The Aviary

Two occurrences from yesterday:

1) So I have this brown skirt that I sewed that I didn't like the color of - I had dyed it myself and the brown came out too light and too orange for my taste. I had decided to overdye it a darker brown and began the process yesterday after dinner. Dyeing takes a while - I was using Rit, and the process is "Make a dye bath, put the item in stirring frequently for up to an hour, rinse out the excess dye, make another bath if you're using color fixitive, put the item in and stir frequently for 20 minutes, rinse again, wash the item in the washing machine, then dry."

I had gotten to the "then dry" part last night before I went to bed. Just before I threw the skirt in the dryer, I looked over it to see how the color looked and was a little dismayed to find several places where it didn't look even and the dye hadn't taken properly. There wasn't anything I could do about it at that point, so I threw it in the dryer and went to bed.

Where I proceeded to alternately worry all night about how I had ruined my skirt, and then try to figure out ways that I hadn't ruined it, or at least not irreparably, and this is how I could fix things. It was not a pleasant night.

And this morning, I pulled the skirt out of the dryer and, lo and behold, the color looks much more even than I remembered, and the few places where the dye didn't take are on inside of the skirt. It looks much better than my catastrophizing brain thought it did.

I don't recommend this worrying-all-night-to-discover-things-are-fine process to anyone, but the relief I'm feeling right now I really pretty great.



2) As I walked to my mailbox yesterday, I passed a dude on the sidewalk carrying a large reusable grocery bag that I couldn't see inside of. I didn't recognize him, but that doesn't mean anything - I am a hermit and am not terribly familiar with many of the people in my neighborhood.

As I passed him, he stopped, looked and me, and said, "Excuse me, I believe these are yours." Whereupon he reached into the grocery bag, pulled out a small but perfect bunch of tiny jewel-like grapes, and handed them to me. Then he walked away.

I have two theories:
a) He has grown the grapes in his garden, now has more grapes than he knows what to do with, and is giving them away to random people.
b) Grape fairy.

If theory b is correct, I'm probably in trouble, because I ate some of the grapes before I thought better of it. They are very tart but very tasty.

Things people have said to me today:

1) At the dentist, my hygienist told me one of my fillings was leaking. Oh my god, why would you say that? Just tell me it needs to be replaced - that is literally all I need to know about these foreign objects you have inserted into my teeth. When the cyborg revolution comes, my teeth are also something that I will upgrade.

2) At the library, a patron asked me if I could check and see if he'd checked out a certain item before. I told him that I can't, because we don't keep a record of what you check out after you've checked it in, in order to protect our readers' privacy. But this patron is a little bit of a crank and acted surprised that we aren't spying on him. "Just the CIA, then," he said, "and the Democratic party." I told him that I couldn't speak to that but that we don't keep records of check outs after the items are returned, at which point he said, "I bet you approve of pornography in the library, don't you?" Sir, you are old enough to be my grandfather - I do not want to talk about pornography with you, or indeed any of my library patrons. (For the record, though: I have no objection to porn in the library, if you're not breaking the law or bothering other patrons. Maybe don't watch porn on the patron computers, though - that's tacky.)

And then, a patron called me over to his computer, so I walked over and asked what I could do for him. He told me that he wanted to show me something, and proceeded to point to a gif of the Blood Moon. I watched it and said "Wow." He turned around to look at me and said, "Do you know what that means?" I told him that I did not and he said, "Well, I'm sorry to hear that."

Apparently, there was nothing more forthcoming, so I walked back to my desk. I still have no idea what that was about.

Some days, I feel like I have walked into a David Lynch movie, but most of the time I'm pretty sure that's on me for not understanding, rather than on the people I'm talking to. But this thing? Totally on that dude.




ETA - Is it an End Times thing? Parts of the internet seem to think it's an End Times thing.


ETA2 - Okay, as he left he asked if we were ready for the next Blood Moon in October and when my coworker said she hoped it was clearer so she could see it better, he said, "Revelation reveals it." So definitely an End Times thing.

(Also, he spent quite some time growling at the computer about an email that wouldn't print and muttering under his breath and generally being very quietly angry in a pretty scary way and, in general, I was pretty happy to see him leave. I'm not usually actually freaked by any of our weirder patrons and I'm sure he's probably harmless but he gave me an unsettling angry-white-dude vibe. I've never seen him before and I hope he doesn't come back.)

