The Count and the Amount

I'm wearing my invisible textbook hat, trying to "guestimate" how short we will be on particular textbook titles, which will be fun because we have no money anyway. All of this takes me back to my middle school days and after school rituals.

We didn't even have television at home until I was in middle school so I had to go to my grandparents, which is where I watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I was so young for that event and didn't go into screaming fits or quite catch the significance of it. I think my parents wanted an environment without the television until I was in middle school. All of a sudden it seemed like the reception had picked up enough that out came the television and the antennae. No cable in those days, especially out in the country with your closest neighbors a mile away. If you didn't like those half dozen channels that you could pull in, tough. Go read a book or do something.
After school and on hot days in the summer, I'd come home, turn on Channel 2 Oakland, and watch "Dialing with Dollars," hosted by Pat McCormick who received these post cards from viewers with their phone numbers. He had this count and amount system, and he'd call homes and say with his very distinctive voice, "Pat McCormick, Dialing for Dollars, calling. Are you watching? What's the movie, and the count and the amount?" If you could tell him, you won a prize, some money and maybe some restaurant coupons. My mom was so uncool because she didn't send in a post card. I guess she thought we lived too far away for someone to call long distance.

Pat McCormick must have been the equivalent of a babysitter for latchkey kids because he also broke up the movie screening with little puppet intermissions, and he had two of the greatest puppets I ever saw; Humphrey and Charley. One was a bull dog, and the other was a horse. McCormick was always off screen when the puppets talked, and he did a great job with his voice. I would forget McCormick was behind them, he was so good.

Anyway, the count and the amount is the name of the game with textbooks. I'm almost afraid I will have to go dialing for dollars to meet the needs of starting the next school year.

The middle-schoolers today wouldn't take to Charley and Humphrey, but television, even if it was black and white, had such better shows then. I cancelled my cable last year- I just can't deal with 100 channels of nothing, half of which are scooping me on the tabloid issues of the day. Back to reading those books because I don't like what comes to me on 100 plus channels.

For Librarian Entertainment

After weeding books with ridiculous sounding titles, I found that a prize exists for books with the oddest titles. I was listening to National Public Radio when they ran a story about the Diagram Prize list of winners which British trade magazine for the publishing industry, The Bookseller publishes annually. If Wikipedia is at all credible, the list and the prize originated as entertainment during the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair.

This list is a short seven titles, up one from six because I guess someone just couldn't decide between two terrible tomes. I am not going to take the time to give you the scoop on all of them, but the titles are "must reads" even if the books are not. I am going to share a couple of my favorites, and then you can go to the link to The Bookseller.

"The Mushroom in Christian Art" by John A. Rush and "A Taxonomy of Office Chairs" by Jonathan Olivares are titles that just make you want to cuddle up on the sofa and read.

Read on:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/diagram-prize-shortlist-revealed.html

If you want to see the whole history of Diagram Prize winners, go to the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookseller/Diagram_Prize_for_Oddest_Title_of_the_Year

Bambi-Eyes are Smiling- and Laughing for Now

This is our Rite of Almost-Spring when the school counselor brings the 8th graders to the library, has them calculate their GPA, and helps them do a reality-check on where they are with their grades and test scores, and where they need to be at the end of the year. All the little Bambi-Eyes are laughing now, but in 3 months or less, I'll be seeing a lot of these little faces in here crying because someone doesn't want to promote them to High School.

I had a teacher send two students down last week to see if they had an English Handbook that they needed for homework, and of course, they had sworn that they never received the book. My system shows they did, and it is amazing how their stories change 3 times within the same conversation, and the parental part of my brain is screaming neither of these students has done a lick of homework in months. They probably haven't cleaned their rooms since before Halloween, either.

I should run a side business as a bookie, taking bets on their GPAs because I could predict fairly accurately who is going to rise above that comfort zone of a 2.0 GPA and who is going to be finishing near the back of the pack from what I see and hear in the textbook room.

I'm betting that one-half of the 8th grade is going to be saying special prayers, polishing apples for teachers, and trying to do a lot of work in the next few weeks, about half of which will be illegible, inadequate, and off-topic. Oh, well. They've got to learn sometime.

Programs and ebooks in the Library

Recent trends indicate ebooks selling more copies and publishers fighting less against the trend. I think school libraries should go more in that direction also because I seem to be spending more time hosting events in in the library than checking out books. If we have ebooks and train everyone to access them, we might actually have readers. Not to mention, weeding might be an entirely different matter. Perhaps after 20 years, the title just melts into cyberspace.

