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Saturday Snap – Finally Time To Call The Tooth Fairy!

What’s the going rate for teeth these days?  I think I used to get a quarter per tooth but there’s probably been some inflation since then! 😉

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Posted 26 October 2013 § Family § Humour § Pace § Photo § SaturdaySnap ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Friday Fun Link – Creative Mom Stages Her Toddler’s Dreams While The Child Sleeps

Amazing.  Inventive.  Magical.

(On the other hand, if I tried something like this with Sasha, it would turn out like a collapsed swan-towel at a two star Mexican resort!) 😉

Posted 25 October 2013 § Baby § FridayFunLink § Photo § Sasha ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Five Memorable Moments at @officialRPL as I Receive My Five Year Pin

So tomorrow is RPL’s annual staff conference and I’ll be receiving my five year pin which officially marks this as the job I’ve held the longest in my adult life since convocating with an undergrad degree in 1996 (although to be fair, I’ve been in four different positions over five years so I’m keeping up my Gen X reputation for frequently changing jobs!)

Here’s the summary: (hard to believe how easy it is to reduce 15 years of your life to a few lines of text.)

1997-2001 – Sask Publishers Group (3.5 years)
2001-2004 – Writers Guild of Alberta (3 years)
2004-2005 – Sask Publishers Group (1 year, 4.5 cumulative)
2006 – (Return to School at University of Western Ontario)
2007-2008 – Southeast Regional Library (18 month contract)
2008-2013 – Regina Public Library (5 years)

Anyhow, to celebrate the big milestone, I thought I’d make a list of…

5 Memorable Moments from My Time at RPL

  1. April Fool’s “In the Loop” – RPL has a weekly internal e-newsletter called “In the Loop”.  A few years ago, a former colleague came up with the idea to do a fake version for April Fool’s Day.  I can’t remember the exact joke but I do know there was a photo of me huddled under my desk, curled in a ball to illustrate whatever joke we were making! 😉   Too bad that idea didn’t continue – it was a lot of fun.
  2. Canadian Library HR Summit – less than a month after starting at RPL, via a recommendation of a former prof, I got invited to be a “youth blogger” at a summit of various top managers, professors and consultants from libraries across Canada.  That was pretty cool to be in a room where it felt like you were part of charting the future of libraries in Canada.
  3. Chair Races – Here’s a recent one.  A bunch of new office chairs were received by various units at Central Library a few months ago and someone suggested that we “break them in” by holding chair races on the linoleum in front of the main circulation desk.  I have photos and videos of the races but won’t post them to protect the innocent! 😉
  4. Midnight Swim – I attended the CLA conference a couple times during my first few years at RPL.  These conferences were always full of memorable moments – professional, personal and otherwise.  One that stands out is deciding to go for a midnight swim with a few colleagues in the middle of the night after an evening of “socializing”.
  5. “Conversations are where the real work happens” – I can’t name one particular example over any other but I’ve had so many fun and memorable interactions with patrons and other staff over the years which has been a real highlight.  A former manager once told me “Conversations are where the real work happens” and I thought that was pretty insightful and has proven to be true over the past five years.

Anyhow, those are the first few that popped into my head.  Here’s to the next five years and further memorable moments!

Posted 24 October 2013 § Library § LibrarySchool § List § Work ‡ Comments (0) °

Brother and Sister Reading

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Posted 23 October 2013 § Pace § Photo § Sasha ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Itinerary of a Day Off

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As part of my new job as Regent Place Branch Head, I now work a few evenings and weekend shifts each month which means at least once a month my “weekend” is on Monday and Tuesday.

This can be a big advantage sometimes when Pace is in school and I can get to appointments I might otherwise not attend or get lots of errands done (trust me – if you’ve ever been to a Costco on a Tuesday, you’ll never go on a weekend again if you can help it!) 😉

Here’s what Shea and I did today…

7:45am – wake up after staying up way too late last night watching a Flames game I’d taped earlier in the evening and surfing around online

8:24am – send Pace out to bus after getting him up and ready for school (breakfast, teeth, hair, lunch ready, etc.)

9:40am – go to get Sasha’s six month needles and catch up on news at the public health office where Shea works.  Also pick up another load of probably hundreds of dollars worth of baby clothes from one of Shea’s co-workers which is saving us a *ton* of money!

10:00am – Shea won a piece of art at a nursing conference last year. I don’t know much about art but turns out the guy who painted it is turning into a pretty big deal.  Originally from Regina, Andrew Salgado is now based in London, England.  His mom is a nurse which is the connection to both Shea and my mom (who was the one who made the initial arrangements for the artist to sign the painting now that he’s back in Regina for a homecoming show in the city where he grew up.)   The artist wasn’t home but we were able to drop off the painting to be signed and will get it back in a few days.

11:00am – go for early lunch at Fortuna, one of Regina’s newest restaurants, an Italian place co-owned by Regina’s former mayor.  It was a bit pricey for what you got and I’m not sure it’ll become a regular stop for us.  But always fun to try new places.

