Friday, October 20, 2017

Dogs Reading and Starlet Blues


Apparently we're in for some stormy weather this weekend. There's something with the provocative label of a "weather bomb" brewing out in the Atlantic, and Brian (as the storm has been named) is supposed to strike the southwestern UK on Saturday with high winds and rain. The warning area includes London, although when I look at my local weather forecast it says the rain chance is only 20 percent, so who knows. Contradictory information! I could stand a day of staying inside and reading, to be honest.

We librarians had our annual group picture taken. I didn't mention it this year, did I? Well, we always do a photo with some kind of theme -- remember a few years ago, when we had our tie-dyeing party and were photographed wearing the results?

This year, the theme included our pets!

Three of the four of us have dogs, and at some point last year someone came up with the bright idea of Tweeting (on the library's account) pictures of our dogs "reading," just to be silly. I swear I did not originate this idea, but I did go along with it. I took a picture of Olga lying rather disinterestedly next to a book (ironically a book I didn't like very much, "The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes).

A few weeks ago, we decided to incorporate our pet pictures into our group photo. We had them printed at the school -- which gave the teacher in the robotics lab a chance to experiment with his new, large-scale printer -- and then we held them in front of us for the final image. (I'm just showing you me, and not the whole group, because I'm not sure my colleagues would want to be blogged!)

We were originally going to wear t-shirts with the pictures ironed onto the front of them, but we had technical problems with the iron-on materials and had to go to Plan B.

Anyway, the group photo is always a fun little team-building exercise.

On a completely unrelated subject, I forgot to tell you a story about my Jane Fonda outing with Dave on Sunday. We were sitting in the audience waiting for the show to start when a man and woman sat down behind us. The woman, who sounded American, proceeded to regale the man with tales of acting and her cancelled TV show -- "they say they only want shows with the potential to be as popular as 'Game of Thrones,'" she told him -- and her plans to stay in Europe most of the coming year filming something or other. I looked at Dave and whispered, "I am dying to turn around." Who could this person be?

I developed some theories, and then stood up to "remove my jacket" while discreetly stealing a glance. I am disappointed to say I had no idea who she was. She didn't look familiar at all. Kind of generic, actually. Twentysomething. Long, brown hair.

I sat back down and told Dave I didn't have a clue as to her identity.

"That's because it's all lies," he said -- rather caustically, I thought.

(Top photo: Yellow trees near a tennis court in West Wickham, London.)

8 comments:

  1. I have a good idea for your next team building exercise and I am taking that term very literally. One librarian lies down on the floor. The next librarian lies on top of him/her and so on until you have a structure of librarians - "built" into a wall. To make the event more memorable you could enact it in the preferred manner of Spencer Tunick.

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  2. Lies, lies, lies!
    Or maybe not. Who knows?
    I do know that you and Dave and Olga are real as real and I am so glad of that.

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  3. I love the team building photos with pets reading. Such a funny, wonderful idea. It would be so cool to have a large-scale printer like that. Makes me wonder what they'll be printing in the robotics lab.

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  4. If the actress was twenty-something, I'm sure that even if she had dropped her own name, you wouldn't recognize it. I don't know who anyone, under the age of 30, is anymore.

    Flaubert's Parrot put me off Julian Barnes forever.

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  5. That really is a fun idea for the group picture and for the tweets. The story about the actress is fun. She could have been famous because heaven knows, if you look at those tabloid magazines they are full of supposedly famous people that I swear I've never seen before. Or, Dave could be right.
    Back in the 90's when I was doing consulting work, my friend David was sent to special assignment in Kansas City while we were under contract in St. Louis. He was going to be there for about two months. One weekend, I flew to Kansas City to spend the weekend with him and while we were having a drink one afternoon at a local watering hole, we pretended to be government agents (sort of like secret service) there to scout out the city for an upcoming visit. It was fun, the bartender kept inching his way closer to us while he casually dried the glasses. We probably didn't fool anyone but, we had a good time.

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  6. That's the first thing we've never seen Olga being excited over! Maybe if there were dog treats hidden in the pages . . .

    I think there are many, many tiers of actors and actresses. Maybe that young woman was in a lower tier but trying to sound upper-tier . . . in which case it wasn't ALL lies but not all the truth either :)

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  7. Cute picture of Olga even if she didn't care. Maybe she knew that the book would be disappointing before you did!

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