The Men to Boys program held a meeting in the library during lunch and 5th period about bullying. They had a speaker, a Mr. Hernandez, who did an excellent presentation, and even addressed cyberbullying. Mr. Hernandez mentioned how one of his sons got caught up in a gang. After the program, I had the opportunity to speak with him, and his story is truly one of extraordinary effort and love to remove his son from the gang, including sending him away from the Bay Area to Samoa for an extended amount of time.

While the program was in progress, I continued going through Destiny and eliminated more ghost records for books that probably haven't been seen in 30 years. I also found a number of books for which fast records had been created without including the copyright date. Most of those books had copyrights as recent or later than 2000, and I took them out and recatalogued them by attaching them to an entry with a MARC record. That should help the average age of the collection.

To archive or not to archive: my take on the school library is that it is not an archival institution, and more than one or two books of 20 or more years of age within a 100 span range of the Dewey Decimal system is too many. We all form attachments, and yes, some of these books still have good information, but let them live on in the classroom libraries of the history teachers. Too many titles are unappetizing, and when you open up the book, the copy is dirty and disgusting. A whole bunch of other titles might inspire a new generation of writers to reexamine the subject matter. Some subjects and persons would be better put into books more general in scope or into collective biographies. Single book titles devoted to each battle of World War II are about as necessary as a single book titles devoted to each of Napoleon Bonaparte's engagements. History moves on, and unless students are specializing in history at a university, they don't need that much World War II detail. Less shelf space devoted to some of this stuff is better for a middle school.

In my case, most of what I am deleting are ghosts; mere records in the system, and I really don't know why someone barcoded all these books from the 1940s through the 1970s. I guess we all get attached to these books.

I think I should do a book featuring all the literary shrines of my life, and it will probably have an audience limited to myself, but perhaps it will help me let go of library books.

Ghostbusted: Devils, Drugs and Doctors, 1929

The All-City Youth Leadership group is taking a break from discussing how to improve cafeteria lunch to eat some catered goodies that look a lot better than what I am eating today. I think they might be finishing up and leaving for the day. I have been cleaning out ghost books from Destiny while they occupy the library, and am working on the 600s of the Dewey Decimal system. So far, I haven't gone beyond 616, but I am about to send the ghosts out for radiocarbon dating.

Just a sample of delightful items not seen for a very long time, and if it were not for a print out of the title details, I'd have no proof that they existed. The winner, by far, has to be "Devils, Drugs, and Doctors: The Story of the Science of Healing from Medicine Man to Doctor" by Howard H. Haggard in 1929. Runners-up owe their lack of appeal largely to the publishing industry which should be sued en masse if sales were low. Take your pick: "Goodbye to Bedlam; Understanding Mental Illness and Retardation" by John Langone, 1974 and "Food Trips and Traps: Coping with Eating Disorders" by Jane Claypool (1983). Ms. Claypool should sue on the basis that alliteration has been taken to extremes to the point of obfuscation of the writer's intentions unless she was discussing eating disorders among amoebic Venus flytraps. Not to be outdone by private industry, the New York Public Affairs Committee contributed a real beauty of a pamphlet no. 507, written by Elizabeth Ogg (not to be confused with Egg), entitled "Voluntary Sterilization." I wonder if Ms. Ogg was proud of this contribution to a middle school library, and if she was aware of how many involuntary sterilizations went on among African American and Native American women during this time period.

Other ghosts: Titles for Herbert Zim and Sonia Bleeker. While I have a lot of nostalgia for these two authors as I read their science and anthropology titles in elementary school, and while their work was very good, I think if I read them almost 50 years ago, they don't need to be on the shelves or lurking as ghosts in Destiny. Their papers are housed at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and maybe someday I will pay a visit to the shrine of the authors of my youth

I'm tempted to send this list of titles off for radioactive carbon-14 dating.

Lexile Land in the Library

The district seems to have blocked just about all the computers from access to blogger except mine, which is fine. I just hope my Yahoo access to it continues. It would be fun to get the students involved in learning blogger, but unless some official approval comes through, I won't do it.

The computers in the library are going to be reduced as a computer lab will be reactivated, and only a few will remain in the library. The concern around that will be getting teachers involved to come to the library at all without bringing students to the library. They don't bring them, and given the behavioral problems, they don't come on their own, leaving before school, lunch time, and after school for individual visits. Students are locked out until the morning bell rings, and after school programs are in here after school, and that doesn't seem to promote other students coming in easily.

