We've had a lot of rain over the past few days and we're supposed to get more. It hasn't been a problem for us personally, but some areas have experienced flooding and transportation breakdowns. The worst Dave and I have seen is that the rain has beaten down some of the plants in the garden. A big branch on our mock orange, already heavy with blossoms, is now drooping low over the lawn with the added weight of water droplets.
The library has continued to be busy with people coming in to get books for the summer. Fortunately the kids are pretty much done so I'm no longer being pestered by demand for computer chargers! We still have middle school students around for half of today, but then they're finished and the next two workdays are just for staff and faculty.
I'm boxing up all the discarded biographies. I went through them with my boss and coworker yesterday, just to make sure I wasn't tossing anything of value, and they agreed with almost all my decisions. I am quite proud of how good the section looks now, I must say!
We had some very strange stuff -- a never-used biography of the band Black Sabbath, for example. Who bought that?
You may be wondering (I'm sure you are!) how well we did getting overdue materials back from kids. As of now, there are still a handful of students with books out -- maybe eight? So not a complete victory (and in fact my worst year so far in terms of retrieving stuff), but not a disaster, either. One ninth-grade girl still has six overdue books, but I'm not seeing any sign that she's going to bring them back until fall. All I can do is ask, write the parents, that kind of thing -- and I did all that. So unless they turn up today, these kids will start next year with frozen accounts. Oh well!
Frozen accounts will be an incentive to return the books!
ReplyDeleteMock Orange...aka Philadelphus..is that a North American shrub originally?..If not,I wonder how it got its name.
There is something else you can do. Contact the London underworld and pay for an intruder to get inside the girl's house to retrieve the books. Any right-thinking librarian would have already arranged this as a matter of duty. Finally, please may I borrow a charger?
ReplyDeleteGorgeous garden photos. I hope you enjoy your summer break.
ReplyDeleteOof - so much rain everywhere! We've finally had a couple of gorgeous days, but supposed to get more storms today...
ReplyDeleteI never enjoyed biographies very much - I'm pretty much all fiction all the time - so I would have gone to town on that section. Ha!
I like your accounts of how you get library books back. It reminds me of my teacher days when I SAW LIBRARIANS CHASING DOWN BOOKS.
ReplyDeleteis your mock orange fragrant and have thorns? mine is the scentless thornless variety that is also called mock dogwood. mine bloomed early this year in May. last year it was still pretty the first week or so of June but by that time this year it was done.
ReplyDeleteThe mock orange is stunning.
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking that if my parents had gotten a letter from the school asking that I return something, they would have been on my case immediately. Sometimes I worry about today's parents.
ReplyDeleteToo bad about all that rain. I wish you could send a couple days of it here. We are experiencing record heat for this time of year.
Maybe the girl loves to read and can't bear to part with her favorites? Just a thought. (Not that I'm excusing her for keeping them!)
ReplyDeleteYou're getting rain and we're having a crazy heatwave here. Fires already in the hot inland forests. The rain on the flowers there look so cool, refreshing and lovely.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to know what your travel plans are for the summer break.
ReplyDeleteLovely pictures! I can almost feel the cool, damp heaviness of the branches and smell the orange scent . . .
ReplyDeleteDon't - I repeat, DON'T - give YP a charger. He should have had his homework done by now :)
Our school used to withhold the final report card for any student with overdue library books or school sports uniforms they hadn't turned in. I think it worked very well!
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine not returning books to the library. I was as obsessed with that as I was with checking them out, which was very!
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