Squeee!

I feel like a badass librarian today. Unbeknownst to me, I have been corresponding with an author of books that I would probably read! Most authors I deal with are in the history field and write books that, generally speaking, I don't like to read. I love historical fiction, but most authors who reach out to the Society are the sort who will need annotations and footnotes. Lots of 'em. So, a week ago when I was approached by an author in Texas for an inter-library loan request of some film on Laura Ingalls Wilder, I thought it was for yet another non-fiction book on the Little House on the Prairie author. Today, I got the payment for the loan and shipped it out, but also decided to look up the author and find out more about her. She was very good about staying up-to-date with the status of the request and was really nice to talk to, but she seemed different than other authors I've dealt with so far.

Turns out, she is waaaaay different and waaaaaay awesome. She's written 50+ historical fiction books plus some juvenile fiction books. She focuses on mystery stories which seem to turn historical figures into detectives of sorts. She has an entire series about Beatrix Potter, which I am totally going to read now. She has two current mystery/romance series and she and her husband have their return address listed as "Partners In Crime", which is adorbz once you realize they're not actual criminals. My local library has 52 of her books and those are just the ones published under her actual name! She's got series' right and left under pseudonyms including (dun dun dunduuuuuun!) Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon. Those might not ring a bell immediately, so let me help you out: those are the pseudonyms used by the author of two crazy-influential juvenile book series: Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. (Several authors have ghostwritten for those series, but I personally have never spoken to them...til now!) I was geeking out all afternoon. I still think it's about the coolest thing that I've gotten to do so far. While geeking out to my co-worker, she began geeking out to me because apparently she was asked to do some research on Reba McEntire's family for that tv show "Who Do You Think You Are?" and she had to sign an affidavit to not talk about it until the show aired last March. I don't think she was able to find much on Reba's family in Missouri, but still, it's exciting to get to take part in these sorts of projects and work with people who are creating books and shows and documentaries that we would read or watch anyway.

Sigh. Good day at work, yo!

"At a time like this, talk about the chickens!"

Chug chug chug went the motor...

I'm having an evening in with Judy Garland and the "Meet Me In St. Louis" gang. I've been having bizarre flashes of wishing to see this movie again for a few weeks and tonight seemed like a great time to get to that. I do love this movie. I re-arranged some furniture in the room where my VHS tape player is located and now the tv is near the open window. I would think that those who walk down the sidewalk below are hearing show tunes this evening floating down to their ears. We're moving into the Autumn part, so it's more appropriate, even.

It's been nice to spend an evening at home tonight. I like being busy and having people to see and things to do, but I also tend to get socially-exhausted pretty quickly. This week has been a lot of fun and a lot of hanging out with people, but I'm glad to have an evening to relax by myself. I had to do a little public speaking at one point this week at a dinner event and I was nervous about it, but it went okay. I'm better at public speaking than I used to be, but I still hate it. Being the center of attention is not something I enjoy. I'm more of a 'blend-into-the-background' sort of person at large social gatherings. This was an appreciation dinner for our volunteers at work and we had it at a nice place in downtown Columbia. I think the volunteers really enjoyed it. I did, too. It was nice.

"Annie" is being performed by a combination of a children's theater group and a local adult theater troupe in Columbia. One of my co-workers is in it and so a few of us went to support her. She did good. The musical was way funnier than I think it was supposed to be due to a hilarious little girl who played one of the orphans. She was really little, with pigtails and glasses and was also really hard to understand, but for some reason, all of this equaled that she was hilarious. There were about 12 or so girls who played the orphans and they were always kind of funny. During one number, they tried to do a chorus line with high kicks and that's one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. It was total chaos with girls kind of flopping around with the taller, 11-12 year-olds practically pushing over the littler ones with their enthusiastic kicking, and the little girls just trying to get a kick in now and again without kicking each other. This was community theater, like whoa, and although there were a few good acting/singing performances, it was much more of an 'I'm here to support my friend, not see a truly well-done play'. Once you bought into that, it was really enjoyable. There was a kid next to my friend who had brought along some handheld video game and played it through most of the show. I don't know why parents allow that? He wasn't a little kid, he was probably 9 or 10. Old enough to sit through a play. His mom made sure he didn't have the sound on, but still, the glow from the game was sort of obnoxious. After the show was over and we were talking outside, the kid and his family came out and somehow the kid dropped the game on the sidewalk and it broke. Vindication! Needless to say, we were not sad for him.

