Libraries, and How They Work

For the average person: Library use is simple. Once a week, or maybe once every two weeks if you’re a remarkably slow reader, you go to the library and get the next poorly written, ½ inch thick novel of your chosen genre. Perhaps a slimy romance, action flick or sci-fi, it really doesn’t matter. You read it (amazingly enough, since an American who doesn’t watch TV in every spare moment is rare) and return it in a timely manner. No pesky announcements about how much money you currently owe to the poor library system when you try to check out your next cheap novel masquerading as literature. No sheepish feeling as you realize that you kept a copy of one of the most ridiculously over-used plot-lines past your allotted three weeks and probably deprived 2 other people of the mind-numbing blandness contained in those tortured pages. Lighthearted and carefree, you skip home to enjoy your next piece of cotton-candy reading.


For the serious reader: Library use is difficult. First of all, they don’t have half of the books you want to read at your branch, and you have to request them. Once your book of real literature written before the days of TV and dumbed down Americans arrives, you take it home and dive in. The only problem is, no matter how fast a reader you are, you really can’t finish an unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo in less than three weeks, unless you have absolutely nothing better to do than read all day long. So the appointed due date arrives, and you try to take advantage of this convenience called “renewal.”


Can I side track for a moment? Why do they give you a due date and fines if you’re also allowed to just renew the book? Think about that as I proceed.


So you’re trying to renew your book. Since you can do that from the comfort of your own home on the internet, you take a moment from reading your wonderful piece of intelligent literature to utilize the library website. But once you click the “renew” button, you get a little red sentence announcing that you can’t renew your book because someone else has requested it! Unlike the average reader of average intelligence might, you don’t sigh and resign yourself to going to the library to return the book before you finish reading it. You resolve to finish as soon as possible, but fines or no fines, you will finish the book. After all, you can’t give up what must be the only library copy of this great work of fiction before you’ve devoured every well-phrased sentence and breathed a sigh of contentment at the satisfactory ending. Somewhere around a dollar into your fine, you start wondering how much you’re going to have to pay. So you get back onto the library website and look up the book in the handy-dandy library catalog. When you check the number of requests, and how many copies of the book are available in the system, you see that there are actually 5 checked in copies of THE EXACT SAME BOOK available to be shipped anywhere that’s desired, and you call the library to complain. “Oh, yes,” the librarian calmly informs you, “the computer program does that for some reason. If you try to renew it now, it will work.” “Great,” you say, “then can you forgive my fine?” “No, I’m sorry,” the librarian says, “I can’t do that.” You bite your tongue, hang up politely and decide that it’s worth it to buy every single piece of literature that you ever want to read in the future. And when you finally finish The Count of Monte Cristo, you go buy a copy of it, because it was just that good.

The Epilogue

The inspiration of a new vacuum was all I needed to motivate me to find the carpet in our room again, and now, with a mostly tidy room and newly vacuumed floors, I can say definitely that the new vacuum is nice. It's made a few finicky noises when I ran into pieces of furniture a little too forcefully, but it recovers quickly and apparently suffers no ill effects. The extension wand for attachments is a little complicated, but allows for good variety: a nice long extension wand for reaching ceiling fans and out-of-reach corners, or a short little wand for "dusting" type uses. Emptying the receptacle is easy, and so much nicer than having to replace bags! It's very quiet for a motorized machine, and it's amazing how much dust it's able to whip out of the carpet with the "wind tunnel" effect that Dyson employs. I think this will be a long and beautiful relationship... hopefully, a happily-ever-after!

(Haha!)

The End.

A New Beginning

Some very old, faithful readers who diligently read all of my lengthy posts from "way back when" may remember my difficulties with vacuums. There are actually three posts about it, which I will obligingly link to, under the delightful illusion that anyone might actually want to read these old posts from the "archives."

Prologue
First chapter
Second chapter

I am happy to announce in this Third chapter that The Vacuum of Sauron has officially been replaced. Finally. And Sarah will not be allowed to name it. Hopefully, it will remain blissfully nameless, and therefore have no "character" to be flawed, thus enabling it to clean sufficiently with no issues.

It's a Dyson, although not a Dyson "Ball" vacuum (those are so expensive just for the convenience of more range of motion!) and I hope will be a vast improvement over my past Hoover vacuum. It doesn't use bags, so already it's better. An improvement would likely mean that there would be no more posts about vacuums, as I have a tendency to blog about exasperating things and enjoy all the convenient and happy parts of my life in bloggy silence... but should it turn about to be an amazing vacuum, I will probably write something in glowing praise, which will be a satisfying epilogue to this trilogy.

Life in general...

