Ready or Not, Here Come the Books

(I've reverted to Old Blogger--the new one drove me nuts, dropping my photos.)

The Thirty-Six Cents

Good news: Big Boss said he'd take care of the 36¢/hour discrepancy in my pay raise. "I don't know why they did that," he said--meaning E.D. (exec director) and Co. shorting me. "Maybe it was a mistake in the numbers..."

"Let's agree to say it was," I said. 
In fact, I am willing to believe E.D. shorted me on purpose, because we do not get along. 
But I don't really care. 

I said to BB, "I don't have to work with E.D. I work with you. If there's anything wrong between you and me, I want to know."

And he said no, I was one of his supports at work, at a time when he feels he's carrying too much alone.

I told him about St. Christopher (he doesn't know Catholica) carrying the weight of the world across the river in the person of the Christ child. I sent him the Bosch painting.

I also made a speech about the importance of 25¢ ephemera. I showed BB the basket I put it in, explaining it's letters and so forth. "Letters," I said, "like what half the gospels are composed of."

BB had told me recently that actions matter more than words. He's been talking a lot about the Good Samaritan.
And I agree that you've got to get down off your horse and into the gutter. DO IT.
But are actions more important than words altogether? 

I took this opportunity for rebuttal.
"St. Paul said actions speak more than words" I said, "but how do we know that?"

BB looked quizzacal.

"Because he wrote it down!"

BB laughed.

So, we're okay. For now.

 

UPDATE: BB never did get me the 36¢ raise. He's a great talker, I'll give him that!

Stand Back and Open
Today's Opening Day--and I still have to print replacement subject labels for the bookshelves I rearranged.
Art Sparker made labels for me a long time ago. I'd foolishly  framed most of them in glass, much of which has since broken (accidentally knocked to the floor, not intentionally).
I've learned my lesson and it's plastic from now on. Also, I just need more signs up.

The printing of labels may or may not happen this morning... We all go in at ten to prep to open at noon, but there's a lot of little stuff to do. 
And we're down staff.
Of course I can print them in the coming days––(labels, not staff--3D printing isn't up to that ... yet)––if, pleasegod, I don't get sick (or die).
We're all so excited to be opening, the mood is great---but I know there's risk...

And we're already getting careless again, two weeks after BB had Covid. We all tested negative (for what that's worth), and we wear masks, but we don't always keep distance--including me, who suggested we take a group photo yesterday.

I can't post it because half the people don't like their photo online, but here are three of us who don't mind. We aren't usually so close, and that face shield is NOT an adequate face-covering.
I laugh more with these two than the others, but they look serious here. In the group photo, you can see we're all smiling behind our masks.
Here's what I've learned from the pandemic: humans are SOCIAL animals and trying to keep apart is almost impossible.
We're wired for contact, and it's like we'd rather die than not touch each other. That makes sense, on a species level, but individually, it's .... well, it's like saying, I'm willing to be the disposable one!

ABOVE, L to R: Jesse, whose favorite dinosaur is a Tyrannosaurus;
me, Custodian of BOOK's; and Sára, the cultural anthropologist from Hungary--when she and I have a complain-fest, I tell her she should be taking notes for her magnum opus, Life in a Grungy Thrift Store.
We're not so grungy at the moment though: can you see that, in fact, we're quite shiny!!! Even water-stained ceiling tile was replaced.

So... I got so little time to work on BOOK's, but I rearranged the sections. Here are most of them. (Minus a few shelves.)

Body and Mind...

Arts and Crafts

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and Religion/Spirituality (not Xtian)

Auto/Biography

...And PETS

NATURE & SCIENCE

Some (3) of the History & Society Shelves
(A nice thing about being down on stock is I can face more book covers forward.)

Minnesota. It's become a joke that we have to fight customers off who want to buy the canoe bookshelf--one guy had even started to remove the books!

MUSIC--because the audio electronics section has moved over here--and BUSINESS books--I put them here because no one buys them, and they're bright, so this dark area is fine.

Mystery/Crime--all 49¢ each. These are for you, River!
There's a bookshelf full of Romance books too.

My Favorite: Cool Old Books & Things
Needs restocking from that stash I showed you yesterday.
However... Everything is on sale for 25% off this Fri & Sat, so I'm holding off. (True Confession: I haven't gotten around to it.)

