braun" over and over for the rest of eternity, probably on a typewriter where every third key sticks.
I don't mind using the typewriter for cataloging, even the days like yesterday when I'm clearly too tired to be operating heavy machinery* and I wind up awash in correction fluid. What I mind is typing the same thing over and over and over again on each of the minimum of three catalog cards every book requires, and the fresh hell that breaks loose when a book has subject headings assigned, which each need a card of their own.
Today I realized that while we don't have 3x5 cards that can go through the printer, we do have card stock and a paper cutter. So I took ten minutes and set up a template in Word. And then I cataloged nine books in 15 minutes through the magic of cut and paste when yesterday it took me an hour and a half to get through 6 books. Behold the power of library automation.
*You don't think a typewriter is heavy machinery? Then I invite you to come try to pick up our venerable IBM Selectric, which as far as I can tell is made from a cross between concrete, anvils and pure malevolence. Always assuming you're not scared off by the way it squats in the corner of the room, humming threateningly and radiating evil, of course.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Two books I found at work today
Your Psychic Power and How to Develop Them
Psychic Archeology: Your Time Machine to the Past
And as a result of this, I now know that "Parapsychology and Archeology" is a Library of Congress subject heading. Words cannot express my delight.
We have a surprisingly large 133* section. I think we may have gotten a donation from a generous crackpot, or perhaps the crackpot's heirs. I think that section may soon get quite a bit smaller, since I don't think we really need to be giving shelf space to the writings of crazy nutters that haven't been checked out in the past twenty years. If they were popular writings of crazy nutters, that would be a different matter entirely. But given the dust from a bygone prehistoric era that puffs up every time you open one of those books, I think that's a section ripe for weeding.
*Occultism and Supernatural/Parapsychology/crazy weird ravings by eccentric loons
Psychic Archeology: Your Time Machine to the Past
And as a result of this, I now know that "Parapsychology and Archeology" is a Library of Congress subject heading. Words cannot express my delight.
We have a surprisingly large 133* section. I think we may have gotten a donation from a generous crackpot, or perhaps the crackpot's heirs. I think that section may soon get quite a bit smaller, since I don't think we really need to be giving shelf space to the writings of crazy nutters that haven't been checked out in the past twenty years. If they were popular writings of crazy nutters, that would be a different matter entirely. But given the dust from a bygone prehistoric era that puffs up every time you open one of those books, I think that's a section ripe for weeding.
*Occultism and Supernatural/Parapsychology/crazy weird ravings by eccentric loons
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The textbook definition of "mixed blessing"
The other day, K took off a wet diaper and put it in the toilet. There's a certain logic there, but I don't like to think what a large cloth diaper would do to our plumbing.
However, she wasn't able to flush the toilet because the handle has been broken for the past two weeks and the only way to flush is to lift the lid off and yank the chain, which K isn't nearly storng enough to do.
Do you think I should send our landlord a thank you note for his negligence?
However, she wasn't able to flush the toilet because the handle has been broken for the past two weeks and the only way to flush is to lift the lid off and yank the chain, which K isn't nearly storng enough to do.
Do you think I should send our landlord a thank you note for his negligence?
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Two
(and a half)
I've been terribly negligent in keeping up with the K updates. The combination of a chaotic summer, depression and grief, too much work and the fact that her development just isn't as dramatic from month to month any more have all conspired to keep me from writing all of her incredible changes down.
I know for many people two is a challenging age. And we certainly have our share of tantrums, defiance and a very definite, yet capricious idea of how the world should be ordered. But I have to say (and don't hate me for this, fellow parents of two-year-olds), two is an absolutely fabulous age for us. Because we had all of those negative behaviors before she turned two, but we also had screaming and bucking when we tried to get her in her carseat, a desperate need for instant gratification and a hair-trigger whine. All that is a lot better these days, and two is a walk in the park compared to 21 and 22 months.
Mental development:
I think the improvement in disposition can be traced to a few leaps forward in brain development:
1. She has a much better understanding of sequences, and therefore understands that, for instance, to go to the library we first have to put her shoes and coat on and then get in the car, so she will do all of those things willingly. And she recognizes that I have to go through certain steps to make her lunch, so as long as she sees me doing those things, she doesn't need to wail until she gets the food she wants. I can't begin to say how much more pleasant this makes life.
2. She can talk better and get across a lot of what she needs verbally. I was worried about her speech for a while - it seemed odd that a child that had a vocabulary that big didn't seem to talk much. As it turns out, she was talking, just not intelligibly. But she's more understandable and I'm listening more closely, so we're communicating much better now.