On the bright side, we were awarded a $500 grant which will purchase some books for mini-reading clubs with 6 students being able to participate in reading some titles with Lexile scores of 1000 or higher.
Titles include: "Begging for Change" by Sharon Flake, "Crows and Cards" by Joseph Helgerson, "Dawn of Fear" by Susan Cooper, "Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra" by Wendy Lichtman, "Elijah of Buxton" by Christopher Paul Curtis, and "H.I.V.E: Higher Institute of Villainous Education" by Mark Walden.

Today we have some sort of all city youth council meeting going on in the library with students attending from other schools as well as a representative from our school. I'm hearing a lot of laughter so they must be enjoying themselves.

Further comment of Lexile leveling of libraries: If this trend in madness persists, I suggest that it be anticipated and outsourced on a private contractor basis over the summers, on weekends, or other after school hours. If it is done this way, at least a portion of the library could be completed quickly; the fiction chapter books, and then the picture books. The librarian could then run the library on at least a limited basis circulating those books without the whole library being off-limits. It is completely unfeasible to check out books while also trying to do the Lexile leveling. Someone working on a private contractor basis could save the district some money by not having benefits being paid for. I just think a way has to be found to have the library more accessible to children while this is being done, and to get better money value out of the process.

Library Weeding and Landscaping

I am beginning to think of the library as a garden, not meaning a library dedicated to botany, horticulture and gazebo plans but a garden as in much weeding of books. Also as in rumors of blowers being used by janitors to speed up the job.

I am pulling books off the shelves and computer as quickly as I can. I have not pulled the old reference books yet, but I hope to eliminate them by Thursday as well. The shelves look a little barer but a lot better. Some of the discards might find homes in classrooms or with students.

As to the blower rumor, someone who worked here as a janitor and moved to another school told me that blowers were being used in the library at other schools. I am seeing a lot of dust on books, and I do not know if this is happening here, and I will probably not know. If I were to run into the office asking that blowers not be used, I would probably be taken for yet another overly anxious librarian. Who knows? If I'm laid off, I will never know what else they are doing with these books; besides not reading them.

Ghosts in the Library

Completing the state library survey motivated me to do some more weeding, and I have been pulling books with copyright dates from the 1980s. I have also wondered how I could possibly have 11,000 books. Now that I ghost-busted some "ghost books," the sections I have completed are about 15 years old.

After weeding, I took a look in the library reports section at the Dewey Decimal ranges in detail, and I noticed average dates of 1942, 1955, and other years from long before this library was automated. I know the books are not on the shelves, and they never came up with subject searches because the MARC records for them don't have tags, I'm sure. Why someone bothered to catalog books already ancient by the time automation was implemented is beyond me. I am spending a lot of time deleting these "ghost books" from the system. Parliamentary procedure material from 1942 and McCarthy investigation materials for the 1950s are no longer phantasms in Destiny. A lot more remains to be done.

Student ghost: As if book ghosts were not enough, I have a student who came to the library, who seems to have a bit of a processing/expressive lag, and I can never really figure out if he's part of the after school program, or if he is just around. He came in to get a graphic novel, checked it out, was with the after school program, I thought. After school program leaves, and I go to the shelves to search for a book, and I notice a backpack, and go to talk to an after school program employee, who comes and picks up the backpack. About 5 minutes later, I hear a voice from the computer area in the dark "That was my backpack." He was sitting so quietly that the sensors have let the lights turn off, and I didn't know he was there. I might have left in 10 minutes without knowing he was in the library.

Now I am going to do a walk-through of the textbook room and the entire library before I leave every day, because I just don't know what might happen, especially if the library were going to closed for a long break. Every year I think I have experienced everything possible, but there is always a new student situation.

Kids, Writing, Blogging

All it took was one paraprofessional showing two boys how to set up a blog when they couldn't use notepad to display some website material they had developed at home to set off an interest in blogger. At least one of them comes in almost daily to scope out the policy on blogger, and that attracts two or three others to come over and join the discussion on cyberbullying and school district filtering policies. I have assured them if we ever hear that it has been approved, that I will help them start blogging. They all want to write about video games they play, ideas for new games, and hand-held game devices.

Personally, I'd love to read TechnoGeek's blog; he spouts forth the genealogy of the games in a Genesis-like session of begat, begot, begotten that is quite ironic since he's the self-proclaimed atheist.

