A Chocoholic’s Guide to a Yummy Library In-Service

Our library closed one day last week for a Staff In-Service, where we learned to better serve you, our patrons, and also had a chocolate-tasting,* because happy librarians are far more willing to share that happy—if not the actual chocolate.

My brilliant friend Cha Cha, who does All The Fun Things, was in charge and offered eight anonymous samples for us to smell and taste and decipher, before revealing the type and telling us a little about the companies.

Informative and yummy—what’s not to like?

We started out with a Peach & Pecan in Milk Chocolate from Chocolove, which was okay.  Apparently, the founder and owner, Timothy Moley, is something of a Willy Wonka, and has consumed two chocolate bars a day for the last eighteen years.  After hearing that, the love poem printed on inside each wrapper is put into almost disturbing perspective—not that I don’t appreciate the sweet (ahem) touch!**

The second one was Green & Black’s Maya Gold, which I’ve gobbled like an addicted lunatic tried before—dark chocolate with orange and ‘spices,’ which aren’t listed but must include cloves.  So, so good, as is every Green & Black’s bar I’ve ever had, even the white, which Cha Cha insists isn’t actually chocolate.  I don’t see how that matters, but okay.

The third was a Ghirardelli Intense Dark Cabernet Matinee, which was fruity and smooth and lovely, but again, I liked the story better.  Apparently, Mr. Ghirardelli made his chocolate fortune in California, selling his products to the gold rushers, but not because these newly rich men were desperate for chocolate, oh, no.  They were desperate for women, but Mr. Ghirardelli’s theory, which he shared with his customers, was that women love chocolate . . . and I probably don’t have to spell out the rest.***

The fourth was my favorite, a dark chocolate with sea salt in it—thank heavens salt is okay to eat now, because it’s amazing with chocolate and caramel.  I’ve been a member of the Godiva Chocolate of the Month Club for years, so I wasn’t surprised when I learned this one was theirs.  Neither was a shocked when my kids inhaled the leftover pieces I brought home, because genetics. To be honest, I was a little weirded out that up until five years ago, Godiva was owned by Campbell Soup . . . it was kind of like learning that the Solo plastic cup company has owned Tiffany’s for the past forty years.^

The fifth hurt—seriously, I tasted it and my tongue lit up like I’d set it on fire.  Theo Chocolate’s Congo Pili Pili Chili bar is infused with a pepper that registers just under a habanero on the heat scale; a habenero is 10, a jalapeno is a five, and a pili pili is an eight.  I brought some home for my SIL, Watson, who snarfed it up like I’d brought her the Godiva, so I’m planning on buying a bar for my mother, who has the same Teflon tastebuds—proving that sometimes genetics ain’t all that.

I can’t tell you about the sixth because my own tastebuds were still ticked off at me, but it was a sugarless one from Guylian and apparently not bad.  Good to know there’s a decent choice out there now for people who watch their sugar intake—I remember my grandpa, who was diabetic, making a No Chocolate for Me face that could damn near break your heart.

The seventh was a Lindt Passion Fruit bar, which was awesome, as Lindt usually is—my German teacher in high school used to reward us with Lindt chocolate.  I did very well in that class.

Which brings us to the final sample.  You know how I always say that if coffee tasted like it smelled, I wouldn’t treat it like medicine for a chronic caffeine deficiency?  Ritter Sports espresso has me covered.  Or maybe I had it covered.  Regardless, I grabbed most of the leftovers and hightailed it before my co-workers noticed.  What’s better for a librarian than coffee chocolate?  It’s a match made in the kind of heaven you don’t tell your kids about.

So, if you ever have a chance to go to a chocolate tasting, go.  It’s a great time.

And afterwards, if you have a choice of meditation or self-defense, go for the second.  Naptime Meditation might sound good, but remember, after the in-service, you’ll have to walk all those chocolate leftovers through the parking lot to your car . . . And your co-workers know it.

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*We had a choice between the yoga and the chocolate, but since I’m shacking up with a yoga instructor, I opted for the latter.  Not, as my husband pointed out, I would have chosen differently under any circumstances, but he was happy to provide the excuse, bless him.

** I’m thinking of doing a chocolate poem post one of these Wednesdays—reporting on which poems are paired with which flavored bar.  It would mean tasting a lot of chocolate, but I’d manage somehow . . . for you.

***Apparently, the spelling and pronunciation of his name was a sore spot for Mr. Ghirardelli, who spent a lot of his advertising space reminding people about the second ‘ar’ sound.  Oddly, my spell check doesn’t have a problem with it—then again, it’s my spell check . . .