It feels like K is losing so much of the randomness of early toddlerhood. She goes about her play with so much purpose. She plays with her trains and cars, builds towers with her blocks, uses her doctor kit to listen to our hearts and look in our ears, makes pretend cookies out of play-doh, makes her dinosaurs roar and takes meticulous care of her baby doll. What she does these days is a lot more recognizable tasks of imaginative play and a lot less random playing with physics (shaking and banging things, taking things in and out of other things, ripping things up, etc).
She recognizes some letters, can count objects at least up to ten, recognizes shapes and colors and knows her body parts. She can unhesitatingly match shapes.
I am doing my best to provide her with a wide variety of potential interests that ignore stereotypical gender lines, and so far it seems to be working. She loves her blocks and trains, her toy toolkit, dinosaurs (why, oh why do girls' clothes not have dinosaurs on them?) and running her cars down ramps. But she also loves to help me cook and do housework, try on new clothes and is absolutely, passionately baby-obsessed. Lately, her baby doll is her favorite toy and we can't go anywhere without it and its bottles just in case it gets hungry. She dresses it and tenderly straps it into its stroller.
That seems like a nice balance of interests to me. Right now, she has no idea that there are certain things she should and shouldn't like because of her sex, and I'm hoping to keep it that way for a while.
Physical development:
I'm in awe of how far her gross motor skills have come from last spring when I first started taking her to the playground to now. She started the summer crawling up stairs, teetering across the bridges and was more likely to try to step out into thin air than to successfully sit down at the top of a slide to slide down. Now, she walks up and down stairs holding onto the rail, runs confidently, has mastered slides and is obsessed with ladders, which she has mostly figured out.
Her fine motor skills are just fantastic. Recently, she picked up a jar of tiny beads and I found her successfully threading them onto a cord. She uses silverware well and has figured out a way to use chopsticks in a very clumsy, yet somewhat successful fashion. She can put on a shirt, pants and socks (she's been successfully stripping naked for nearly two years now).
K is currently 35.5 inches and 29 pounds. Her arms and legs are getting longer and she's almost lost her toddler potbelly. I can't believe how much she's grown up in the past few months. I can see her babyhood slipping away, almost gone, with this child emerging in her place. Sniff.
I've been terribly negligent in keeping up with the K updates. The combination of a chaotic summer, depression and grief, too much work and the fact that her development just isn't as dramatic from month to month any more have all conspired to keep me from writing all of her incredible changes down.
I know for many people two is a challenging age. And we certainly have our share of tantrums, defiance and a very definite, yet capricious idea of how the world should be ordered. But I have to say (and don't hate me for this, fellow parents of two-year-olds), two is an absolutely fabulous age for us. Because we had all of those negative behaviors before she turned two, but we also had screaming and bucking when we tried to get her in her carseat, a desperate need for instant gratification and a hair-trigger whine. All that is a lot better these days, and two is a walk in the park compared to 21 and 22 months.
Mental development:
I think the improvement in disposition can be traced to a few leaps forward in brain development:
1. She has a much better understanding of sequences, and therefore understands that, for instance, to go to the library we first have to put her shoes and coat on and then get in the car, so she will do all of those things willingly. And she recognizes that I have to go through certain steps to make her lunch, so as long as she sees me doing those things, she doesn't need to wail until she gets the food she wants. I can't begin to say how much more pleasant this makes life.
2. She can talk better and get across a lot of what she needs verbally. I was worried about her speech for a while - it seemed odd that a child that had a vocabulary that big didn't seem to talk much. As it turns out, she was talking, just not intelligibly. But she's more understandable and I'm listening more closely, so we're communicating much better now.
It feels like K is losing so much of the randomness of early toddlerhood. She goes about her play with so much purpose. She plays with her trains and cars, builds towers with her blocks, uses her doctor kit to listen to our hearts and look in our ears, makes pretend cookies out of play-doh, makes her dinosaurs roar and takes meticulous care of her baby doll. What she does these days is a lot more recognizable tasks of imaginative play and a lot less random playing with physics (shaking and banging things, taking things in and out of other things, ripping things up, etc).
She recognizes some letters, can count objects at least up to ten, recognizes shapes and colors and knows her body parts. She can unhesitatingly match shapes.
I am doing my best to provide her with a wide variety of potential interests that ignore stereotypical gender lines, and so far it seems to be working. She loves her blocks and trains, her toy toolkit, dinosaurs (why, oh why do girls' clothes not have dinosaurs on them?) and running her cars down ramps. But she also loves to help me cook and do housework, try on new clothes and is absolutely, passionately baby-obsessed. Lately, her baby doll is her favorite toy and we can't go anywhere without it and its bottles just in case it gets hungry. She dresses it and tenderly straps it into its stroller.