We're heading toward October! I'm beginning to think of getting my Halloween costume together. The event I'm taking part in is about a week before Halloween, so I need to get started on it. It shouldn't be too difficult, but I do have to search for some "parts". I'm planning to be a Beekeeper and all I have so far is a hat that I think I can use. I'm on the lookout for some other things. It's Halloween right now in the movie... I'm so glad that the weather is turning cooler. Wearing sweaters and jeans is so nice. Happy days, every day.

Evan Robertson's artwork

I was introduced to this guy's artwork today. He does Lit-prints and they're awesomely unique and detailed. Go see his site to see more. I love them all.

If you go your way and I go mine.

Happy Sunday morning to ya. It's nice and cool here this morning, but it's cozy and warm on the couch all wrapped in my shawl. I love mornings like this. I always thought I was more of an afternoon/early evening sort of person, but as I get older I'm beginning to feel like I might be becoming more of a morning person. It's very serene here in the mornings, usually. Especially weekend mornings. Bea is kind of crazy a little bit, but still, the street isn't crazy busy with traffic and joggers and things. It's easy to sit on the front porch and read or drink hot chocolate and look out the window. I like mornings a lot more than I used to.

However, yesterday morning was less quiet than normal because my neighbors' truck was broken into and the police were around for the report. It's difficult to say what happened, except that my neighbor has a truck that he likes to work on and someone broke the lock on the passenger door and took something from the truck very early Saturday morning. The backs of the houses on my block and the block behind me all have a shared alley between them. But there are very few neighbors who actually park their cars back there. I let my neighbors park one of their cars in my little gravel driveway and they park the truck he works on in their driveway. It doesn't appear that anybody messed with the car that was parked in my driveway, because the policeman was only looking at the truck. So...I guess there was just something the thief really wanted in the truck. From experience, I know that people mess with cars around here. We park on-street mostly and people get bored and wander the streets late at night and before you know it, things just happen. People might wander through the alley from one end of the block to the other, but I'm not feeling like calling the cops every time I happen to see someone wandering the alley from now on, you know? I feel more like, if you don't want people taking things from your vehicle, don't leave stuff in the vehicle that they'd want to take. And on the plus side, at least they didn't break the window to get into the truck? No glass to clean up, at least. It does feel bad to be the victim of a break-in, whether they take anything or not.

