They are the lanterns and you are the light.

I've just started How It's Done by Christine Kole MacLean. It's about an 18yrold girl who's led a very sheltered, religious life (her dad has the "In case of Rapture this car will be unmanned" bumper sticker I've always joke-wanted) until she gets involved with a hot young college professor.
Unlike in a lot of teen girl/older man books, Grace has the sense and/or balls to ask why her professor isn't dating someone his own age.

"I have," he said..."But they are too hard. There's no 'give' to them. They already think they know everything...With you, there's this incredible sense of discovery and openness to things. To me."

Enter Bitter. It'd just be nice to not feel like my experiences and intelligence are not a liability for once, for more than 3 dates.
And you know, I wasn't in a bad mood or cranky or bitter about boys today, until I read that. Jerks.

Have I left my home just to whine in this microphone?

follow librarianjessy at http://twitter.com

It should come as not surprise to anyone that, for a variety of reasons, I haven't been blogging nearly as much as I did in the That Town years.
The other day, I found myself missing the forced non sequitor of the Billboard entries.
I'm playing with Twitter for work, kind of to see how my new library can use it. Because I keep seeing all this stuff online about it, and how great it would be for libraries to jump on yet another bandwagon, but no one has any actual tips and tricks. (I'm thinking we should run our New Stuff and Today's Programs RSS feeds through it, though.)

But anyway, if you miss me here at PoBaL, I'll be over at Twitter being random. And that's not to say I'll never be here again. I still visit my parents' house in Pittsburgh, but I leave a forwarding address so people can find me where I live now.

I don't want to wait for our lives to be over.

Found in a box of paperbacks from 2004, intended as summer reading prizes:

Also in the box: a Buffy paperback about Cordelia, a Clueless tv show tie-in, a Sabrina the Teenage Witch (although not my favorite Sabrina, which features the world's saddest piratical eye patch. Like, I think they just took an old pictures of Clarissa and sharpied an eye patch on.*), and a Popular. Remember Popular?
Here's the back cover blurb of Bayou Blues

"No one is allowed."
Joey, Pacey, Dawson, and Jen shudder at the housekeeper's ominous words. It's dark and gloomy at one end of the Southern plantation where Jen's cousin Monique lives, and nothing's been touched in the off-limits wing since 1870. Isabella Percy, Monique's relative, died there of a broken heart, waiting in vain for her true love to return after the Civil War.
A spooky mansion, a secret tunnel, a romantic love story, and some voodoo: Dawson is convinced the group is in for the adventure on their lives.
But evil is near.

Jinkies!

*

Why is this blog different from all other blogs?

Yeah, this post? Let's just say that if you didn't think my whole "Taco Seder" thing last year was funny, you might want to go check out something else. 'Cause we're all about the blasphemy here at PoBaL, especially during the Easter/Passover season. Now, on to our story...

I turned on the tv, saw this, and was intrigued. Turns out, it's the story of Passover. Or, as the Christians call it, Exodus. I also find the term "Israelite" interesting. Like no one's going to know you're talking about the Jews or something.
Look, it's a plague! And another plague! And, uh, raising dust that will turn into a plague!


Man, when God smotes you, he does a thorough job.
Oh, check out Jewy McHeeb-bergstein. He's our narrator and host.
I'm not sure, but I think those dark, Semitic circles under his eyes might be painted on.
For the record, there were a few Jewish cowboys, ladies and gentlemen. Big guys who were great shots and spent money freely.
More plaguing it up (this is my favorite of the plague pictures):

Every time Moses talks to Pharoah, he's in the bath. What is this, Old Testament slash?

And check out Moses' expression in this one:

That's not, "Let my people go!" That's, "Hey buddy, you know--heh heh--we were both drunk, things happened..."
If you're interested there's more on my flickr. I'm putting them in a slideshow so everyone can enjoy the magic of this seasonal and poorly animated show my TV can barely get a signal for.
Melissa, feel free to use this post in your godmotherly duties to Rose.

...or the dogs that shoot bees out of their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you.

I got home yesterday to a giant box from my mom, by way of the Everything Jewish website/catalog. Yes, it's a real place. The best thing about this catalog is the truly weird shit, like the bag of plagues (or, more accurately, cheap plastic things that sort of symbolized plagues) mom sent me a couple years ago, or this adorable plush Torah they used to have. Not that one on the site now; he's weird looking.
So here's what I got:

It's a plush Judah Maccabee! He's like 18" tall. I can't wait to have him meet Tree. Tree, incidentally is MIA, by which I mean he's probably under a bunch of laundry I haven't gotten around to putting away yet.

By some miracle, the unwrapping lasted for 8 nights:

But then the cats had plenty of twisties to play with, including the one I broke and left in the box, which Legs spent 10 minutes with his head in a too-narrow box trying to rescue. Because the 300 other bits of plastic around the apartment he's commandeered to play with aren't enough.
Here's Judah off to buy some Kosher for Passover food. Or, standing in front of where I keep my perpetually in progress ill-fitting Koigu gloves.
But wait, there's more! I also got a tenpin toy bowling set where each pin represents one of the plagues suffered by the Egyptians. That's right, BOWLING with the PLAGUES. Hell's yeah.

And here they are all artsy and backlit and shit.

I kept the key. It's easier to figure out what some of them represent than others.


They're all such happy plagues!

...except for "1st Born".

Only my mother would send me a Maccabee and a plagues bowling set as an Easter/Passover present. Although I prefer to think of it as a psychic YA-circ-stats-doubled-this-month present. Yeah, that's right--teen materials went out twice as much as last month. I am a golden god.

That's in juvenile. This is Young Adult.

...or, "It's a record we've been listening to and enjoying, Barry."

Last week, one of my coworkers was on the phone for twenty minutes, giving by-the-minute direction action to him while he drove over half an hour to get to our library. You know the kind: "OK, coming up on your left is a Skyline...let me know when you get there..."
What was this patron coming for? Doogie Howser dvds.
The week before that, we all laughed uproariously when another teen librarian told a story about a teen's spectacularly false claims of Dance Dance Revolution mastery. In my head, it looked a lot like the dance scene in Better Off Dead.

(I couldn't find the dance scene. Sorry.)
So is it any wonder that yesterday on my first trip to the record store in the painfully hip part of town I went looking for and then asked the clerk where I could find the new Arctic Fire album.
I also bought this super-cute li'l guy:

I'm so all about Japanese and fauxJapanese surprise toys for "grownups".
And then I went home and did my taxes with an excellent soundtrack.

You're melting snow angels all over town.

We had several snow days awhile ago and I got projects finished.


I finally stretched out and blocked the finished Argosy scarf from Knitty I made for a family friend in Paton's SWS. Pretty yarn, splits a lot, needs a crap ton of blocking. But very squishy and nice colors.


That thing underneath it is my Target stuff the college kids don't want sale ironing board. Cute, hunh?

I also decided that I hated the collar on Teva Durham's Lace Leaf Pullover, so I cut it out, picked up a bunch of stitches, and made a better collar. This is scratchy and warm Lamb's Pride Bulky, so I probably won't wear it quite as much as some other things, but I still really like it.

That wet spot is when I started to block, but gave up. My feeling on sweaters is that I beat them up so much, they kind of stretch out and block just from that. Or, I'm lazy.
Here's a close-up of the cute leaf device:


While I got things done, Johnny made a fort: