Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

I love this book because I remember reading it to myself as a child.  It was one of many books that I selected off the shelves at the Northside branch and read over and over again at home.  Something about the story is so appealing in it’s simpleness.  This book captures the wonder and amazement that children feel at that first big snow.  I related to the little boy as he explored the snow and all that he could do with it: snow angels, making designs with sticks, snowballs-and wishing the big kids would let me play with them. 

I found this storytelling kit in the storage closet-it most likely is as old as me.  I used the little boy puppet, leftover halloween cobwebs, and a stick that I found outside.  It is really simple, just like the book-but I love it.  Plexiglass isn’t very easy to photograph.

Ten Random Things

Hopefully my random things are somewhat interesting.  I’ve enjoyed reading others’ so here goes:

1.  I hate peanuts in food.  I love peanuts, and peanut butter.  But there better not be any crunchy peanuts in any of my baked goods.  Ugh.

2.  My life was once saved by a stranger.  Four years ago I was backpacking through Italy with a couple of friends.  We were in Naples, which is a dirty, scary city.  We took a wrong bus and ended up in the outskirts of town.  We stopped into a corner grocery store to ask for bus directions back to the city.  This was not a touristy area and no one spoke English (and we didn’t speak Italian).  A kind woman practically pushed us into her car and drove us to the train station, where she talked to the guard on duty and had us wait for the train in his office.  We weren’t able to communicate verbally at all, but through her body language we were able to deduce that we were in an extremely bad area where druggies would surely kill the stupidly innocent Americans.  Even though I wasn’t there for very long, experiencing first hand the stress of isolation, fear and anxiety of being in a foreign country is at the top of my list of life experiences.  The experience has helped me be more sensitive to immigrants in this country and the magnitude of what they are going through.   

3.  I have had stitches 5 separate times in my life.  I was an accident-prone child.  Though the dog bite and car accident weren’t exactly my fault. 

4.  I didn’t always want to be a librarian.  I have witnesses that I spoke the words ”I will never be a librarian.”  I was young and naive and ignoring my calling   Now I can’t imagine being anything else. 

5.  My brother is autistic.  I’m not trying to get a sympathy vote here; it’s just a part of who I am.  It forced me to grow up quickly, and inspired me to work with special needs children and adults for years.  There has been a lot of turmoil over the years, but I love him the way he is and wouldn’t change a thing about him.

6.  Every spring I get super-excited about planting a garden in the 4 X 4 foot patch of dirt in my back patio.  I buy seeds and plants for flowers and vegetables.  And then every year by July I’ve gotten totally lazy and the entire thing has grown over.  The whole “maintenance” part of gardening escapes me.  2009 will be different!

7.  I’m pretty private at work about my personal life, but here is something.  My boyfriend is Japanese.  I’m amazed at how well we get along despite our different backgrounds.  I don’t speak Japanese at all except for some useless random words like “nice to meet you” and “I like ski pants”.  It thwarts my eavesdropping on his phone conversations.  Every once in awhile when he’s tired he’ll say something to me in Japanese instead of English and I go, “aaa…what?”  We have a pointless 4 year ongoing argument that we always bring up when we want to insult each other: which is more disgusting, peanut butter or raw fish?  I met and loved his mother but am scared to death of meeting his father for some reason.     

8.  I’m not a natural redhead.  There, I said it.  Everyone else in my family has some beautiful shade of auburn but not me.  I’ve come to terms with this and am now in the process of growing my natural color out, I’m excited to see what it is. 

9.  My two best friends (same from #2 on the list) are expecting their first babies early next year.  I am super-excited to be their crazy library lady aunt; there are so many great books I want to buy them.  It also is a little scary that this means we are all growing up. 

10.  After years of public service and do-gooding, when I am a senior citizen I totally intend to be the neighborhood crazy cat lady. 

Flashdrive, not a banana

I came into work this morning to find my CML flashdrive waiting for me! 

Unfortunately, monkey puppet got to it first.  Bad monkey!

# 23 The End

The final curtain for my Learn & Play experience. My favorite exercises were:

Twitter – I guess I’m just a social networker.
YouTube – Such a great concept and a lot of fun. I think it will go down in history will lava lamps and 8 tracks as pop culture icons.
GoogleDocs – Maybe it defeats the purpose, but I’ve been using GoogleDocs now for a lot of my work, but I still back it up on a flashdrive. One can never be too careful.
Flickr – Photo fun
Blogging – I think I might start a blog of my own, but I’ll leave this one up if CML chooses to keep an active list of the Learn & Players. I love reading blogs, and I’ve seen a lot of crafty bloggers that have inspired me to start creating.
Delicious – I should use this more often to keep track of my stuff.