^ I’m almost positive it hasn’t.  If you know better, please leave the remains of my naivety alone.

 

Random Thursday: Bad Librarians Do It With You

It’s Random National Library Week Thursday!

Have you given your librarian chocolate today?

Would you like a librarian to give chocolate to?

Because I could totally be that librarian.

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The Librarian Song

Joe Uveges wrote a song for the Colorado Librarian’s Association five or six years ago and a friend sent it to me a couple days ago.

Most of the librarians I know would have been in the peeing section.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound right, but you know what I mean.

(thanks, Kev—you owe me a keyboard)

ooooooooooooooooOOOOOoooooooooooooooo

We do, Actually

(via Watson, who appreciates literacy in a tall man)

ooooooooooooooooOOOOOoooooooooooooooo

Stay Informed, My Friends

No, Paul, that’s not me.  At all.  But I’m flattered you asked.

ooooooooooooooooOOOOOoooooooooooooooo

Share the Love

In honor of National Library Week

The Poetry Wednesday Ode to Libraries (and Librarians) Contest
challenges you to get your poetry on!

Rules and Regs are here.

As of this post, we already have five names ready for the Hat of Win.

You have until the 20th to post your Libraries (and Librarians) Are All That poem in the comments of  the post I’ve now linked up three times in this one section.

Seriously, it’s easy:

Librarians know
Where All the Secrets Are Kept
Do not tick them off.

See?*

ooooooooooooooooOOOOOoooooooooooooooo

I Wanna Be a Bad Librarian!

Or at least work for the Jonesboro Public Library System, because they’re definitely in the peeing section.

Yeah, still doesn’t sound right.  But you still know what I mean.

Wonder if they’re hiring?

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*My husband suggested that I get someone to translate this into kanji or rōmaji for my next tattoo.  Hmmm . . .

The Power of Coffee

Last year, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I was standing in a long line at a grocery store when I smelled a fantastic, delicious smell. It was warm and inviting and lovely and I breathed deeply, trying to figure out what it was.

I turned to the woman behind me—because in the Midwest, standing in the same line for more than five minutes will encourage you to form bonds with complete strangers, even if the new People  is right there on the rack to the left—and said, “Do you smell that wonderful smell? What is that?”

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “That’s my coffee.” And—because in the Midwest, this is what people do—she reached into her cart and handed me a shiny bag.

I tried not to get my noseprints on it, but it was tough going. It smelled like butterscotch and hazelnut* and caramel and good mercy it was good.

Except under conditions of severe caffeine deprivation, I’m not a coffee drinker, but I thought I might at least offer it to the other adults in the family so I could stand over the pot and breathe while it was brewing.

Unfortunately, the nice lady made me give it back. There were too many people in line to beg the cashier to find me some—I hate doing that, anyway, unless there’s a price dispute, which may or may not be a Midwest thing—and I didn’t want to wait in line any more, so I let it go and made a mental note to buy some when next the opportunity arose.

Unfortunately, that was the only store around here that carries it, and by the time I discovered this and returned to the scene, I was informed that this particular flavor is seasonal and I was out of luck.

Drat.

Fast-forward to this morning.

Due to circumstances that were technically-but-who-are-we-kidding-here under my control—a late-night writing frenzy and early morning child wrangling—I was barely awake and running late. So after dropping the Slow-Motion Sloth Sisters off at school, I zipped around the same grocery, trying to find goodies for the short story group I lead at the library branch on the second Monday of the month.

Some of our members like chocolate, some hate it, some are on diets, the library has a budget, and it was suggested to me that store-bought cookies were losing their appeal.  So I’d thrown a half-gallon of cider and some white-chocolate-covered pretzels in my cart, found a brownie assortment and some lovely grapes, and figured I was done.

And then I smelled a happy, lovely, warm smell.

My mental notes usually come unstuck five seconds after I slap ‘em into place, but there’s nothing wrong with my olfactory memory.

“Highlander Grogg!” I said, to the confusion of the man next to me, and headed for the coffee aisle.

I found it in decaf first, which is dangerous to give to a group who will be discussing a lesser work of Charles Dickens, and then a bag of beans, which wasn’t the safest idea in my current state.** The only regular bags, as it turns out, were for individual cups.

After doing some mental math—and finger math, too, I won’t lie—I bought eight little sweet-smelling bags of the stuff and called it quits.