I moved the CHRISTIAN Books to the back wall---Bibles sell well, but the other stuff doesn't. 
Below them is GARDENING, which sells well in the early spring...
And below that, SPORTS, which really don't sell.

BARGAIN BOOKS, 33¢ each. 
Again, sparse at this time... I culled a lot of books that'd been on this (and other) shelves for a year or longer and sent them to recycling.
I didn't want old customers to return and see the same selection as in March.

Spanish and Other Languages.

Other Places/Travel Writing; Games and Humor; 
Child birth and rearing (better name?)

Fiction & Literature (e.g. essays by Emerson, etc.), starting with A––

 Etcetera...

BELOW: Children's Books, in the front room
Ass't Man asked me if he could move the black-and-white image of the girl to this section, saying, "We should have more diverse representation."
Great idea, I said.
(You can't see the art above, here, but it tends toward white, cherubic children with halos of blond hair.)

Aaaaand... my work space. CHAOS! 
Most of the boxes are filled with books to be recycled---we really need donations but are holding off for now--everything else is swamped. For now, BOOK's will just have to go on with what's there.

WE WON!!! for... ephemera

OMG!!!! omg omg omg!!!

Unclassifiable printed ephemera --that's ME!!!!

Thank you all who voted, and for your friendship here on l'astronave.

This is the HUGEST boost possible. When I saw it this morning, I was literally shaking with joy and pride for us all at the store!

And for me.

I've felt really worn down at work.

I didn't mention here because I don't want to keep complaining, but despite Big Boss's promise (he'd literally said, "Trust me, I will get you this raise"), I got 36¢/hour LESS pay raise than I'd requested, so I'm still paid 25¢/hour less than the cashier who started in January.

I wrote just now to management saying,
"What must I do to prove my worth? Please reconsider and pay me the little bit more I asked for."

But, the uppity-ups notwithstanding...
I AM SO PROUD OF THE STORE.

Gotta go now...

MUST PUT OUT MORE EPHEMERA!!!

http://www.citypages.com/best-of/2020/city-life/st-vincent-de-paul/571891221

Ergh. Bloody New Blogger... (Book Backlog, Part 2)

What's the trick in adding new photos to an already published post?

I tried several times but could only add one.

So here are a few more of the Cool Old Books Backlog.

Cool Old Books Backlog, Part 1

I wish I'd been able to come into the thrift store after it closed on March 20 and work alone, sorting the Cool Old Book backlog--books I set aside to look up and either sell on eBay or display in our glass case.

(If I had a car, and space to work on piles of books, I'd have hauled them home. But I have neither.)

Even with staff working in the closed store the past couple months, what with the huge mess after being broken into, I've not had time for books. The past couple days I've worked hard simply to get my books section in order, and restocked.

With the store opening tomorrow (yay!), I'm sure not going to get to the backlog now.
Except for the few books I'm sure are worth a lot, I'm going to plunk them all on the Cool Old Books shelves at $1.99/each.

If they find good homes, that's what I care about.

I'd like to make money for the store too. But unless a book sells for more than $30––and few of these would––it's not worth my paid-time to list it online.

(I'd suggested to management that I list books on my own time, and split the proceeds, but they did not go for that.)

What would really be fun would be to package them in sets––e.g., Books with Embossed Covers––as I see some sellers do--mostly on Etsy.
But realistically, that's not going to happen.

We do get book resellers, but they're the kind that scan every book with an app. This doesn't apply books without ISBNs, (or I'd do it too), so the old books tend to get bought by people who WANT them for themselves.
Which makes me happy.
And if they resell them, good luck to them too!

Anyway, here's a glimpse of the book backlog I snapped quickly before leaving work yesterday.

Ergh--not used to the new blogger, I lost a bunch of photos as I was trying to resize them. Trying to reload them...

Ay ay ay!!!
This is not working well.

Wade in!

The mood at the store is brighter since . . .

1. our broken glass doors and windows were replaced on Monday,
and,

2. we are opening on Friday!

We are opening in our leaders' usual half-assed way (plan? what plan?), but we are opening.
And that's great!

We're all more than ready to be done with being alone with one another.
I hope we've cleaned up the last of the glass from the ransacking after the police murdered George Floyd.