...We appear to have received as an anonymous donation, in our bookdrop, a copy of City on the Edge of Forever that looks to have been signed by both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

Huh.

I just spent the last 10 minutes outside, staring at a trio of goats that just wandered into our neighborhood.

Goats.

We thought they might be wild goats at first - they had very long horns - but they weren't at all afraid of people and their coats looked very well cared for. So they're obviously domestic goats that have wandered away from their owners. Unfortunately, they didn't have any identification on them, so we're not sure who to contact about them.

They wandered away up the street and tried to get into someone's garage, and that is the last I saw of them.

Goats.

Today is officially the Weirdest Day.

And then, a man with a meat delivery truck knocked on my door and asked me if anyone in my household liked steak.

I mean, I quite like steak and so does the rest of my family, but I don't really want it coming to the house unsolicited.

And then, a woman called the library looking for me. Apparently, she has written a book and because someone told her I was a computer expert (!), she wanted to me to help her "launch" the book (!!). She specifically mentioned twitter and wordpress blogging.

I told her that I'm not that familiar with twitter and that, in any case, that sort of help isn't something the library can provide at this point. And then she said that no, it wouldn't be through the library, she just wanted to hire me to launch her book.

And then I stared at the phone for a long moment before telling her thank you but I am in no way qualified to help her launch her book.

Lady, I'm just the person who helps people put ebooks on their ereaders. I know exactly as much about computers as any other casual internet user and thus am in no way an expert. Also, I do not make house calls. Possibly, you should talk to someone who actually knows something about publishing?

That is probably not the weirdest thing I've been asked at the library, but it's the weirdest in a while.

And, back to work.


Patron: Can you put a Sherlock Holmes dvd on hold for me?

Me: Sure. Which Sherlock Holmes are you looking for?

Patron: You know, just the regular Sherlock Holmes.

Me: ...I'm going to need you to be a little more specific.


Eventually turned out that he wanted Game of Shadows. But, just, "regular Sherlock Holmes"? I was unaware that there was a standard.

Conversations from the library:

Elderly gentleman: Tell me something. How much sympathy could you dream up for a man who got his hand bitten off by an alligator?

Me: Well, I knew a man when I was little named Big Newt* who had lost a hand in a sawmill accident, so -

Elderly gentleman: ::waves dismissively:: I can't hear you.

Me: ::louder:: Quite a lot.

Elderly gentleman: Really? I don't have any. Alligators will eat anything.

Me: ...






*True story. His family lived next door to my dad when my dad was a kid. We would go down to Georgia to visit my grandmother and go to see Big Newt and Miss Louise. We would gather pecans from the tree in their back yard and they would give us sweet tea and pimento cheese** on white bread sandwiches. I kinda think of that as my most Southern memory.

**Pimento cheese = really gross. JSYK.

Have just had to convince a patron - one who has never displayed anything wackier than general grumpiness - that the fact that his computer keeps freezing on conservative political websites and not on liberal ones is solely a coincidence and not at all the result of some sort of liberal hacker conspiracy.

OMG, what is with today?

Scene from the library:


Patron: What's that on your necklace?

Me: It's a bat. It's based on an Edward Gorey illustration.

Patron: So...are you a Wiccan or something?

Me: ...no.


I'm still trying to puzzle out where that connection came from. I'm assuming it's some kind of Wiccan = witches = Halloween = bats, but I'm still sitting over here going, "Bzuh?"

(Of course then I had to explain that no, I just like creepy things/horror fiction/Edward Gorey*, which inevitably led to the patronizing "Oh, yeah, I used to read a lot of that stuff when I was a kid but I grew out it" conversation. I hate that conversation. It makes me want to hit people with my copy of Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.**)




*Seriously, who doesn't like Edward Gorey?

**Because that sucker would hurt. It's a nice thick lump of a book.

Today's example of cultural language barriers:

I spent a full three minutes explaining to a patron that no, you cannot touch or hold an mp3.

Dear Everyone,

If you take the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston, that takes you to Kingston. Which is, yes, in Kitsap County, on the Olympic Peninsula.

The Edmonds-Kingston ferry does not, for example, take you from Mukilteo to Whidbey Island. This is because Mukilteo is on the other side of Puget Sound. So, if that's where you're going, you may want to take the ferry back to Edmonds and stop looking at me like I'm crazy when I tell you that there's no other way to get to Whidbey Island from here.*




*Well, I suppose you could drive around via Tacoma but that would take you hours in the opposite direction and thus seems rather silly.