Things I was not a fan of:
Bloglines – meh. I could just use delicious.
RSS Feeds – Hmm, I could just use delicous. But I’m glad I know what RSS feeds are, because they are everywhere.
Wikis – I gonna come out and say it, I don’t like wikis. They are unorganized, cluttered, and annoying. Except for Wikipedia of course, which ranks up there with YouTube for me.
Podcasts & MOLDI – I see their value, and will promote them to customers. I just don’t think I’ll use them on my own on a regular basis.

This program has helped encourage me to be a lifelong learner. It has prompted me to experience a lot of new technology that I might not have gotten around to exploring before. It’s funny that now my ears perk up whenever I hear Twitter mentioned on NPR, a couple months ago I wouldn’t have even known what they were talking about. Just because I’m done with school (!), doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn and grow as a person and a professional. I plan to become a certified librarian, and I love attending conferences to gain new knowledge and perspectives. I’m not perfect now, nor will I ever be in many aspects. However, as long as I continue to push myself to experience new things and learn from my past mistakes than I will continue to become a better person and librarian.

This Learn & Play experience did have a lot of surprising, but positive outcomes. I’ll reiterate what I’ve heard from others that I feel more connected to co-workers, former and present, as well as others at CML that I may not have ever met. CML does feel a little smaller now, and that is wonderful. I went to the Celebration of Learning this month, and I spoke with several people for the first time in person that I recognized their names and faces from Learn & Play. Who needs to worry about conversation ice breakers when I can just say, “Hi, I’m Rebecca, you’re following me on Twitter”.

I think Learn & Play has helped to create a greater sense of community at our library system. Getting to know my extended colleagues through their blogs, photos, videos, and tweets has brought us closer. During a time of national economic hardship, that greater sense of community can increase staff morale like nothing other. I do wish that more people had participated in Learn & Play, and I wish I could have eased some grumblings by people who were uninterested or had no time to complete the 23 things. I hope that every participant has taken away from this experience the same thing that I did; that I have an identity in the community of people who work for the #1 Library in the country.

If CML offered another discovery experience, I would be one of the first to sign up. My advice for any future discovery experiences is to space out the assigned exercises. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed that I had fallen behind and there were two more exericses added in one week. Other than that I have no complaints. I am sad to think that all the funny videos with Gerald2.0 and LibraryJoy will end. I hope that staff continues to post blogs and videos to help us all feel better connected.

Your own Dewey Decimal classification!

Rebecca’s Dewey Decimal Section:
386 Inland waterway & ferry transportation
Rebecca = 8525331 = 852+533+1 = 1386

Class:
300 Social Sciences

Contains:
Books on politics, economics, education and the law.

What it says about you:
You are good at understanding people and finding the systems that work for them. You like having established reasoning behind your decisions. You consider it very important for your friends to always have your back.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

I read this in the ALA newsletter: http://spacefem.com/quizzes/dewey/

I thought I would be in the 740’s for the arts, but for some reason this quiz looked at me and thought “inland water & ferry transportation”.  I guess I had the wrong major in college!  Actually, I do like ferries.  I’ve always been fascinated by people that live on islands.  Last summer I rode a ferry to attend a wedding on Lopez Island outside of Seattle.  Four years ago I rode a ferry to the Island of Capri off the coast of Italy near Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast.  During both rides I was filled with anticipation to see what type of people chose to live somplace where everything has to be imported, where you are somewhat isolated from the rest of the world.  Maybe it’s because I grew up in a land-locked state.  Someday I hope to go to Hawaii, and check out the locals there.

#22 MOLDI

I recently joined a book club, and the last book we read was Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  My friend told me that she enjoyed the book more on CD, and as I started to read it I could see where the author’s narrative would sound better being read as an essay on NPR than in text.  I actually didn’t get to finish it yet, but if you look closely at the cover you can see that it is a bathroom floor-you’ll have to read it to discover the symbolic significance there  

Before I got around to exploring this exercise, I didn’t realize that I have already been using MOLDI (Mid-Ohio Library Digital Initiative).  We talked about it in library school, but I never used it for myself.  I found some juvenile fiction and picture books that would be cool to listen to.  A couple weeks ago I had a customer that was looking for an older movie, either the copies were checked out or it was one of those older movies that haven’t been release on DVD yet.  It was the customer that asked me “isn’t there a place where you can watch movies online using your library card #?”  Oh yeah, that’s right….thanks library school!  For the life of me I couldn’t find the link on our website, until I glanced up at the toolbar and saw “eMedia”!  Right in there in front of my face.  Now I know what MOLDI is, where to find it, and have since directed a couple customers to it.  MOLDI can be especially useful for smaller branches like mine where we just don’t have the capacity to hold as many titles as the bigger branches.  Of course not everything is available online, something to do with copyright I believe. 