I haven't had much time for lengthy blog posts... it seems that short little things on Facebook get more response anyway. ;) But, even if it's just for myself, I like to keep some track of what's going on in my life. So, on my plate for this year:

-Teaching my 12 piano students
-Taking piano and voice myself
-Theatre and broadway dance
-Swimming

Some of my goals are to continue to improve my cooking, and thriftiness. To help with my money management and budgeting, I'm paying for all of my activities, buying my dad's car from him (and he's looking for a "new" car) and paying for my own personal spending from my own earnings. If I can't pay for it, I can't afford it.

I'm still trying to go to bed earlier, and get up earlier. I've also been trying to get up early enough to have a Bible study time in the morning. Abigail wrote an inspiring post about the importance of starting the day just a few days after I'd been feeling that waiting until the evening wasn't a good idea for me, and that gave me the extra nudge I needed. I can't get up and instantly start reading though, so I give myself some time to wake up so I can devote my attention to reading and prayer.

It feels weird being in something of an in-between phase; since I've graduated from high school, but am not planning on going to college. I am apprenticing with my piano teacher, learning as much as I can about teaching, and teaching my own students, focusing on some home-making skills for the future if I get married and continuing my interest in theatre arts, plus widening my musical attempts into voice. And I'm even trying to include some higher level "school" type study in. I'm excited, but also a little intimidated, since this is the first time in my life that I haven't had an "end" in sight: like the end of high school. There is no longer any sort of time-line that I can see. Suddenly, life feels bigger and more adventuresome.

~Lizzie

This too, shall pass...

So far this year that has been coming up a lot in my thoughts. As my senior year, and the senior year of many of my friends, I've been realizing that a lot of changes are coming. It's a feeling of dread and premonition, but also of excitement and mystery. It's sad, because I can never go back, but also happy, because I am moving forward into the future with hopeful prospects.

I've been trying to enjoy every "last" moment, like my last swim meet on a team with my siblings. Actually, swimming has mostly been my only "lasts" because other than aging out, my life isn't changing much. It just feels like it is. And that's what I think has called my notice to the thought: that this moment will eventually be gone. In the day to day, something as simple as laughing with my siblings over something funny or watching a beautiful sunset while taking a family stroll down our dirt road, I'll suddenly be struck with the thought that life will not always be like this. We're growing up, getting older and changing. Eventually, we will move out, get married, have kids ourselves and eventually die. And that, for us as Christians, is only the beginning, so I won't get all depressing here.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this year has taught me to enjoy every second to the fullest. This moment will never be here again. If you knew that you had one chance to try the most decadent and delicious dessert ever; that you would get only one bite, and you'd have to live with that taste of it as your only experience of that dessert for the rest of your life, imagine how you would savor it. Now imagine every moment of your life is a new and delicious dessert, and you only get one taste. Enjoy.

My View of Adulthood

As a child, I thought there were three kinds of adults. The bad kind (the sort of bad grown-ups that went to prison for stealing and stuff like that), the good kind (like the Wal-Mart sticker greeters and other adults that I didn't know) and the really good kind (like my parents and their friends). I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the really good kind of adult never did wrong. If they were angry it was justly over someone else's wrong. They were completely selfless, always knew the right answer and never failed to punish me when I'd done something wrong.

Imagine my shock when I grew older and realized that there were many more wrong things that could be done than the ones I knew. There were lots of things you could do even accidentally that would make other people hurt or angry with you. The subtleties of manipulation, insults and exclusion that I began to understand were mind-blowing; almost as much as the fact that "really good" adults actually committed these wrongs. Now, as a young teenager growing toward adulthood, my view of adults had changed. I was planning on becoming the "really good" kind of adult that never did anything wrong; now that kind of adult doesn't exist. Suddenly, adulthood wasn't an arrival where you instantaneously become the kind of adult you were raised to be, but merely an extension of childhood where you are bigger and more grown-up, but still struggle with doing wrong. Eventually, you are no longer under your parents authority and are responsible for making yourself do right... and if you should happen to do something really wrong, then the police would put you in jail.

Even at 19, some of my childhood ideals are still being crushed by the pettiness of most of the adults in this world; yes, even the ones that my childhood self would have considered "really good." But all this only serves to remind me that God is the fulfillment of all my ideals of the perfect "adult." In childhood, your parent serves as the "all-knowing" governing authority; in adulthood, God is the one who reminds you to apologize for your wrongs, and loves you as His child, even through all your disobedience and childish tantrums.

NCHE Convention and Graduation... AND Sarah's birthday!

Wow, what a weekend! We had a great time.