If you were to hand them a piece of paper and ask them to write something on it in here at recess, you would clear out the library, but find out you can write on the internet, that's another thing. Writing in a word processing program is not all that cool; too much like a regular class assignment.

Do it in Blogger, click "Publish," and you're live in Cyberspace with fellow humans and aliens listening in for intelligent life forms.

Library Collections: An Eye-Opener about American Society

Weeding old library collections reveals a lot about what books were being written, sold, and bought for consumption by children through the efforts of supposedly well-meaning adults. Looking at the frightening titles of the dribble of the 1980s provides a view of tweens and teens as up to no good and quite menacing. Titles like "Vandalism: A Crime of Immaturity" brings to mind that this is just a teen crime, and not having bothered to read the book, in all fairness, perhaps the author said or suggested that some immature minds over the age of 21 do exist. I just know that personally I have removed so many of these books based on the fact that the title alone seems to promote poor self-esteem.

The book industry, and everything else attached to it, has a lot of power that while perhaps only subconsciously aware of its effects, exerts a lot of influence which is not always positive. I would hate to be a child with a whole social science section full of horrendous teen possibilities. I don't find nuclear warfare, toxic waste, global warming or terrorism comforting, but these topics seem less focused on a particular generation. It's a sad commentary on our culture and its interaction with our own youth.

Having said this, some of what comes up so disturbingly cannot be blamed on the book industry. A title that I would not have cringed at a month ago caused me great distress due to a recent local crime, which has been exerting its effect upon me more than Goldilocks smoking on my sofa. "The Ma and Pa Murders and Other Perfect Crimes," is thankfully old, and even though Lizzie Borden went on to jump rope ditty fame and has fascinated many, this book doesn't need to be here at this particular point in time.

On a lighter note: The unlocked display case outside the library has a display featuring my newsletter with the recipes to go with the Students Across the Seven Seas series. Given the lack of a lock, a little mild vandalism, if we need to use that word, has been going on, and it is starting to resemble an ofrenda offering of a Day of the Dead alter with delicacies like half-eaten energy bars and an occasional expletive directed to, heaven-forbid, the librarian, who probably said not to eat in the library. Could it be that vandalism is another form of free-speech protected by the Bill of Rights? I think so, even if my occupation is there as an object of derision.

Personally, I'm thinking of going with the flow, and making a multi-cultural ofrenda and just pile some more favorite foods in there, and open it as a snack bar. I even thought of putting in some incense sticks, but then I remembered Goldilocks.

Preparing for the End of the Year

Sometimes I don't know if I'm coming or going. With the textbook part of the job, which I don't officially do, coming and going are about the same. I just sent an email to the principal to keep me in the loop even if I am not budgeted for a job next fall, because I will need to know the projected enrollment to help the school be ready for fall.

Not only do I have to count the returned books to know how many we have ( I can't rely on the computer to tell me how many are here, nor the number of students we have now), but with school closures going on, I'm not even sure the enrollment will be similar to this year's enrollment.

Money is scarce, and I don't know that I will be here. That means I am going to try to clean out as many of the probably 600 excess students in the database before I go, and discard as many 1980s library books as possible.

Like I said, I don't know if I'm going away for the summer or not coming back at all. Just another year with less than desirable funding.

Older Librarians Make Libraries Look Younger

I brought my laptop today thinking I would use the wireless connection and work on my website. I'm hoping it will connect faster than my work computer. Between issuing new books to a student and getting involved with weeding some books in the morning, I never got beyond the weeding. I did some sort of inventory last year, but don't know if I completed it all, and I spent time deleting things that were not only from the 1980's but from earlier. There weren't even copies on the shelves for a lot of these items. I only went through part of the 970 range, and the sad thing is that this weeding still leaves me with copyrights from the 1990's. I am down to very few books on states and colonies, and if I don't scrounge up some money from somewhere, this library will be down to nothing if I keep weeding.

There isn't even one a good section in the library. My 000-099 section has an average copyright date of 12 years, and that is as good as it gets. If I were a 22-year old library clerk starting out on this job, I would be younger than the collection on an average. By my being older, the library looks good when compared to me. It took me all morning to do this, which, of course, is one of the things library clerks do to waste time.

