Trying to turn a corner

I have had a shit-tastic couple weeks.  I euthanized my best-beloved horse last Thursday.  A few days before that & one day after, the neighbor's dog disappeared two of our barn cats (yes, I called animal control, I have an incident report, there will be a fine- it still sucks). 

But I had been looking forward to this past Saturday for a long long time.  It was my twice a year cleanse & renewal, my high holy day.  That's right, the Friends of the Library Book Sale.  We did all the traditional things, hunted for a parking space, bumped elbows with fellow junkies.  While we waited in line at the check-out, A predicted the event had another ten years tops (& yes, he has been saying this for more than ten years).  I ate too much lunch before the book sale & then on the way home we went for MOCHI.  It was a good day.

We also had a particularly good haul.  I know I say that every time, but seriously, this one was good.  First we had the basics that we will read, pass along to other people & may very well end up back in a future sale & that's just fine.  A found a textbook in physical science about color which delighted me (& at 5 bucks pushed me right up against my $15 limit for a grand total of $14.10).  He could not figure out what class it might have been for but who cares!  It has cool graphs about color!  I found A two copies of Susan Orlean's biography of Rin Tin Tin (we only bought one so the other might still be there).  The quilting books have been picked pretty clean the last few sales & this time the knitting books were also a bit lean.  One of my local librarians told me that those kind of books (746 et al) have been higher traffic of late, so less likely to be culled.  There were still a few.

I was looking at A Garden of Quilts by Mary Elizabeth Johnson & kind of on the fence (it's not the money, its the shelf space) until I flipped to the back & discovered these beauties.  It was destiny; we all went home together. 

My other happy meet-up was with an old copy of Maude Southwell Wahlman's Signs & Symbols:  African Images in African American Quilts.  Shocking that I did not already own my own copy.  Even lamer, it flops open automatically to....you guessed it:  Pecolia Warner's Bird Trap Quilt.  It's almost like someone checked this book out & gazed at that photos for, I am going to guess, hours & hours.  Oh well the library's loss is my gain.  & don't be too sad for them-they have at least one other copy of this book still on the shelf.  I know because I checked.

Big doings week-end

There is A LOT going on in our little corner of earth over the next few days.  Let me start be describing the one thing we will not be doing & yet benefits us greatly.  Wait, let me back up.

How do you feel about football?  College football? Gator college football?  Well, we have a love hate relationship.  More like a like, don't really care relationship, but whatever.  The short version is when there is a home game we do everything we can to get the hell out of Dodge.  It is not just what the people attending the game do.  I don't mean drunk & disorderly, although that is a factor, I mean thing like the university reselling ALL THE PARKING SPACES to alumni & other fans, so if you have not done something about your car before the end of business Friday, you can count on getting towed & fined.  When you consider how much it costs to park near A's building (I will give you a hint: it is more than $500), you can see how it might get old.  Fast.  But added to that are all the people not attending the game, who just want to hang out & bask in the drunken halo outside of the stadium.  & that is before we get into any real rivalry games.

Well, this weekend is the most famous college football rivalry of all time:  The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.  & the good news is it is so damned big (& the rival is so damned close), they have all agreed to move it to Jacksonville & we get our town back.  Which means we will be able to move about freely & do everything else going on this week-end.

Today is the first day you can vote in the election here in Florida.  I am told that this is the second busiest day (the first being the actual 2nd Tuesday in November), but I probably won't get there until Monday myself.

Today is the first day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale.  We actually have a FOL booksale twice a year (we do love our library) but the October sale is usually the BIG one.  We will not be there this first day, but we do plan to go Sunday (the book sale runs Saturday to Wednesday).  We are arriving late because

Saturday is the only day of the Bat Festival at the Lubee Bat Conservancy.    We have never been, but I am determined to go this year. 

Yesterday I was on campus, for the first time in a long time I might add, & was talking with the most recent set of undergrads work-studying in the Herbarium when one of them bemoaned the "home game" being "so far away" & how he was just going to have to watch it on tv because without football there is "nothing to do in this town".

