Athena’s Banquet

Today I:

• Helped with pre-school storytime and tested out a vegetable stamp craft.  We had some donated small rectangles of matte board, a bag of vegetables (carrots and cauliflower and brocolli), and some ink pads, so my supervisor had me try making vegetable stamps by slicing them in half and inking them.  It worked pretty well, although some kids were much more interested in stamping themselves than they were in stamping the paper.  Oh well.  It’s washable.


• Pulled the first set of books for weeding, checking the dusty shelves list as well as pulling books that were more than about 10 years old (checking the date stamped in the front cover) or were in bad condition.


• Worked on processing books for weeding.


• Worked the reference desk for a while.  I had one interesting question today: a woman came in looking for a book that had been made into a movie, about a woman who moved into a retirement community.  She thought the woman was named Mrs. Claridge, so I spent some time checking the catalog, Google, and Amazon for that with no luck, and then she realized that the woman was actually named Mrs. Pelfrey, so I looked for that for a bit, and then by some magical combination Google spat out that it was Mrs. PAlfrey at The ClareMONT, and thus I found her book and movie.  And all was well.  It’s great when patrons gradually remember bits and pieces of things that let you find what they want; it’s like a scavenger hunt through their memories.


• Pulled books for a special request – my boss had gotten a call from a patron who was stuck at home with two sick little boys, ages 2 and 4, and was desperate for something to read to them to keep them entertained.  So I was sent out to the shelves to dig up books on robots and trucks that would keep little boys busy, so I pulled about ten books (Mike Mulligan, an Eye Spy, a few on dinosaurs…there were surprisingly few on robots that I could find, but then I was just scanning) and handed them over to put them on hold.  It was really kind of fun.  I felt like a personal shopper.