Mizzou barely held on to win against Arizona State last night. I thought they'd for sure give up the entire game in the last minute or so, but they managed to hang on and intercept a pass at the last minute. Mizzou likes their dramatic endings. During parts of the game I was reading old letters that my dad has between my Grandpa and Grandma during WWII. I want to get the letters better organized and cleaned up and I started to look through them a bit. They're really great. They run from 1943-45 and we have most of the letters my Grandpa sent home, and many letters my Grandma wrote to him. They include the birth of my Uncle Paul and how my Grandma was trying to take care of the baby by herself. My Grandpa was a glider pilot and my dad always said that he never remembered him speaking much about the war or what he saw. He was in the Battle of the Bulge and then part of the occupying forces in Germany, so he didn't get to come home nearly as early as he had hoped he could. But, early on, my Grandpa tries to write to my Grandma about what he was seeing and how people were dying and she tells him not to write that to her anymore because she couldn't handle it. So, maybe part of why he never talked about it was because she was never comfortable with hearing the details or something? I don't know. But there are funny parts of the letters, like the first Christmas in 1943 when my Grandpa was supposed to get a furlough and then ended up not getting it and my Grandma was so disappointed and wrote him a letter about that, but the next morning she got up and wrote another letter filled with all of her ideas of what he should tell his commanding officers to get them to give him his furlough. Her main suggestion was to tell him that there were two mice in the basement that were freaking her out and that if he didn't get home soon, she was going to let out the biggest squeal and scare the neighbors half to death. She also had plenty of ideas of how to solve the war. And later, when my Grandpa was in Belgium and Luxembourg just after the Battle of the Bulge, he writes over and over hinting to her to send him a certain kind of shampoo. And he hints and hints for nearly a month for this shampoo until, by the end of the month, the letter ends with a postscript entirely made up of 'Send me shampoo. Send me shampoo. Send me shampoo. Send me some Fitch's shampoo.' He had hinted earlier on when he was in England about how he'd like a bottle of Coca Cola and a few weeks later in another letter he wrote, he mentions he got it and wonders how she found a bottle to send to him. So, most of his hints seemed to work out, but I do wonder if he ever got the shampoo he wanted. I haven't read every single letter yet. Some are from Great Uncles and Great Aunts as well. It is interesting to read the letters after so recently having read so many Civil War letters. Lots of similarities, but these are interesting because I know the people involved this time and I can go to Google and look up the houses that are being mentioned and see what the neighborhoods look like now.

The 1940 census helps, too because you can go and look at the names on the census and see what sorts of families made up the neighborhood at the time. My Grandparents didn't get married until after 1940, but still, the neighborhoods were similar. I was proud of my Grandma, who is listed on the 1940 census as being a single woman of 29, head of household, living in a duplex and working as a power machine operator in a dress factory. There's something very cool to me about being independent like that and having your independence show up on a national document like the census. It might seem silly, but it made me really proud to have a Grandma that went off on her own for a bit and didn't just stay at home until she was married. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but I feel proud when I see women (in the past, especially) who did go out and do their thing on their own. Who am I kidding? I still feel that way... In fact, I remember being very happy when the 2010 census came to my house because I knew that I'd be part of that sort of a thing now. I'll be listed as a single woman head of household on the 2010 census and no matter what happens later in life, for that moment in time, I'm recorded as a woman of 25 who had herself together enough to live alone and support herself in a single-family house in 2010. Booyah. Even if I never have kids who someday look me up on the census, maybe my neighbors' descendants or those of the family who I bought the house from will someday look it up and see me, being young and doing my thang in 2010 and feel proud of me? Or maybe not. But, I still do. Now I just hope they don't lose this census in a fire or something.

I also found an old hard drive of mine that had a bunch of pictures from highschool-college and Texas on it and I was looking through those. Lots of music on there from that era, too! It got me listening to a lot of stuff again. Good stuff that I'd forgotten about. Eve 6 has been playing like crazy around here lately. "Promise", "Jetpack", "Tongue Tied", "Inside Out"... Man, that band was so good. I don't think they ever had a bad song, even though some of their songs didn't make huge waves in radioland. This one did, though! I always loved this video, too because it fit the song so well, I thought. Aw, Eve 6:





One more, eh? Because they were awesome:


Then, some songs I haven't re-discovered because they've never left my mind, but when looking for a video to share on here, I ran across the video of "All the Small Things" and I totally forgot how awesome it was! Blink spoofed the boyband/pop star wave of corny videos and I had forgotten how hilarious it was:

Dare alla luce.

I don't have much to report on goings-on in my life, but the lives of folks around me are changing quickly! New things everywhere! Mizzou fans in general had a change over this weekend as we had our first SEC football game. I mentioned last week how excited everyone seemed to be about it. Mizzou lost to Georgia, but it was a good game and I was proud of the Tigers. I saw a Georgia sports blog post about the game and it was friendly and complimentary about Columbia, Mizzou and Mizzou fans in general. The comments that were left were also mainly pro-Mizzou and that the Georgia fans were happy to have Mizzou in the conference and respected their abilities as a football team. It was nice. I think there was some disappointment by Mizzou fans to lose, but I think they should be proud of what is happening. It's a turning point, and I think both Mizzou and Texas A&M, who also began their SEC career this weekend, both did a good job at showing that they can play in their new conferences and not be humiliated on the playing field. I was happy with everything. 