Major scores in 746

This weekend was the beginning of the Friends of the Library booksale here in our little county; I have said before it is the big social event of the season (two seasons actually as there is one in October & one in April, but October is the biggie).  This year we saw more people than I can list here, or that's all it would be.  One interesting twist, though, the first day of the sale over lapped with Pride Days here in town.  As a result there were slews of people sporting rainbows, of course; several same-sex couples hand-in-hand & I overheard more than one conversation between rainbow-wearer & FOL library volunteer clarifying "yes, we do this right about now every year" in both directions.  What I did not see was a single Dove World clan member.  No Islam is of the Devil t-shirts, no lighters or matches to be seen anywhere in the religious volumes section.  In fact, Dove-clan were deemed so unlikely to appear there were not even police posted around that area.  There were plenty of officers, mostly directing traffic around the hoards of pedestrians lugging crates of books from the sale across Main Street.  & they all looked happy to be there, actually.

A & I usually walk in together, look at each other & say "see ya".  Sooner or later we will trip over each other, sometimes more than once.  If he needs to find me I spend a lot of time in children's books & poetry.  He can be found in engineering, science or depending on the size of the crowd, taking breaks next to the big bay doors at the back where the temperature is likely to be several degrees cooler than the rest of the warehouse.

This year I made major inroads in 746.  In fact, I hardly left that part of the building at all & when I did, my bag was so heavy I had trouble lifting it.  I only made it from there to the lower 700s when A came looking for me (Okay that's a lie, I did a quick cruise through 821 & found what I think might be the very translation of Canterbury Tales that A***** has been so happy with & bought it for 75cents).

Most of my books came from 746 though.  There has been a knitting, quilting, etc renaissance in the past few years & in order to make way for the new stuff they have to clear out some of the old stuff.  That much of the old stuff on the way out deals with garment construction specifically bodes very well for those purchases.  I was sorry to see Judy Chicago on the weeded table but not sorry to bring her home.

It was a good day.

How is a used book sale like the stock market?

Our local library has two book sales a year & they are impressive. The next one begins tomorrow & I would not miss it for the world. A will be out of town but I still plan to face the crowds (& there are crowds, believe me). Typically, we will drive downtown just before lunchtime; the real hardcore booklovers will have been waiting for the doors to open & will be trickling away by then. Sure, it will be blisteringly hot, but we will be able to find a parking spot.

We go to at least one sale a year & may go more than once in the course of the sale, each day getting progressively better bargains. I have never once been & not run into at least one person I knew would be there at some point (either because they said so or because it was so patently clear they must go at some point) & at least one person I was not expecting to see (not because I think these people are idiots, but because they just have not passed thru my brain in quite some time).

Last year we ran into several good friends including C***** who had brought J***** with her. He was going through old VHS tapes; she was looking for old 33rpm records to use in art projects. I also ran into M*** L** who talked at length about the GED program she volunteers with at the county jail; she was at the sale buying books to loan to the prisoners to meet their GED requirements. I learned that haiku is very big in the prison (or was last Fall) & a number of her books dealt with the history & architecture of that style of poetry. S** & R***** had traveled from their new home in North Carolina to volunteer at the sale because they miss it so much but did not happen to be there on the day we went. I wonder who I will see this year.

ANSWER: The initial sale (of book or stock) is the only time the originators (the author, the publisher, the principal of the company) really benefit financially. After that, the buying & selling of used books/stocks profits the seller. There are exceptions. My favorite is when a company goes public & the principal stays on as an 'adviser'. If the stock does well, the shareholders might vote him a big fat bonus.

If you are asking yourself why then does a company care so much what its stock is worth you are asking the wrong question; the company does not care (sort of), but the guy who is hired or fired on shareholder say-so cares very much.

//On re-reading this I realize I inadvertently implied I think people who do not support their local libraries &/or go to library book sales are idiots. Let me clarify: I think they are willful idiots which is so much worse than just plain old born stoopid. Glad to have the chance to clear that up.