Incoherent Scribblings

That is the German word for “rusty.” Now, I will admit that I don’t remember if one uses the concept of being rusty at something to describe being out of practice, but in keeping with the spirit of Denglish, today I am going to.

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Today, while working at the Information Desk, I had a lady come in to register for a community borrower card. Because I am still learning all the nuances of the different services we provide at the Information Desk, at this point I had to bring another librarian in to refresh my memory as to the next steps in the community borrower registration process.

When we first spoke at the desk, I thought I had detected a German accent in the prospective community borrower’s English and as we began filling out all the necessary paperwork, it came to my attention that she had a very “German” name.

However, it wasn’t until she was looking over her registration information and mentioned that our computer had not put an umlaut over the “a” in her last name that I took the plunge.

“Sprechen Sie Deutch?” I inquired.

Why, yes, as a matter of fact she did, she replied in German. She then asked me if I was German. In German, I replied that no I wasn’t, but I had lived in Germany for four and a half years. (Seriously, it’s the blonde hair, it gets them every time!)

At this point she had been entered into our system so we collected her annual fee and then briefed her on our community borrower policies and did a little demo of the online catalog. As this was the first time I had been involved in registering a community borrower, I mainly observed as my colleague instructed her on the catalog and how to renew books online. Near the end of the demonstration, the phone rang so I left the scene.

She spent a few minutes browsing the catalog but before she left, she came back over to the desk and started chatting away with me in German.

I was very excited to be speaking German again but was also nervous and as a result, I was embarrassed at the rustiness of my conversation.

Although I understood and responded correctly to the questions about how long I had been living in and what brought me to West Texas Town, I completely misunderstood the question she asked about whether I had come directly from Munich. I stumbled over my past tense helping verbs (haben vs. sein) and was surprised she understood anything I said as the order of the words in my sentences were enough to make me cringe as they tumbled from my mouth.

I apologized profusely for my German, but told her that it was because I hadn’t been practicing. Minutes later as we parted proper in German fashion, I couldn’t help but hope that I had made a contact that would help me fulfill #48 on my 101 Things list: Continue practicing my German in the US.

As I have no stitching progress to show at the moment, I thought I would take the opportunity to do my personal assessment of the issue that Dawn so kindly sent me (along with a too cute and too tiny scissor fob)!

I haven’t read any of the articles or tried any of the recipes yet, so this isn’t a review of that, rather just the patterns… Which is all we are really interested in anyway, right?

I have three categories and if the pattern isn’t mentioned here that means I am not even considering stitching it. Therefore, my categories are 1.) Must Stitch, 2.) Might Stitch, and 3.) Like, but probably won’t stitch.

Here is the breakdown by category:

1. Must Stitch – 5
2. Might Stitch – 17
3. Like, but probably won’t stitch – 4

Total – 26 out of 75 or 35%

The five that I must stitch are:

“Noel Christmas Bellpull” by The Sweetheart Tree

One of my 101 Things is that I want to stitch something for myself for each of my favorite holidays during its season. I would like this one to be the one I stitch for Christmas.

“The Decorator” by Full Circle Designs

I can’t help it, I am in love with this little guy!

“Jingles the Penguin” by The Stitchworks

I have decided to make it a yearly tradition to make my niece and nephew stitched things for Christmas, so I could stitch this cute little penguin for either one of them.

“A Merry Kitty Klaus” by Val’s Stuff

It’s a cat! Need I say more?

“Snow Bunnies” by LHN

Because I love Little House Needleworks!

OK, now I am off to stitch!

It has come to my attention that one might mistake my 50 Books in 1001 Days as the only books that I intend to read during my 1001 days. On the contrary: I intend to read the books on that list in conjunction with whatever else I might feel like reading. As a result, I have read a great deal of books in the past few months that were not on my list.

However, I was inspired to head to the library a few days ago and pick up one of the books on my list because of The Police. I was never a big fan of the group, but since they are supposedly back together now I find my radio station playing their music more often and the other morning they played my favorite song that refers to “that book by Nabakov.”

If you don’t already know, that book by Nabakov is Lolita and it is on my list of 50 books to read in 1001 days.