Back at the library, I filled the filter of the industrial percolator a quarter-cup at a time,*** added a little roast to make up the difference, and plugged in the machine.

Ten minutes later, two staff offered to clean the kitchen for me, if I’d leave the leftover coffee for them.  It smelled that good.

So good that when it was done, I tried half a cup myself, liberally sweetened.

It’s not bad.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that it almost tastes like it smells, my highest level of java praise, since—to paraphrase Garrison Keillor—the best coffee I’ve ever had wasn’t that much better than the worst I’ve ever had.

But the group loved it^ and more than half of them wrote down the brand and the flavor.^^ There were four cups left out of a 24-cup batch, so the branch staff was able to sample it, and I was able to sneak out without swilling the pot.^^^

Plus, I got a blog post out of it, which is a nice bonus.

So while I’m still not a coffee-lover, I’ll admit that it did make my Monday a little brighter.

I wonder if the Berres Brothers make tea?
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*Have you noticed that hazelnuts don’t smell or taste like much even when they’re roasting, but mix them with hot coffee and they’re magic?

**Plus, I love this group, but I draw the line at trying to smash coffee beans for them with my giant Have You Given Your Librarian Chocolate Today? mug, which I don’t have and don’t actually know exists, but would adore and use every day, in case anyone with google-fu skillz and a generous nature was wondering what might be the perfect gift to give, say, a librarian and diet Pepsi addict who blogs about Highlander Grogg and HobNobs.

***Note to self: scissors, next time, and ask the dentist to check your bite around the right incisor.

^We digressed from a discussion of the chronology of Dickens’ Four Sisters to one about that $50-a-cup elephant-poop coffee that one of our members had read about last week in the papers.  No one minded much.

^^I did avoid giving them the name of the grocery store—I’d feel guilty, but I still have to find a gift for my MIL, and this just may do.

^^^I did dump the grounds and clean the kitchen first, in case any of my co-workers have found this blog.

Rant of the Wild Librarian: Just Plain Filthy

This is the Thirtieth Anniversary of Banned Books Week and I’m not sure whether to be pleased that people have been officially fighting censorship for at least this long or completely frustrated that we still have to remind people that, as the Supreme Court told the School Board of Island Trees, New York, in 1982, it isn’t particularly legal to keep the public from accessing books like Slaughterhouse Five “simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”

Not even if they’re “‘anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.”

The American Library Association, as you might suspect, is all over Banned Books Week, and has provided a terrific timeline of Banned Books, highlighting one challenged title for each of the thirty years.

Even after all these years in a public library setting, I wasn’t expecting The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak, though the reasons are about as facepalm-inducing as one might imagine.

But it’s difficult to predict every little thing that might enrage other people’s sensibilities—though there are certain subjects that are practically guaranteed to do so.

About twenty years ago, when I was working for the summer at my hometown public library, a patron came up to the desk with a biography, meant for adult readers, of a movie actor who shall remain nameless because I honestly can’t remember who it was.  The patron said he wanted me to “be aware” of something in the book and opened it, not to a torn page or the impression of a bacon bookmark or even commentary rendered in magic marker,* but to three very specific publisher ads in the back.

Two of these ads were for annotated filmographies of gay cinema and one was for a book about a male character struggling with his sexual orientation in Hollywood.   The wording and images in these ads were not, as I recall, explicit.

He also told me that he was sure the person who had ordered the book for the library had no idea that sort of thing was in this otherwise fine biography of a fine actor, but he wanted me to be aware that it was “just in case someone else saw them.”

I gave him a complaint form, which was standard procedure, and took the book away, even though he said he would put it back.  This was also standard procedure— we had been told how creative people could get when it came to sparing other people from items they didn’t like.**  Or didn’t want other people to like.

What I did not say to him—because I didn’t know how to express it and had no authority to do so—was that no one was forcing him or anyone else to buy the books in those ads or to approve of them.  The library could not control what publishers advertised in their own publications and was not going to remove pages from a book out of fear that someone might know that certain books exist or are available for purchase.

It is not the place of a public library to support or disapprove of any particular concept.***  It is the place of a library to make a variety of fiction and non-fiction materials available to the public, who are then free to choose what they wish to read, view, and believe.

One’s responsibility to protect others from ideas and concepts ends at the boundaries of one’s own immediate family.

But I didn’t have to say any of this, because the library board said it all when the patron attended the next open meeting and asked what the library was planning to do about the “filthy things” in the book.

“So you want people to know that the library supports this kind of perverted lifestyle?” asked the patron.