People that I used to know and still keep slight tabs on are starting over in new places all over the world. I found out this week that one is in Estonia, another in China, and one is back in Korea after being elsewhere for a while. Happy travels to all!

But, closer to my life personally, this week has been a busy one for friends! A buddy at work found out she was hired for one of our permanent positions on Friday afternoon (which she is perfect for, in my opinion, and I think she's going to kick ass at it). She had little time to let that sink in because she was also told she'd be starting immediately by heading to D.C. much of this week for training. Surprise! I missed the announcement of her hiring since I was at home on Monday, but we celebrated on Tuesday with a lunch before she hopped the eastbound plane. Tuesday was celebration central, because not only did I find out about my friend and her new job, but another buddy of mine ended up having a baby on Tuesday. She wasn't due for over a month. Surprise, again! I went to see the new family after work today and everybody's doing well. I don't know much about pre-mature babies (or any babies in general, for that matter), but this particular one looked pretty perfect, chilling out in his incubator getting all warm and cozy. Congrats to the new family! 

I follow Letters of Note, which I think I've mentioned before, but yesterday's letter was actually an advice letter from a father to a son and the end of the letter seemed totally appropriate to share while on the topic of new additions to our species. Buddha and the Greeks tend to put things better than I ever could:

"As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you."

Oh, the places we'll go.

I'm having an impromptu personal day off from work. My car seems to be having some sort of tire issue. It had a problem last month and I took it in and they just filled all the tires with air and sent me on my way. Then, today, the car freaked out again. At work, we get four personal days a year that we can take which don't count against vacation or sick leave. I haven't taken any, so I decided today was a perfect day to do that. The weather is beautiful and it made having to go back to the auto shop a little easier to handle. They still didn't find anything and just blamed the low air on the fluctuating temperatures... I'm assuming next month the tire pressure gauge will freak out again and then I'll just have someone actually change the damn tire. But, still, today was once again cost-free for me, so no real complaints about that. I have my auto maintenance class this week, so maybe I'll get some awesome tips and learn stuff. I'm hoping so.

After doing a little grocery shopping and going on a long walk around downtown, I've spent the last 20 minutes or so watching bits of a movie I picked up at the library today as well as browsing Pinterest. It's nice and lazy today. This 'personal day' stuff is great. I've got my windows open, and my neighbor came home recently at lunch to walk the dog and I kind of love the sound of their wooden screen door. It's got a creak in it, plus that great wooden screen door slam to it when it closes. It's weird to say that a slamming door sounds nice, but it does. It's friendly. Aluminum screen doors like mine can slam, but it's less of a friendly sort of sound. It's more obnoxious. There's just something comforting about the creaks and slams of wooden screen doors, you know?

Having a day off has made me think of vacations, again. I'm imagining myself in many places today where (in my head) the weather is as perfect there as it is here today:

Bamboo forest in Japan.

Outer Banks, NC

No idea where this is located, but it's pretty.

Black Forest in Germany. (Heigh-ho, heigh-ho...)

It's hailing cherry tomatoes!

Even though I was off for a holiday this week, it seemed to be a long week. I'm glad it is September, though. The temperatures are dropping and I'm feeling more festive already. No matter how short the season is, to me, Summer always drags on and on and when we finally start to get Fall-like events and things, I get really happy. The events are starting to show up! I have an itch to wear boots and sweaters! Bring on the homecoming parades, the corn mazes, the pumpkin breads, and the turning leaves (well, those that survived the drought, anyway).