What a long haul this has been, the past two months.

I keep pondering how I've changed, as I approach old age.

WHAT? What is this, "old age"?  
Well, I'd say sixty (coming up in March 2021) is the beginning of early old age. 

Age is not "just a number"--it's a whole bunch of gradual but real and significant physical changes---and, what I didn't expect--psychological ones. 

The physical changes have mostly been losses.  I'm lucky--the losses have been minor so far--along the lines of crispy hair and crepey skin. (Though I'm happy not to be jerked around by hormones every month, their diminishment has down sides.)
Gentle reminders of More to Come...

The psychological changes have all been gains, so far.
Well, except how I don't remember stuff as well--but that's offset by having accumulated so damn much experience, knowledge, and trivia, I can afford to forget half of it. And I write down things now, so I don't forget when I said I'd do thus-and-such (and what thus-and-such I said I'd do.)

I'm glad (and a little surprised) that I can say I'm proud of how I've behaved at work. More than once I was the peace keeper, the mediator. 
And I just kept showing up.
In the past, I'd have flown out of there so fast, in the face of some truly miserable "leadership".

I've never seen before what a blessing good Project Management is (because we don't have it).
The older I get, the more I value people with organizational skills,
and especially communication skills, and emotional self-management.
That'd all have bored me at twenty, but now...?
All praise to the ones who can stay calm and help one another.
I'm just amazed that I am in any way among their company.  
Though looking back, I can see a gradual development--it wasn't until these crazy times tested me that they came together.

I AM NOT MAKING PROMISES ABOUT THE FUTURE though!!!
Who knows?
When the store opens, I might get in a huge fight with one of the management (I can well imagine this), and still fly out of there!
Ha.
It could get tense.

But... the mood truly is brighter this week, and I think we'll all pull together when we have something up-close and tangible to pull toward--serving the community again.


We'll have candy to help too.
My auntie--who turns 95 in a couple weeks---send me a box of handmade chocolates and candies, and another to take to work to share with coworkers.

The girlettes say they are my coworkers, so last night they shared a mint meltaway among themselves. (I had to help them finish it.)
This is the second box of presents they've had in two days---they are delirious with joy!

A few photos...

This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen on a tea cup. Sweet milky trout?

BELOW: I'm reading Letters from Tove–– Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomin. She met her life partner, Tuulikki, when she was 41. Letter from Tove to Tuulikki, June 26, 1956 (their first year together):

“I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves.

...

I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom.”

When I read that I thought, I want to find a life partner...

Presents!

The girlettes have received a package in the mail!
Everything required for a tea party picnic, including frog, mouse, and pink tissue paper... (And a suitcase for the evacuees.)

I vetoed their suggestion of A Picnic at Hanging Rock.


THANK YOU, Linda Sue!!!
You have made some small beings (and one large being) very happy.

Undaunted, Episode 2: Penny Cooper, Rescue on the Rock Face

Penny Cooper has gone back in time to Great Britain during WWII.
She and her new friends act fast when Ivy, one of the evacuees from London, slips during an outing along an unfamiliar path.

Saved!

Lion can't move, he's so sick with relief.

Abbondanza

My auntie turns ninety-five in a couple weeks. Her favorite word is ABBONDANZA, Italian for abundance. 

She has asked me (more than once) not to spend money on presents for her. I will make her something instead. 

Meanwhile, she told me she has ordered a big box of fancy, mixed chocolates from a candy maker in her neighborhood, for me and my coworkers.

Maybe I will calligraph this as a birthday card--the generous sower is very her:

"Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly,
and whoever sows generously will also reap generously."
--2 Corinthians 9.6

❧    ❧    ❧

Along the lines of giving freely...
Talking about watery things with Sarah of Circles of Rain, I came across this Bosch painting I'd never noticed before: "St Christopher Carrying the Christ Child".
www.boijmans.nl/en/collection/artworks/101481/saint-christopher-carrying-the-christ-child

Curious background details, like a little dog drinking water, lower right.

According to the 13th-century Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) of Jacobus de Voragine, which tells the lives of the saints, Christopher was a giant named Reprobus (Latin for ‘rejected’) who helped people across a dangerous river.

One day, a small child asked to be carried across. As Reprobus carried the child on his back across the river, his burden became heavier and heavier.

