My injury is causing me to take so much longer to do everything that I find it hard to get on here.

But, it's time for another information dump from this over zealous mind of mind....prepare for the randomness!

Dreams.

I'm one of those people who dreams all night and remembers many of them right down to the colors, sound and smells.  For instance, in the early morning hours of today, I was dreaming that I had been invited to a party.  It was a beautiful sunlit, warm day and the party was out of doors, filled with happy people and great music.  Suddenly I was told (by person unseen) to look up.  Above us was a sleek airplane with a windowed compartment hanging from the bottom of it.  I could see into the compartment and realized that it was a laboratory.  I then left the party and proceeded to a nearby barn where there was an angry bull trying to get out of his stall.  The boards on the stall were barely containing him, and I kept petting his nose.  This calmed him somewhat but I knew that he really wanted out to stomp me.  Cue the alarm and the end of the dream.  Weird, huh?

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Congressional hearings.......

Today the Congress held a hearing on what to do about gun violence.  Gabby Gifford spoke eloquently about how it's past time to do something.  Wayne LaPierre spoke about how it's not the fault of guns.  Legislators on both sides lined up along predictable lines.  Cameras snapped, reporters jostled for space and it looked good.  The possibilities of anything being done?  Slim to none.  Posturing doesn't always happen on runways.  It happens in the Congress as well.  (Personal note:  Wayne LaPierre gives me a massive pain in the posterior.  The man is simply odious.)

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Mother Nature has PMS.

It's January.  The best we should hope for is a thaw, you know, around 35 degrees or so.  Instead we have temperatures in the 60s and wild swings in weather, some violent to the extreme.  Lives will be lost. It's time to give this old girl some serious chocolate!

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The Super Bowl.

Yawn.  The sun will come out on the 4th no matter who wins.  Enjoy the party but keep in mind that there are more important things in life.  Like....pitchers and catchers report!

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Survival stories....

A man in Central Pennsylvania had been missing since Saturday.  He had headed out on his snowmobile and never returned.  They found him today, dehydrated and tired, but safe.  Sometimes miracles do occur.  He had crashed his machine into a frozen pond and crawled out and stayed under the shelter of some trees. Despite being soaked and the night temperatures in the 40s, he appears to have survived this and will be ok.  Good feelings all around, since many times these types of stories have not so happy endings.

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Prognosticating rodents and PETA..

It's time for the groundhog to do his thing again.  And the regularly scheduled PETA protest will occur.  That's about as exciting as it gets in February in Punxy, Pa.

Alrighty then, I feel better.  Time to clog the cerebral spaces with more stuff.  Think of it as cognitive over-eating. 

I've taken a rather nasty tumble on the ice and I'm sore and cranky.  Consider yourself warned as I go on to vent and rant....

1. Congressional hearings about Benghazi.  Go Hillary!  For crying out loud, this hearing should be about solving this as a security problem, not settling blame.  How ironic that the Republicans in the Congress are suddenly out for blood over this, asking question after question, but NOT asking the question that should be asked...ie:  What effect did the 312 million dollar reduction in funding for protecting the embassies and their outlying posts have on whether or not security was compromised at this outpost? That's a question that won't be asked.  And as for Sen. Rand Paul, who firmly and smugly stated that if he were President that Hillary would be asked for her resignation, did he suddenly have an attack of amnesia?  HIS name is all over the legislation that cut the money!  Faux News gives me a pain as well, beat that drum, tell some halftruths and make up a crisis....

2. I'm also on Facebook.  Over and over I see the following post:

Again smug is written all over this.  We drug test individuals who drive commercial trucks, guide airplanes safely into the airport and a host of other dangerous jobs.  The writer and reposters of this presume that every person on welfare is there because they are a cheat.  Not so.....many of them are the unemployed who have exhausted their benefits (which is also something that these folks find offensive-that a worker dare try to get back something when they have worked for it.)What these folks do not understand is that such testing makes it difficult for people with constant pain to continue to get their medications.  If someone shows up in a drug test for opiates does NOT mean that they are a junkie necessarilary.  I can only hope that life goes swimmingly along for these smug twits.  Because we all know that when things get tough for them, they will whine and moan the loudest!