I have never listened to an audio book, and I’m intrigued.  I only have a 5 minute commute to work, so that would take me awhile to get through a book listening for only ten minutes a day.  I have an iPod but rarely use it, I don’t know why.  Maybe I could download a book and listen to it while I’m doing housework, or use that as an excuse to get outside and take a walk.

Happy CML Anniversary to Me!

2 years currently, but technically it is 7 years total.  How glad I am to be back at CML, I will never leave these fair walls again.  My co-worker, Northside Shark, just told me that its like I got married, divorced, and re-married to the same person.

#21 Podcasts

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irony

I enjoy the common craft tutorials, they are really informative.  I do think it is a little ironic that the common craft videos use cut-out paper shapes to illustrate Web 2.0 applications.  In the movie Reality Bites, the main character can’t come up with a definition for “irony”, and shouts “but I know it when I see it!”.  This somewhat describes my knowledge of Podcasts.  If forced to define Podcasts before I might have said something like, “it’s like listening to a radio show, but on demand, know what I mean?!”  I didn’t know that it stood for “Portable on Demand”  Well, duh, that makes sense.  Some things I don’t catch onto right away.  My friends still love to tease me about my epiphany a few years ago when I suddenly realized what the hand gesture “air quotes” meant. 

I looked at podfeed.net and tried to search for podcasts related to storytimes, but didn’t come up with anything.  At podcastalley.com I found a video podcast called “Becka and the Big Bubble” and added the RSS feeds to my bloglines account.  This is the description: “Animated Children’s Picture Book Series. Becka blows a Big Bubble and travels to a new land each book. She rhymes, learns, and has Fun! Kids Learn Confidence, Geography, Culture, and to PLAY!” 

This sounds like a lot of fun.  I would like to see CML use podcasting to promote storytimes and children’s programming.  We could make podcasts of booktalks for teachers to play to their classes, podcasts of storytimes for parents to listen to at home with their children.  Spooky tales at Halloween for kids and teens……the possibilities are endless.  Let’s start this initiative now!  Let’s use this technology to show off the talents of CML staff.

# 20 YouTube

I think YouTube might possibly be one of the best things on the Internet.  Free, easily accessible videos of just about anything…I’m am so grateful to be alive right now.  I’ve gone to YouTube before to look up random obscure old music videos from the 80’s and 90’s.  One thing I don’t recommend is spending about an hour looking at spooky footage of ghosts by yourself at night.  Try sleeping after that without jumping at every little shadow and sound.   

I see YouTube as being a wonderful resources for Children’s Librarians.  If I want to try out a new song for storytime but I don’t know the tune or cool motions to go with it, I can find a video of someone performing it online.  At the last Youth Services Meeting we had a workshop focused on string stories.  Trying to figure out what to do with the string from an illustration is next to impossible for me, and several people suggested that the staff member post instructional videos on YouTube for us to watch later.  I think it would be great if the Youth Services staff members at CML posted videos to share with each other demonstrating songs, string stories, flannel stories, etc.  What do you guys think? 

I searched for storytimes on YouTube and found a lot.  When I used to do baby laptimes (which is so much fun and I often miss now) there were often parents/grandparents taking pictures and videotaping.  There were mostly focused on their own child but there are some videos floating out with me singing *eeeek*.  I had a wonderful supervisor who encouraged me to develop my own repertoire of songs and ryhmes that I could perform within a second’s notice if needed.  This supervisor also taught me that you don’t always have to rely on a CD to perform a song, sometimes it is just as much fun to just lead the song yourself.  Open, Shut Them is one of those songs that I learned and prefer to just sing myself instead of putting on a CD.  Here is a random video I found on YouTube of the song being performed at a random library:

  

And here is a longtime favorite of mine, a video of a baby Panda sneezing.  The mama Panda’s reaction is priceless:

Fun, Fun, Fun

One of my favorite photos from the Fall-O-Ween festival here at Northside!  I think it really captured the “energy” of the moment.  I didn’t tell this particular co-worker that this was one of the photos I submitted to CMLsi until it had already appeared online.  She promised she wasn’t mad, and it gave us all a good laugh describing what it looks like is about to happen moments after the photo was taken.