There are many preconceived notions about the book Lolita, but let me clarify a couple of things: There is not one four-letter word, nor one obvious sex scene. While it is true the narrator is what today we call a pedophile, I believe the overlying theme of the book has nothing to do with the difference in age between the characters or pedophilia, but about Humbert Humbert’s love for Lolita. Whether we find his actions “normal” or not, this man is in love with that girl to the point of obsession.

And though she is a child when the books begins, Lolita’s actions throughout the story made it easy to forget her age. She deliberately plays with Humbert and despite the fact that she is merely twelve years old at the beginning of their relationship, I believe she has a very good idea of what she is doing.

By the time the book finishes Lolita is a young woman; married and pregnant with another man’s child and Humbert’s obsession with her has driven him mad.

If one digs deeply, perhaps they can claim the tragic result of the story serves as a type of morality tale, but according to Nabakov himself, he didn’t “intend” anything when he wrote the book: The story is just a story and it doesn’t “mean” anything at all… and that is just fine with me.

Over the past two weeks I took another step of reintegrating into American society: I bought a car. Once I successfully passed my driving test I figured it was only a matter of time before I would take the plunge and get a vehicle, because let’s face it, in the United States you can’t really function without one.

Since I got back I have been driving my mom’s 1980 Chevy Malibu and to be honest, I really figured I would continue to do so for a while. However, since I have to drive 44 miles round trip to work (I got a temporary job helping out my dad while I wait for a library job) and that Malibu gets horrible gas mileage, I was prompted to start looking into buying a more fuel-efficient car.

As luck would have it, my step-dad came across a really good deal on a 2004 Chevy Cavalier about two weeks ago. And though I wasn’t 100% sure about the make and model, it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for: A late model vehicle that gets great gas mileage… and the fact that it is a little blue coupe just sweetened the deal all the more. So a couple of trips to the bank to apply for a loan and one cashier’s check later, I am the proud owner of a brand new used car.

Now, “buy a car” is something that I had considered putting on my 101 Things in 1001 Days list, but since I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I could actually make such an investment I chose to list “save $500 towards the down payment for a new car” instead. However, given this new (and somewhat unexpected) development and the fact that I plan on driving this particular car for some time after my initial 1001 days, I have made the executive decision to revise #61 from its original form and substitute “get a loan for a new car” so that I can cross it off.

And that $500 that I was supposed to be saving for a down-payment? Well, I suppose I should still save it because I will eventually have to buy new tires or maybe something even more essential… like a fancy stereo system.

I am five days into my 101/1001 project and I have already completed two tasks. Yeah! I have completed my “50 Books in 1001 Days” and “25 Places to Travel Someday” lists and believe me, they weren’t as easy to put together as one might think.

The travel list was fairly straight-forward as I have a basic idea of the places that I would like to visit someday. However, I may expand upon it because while it is nice to say that I want to go to Mexico for example, Mexico is a big place and I think it would be better if I knew exactly where I wanted to go, what I wanted to see, and/or what I wanted to do.

In contrast to the few hours it took for the travel list, it took me over two days to do the book list. This list was pretty labor-intensive because I wanted to have a good mixture of “fun” books and contemporary literature.

I already have a few of the books on the list and I plan on starting with them. The reason they made it on the list is because even though I already have them, I have never gotten around to reading them. (Shame, shame) I am not planning on buying any of the books that I don’t already own after that though: Instead I will use the opportunity to fulfill another goal that relates to the use of my local public library.

And finally, I have about two dozen recurring goals that I had to try and figure out how I was going to track in relation to this project. I didn’t really want to have to edit my main page and add little notes concerning whether or not I did something all the time, so I finally settled on creating a spreadsheet. It lists my annual, biannual, monthly, weekly, and other recurring tasks and each month when I update my list I will check the spreadsheet and tick the corresponding boxes. At the end of my 1001 Days I can then specify how each task was (or was not) completed.

With the exception of trying to get a job, I am not sure which task I will tackle next… Even though with this chilly weather the idea of starting to knit an afghan (#79) sounds awfully tempting!