This is our lovely hotel room at the Brookstown Inn. It is a renovated cotton mill from the 1800's. Our room was very spacious, clean and homey, and really really comfortable. I love the wood beams in the ceiling and the old brick walls. Many people at the conference like to stay at the hotels right at the conference building. Those hotels are harder to get though, and we don't mind the 4-5 block walk to the convention center. And personally, I enjoy the rustic simplicity and cheerful southern comfort feel of our favorite hotel much better than the new, plastic, cookie-cutter large-corporation feel of most hotels.

Sarah and I experienced swing dancing for the first time at the Teen Cotillion the evening of the first conference day. It was a LOT of fun! None of the speaker sessions were mind-blowing fantastic, but they did give me some things to think about and some mild inspiration.

Mainly I was blessed to have the theme of all the sessions serve to give me more confidence in my choice to pursue my interests at home, and outside the corporate realm of college. The speakers for teens emphasized living your life for God, and that the important thing isn't whether you make a lot of money or not, but that you do everything for the glory of God.

The graduation Saturday was nice. I was wavering on whether or not I wanted to do it, because it just seems so pointless, but I finally decided that the opportunity for regret was less if I just went ahead and did the graduation. If I hated it, I would get over it, but if I later began to regret not doing it, then I could possibly feel regret for the rest of my life. I'm very glad I decided to go through with it, because I really enjoyed it, and it was a decided end to high school. I'm finished!!

My graduation happened to be exactly on Sarah's birthday, so afterward, we went out to eat. Sarah and I both wanted to go to the Mellow Mushroom, and there was one right across the street. We walked down there, and discovered that there was a two HOUR wait for our party of 14. This was at 6pm. So we decided with the M's and B's, that since we were all packed up and checked out of our hotels already, that we would drive to Greensboro and eat at the Mellow Mushroom there, since it was on the way home. In Greensboro there was a 30 minute wait, but we lost the B's; they got a little lost and ended up at a Mellow Mushroom in Burlington. They called to tell us to go ahead and eat without them, and that they would just eat there and compare food with us, but we decided to drive on to Burlington and eat with them. So finally, we all ate. At 8:30pm. It was really fun, the perfect end to a great weekend.

Mayhap the Randomness will resume...

I stopped posting to The Random Digressors mostly because I felt like I was running out of things to share with any readers, and because it felt lonely without Sarah posting... I'm not going to change the name, but I will probably be the only one posting.

Anyway, this is just another short post to announce that my random thoughts will be here, but with a different theme. My new blog will be more focused, but I will continue randomness here. Mostly because I can tell a difference in my writing style without the regular practice at writing what I'm thinking...

So read if you want, but it will be the same random (probably boring) themes as before...

I was not looking forward to the lap-a-thon this year. As a super-senior, this is my last official year (meaning the last year that I "have" to swim the lap-a-thon) and I didn't think about that much until a few days prior to the lap-a-thon. Then I looked forward to it even less because I realized that I should have trained some and tried to achieve a particular number of laps (since this will probably be my most successful year of swimming...). But I was unprepared, and I only made 152. I swam on Wednesday, while my siblings all swam it on Tuesday (Tuesday was long course, and I hate swimming the lap-a-thon long course!) so I knew that Joel and David had both done 154, and I hoped to tie. Missing that by two laps was very disappointing. But I did improve by about 10 laps (I can't remember how many I did last year, and there appears to be no blog post on the subject...).

We're performing "The Wiz" two weeks from tomorrow. ACK!! I am NOT READY! Oh, why are we never prepared?? Thankfully, I don't have any lines. I didn't audition for a speaking role, for several reasons: they all had songs that I didn't like (and therefore didn't want to attempt to sing), I didn't want to memorize a lot of lines and I thought it would be less stressful to "just" do all the dances and chorus songs. Wrong. It's crazy. But I do think it will be more fun than trying to pull together a bigger role last minute. Which it seems that everything in theatre is always last minute.

Looking forward to summer swimming starting (except I'm NOT IN THE SHAPE I WANTED TO BE IN!) for my last summer season...

And we saw Wicked! BEST PLAY EVER.

And now you're caught up on my life.
~Lizzie

Announcing a New Blogging Venture

I am striking out on my own with a new blog that focused more in the same direction as my life. My interest in being a Random Digressor has waned, as has Sarah's, apparently. If my interest in blogging is revived by posting on my new blog, I may still do some random posts here, but as it is, I don't know how often I will post on my new blog.

Anyway, and without further ado, introducing: the Hopeful Aspiring Homemaker. I will be sharing projects, ideas, recipes and anything else I find interesting or inspiring in my journey towards my "hopeful" future of being a wife and mother. I hope any readers who still remember The Random Digressors will find it an acceptable substitute. ;-)

So long for now, and perhaps the Random Digressors will be back sometime in the future...