That seems like a nice balance of interests to me. Right now, she has no idea that there are certain things she should and shouldn't like because of her sex, and I'm hoping to keep it that way for a while.
Physical development:
I'm in awe of how far her gross motor skills have come from last spring when I first started taking her to the playground to now. She started the summer crawling up stairs, teetering across the bridges and was more likely to try to step out into thin air than to successfully sit down at the top of a slide to slide down. Now, she walks up and down stairs holding onto the rail, runs confidently, has mastered slides and is obsessed with ladders, which she has mostly figured out.
Her fine motor skills are just fantastic. Recently, she picked up a jar of tiny beads and I found her successfully threading them onto a cord. She uses silverware well and has figured out a way to use chopsticks in a very clumsy, yet somewhat successful fashion. She can put on a shirt, pants and socks (she's been successfully stripping naked for nearly two years now).
K is currently 35.5 inches and 29 pounds. Her arms and legs are getting longer and she's almost lost her toddler potbelly. I can't believe how much she's grown up in the past few months. I can see her babyhood slipping away, almost gone, with this child emerging in her place. Sniff.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
So have I ever really talked about my job?
As I've said, it's a library in a museum in a gorgeous Victorian mansion. It's in a park where I often take K, since it has a really good playground. As it turns out, the park, the museum and the library are all the gift of Robert Ryerss, a rich man who died in 1910. He was a Quaker, the descendant of someone who came over with William Penn, and believed strongly in public service. So when it was clear he was going to die childless, he left his summer house and the land around it to the city to make a park, museum and public library. His wife (his former housekeeper) decided that there wasn't enough stuff in the house to make a proper museum, so she went on an around-the-world shopping trip, bringing back anything she thought was interesting. She wound up bringing so much back that they had to build an addition on the house (a lot of that was because there were some big Buddhas that wouldn't fit in the original house).
So the museum consists of the first floor, which is set up the way a Victorian house would have been set up, two gigantic rooms full of a fascinating variety of stuff, and then the library on the second floor, where the bedrooms used to be. The library is just like a small public library - popular fiction, a wide variety of non-fiction, some local history and a children's section.
It's not intentional, but the library is a bit of an antique just like the rest of the house. We do pretty well keeping current with adult popular fiction and some adult non-fiction, but there isn't any regular purchasing for the children's section, which means it's more than a little bit dated. And speaking of dated, we still have a card catalog.
I have several goals for this job. One is to try and get more people in, and younger people. We're a well-kept secret with a small core clientele, who tend to be on the antique side themselves. I think we really need to get younger people in, and the best way to do that is try to attract children. We have a bunch of prepared children's programs, so I'm probably going to start trying to run them in the new year. I may try to start a storytime as well. I'm going to state for the record that both of these projects are so far out of my comfort zone that I can't even see it on the horizon, but at least now that I'm a parent, I feel like I'm marginally capable of this. I've been to a lot of storytimes recently, which gives me a much better idea of what works well.
My second project is rearranging the children's section. It's broken up into a lot of smaller sections, but none of the books have spine labels, which means I tend to spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out where books should go. In a library, not knowing where the books go is, what's the term? Oh yes, incredibly, stupendously, horrifyingly bad. Bad bad bad. And did I mention bad? So I'm going to put spine labels on all of the books so we know where they go. Before I do that, I need to make sure all of the books are where I want them to be, so I'm slowly shifting and rearranging.
And as I'm doing the spine labels, I'm going to be working on my third project - moving everything to the computer. I'm not talking about getting rid of the card catalog, but there's no reason that we can't do the cataloging on the computer and then print out cards for the physical catalog too. Right now, all of our cataloging (typing the cards and the labels) is done on the typewriter and it's absolutely unnecessary. All of that can be done on the computer and save us a huge amount of time and tedium. I'm not sure what's worse - having to type out five cards for the same book (one each for author, title, subject headings and the shelf list), or discovering at the end that you've faithfully reproduced the same mistake on all five of them. We don't have a correction ribbon either, which makes typing a much more hazardous proposition. You never quite realize how bad a typist you are until you have to use a typewriter and can't backspace to erase your mistakes. If I were doing this on the computer, even if all I were using was Word, I could use copy and paste to only have to type out one card and then make the minor changes for the other cards.
I'm sure I don't even need to talk about the advantages of having the catalog on the computer. Besides the better searching capabilities, it would solve the problem I've been finding of catalog cards that aren't always in the right order. Argh. Pardon me while I go whimper in the corner now. Once the cards are out of order, all is lost. Quite literally.
