The Concentration

Well, yesterday turned out to be busy but manageable in the library. My boss was out and she had a substitute -- a guy who's getting a library degree and is interning with us. We had five 9th Grade English classes come in and check out books to read next week, when the students will all be on break. I didn't allow any kids who still had summer checkouts to get a new book, and at the end of the day that only prevented three students from getting something -- the rest all brought their overdue books back. I call that a win!

Everything ran smoothly and the day was very calm. And at the end of it all, I went to a pub with the middle school librarian and some other teachers and had a couple of pints as a little end-of-the-week celebration. A surprise element was meeting the director of this movie, who is married to one of our school administrators. Who knew?!

So, yeah, break next week. Two days are parent conferences, which for me doesn't mean much but Dave will be busy, but then we're off after Tuesday. We have no special plans yet but I may try to stir up some kind of late-breaking adventure.

I walked Olga yesterday morning and she was feeling frisky and insisted on making a complete circuit of the neighborhood. I was afraid she would make me late for work but I squeezed in just under the wire. As we were walking I found some trash that included someone's miniature painting of (I think?) a tree trunk.

The big mystery in the library involved that spreadsheet of games I mentioned one or two posts back. One game was listed in our catalog as "The Concentration," and it had no picture and no descriptive information. I could not find this game anywhere. I looked and looked and was completely at a loss to describe it on the spreadsheet, much less link it to a how-to-play video or web site. I even went down to the Lower School to see if it was there, and it wasn't. I began to suspect it was some kind of test entry in the catalog that didn't correspond to a real object.

But finally I looked on our puzzles shelf and found this:

Yes, it appears to be a (donated) Asian game -- which I guess is why we didn't describe it in the catalog. All the rules are in Japanese -- or is that Chinese? I couldn't even find a description online, maybe because its name is so similar to the card game Concentration and its bazillion variations. I suppose someone might play it but they'll never find it if it's with the puzzles, so I moved it to the games cart and took this picture for the catalog and spreadsheet. We wind up with some interesting stuff in the library!