The textbook side of my life is just as complicated. The school secretary calls and asks me about some kid owing a book at another school that she can see on Aeries, and I tell her that I don't use Aeries and that my system shows me less and less, so I don't see anything owed. Some of these kids went to schools that are now closed, and the books were never checked in. I have little ability to know if kids at this school actually took home the book checked out to them because the books were in the classroom when the Williams people came through to check on students having books, and when the teachers gave them out, many of them didn't get the book that had been assigned to them.

I am a smoke and mirrors textbook clerk, since I really am a library clerk and not a textbook clerk. The whole system doesn't work from the top to the bottom beginning with the principals borrowing books from each other without getting them off of the original site's inventory. Each layer down has its own problems, and a lot of books don't come back or get paid for no matter how much I growl or how many bills I mail. I am not going to stress out over it. I rather imagine that the ACLU wants kids to have access to an education, and next layer up can try charging for those books if they think they can convince a parent to pay.

Now that lunch is over and my little friends are off with their teachers, I hope to hook up the laptop.

Reading Chuckle: the little news item on Yahoo about the guy who got a $11,000 bill after letting his kids stream videos while on vacation from Canada to the southwest of the U.S. I bet he never spends a $1,000 on books for them, which is what he settled the bill for with the wireless carrier. He could have bought each kid a ton of activity books for a $1,000! I wonder if he thinks reading is an option now!

Iditarod Dog Sled Race Classroom Projects

The annual Iditarod Dog Sled Race that commemorates the 1925 emergency dog sled run to bring serum to diphtheria-stricken villagers in Nome, and the race's website offers a lot of instructional ideas and tools for teachers who might like to follow the race and help their children learn according to standards.



One option is to write letters and send them with the mushers (drivers). Read the instructions carefully and observe the deadline for mailing on February 12 if you want a musher to carry your class letter. I haven't done this in a while, but it was easy as it came with the requirement of one-page only since this stuff is going by dog sled. You should also tell your students that the letter might not get returned due to sled spills, driver's not sending it back, or it might get back, but not until late. You can follow the progress of the race which begins March 3rd this year. The race takes between 10 to 17 days for the racers.

My musher for the year I did this was great, and an interesting man who was born in Switzerland, married an American, lives in Alaska raising sled dogs, and fights fire in the lower 48 states during the summer.

The website has a very nice list of books for all ages that can provide you with reading that ties in with the race and the habitat.

http://iditarodblogs.com/teachers/iditarod-books/


This is the link to the website.
http://www.iditarod.com/learn/

This is a link specifically to the instructions on sending material to be carried by dog sled. Read carefully.
http://iditarodblogs.com/teachers/writing-to-mushers-must-read/

This is a great way for students to learn about different lifestyles and different habitats.

Yahoo! for bringing you my shout out on this dog sled race.

A Fairly Normal Friday

Working 4 days a week at one school and 1 day a week at another school is a challenging schedule to say the least. The one day a week school doesn't have much of a chance for me to do more than lexile level the library, and I always feel that I have dropped in to do my job, but people and occurrences are making it difficult. My mind feels like I have just woken up from a dream and can't quite decide what is real and what is a dream.

Today is fairly calm, and I handed out free RIF books to half the students, and will hand out books next week to the other half. As easy as this sounds, it, too had its challenges. The boxes of books were moved into a storage space, and the boxes were hard to access. I pulled out books for the older children and concentrated on them today because I could get to them. The shipping boxes arrived at school in very poor shape, and so many have come apart that I am hoping I will be able to fit the books on the tables back into some box at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, I continue to lexile level the library, and we will order the spine label and protector supplies on Monday. Eventually, this library will come together. I still have quite a bit of work to do on the non-fiction and some odds and ends, but I think progress is being made. I will be off the system and cleaning up around here at 3:30 pm when the district shuts me out while it maintains the server. I'm looking forward to the weekend.

We Need a List of Computer Skills for Students

We need to come to some list of say up to 10 skills or types of programs our kids can have access to through the internet and computers and find ways to allow it without all the filtering by the district. Many of the kids are starting to use this stuff at home, and probably with varying skill levels. Many kids have lots of little clever things they have learned to do such as make pictures and then post them to the desktop but at the same time they are lacking a consistent set of realistic and reasonable skills. For instance, they don't understand the word processor program to a middle school level of competency. They are not familiar with flash drives and how to use them.

A paraprofessional brought a seventh-grader into the library during lunch today, and said that the boy was making a website at home with his uncle. The boy didn't seem to know where to go to get to the website which might not be hosted at this point. He wanted to show his content to us in notepad for some reason, and the district doesn't allow notepad to be utililzed. We are worried about kids writing programs and being hackers probably..