So! Clearly it's going to be a while until I'm bored at work. These projects are all in addition to the normal work of checking books in and out, helping patrons and all of the sundry other things librarians do. Lately, it's been printing out seasonal decorations from the web for new displays as we move rapid-fire through the different holiday seasons. I have to admit, my graduate school classes never really prepared me to spend the afternoon cutting out paper snowflakes. And even enjoying it, which is weird because that so isn't me. I'm not the artsy-crafty decorating type, but I seem to be discovering my inner kindergarten teacher.
So that's my job. I go to work in a gorgeous mansion, in a room with beautiful molding and two marble fireplaces, doing work I really love. If only it were more hours a week, it would be perfect.
As I've said, it's a library in a museum in a gorgeous Victorian mansion. It's in a park where I often take K, since it has a really good playground. As it turns out, the park, the museum and the library are all the gift of Robert Ryerss, a rich man who died in 1910. He was a Quaker, the descendant of someone who came over with William Penn, and believed strongly in public service. So when it was clear he was going to die childless, he left his summer house and the land around it to the city to make a park, museum and public library. His wife (his former housekeeper) decided that there wasn't enough stuff in the house to make a proper museum, so she went on an around-the-world shopping trip, bringing back anything she thought was interesting. She wound up bringing so much back that they had to build an addition on the house (a lot of that was because there were some big Buddhas that wouldn't fit in the original house).
So the museum consists of the first floor, which is set up the way a Victorian house would have been set up, two gigantic rooms full of a fascinating variety of stuff, and then the library on the second floor, where the bedrooms used to be. The library is just like a small public library - popular fiction, a wide variety of non-fiction, some local history and a children's section.
It's not intentional, but the library is a bit of an antique just like the rest of the house. We do pretty well keeping current with adult popular fiction and some adult non-fiction, but there isn't any regular purchasing for the children's section, which means it's more than a little bit dated. And speaking of dated, we still have a card catalog.
I have several goals for this job. One is to try and get more people in, and younger people. We're a well-kept secret with a small core clientele, who tend to be on the antique side themselves. I think we really need to get younger people in, and the best way to do that is try to attract children. We have a bunch of prepared children's programs, so I'm probably going to start trying to run them in the new year. I may try to start a storytime as well. I'm going to state for the record that both of these projects are so far out of my comfort zone that I can't even see it on the horizon, but at least now that I'm a parent, I feel like I'm marginally capable of this. I've been to a lot of storytimes recently, which gives me a much better idea of what works well.
My second project is rearranging the children's section. It's broken up into a lot of smaller sections, but none of the books have spine labels, which means I tend to spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out where books should go. In a library, not knowing where the books go is, what's the term? Oh yes, incredibly, stupendously, horrifyingly bad. Bad bad bad. And did I mention bad? So I'm going to put spine labels on all of the books so we know where they go. Before I do that, I need to make sure all of the books are where I want them to be, so I'm slowly shifting and rearranging.
And as I'm doing the spine labels, I'm going to be working on my third project - moving everything to the computer. I'm not talking about getting rid of the card catalog, but there's no reason that we can't do the cataloging on the computer and then print out cards for the physical catalog too. Right now, all of our cataloging (typing the cards and the labels) is done on the typewriter and it's absolutely unnecessary. All of that can be done on the computer and save us a huge amount of time and tedium. I'm not sure what's worse - having to type out five cards for the same book (one each for author, title, subject headings and the shelf list), or discovering at the end that you've faithfully reproduced the same mistake on all five of them. We don't have a correction ribbon either, which makes typing a much more hazardous proposition. You never quite realize how bad a typist you are until you have to use a typewriter and can't backspace to erase your mistakes. If I were doing this on the computer, even if all I were using was Word, I could use copy and paste to only have to type out one card and then make the minor changes for the other cards.
I'm sure I don't even need to talk about the advantages of having the catalog on the computer. Besides the better searching capabilities, it would solve the problem I've been finding of catalog cards that aren't always in the right order. Argh. Pardon me while I go whimper in the corner now. Once the cards are out of order, all is lost. Quite literally.
So! Clearly it's going to be a while until I'm bored at work. These projects are all in addition to the normal work of checking books in and out, helping patrons and all of the sundry other things librarians do. Lately, it's been printing out seasonal decorations from the web for new displays as we move rapid-fire through the different holiday seasons. I have to admit, my graduate school classes never really prepared me to spend the afternoon cutting out paper snowflakes. And even enjoying it, which is weird because that so isn't me. I'm not the artsy-crafty decorating type, but I seem to be discovering my inner kindergarten teacher.
So that's my job. I go to work in a gorgeous mansion, in a room with beautiful molding and two marble fireplaces, doing work I really love. If only it were more hours a week, it would be perfect.
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