Sticker Shock, and the Bat

I think I may be repeating myself with this photo of a car in my neighborhood, but I can't find any evidence that I've blogged a similar picture before. I took this one yesterday, but if it looks familiar, my apologies!

It's an eye-catching way of making one's car stand out in a crowd, anyway. I wonder if the fender was damaged or didn't match the rest of the car, and this was the solution? Like a fancy Band-Aid.

I mentioned earlier that my co-worker Joanna, the other assistant in our library, was leaving her position. Her last day was yesterday, so for the foreseeable future there's now only one library assistant -- me. Joanna's duties will be parceled out between me and the two remaining librarians.

We didn't have a special send-off for her yesterday, because she dislikes attention and inevitably feels obligated if someone gives her a gift or makes a fuss ("Now I have to write a thank-you note!") but we've all told her repeatedly in many ways that we will miss her. Which is true.

How this will affect my own job in the long-term is still under discussion. (And I'm part of that discussion.)

Hopefully I didn't give Joanna a cold as part of my going-away gift. The cold I thought I had Friday and Saturday seemed so mild that I began to doubt I had one at all, but now Dave thinks he's sick, so who knows. I feel pretty much normal, if a little sniffly.

My Halloween bat has made its reappearance over my desk. I realized yesterday I've been hanging this bat up for ten years, at least -- and it's been deflated for much of that time. (It used to be much fuller, sort of football-shaped.) I just found it in the supply cabinet at work but it has become my annual tradition.

I'm not going to post the video of Olga scratching around on our bed pillows, partly because it seems weirdly intimate to show her on our bed with Dave walking around in his pajamas and our laundry on the chair in the background, and partly because it only captured her scratching for a few seconds (and believe me, it is a much lengthier process). I'll try to make a better one.

But this is the end result. We put that striped pillow in the foreground on the bed especially for her, so she wouldn't nest in our own pillows, but of course she doesn't like to use that one. She does run our lives, that dog.