The paraprofessional helped him set up a blog on blogger( which the filters didn't him even though sometimes I get a message saying it isn't allowed in the district, and then I do another search and login to with sucess.) The only thing the kid was typing was a list of character names, maybe for Pokemon characters. There weren't really any sentences that I could detect. I am not sure if this kid is resource or if there are some special needs. I seriously doubt that much of his website is really being done by him rather than his uncle. The kids want to do this work, but we are not teaching them even the most basic of skills.

This is my suggested list.

They should have a flash drive and know how to save to it. The district doesn't allow saving anything to desktops. Some kids seem to know a way around that, I think.

Basic parts of the computer: the hard drive, the monitor, the keyboard, the printer. A lot of our students think turning off the monitor is turning off the computer.

Keyboarding: I know of only one teacher who has had students work with the free online games for keyboarding.

Open a free email account, send emails, save and delete mail and contacts.

Microsoft Office Word proficiency: Insert dates, select text, cut and paste, apply bold, italic, underline; spell check, bullets, lists, page alignments, do a simple table, save and send a document by email, print.

Microsoft Office Excel: Know about worksheets, columns, rows and cells, change the name of a worksheet, change the color tab of a sheet, make a list, sort alphabetically, be able to enter amounts of money, and generate a sum, and do simple pie and bar graphs.

Microsoft Publisher: Students should be able to do a simple newsletter, and design an event poster, be able to upload clip art into their documents.

PowerPoint or other slide show type program: They should be able to put together a short slide show, and include video clips if our filters allowed them to do it.

Blog: They should be able to start a blog, select a template, write some text, and upload some pictures and widgets if our filters allowed that.

Google docs: Our students need to be familiar with these documents and know how to share their work with their teachers or other students working on collaborative projects.

Google website or other free website program: The google website tools are not that easy, but they are not that hard either. Students could do a simple 4 to 5 page website on some topic.

Noodletools citation generation: Students should be able to use Noodletools to produce papers and generate a bibliography at least in the simplest format, share work with teachers.

Those are 12 skills I would like students to learn. I hear statements like we don't know what to teach them because we don't know what they're going to need. Technology changes, but if they learn these basics they will adapt to whatever comes along. As it is, they know a fair amount, but it isn't from a taught curriculum and its just bits and pieces. They don't need to be experts but they should have some knowledge, and I think why we don't do it is that it isn't tested by the State of California. I think by the end of eighth grade, they could know these skills, and know about cyber issues.

Gotta Go, Gotta Go, Goldilocks and To Build a Fire: In My House!

I just issued textbooks to a new student in my unofficial textbook capacity, and we have been getting more students coming in than going out. That is good news for the school. Of course, I might find later that a whole bunch of students left without coming through the library first, and change my assessment on that trend.

Remedial math happened in here this morning on the very few functioning computers, and AVID students will be here doing something later in the morning. Otherwise, I am cataloging and processing books with a somewhat distracted mind. The office is calling with calls that when I try to pick up the line, I get no one. Finally, the RIF contact got through to me, and I am going to fax off a UPS shipping bill to them because I'm being billed for shipping which we don't have to pay on RIF. Most of these calls are probably sales calls.

There's a book, or two, for any occasion, and the distracting dramas of my week have included numerous trips to the bathroom, which in our district is never in the library. My doctor has my water pipes under treatment, and I look forward to less locking up and trekking during the day. I guess that book is "Gotta Go, Gotta Go."

If there were not enough distractions to my days, neighbors and the Lake County Fire Protective Services informed me on Sunday that some young male, who probably answers to "Goldilocks," took up residence in my house. Goldilocks must have liked the feel of Mom's old sofa (which I put in the house only out of filial duty, because I hate(d) it). I suspect Goldilocks was reading "To Build a Fire" while he sat on that sofa, and was inspired to cause $25,000 in damage.

Maybe he didn't like the sofa either. I haven't seen the mess yet, but I will be taking off from work on the 15th of this month to talk to the insurance adjuster.

That house needed repairs which were on hold, but with some insurance money, repairs might speed up to this summer.

No one was hurt, and the neighbor's property is fine, and if they convict Goldilocks of anything, maybe he can do community service reading to senior citizens, tagging bears, or cutting weeds as part of fire abatement. I think he already did me a service, and I am not going to say a word to my mother about her sofa.