12:00pm – pick up a Christmas gift for Pace (I’m not going to mention it here since I don’t know if he reads my blog yet but I do know he can read!) and a part for our van which is booked into a local garage later in the day.

1:00pm – after dropping Shea and Sasha at home, go into work for a couple hours for a couple meetings – one planned and one spontaneous.  Yes, it’s my day off but our workplace allows us some degree of flexibility and so coming in for a couple hours on a Tuesday means I might slip out a couple hours early on a Friday some time which is a pretty decent trade if you ask me! 😉

3:37pm – drop car at home then walk over to pick up Pace at school which is a couple blocks from our house.  You can add “seeing Pace’s face when he sees me waiting for him after school” as another great thing about having the odd day off mid-week.  It’s only a couple blocks to his school but since we live across a fairly major road, Pace still gets bussed.  So it’s nice when I can save him a twenty minute bus ride and get him home in five minutes instead!

4:00pm – load up everybody and take a caravan of vehicles – our van which is booked in for some repairs and our car to get everybody home – to a repair shop that was recommended to us as doing good work at a reasonable price (extra important now that our van’s warranty expired this past summer!)

4:30pm – decide to really spoil ourselves and go out to eat again at an off-the-radar Thai place in a semi-industrial area of the city. It’s not highly rated on UrbanSpoon (although only two reviews so hard to judge) but I remember hearing it called a hidden gem of Regina by someone.  Both Shea and I were very pleasantly surprised with the tastiness of our meal.

5:30pm – home and spend some time hanging out with Sasha while Pace plays outside with a friend (and inside once it gets dark.)

6:00pm – I’d seen a post on Facebook that a CBC reporter was looking for pictures of kids having fun in the snow so sent in one I took of Pace in the schoolyard when I picked him up yesterday.  They apparently ran it but I forgot to tune in until the telecast was half over so missed seeing it.

7:00pm – in what is a very rare occurrence, Sasha falls asleep in my arms in the living room (most nights, she goes to sleep after nursing in the rocking chair in her bedroom with Shea) so I get to put her to bed.

7:30pm – go for a nice long hot bath

8:00pm – help finish off Pace’s bedtime routine (Shea’s given him his snack so it’s pyjamas, teeth-brushing and flossing and then usually some combination of a story and/or some TV and/or iPad.)

9:00pm – watching a Flames game while typing my daily blog post.   Bed to follow soon.

Posted 22 October 2013 § Pace § Photo § Randomness § Sasha § Shea § Work ‡ Comments (0) °

Music Monday – “And I know that by February/My thoughts on snow will be contrary/But this is now and then is then!”

Here are a few pics I threw together in a slideshow to celebrate the first snow of the year.

“Celebrate” might sound like the wrong word but for me, the first snow of the year is always exciting and, as the song says, “I know that by February/My thoughts on snow will be contrary/But this is now and then is then!”

Posted 21 October 2013 § MemoryLane § MusicMonday § Pace § Photo § Shea § Xmas ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

Neil Gaiman’s Love Letter to Libraries

The Guardian recently published an edited version of Neil Gaiman‘s lecture for the Reading Agency. 

The Reading Agency’s annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

The lecture is amazingly good.

On the purposes of reading (and specifically reading fiction)…

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading.  The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything…And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

On what children should read…

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading…It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

On why the Chinese have relaxed their ban on science fiction…

It’s simple, [the Chinese official] told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

On the librarians he encountered as a child…

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

I know I’m close to quoting the whole article but again, it’s got so many great points and insights (“Books are how we communicate with the dead.”)  I’ll just leave off with one more extended quote…

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

…then encourage you to go read the entire article yourself.

Posted 20 October 2013 § Canada § Censorship § Internet § Library § UK § United States § Wisdom ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Saturday Snap – Perogy Poutine

I don’t post a lot of pictures of food on my blog but I couldn’t let this one go by.

After Pace’s swimming lessons today, we decided to check out a new restaurant called Coney Island Cafe which was rumoured to have a few varieties of poutine rather than the traditional fries/gravy/cheese curds version you get in most places in Saskatchewan.

Well, they didn’t have the 22 varieties we were faced with in Montreal but it had a solid six or so that ranged from Mexican to Cheeseburger to a quinnessential Saskatchewan version, Perogy Poutine, which is the version I chose of course.

We saw a group of three EMT’s pull up just before we did and once we realised they weren’t there on an official call, I thought “How unhealthy can it be if the EMT’s eat here?  Or even if it is, how lucky to know a defibrillator is nearby?” 😉

Yep, that looks like “heart attack on a plate” to me…

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Posted 19 October 2013 § Canada § Humour § MemoryLane § Pace § Photo § SaturdaySnap § Shea § Travel ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Friday Fun Link – Wearable Gesture Control

Recently read an article about up & coming Canadian start-ups which mentioned Pebble and these guys whose product looks amazing!

Posted 18 October 2013 § Canada § FridayFunLink § Technology § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Pace and Sasha at Six Months…

…who’s chubbier? 😉

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Posted 17 October 2013 § Family § MemoryLane § Pace § Photo § Sasha ‡ Comments (0) °