Today I held the biggest hailstone I've ever seen. It wasn't really an epic-sized hailstone in the history of hailstones or anything. This was closer to an inch or maybe slightly larger in diameter, I think. A big storm hit Columbia this afternoon and it didn't even start out as rain, it just started dropping massive hail. Some parts of the city got hail the size of lemons. LEMONS. We decided ours was more like cherry tomatoes... Still, it was pretty impressive. Or, I was impressed, anyway. Maybe I'm easily impressed? It's easy to be impressed and not upset about it when you're comforted by the idea that your car is protected in a parking garage and not just out on the street like it would be if I had been at home and the storm hit.

Tomorrow is the first big football game of the season for the Tigers. Georgia is here to play us and to say Columbia is excited would be a major understatement. It's hard to not get excited when everyone else is so excited about it. I'd been hearing all week about these 'sightings'. Like mythical creatures, the fans of Georgia had been seen around Columbia (or were rumored to have been seen) and everyone was kind of ecstatic about the fact that we're now in a conference where the fans actually travel to watch their teams play football. Mizzou and Columbia are incredibly welcoming. I don't know how long that will last. Maybe a season or two? Eventually, it won't be as friendly as it is right now. But, after hearing about them, I looked on Wednesday and Thursday, but until today, I didn't actually see any of these Georgia fans. I had to laugh when I finally saw some today while eating at Chipotle. My friend and I looked at them and smiled, laughing at our reactions, like 'They do exist! Hello Georgians! Welcome!' They were easily picked out by their red Georgia tennis caps, and assorted Atlanta Braves t-shirts. There's been a lot of talk about trying to make Mizzou fit the SEC image, which includes dressing up for football games. That's another thing I'm not sure is really going to stick around Columbia after one or two seasons. It's hard to keep your khakis and tie clean while tailgating for 8 hours pre-game. I just don't really see that working out at MU, but for now it seems like Mizzou fans are all a-twitter about buying dresses and dressy clothing to wear to the football game to fit in with the SEC culture. I know many of the Greek houses are requiring Sunday attire for the games this season. Hmm. Should be an interesting change.

Did you watch any of the political conventions? I think the USA does itself a big dis-service by not having Election Day within a week of these conventions. Americans do not have long attention spans and nobody is going to remember what was or was not said at these conventions in two months. I mean, come on. If you want these things to matter, you've got to know your audience. And perhaps these conventions used to be a big deal, but for God's sake, MTV had it's Video Music Awards on while the President was speaking last night at the Democratic National Convention. I couldn't tell on Twitter who was performing at which event, all the tweets were getting mixed up as AP was trying to report on everything. It was ridiculous. As an aside, though: whatever you feel about politics, you've got to admit that our First Lady is pretty much the coolest woman on Earth. Her speech rocked and she held the attention of an entire room of democrats and got them all fired up without ever once mentioning Mitt Romney's name. She didn't get mean or make cracks about anybody; she was dignified and classy and that's why she's so awesome. I prefer that kind of speech. The kind that makes its point without being ugly about it. Politics is ugly, I know. But some politicians seem to spend so much time throwing mud that their mud pits are so deep now, they couldn't rise out of it even if they wanted to. That's probably why it's so amazing when you have someone like Mrs. Obama who can rise above everything, make her points relevant and personal, and enliven her audience without shredding an opponent's name to bits. I don't know how anyone could dislike her. It'd be like disliking a unicorn and nobody can do that. It's impossible.

Quando, quando, quando.

It's a holiday! And it's a beautiful day outside. What was left of Hurricane Isaac came through at the beginning of the weekend, but he was very welcome. The rain was wonderful. Now we're back to our sunny days, which is nice, too.