On the other side, the child said,  "Indeed you have been carrying the whole world on your shoulders, for I am Jesus Christ".

Reprobus took the name Christopher, ‘bearer of Christ’.

His attributes are a tree (usually used as a staff, sprouting fresh leaves), a branch, a spear, a shield, and he may be shown as a man with a dog’s head.
--via

A dog's head! "Understanding The Dog-Headed Icon of St-Christopher", Orthodox Arts Journal

The Movie Rest-Cure

I watched two movies while resting up and drinking fluids yesterday, and I felt entirely well by late afternoon.

I. Miss, but Hit

Juanita (2019, Netflix) was close to being a good movie. 
But it wasn't.
I really liked it anyway.

The two stars, actors from a couple of my favorite movies, do a good job with poor material:
the wonderful Alfre Woodard (Lily in Star Trek: First Contact),
and Adam Beach, from Smoke Signals. 

It's like a Hallmark find-yourself love story that wants to be an indie film about characters with PTSD from war, racism and poverty.
It's a mess, but I recommend it (cautiously).

Juanita reminded me of the West German film Bagdad Café (1987): a far better made film with the same premise:
A woman from a particular culture (Germany/inner-city Cleveland) walks away from her crummy circumstances and washes up in another culture at an isolated restaurant in a remote location (Mojave Desert/rural Montana).

 BELOW: Marianne Sägebrecht and CCH Pounder in Bagdad Café. 
Pounder said, "I got tons of letters from people who wanted to leave the corporate world and reawaken their creative life. Or, many people tell me: 'I finally came out to my mum and dad.'"

From the Guardian interview "How We Made Bagdad Cafe" with director Percy Adlon (who also made Sugar Baby with Sägebrecht), 2018:

"We had this mix of people: the Native American who is the sheriff, the abused German housewife who has an urge to clean everything and this struggling black family trying to make ends meet.
They are all what Trump really hates.
Because of our strange time with this exclusion of everybody who is not white, our film is now more urgent and contemporary than when we shot it 30 years ago."

II. Tripe 

The second movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I hated. 
(Susan, what's that rule about avoiding movies and books with titles that include cute food references?

[Susan answers in the comments.]

Getting exercised over a stupid movie was a nice distraction--probably did me a lot of good.

Guernsey was a flummery of falsehoods, from start to finish.
Well, I shouldn't say "to finish", because I didn't watch it all the way through. But I did hop, skip, and jump to the end.
If I'd seen it in a movie theater, it'd join my list of Movies I Walked Out On.

Forgive me if you liked it---I can see it's appeal--it's beautifully filmed, and romantically, by people associated with Four Weddings and a Funeral.

In fact, I watched the movie in the first place because of a visual detail: the hole at the neck of this sweater worn by Michiel Huisman, who plays a pig farmer. And a lover of literature.

(Someone was paid a lot of money to make his hair look so artistically dirty too.)

 Sometimes it's a good sign when movies take care to make clothing look real. But not in this case.

The whole movie could be summed up by the way it ignores the reality of pig farming.
The characters stand in pig pens and flirt. 

Have you ever been around pigs?
The odor of their waste is foul, and the stuff is toxic--like human waste, it's filled with bacteria and ammonia.

That beautifully well-worn sweater?
It would knock you down with its smell of pig shit and urine.
(If the farmer's never mending, and he's not shaving daily, he's sure not hand washing his woolens.)

Large-scale hog farming is insane [Guardian article "An unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms"]. Even small-scale pig farms are plenty disgusting.

I stayed in a hostel in rural Spain downwind of a pig farm about the size of the one in Guernsey Society. The smell was so noxious, it was hard to sleep, much less eat food while breathing.
(We only stayed because we'd already walked 20 miles that day,  on the Camino de Santiago, and there was nowhere else to stay.)

Yeah, yeah, so what?
You can't smell a movie.

True, but this detail stands for all the other whitewashing, historical and emotional.

For instance, the way Britain has miraculously recovered from the war by 1946--there's no mention of rationing. 
Where did the pig farmer get his many, healthy pigs one year after the war ended, when we've seen that the Germans requisitioned all of his livestock?
Did the pigs regenerate once the occupation ended?

