Azaleas and Library Drama

Our neighbor down the street has this amazing Ceanothus, or California lilac, growing in the front garden. I love the way it's consuming the gatepost like a big blue amoeba.

I have another post to write about old slides, but let's take a break from that subject today. Instead, I want to show you our azaleas:

This little miniature azalea is such a great color. It's sort of buried in our flowerbed amidst a lot of other stuff -- like the blue forget-me-nots -- but I'm always happy to see it bloom each year.

We're also getting flowers on the pink spider azalea that I got for free when Homebase gave away all its plants during the first lockdown in early 2020. At first we kept it in a pot behind the garden bench, but it never bloomed there. So we moved it to the middle of the garden, where there's more light, and it has rewarded us with flowers. Ta-da!

And finally, the orange rhododendron in the middle of the garden is blooming as well. As you can see, the foliage has a bronze tint.

I'm having ongoing battles with the mob of about 25 ninth-grade boys that take over the library's fiction section each day at lunch and break time. I occasionally catch them eating illicit snacks, and as I inventoried fiction yesterday I found tons of crisp packets, lollipop sticks and candy wrappers behind the books -- not to mention a fresh wad of chewed gum. Yesterday one of them left a crumpled-up assignment behind the books, with his name on it! So there's no uncertainty about the culprits. I'm taking steps to disperse that group.

I finished the inventory -- all except the professional development books, which won't take long. I'm skipping the DVDs and the reference section. Reference includes that vast collection of literary criticism books -- the ones my boss wants to sell -- and they're squirreled away in various cabinets so it's just too hard to dig them all out and scan them. And the DVDs -- well, as one of my co-workers said, "Who cares?"

It looks like we're missing about 25 books, but I'm not too concerned. Kids probably simply borrowed them without checking them out, and I suspect a lot will come back before the end of the year.

I did find this interesting gem while inventorying (and simultaneously weeding) the biography section:

This is a 1977 biography of "Bloody Mary" Tudor, which we've had in the library since 1979. It wasn't in great condition and hadn't been checked out in 13 years, and someone had taken a pink highlighter pen to its pages. And then I found this note inside the back cover:

I did a Google search and darned if that's not correct! OOPS! I wonder if someone at J. M. Dent & Sons lost their job over that little gaffe?

Apparently the artist, whose name is given here as Antonio Moro but who is also called Anthonis or Antonis Mor, did paint a portrait of Queen Mary. But it's this one, not the one on the cover of the book. (To be fair, the women do look quite similar, and both were married to Philip II of Spain.)

Anyway, given the book's age and condition and the inaccuracy of the cover, I weeded it!