3. Shingles commercials.  Especially the one where the guy says that it feels "like someone put a bag of hot charcoal on his neck."  Really?  Hyperbole much?  Or, maybe more frighteningly ....do you put bags of coals on your neck regularly?

4.  This darn cold weather.  And the fact that 2400 people washed out during Storm Sandy are STILL living in tents?  Really America?  Is this the best we can do?  Shame on us!

Harumpf!

I am finding it nearly impossible to write here as much as I would like.  The disastrous work project is sucking the life out of me but progress is being made.

But.....not having the time to write has not stopped me from having time to think!  So, here's an unload of the things rattling around my brain this week.....

1. Flu vaccine.  Lately, I have been asked for my mature (more on THAT later!) opinion on whether or not children should get vaccinated.  Let's see......I lived through three types of measles, chickenpox and scarlet fever.  I lived through them but others did not. Some children were left blind, some deaf and others with debilitating heart disease.   Missing out on having the mumps was kind of nice, but when the vaccine came out for it, I got the vaccine.  For those  who have lived through being vaccinated and not having to go through those "childhood diseases", there may be some doubt about whether or not the shots are worth it.  My advice?  Ask someone who had those diseases.  I recall spending a considerable amount of time at age 4 on the couch with various relatives wandering in and out as I lay there with scarlet fever.  Only later did I find out that they were coming in case I died.  For me, getting the vaccine is a no brainer.  Which leads to item number 2.......

2. Vaccines cause autism!!!!  No. They do not.  There is a lot of hysteria out there about how there is proof that they do!  Shun the vaccines!  They may cause your child to catch autism!  The problem with this "evidence" is that the basic person out there may see tidbits of research (carefully packaged by the anti-vaccination people!) which indicate a correlation between the shots and the onset of autism.  Unfortunately, there is a correlation but not a causation-and the causation is the key here.  Autism is often detected at the age when children are receiving a plethora of vaccinations (correlation ).  However, this is not causation-which means, there is no evidence that it causes autism.  If vaccinations caused autism (causation) then every child would become autistic.  And as we know, that simply is not true. I'm sure that there are those out there who disagree with me.  Spare me your venom.  I am not convinced by "evidence" shown by a former porn star (Jenny McCarthy) or by a natural herb shill (Mike Adams).  I think that Ms. McCarthy may well believe that the vaccines caused autism in her child.  When she gets her MD or her PhD, I'll be more inclined to listen to what she says.  Mr. Adams is simply trying to sell a lot of herbs and "natural" medicines.  He figures prominently on conspiracy sites (along with Aliens, Mayan prophecies, Atlantis, UFOs and the coming collapse of every economy known to man-Save the guns!!!).  Before the Internet, he would have travelled with carnivals selling snake oil.  Now, he's a world-wide nuisance to thinking people.

3. Since when does grey hair equal senility?  I've written in the past about how I have left my hair go naturally grey.  This is partly because I happen to love grey/white hair and partly because I'm just too lazy to color it. Lately, I have noticed the tendency of people to repeat things to me s-l-o-w-l-y as though I am either deaf or senile or stupid.  The other day, I needed to get an insert for my shoes to alleviate some foot pain I was experiencing.  The young lady (as in mid-20s) who waited on me explained to me that although it was the size that I needed, I may have to trim the insert.  She took care to explain this to me three times.  Apparently, me nodding my head and saying yes, I understood, did not convince her that at my advanced age (mid 50s!) that I was capable of handling this monumental task all by myself.  I've noticed this several times lately.  Everyone who is repeating things to me is much younger.  Do they not have older relatives?  We aren't all senile!  The best one was the young teacher who carefully explained to me how to find things on the Internet.  He was probably in diapers when I trained an ENTIRE school district on how to use the Internet.  I did not embarass him by explaining that I did, indeed, know how to use the Internet.  I left his fellow teachers straighten him out later.  He came back to apologize and I kidded with him that some of us are not exactly in our fading years and do, in fact, happen to love and use technology.  Now, he and I stick to talking about fishing......