Worse, the way it turns out that a character who is a possible contender for the pig farmer's love has conveniently been killed by the Nazis because she protected a child.  
A cheap way for a writer to dispose of a likable, worthy rival.

Finally, if this was a terrible movie but the actors were on fire, I'd have enjoyed it anyway, despite the emotional crap.
But the only spark of eroticism is when Huisman's character, while delivering a calf, is aided by a handsome Nazi doctor (HND). All a good romp in the hay for these beautiful boys.

The HND is a good Nazi, you see. He becomes the lover of the Heroic Possible Rival --she who is later killed by the bad Nazis, but that's not HND's fault. He had no choice but to serve in the military. Right?
He is also conveniently killed off. 

Where Juanita is a like a knitting project gone wrong, Guernsey is tightly constructed, I'll give it that. 
But it stinks.

Tow-Heads & Tender Bunnies

At work, a white person was wondering if "tow-head", for a very light-haired person (often a child with white-blond hair), is racist.

Perhaps they were thinking of the slur towel head?
Or they are confused and frightened about anything related to race. Wanting to be a nice, non-racist white person, they overshot, and in the wrong direction.

Isn't life interesting?

I do wish we had words that differentiated between

1. the racism of, say, a person proudly proclaiming white supremacy, and,

2. the racism of a person with biases that formed growing up in a society where racial bias is as prevalent and unquestioned as fluoride in the water.

Like the difference between having a socially conditioned preference for blonde hair, and thinking we should have eugenics programs to breed light-haired people. 

I see people trying to untangle these snarls (and I try too), but I haven't heard them clarified in language yet. 

Phrases like implicit bias and systemic racism are not all that user-friendly.

Anyway, I looked up the etymology of tow-head and was happy to be able to clear it up. The word refers to the light color and tousled look of plant fibers being processed into textiles:

"tow (n.1) : the coarse, broken fibers of flax, hemp, etc., separated from the finer parts," late 14c., probably from Old English tow- "spinning""

When I saw these English towhead evacuees from German bombing in WWII, I wished I had one of the two blonde girlettes I gave away.

And then--I found another on eBay. Not like that's a miracle or anything--it's eBay, there are plenty--but this one is not only a blondie, she has the best sweater!

She is coming to stay.

You know what else is coming?
Cooler weather!
Cooler nights, at least.
Even though today is in the mid-90s, I am cheered because the bike path is now lined with late summer/harvest-time flowers.


Black-eyed Susans are my favorite, with their cones of brown velvet.


I woke up feeling icky today. I think I didn't drink enough water yesterday (again), while I was working hard enough that I was sweating.

PUSH THE FLUIDS!

I stayed home. 
I feel better after a morning lying on the couch drinking weak lemon water ( a pint of water with the juice of half a lemon, a tiny pinch of salt, & a sprinkle of sugar). 

I also cancelled plans to see my sister this weekend.
She means well, but her insensitivity grates on my frayed nerves--not good when I'm feeling sharky. I don't want to bite her head off.

Here's what. If someone told me they were feeling frazzled, (like I told my sister), and I recommended an emotional TV show that they rejected--even rudely--I would apologize. I'd say something like,

"Oh, hey, I'm sorry! That was really off the mark, wasn't it, to recommend a sad show when you're feeling low.
Ha-ha. Silly me.
How bout this Korean dramedy (K-drama) I heard about, instead: Crash Landing on You, about a rich and beautiful Korean woman who gets blown in a tornado into North Korea, where a handsome army major gives her shelter from the officials.
It sounds perfect distraction for a poor little bunny like you."

Which my sister didn't say.

bink had recommended Crash Landing on You, in fact.
I watched an episode. It was kind of bad and kind of adorable, and also, entirely off my radar, the topic of relations between northern and southern Koreans. (Like, did I even get the capitalization correct there?)
In other words, perfect for a tender bunny shark-lady such as I.

And this afternoon I am going to watch the Netflix movie Juanita (2019), about a woman escaping her frazzled existence to start over again in Paper Moon, Montana.
It sounds like a Hallmark movie, which I usually can't stand, but it stars Alfre Woodward. 
I've loved her ever since, as Lily, she talked sense into Capt. Picard in Star Trek: First Contact.
Favorite line--useful for when someone hurts themself, throwing a tantrum: