Tangram: Better Late Than Never?

Being indulgently lazy on Sunday seems to have disrupted my usual goal of posting a heart by Sunday evening. This time, I didn't even think about it until Monday. And here it is Tuesday. So I grabbed our copy of the 365 Creativity Journal for an idea. Idea 65: "Work with only the classic tangram shapes"! Hey - I have a tangrams set right here in the storage part of the coffee table! Experts will see I left out a piece. :-/

20/52

After taking the picture for Phil's Picassostache, I played with my food for my weekly creativity. I think food is the medium for many of my hearts.

Dandy


We agreed to be on a neighborhood garden tour in May, so I'm extra-focused on details when we work in the yard this spring. That focus helped me finally begin to see things like the difference in the types of hydrangeas we have.


This attention to detail, plus this 365er Noah highligthed, led to this week's heart. There really are a lot of dandelions blooming already, if you just look.

Ref Grunt

She wants to print out 114 emails.

Looking for Finding Thalhimers.

Photocopier

P.C. Cast's new one.

The other desk is for check-out.

Why can't he right click. -- Who knows, but just go 'round the other way and click edit>copy.

PIN is changeme.

Daisy Dalrymple mysteries (thanks for the help, NoveList!)

Watching dude who is sitting between two of our quickest-to-anger patrons talking on his cell phone. He's amazingly quiet, so I may let it go.

Direct her to Mysteries.

Gent is shocked - shocked! - that people don't put magazines back in the right place. I tell him we'll take care of it. (It was about time for me to circle the room, anyway, so I grabbed them. I did not know we subscribed to Truckin.)

Computer classes.

Printer.

(Why do older gents think it's hilarious to comment on the full computers? If I point out an available machine they're all "I'm just joking." Joking about what? About how people love their FarmVille?)

Ref Grunt

Q: I can never remember: which are we - central or specific?
A: Ah, um - Eastern.

A bit of a curly heart (am I pushing it if I call it art nouveau?) out of the mixer cord. Also, a birthday cake for Phil.

Ref Grunt

Sorry, no, I can't unfilter the computers in Children's for you.

Telling me you haven't been to the library "in over ten years" and asserting your are "just looking to kill time" does not win me over.

(I switch to adult side, and forget about working on my monthly report!)
Copier.

Pursuit of Happyness.

Copier.

Computer, computer.

Printer is where?

Add money to print, how?

Take the phone chat outside, please.

Copier.

Where's my print? [You gotta hit print the second time, when money management system asks, do you really want to print these x pages?]

Teach new library member to use shelf-check. He's got an H2G2 DVD, so I am extra nice.

Computer?

Scary dude needs our phone. He is not too angry or loud at the person he calls.

Computer?

Tissues for amiable, chic woman. We grouse about allergies for two seconds.

Hipster with ringing iPhone needs the hold he didn't come in for in time re-sent here. Or not. He can't decide.

Books by Frank Deford, Laura Hillenbrand.

(OMG, look at the cute red polka-dot Mary Jane sneakers on that child!!)

Purple Heart

Finally came off the needles today! I was out of practice making this mitten pattern -- the project I made while learning to knit, and that I've made a dozen or twenty times since.

Special Effect Heart

This is just a bit of a cool wrapping paper that I used recently. The first picture I took triggered the flash and -- ugh! -- washed it out. For the second shot, I put my finger over the flash and got a super-red image. Third try, I held my finger off the flash half an inch or so, and that's what this is.

15/52

Matched by Ally Condie

As is the custom in the Society, Cassia goes to be Matched at seventeen -- to by video screen the man she will marry at 21. She's thrilled by the event -- then shocked and thrilled to be Matched with her childhood friend. Being Matched with someone you know is nearly unheard of. So are mistakes, in the Society, but it seems one has been made.

Though reminiscent of a slew of great stories (Feed, Uglies, Hunger Games), Condie expresses nifty dystopian ideas quite well:

The almost-snow reminds me of a line from a poem we studied this year in Language and Literacy: "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." It is one of my favorites of all the Hundred Poems, the ones our Society chose to keep, back when they decided our culture was too cluttered. They created commissions to chose the hundred best of everything: Hundred Songs, Hundred Paintings, Hundred Stories, Hundred Poems. The rest were eliminated. Gone forever. For the best, the Society said, and everyone believed it because it made sense. How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with too much? (p. 29)

Or when another character tells Cassie about the myth of Sisyphus:

"I don't know if he's real," Ky says. "If he ever existed."

"Then why tell his story?" I don't understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tell me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there's no proof that he ever lived at all?"

Ky pauses for a moment before he answers . . . ."Even if he didn't live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it's true anyway."

A thoughtful and gentle introduction to dystopias.