Oh well, time marches on.....but don't count me out yet!!!

Ever have a half & half day?  You know the kind...half of the day is ok/great and the other half falls apart so badly that you need a crying towel.

Case in point-today.

The morning went well, got a lot of work done, some issues settled and was making great progress.  Even the school lunch was great.

The after lunch?  Not so much.

We use computer programs in our library that handle our catalog of materials and our circulation.  Most of what's in that catalog is pretty well done, but there are always changes in subject headings and sometimes missing information that would help our patrons find things easier.  To make the catalog work better, we use another program that "fixes" a lot of issues without us having to look at them individually.

Today I was attempting to check and fix lexiles (reading levels) in our geography and history section.  I exported the files, sent them to the program, which "packages" them and sends them on to a company with nifty super computers who compare and fix the records. Then the records come back, we "unload" them and upload them back into our program where they fix things and complete missing information.

Usually this works like a charm.

Usually.

Today, during the re-upload, there was a glitch.  The upload stopped, then restarted.  This sometimes happens and is not usually a big problem. 

Usually.

Today, when we printed out the upload report of the records, we discovered to our dismay, that it had not only done the fixes, it had also duplicated every copy of every book in that section.  This meant we had about 5800 duplicate records.  They were easy to spot since they had seven digit numbers instead of the four, five or six digit numbers the books should have.

Another easy fix, I thought.  I set the program to delete the duplicate records in the range of seven digit numbers.  This should not have deleted anything else.

But it did.

Each and every book record in the 900's is gone.  Every one of them......

I did not swear.  I tried to keep a cheerful attitude and told my aide that I was just glad she hadn't done this and I had, because I would have felt terrible for her.

So we had to tape off the entire 56 shelves of books to keep the kids from trying to sign them out and driving us nuts.  Then I began shelf by shelf to fix.

The lemonade part of this major lemon is that we really needed to weed the shelves anyway.  This gave us a perfect excuse and the "disaster" actually helped in the weeding because now we didn't have to hunt down every record and delete them individually.  Ok, it was a tankerful of lemonade, but we'll take it.

So, we have a heck of a job ahead of us.  Ironically, this section was the last one to have the lexiles updated.  If it had happened at first?  I wouldn't have bothered.....

If this were the only incident it would have been bad enough.  But it wasn't....before the day had ended, I had smashed my finger in a door, spilled a Dunkin coffee in my car and then discovered that, when I tried to drink what was left of it, that the dingbat who made my caramel cappuccino had put in the coffee and the foam, but nothing else.  No wonder it felt lighter than I thought it should have!

Ok, I'm home now and I intend to attempt nothing at all this evening.  Hopefully, I can manage to not fall off the couch!

The past several months have seen a gush of engagements among young people that I am very fond of and to whom I wish the best.

This year, hubby and I will celebrate 25 years of marriage (the vast majority of it happily!).

All of this made me think of the institution of marriage and how it enhances the lives of those who embrace it.  Living together is faux marriage, sometimes comfortable, sometimes leading to the dissolution of the couple.  The act of getting that "piece of paper", of making it both public and official, is a step that should not be taken lightly and should not be considered to be a temporary type of thing.

If you intend to get married, it should be considered to be a commitment.  No letting one another off the hook and not allowing the other not to try.  It takes effort, lots and lots of effort.  It also takes the ability to overlook some things, endure other things, and laugh at a lot of things.

So for those who want to take the plunge and dive into marriage, I say, "Good for you!".  Marriage is well worth the effort.  I think it's rather like a garden that you constantly must work in and which often blooms in amazing ways.

.....and I'm not overlooking the fact that yes, you have to get your hands dirty!