A local trade-a-book store in town is being sold. I was in on Saturday buying some books for my bare bookshelves and talked to the owner about it. I think someday I would love to run a used book store! It would be very different, but I've always enjoyed her store and her business has been there forever, it seems like. I remember going in with my mom when I was little. I hope whomever buys the business keeps it going and doesn't run it into the ground. It's tempting to buy a business like that when you know it's already got a pretty steady clientele, and a good reputation? I'm not ready to own a business. But someday? It would be nice. Maybe in a place like Loblolly-by-the-sea? (Okay, maybe that's too much like the movie "The Love Letter" with the terrible acting job by Blythe Danner.) But, still. A small down on the eastern coast should have a little used bookshop. And I might be just the gal to open one around there some day. I would definitely have a bookshop dog. Some kind of older, lazy mutt that likes to lay next to the counter or slowly wander the aisles now and again. Not one that would bolt out the door every time a customer came in, or one that liked to bark at people. Something calm. I got so into the idea on Saturday that I began a pinboard on Pinterest for it. Most of my friends on there have pinboards about their future baby or their future wedding or something. I have 'Future Bookshop'.

Not sure how great business-sensey this is, but I love it anyway.

What else? So, I returned to facebook, mostly just in name. But, a few of my co-workers told me about Words with Friends and so I promised to try that out and see how I liked it. Well, it's fun. I like Scrabble. But then I wandered a little further into the games area and came across SongPop. Good lord. Addiction central. I've been playing it a lot this weekend. I'm nearly kind of burned out. Nearly, but not quite. I really love music trivia games that include song clips. This is right up my alley! Did I mention that I won a game like this at a baby shower last weekend? I did. And I usually do okay on trivia nights when one of the rounds is a music trivia round. I really love it. I even took a class in high school where the tests were almost entirely done like this with little snippets of a song and you had to name the artist or title (and sometimes year). It was one of my favorite classes. SongPop is addicting and awesome and is bringing back memories of that class with songs by Connie Francis and Paul Anka. I'm sad to say I've missed a few that I probably knew back in high school. I really like that you can challenge random opponents. I've had opponents from all over. Some of the challenges I've played have been French Songs that I've never ever heard of. Or some guy that really loves Metal music. But, it's all very interesting and fun. One thing is for sure: It is all making me realize that maybe I don't need a tablet computer for much of anything except these cool apps that you can get on them. Sigh. Maybe for Christmas?

Also this weekend, I discovered that Jeff City is a TWO Jimmy Johns town now! (Possibly more, if there is one on the east side. I don't know.) But, there's a new one now right smack in downtown! If I were really into taking a walk one Saturday, I can walk there for lunch sometime. This makes me happy. I love JJs. 

And, lastly: My dad and I made homemade pasta yesterday. I'd never made pasta from scratch before but it turned out pretty well! It was easy to make, even without a pasta maker, and it was really really delicious. I'll eat pasta anytime and it's always pretty awesome, but I could tell that this was better than the normal store-bought packaged pasta. We made trofie, and they were slightly larger than they probably should have been, but still so good. My dad invented a pesto cream type of sauce and it was excellent with some asiago cheese bread we found at Hy-Vee. It was good *pig snorts*.

All in all, this has been a great weekend so far! I'm feeling pretty rested, too. It's nice to have an extra day to bum around the house. I actually got up and decided to see if I could jog around in a pair of sneakers that I have (since I can't afford new tennis shoes and my old ones didn't make it back from the Color Run). I went for a little walk/jog and ended up stopping and playing a couple of rounds of bocce at Washington Park this morning before continuing back to my car. It was fun, although there are some creepy parts of the trail that I went by today. There's something innately creepy about walking under overpasses, you know? Just tends to give me the creeps. I know I'm not the only one either, because when I was walking back to my car, there was a woman walking a bit in front of me and she slowed down when we were coming up to the first of several overpasses and she took off her sunglasses and looked all around before she continued under them. I felt less wussie when I did the same. It just seems like a good place for bad stuff to happen. But nothing bad happened. Probably the anxiety helped get the blood pumping even more than it was with the exercise, yes? Sure. 

Happy Labor Day!