“We want the public to know that we do not support censorship,” said the Board president.

It’s as simple as that.

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*Librarians have all seen worse, believe me.  If you’re reading to take your mind off a heavy cold, please use a tissue and turn your head when you sneeze, okay?  Snot is intended to be nature’s superglue.

**And from typos, too.  If you ever feel compelled to physically correct the grammar and punctuation in a library book, please don’t.  I do sympathize, but it’s still considered vandalism—and to be honest, you aren’t always right.

*** Except possibly for the arguments against tax levies for public libraries, because c’mon people, seriously?

 

 

Short Reading Lessons in Writing: An Introduction to Stephen King

A morning short story reading group meets at one of our library branches on the second Monday of each month.  The library provides the short stories, snacks, and a staff member to make coffee and keep things moving along. 

That staff member is me.

And this is what I learned today about how readers see writers.

 __________________________________________________

When I told the group that we would be reading a Stephen King story, I saw more than a few noses wrinkle.  One of our regulars said, “I hope it isn’t too gory, because I don’t like those at all,” and there were many nods around the room.

I promised it wouldn’t be—and it was easier than a non-King fan might think to find stories without a drop of blood or the hint of a monster, human or otherwise.

In fact, that was the point of choosing a Stephen King story in the first place—I wanted to show the group, most of whom had only seen movies based on his books, that there was more to him than his (well-earned) reputation as a Blood-Soaked Monster Wrangler might imply.

Part of this is because it’s my job to broaden their horizons a little, but also because it’s my personal opinion that Mr. King wouldn’t have the longevity he’s had as an international best-selling author if the man couldn’t actually write. 

I’d originally chosen “Stationary Bike,”* because it’s about a subconscious fantasy gone just a little too far and how moderation in all things is a good idea, even in this age of All or Nothing perfection.

But while I was wrestling with the admin photocopier, a passing supervisor—and fellow Stephen King fan—mentioned that there was a lot of strong language in the story.  I reviewed, and there is.

While I’m not a proponent of censorship and in my opinion, Mr. King’s language choices are never gratuitous, several of the members of my group have mentioned that four-letter words tend to kick them out of a story.

That was the last thing I wanted to happen, especially since Mr. King’s reputation wasn’t winning him any points with most of this crowd anyway.

So I switched to my close-second choice, “Ayana,”**  a story about death, miracles, and motivations:

Charlie, the narrator, is waiting with his family at the deathbed of his father.  A woman walks into the hospital room with a blind child and, despite the protests of the dying man’s family, guides her to the patient.  The girl, Ayana, kisses Charlie’s father, and, upon leaving, touches Charlie on the hand.  Charlie’s father immediately goes into complete remission—and though his relatives refuse to call it a miracle, Charlie does.

Especially when, months, later, a stranger appears to take him to visit a dying child in a hospital.  He is called on several more times over the next decade or so, and though he doesn’t know for certain what happens to the people he kisses and has no idea how or why he or they were chosen, he answers the call until his time of miracles ends as quietly as it began, leaving nothing but his belief that they did actually happen.

“Ayana” is so completely open to interpretation that it’s difficult to describe without using one’s own values.   There are many loose ends here—the reader doesn’t know any more than Charlie does about what might be happening.  We all believed that Charlie was telling the truth and we all believed that he was the kind of responsible man whom we would want distributing miracles .  . but who was in charge of all this?  Who chose the guides?  The miracle-carriers?  The recipients?  And why?

There were fourteen of us and we all had our own takes, filtered by our own experiences and belief systems.

It was a riotous meeting, let me tell you—we ran over by ten minutes and the industrial-sized percolator was dry.

Everyone loved this story with the single exception of a reader who fully admitted that she didn’t like mysteries without solutions—and even she thought that it had been very well-written.

And everyone barring myself and one other reader was surprised that Stephen King wrote stories like this.  Descriptions that made them see, details that made them believe, and characters that made them feel.  That’s a direct quote, by the way.

During our discussion, I saw their concept of Stephen King morph from Gorefest Broker to Excellent Writer.

I asked if anyone was interested in reading more King, and everyone thought they might give him a try, though they asked me to find other stories this “complex,” by which they meant “no paranormal monsters or demons” and, if possible,  “no blatant nightmare fodder.”

I said I’d do my best, and mentioned that I’d brought along those copies of “Stationary Bike” just in case.

Every single reader took one.  They thought that, having seen what Stephen King could do, strong language wouldn’t be a problem.   And after the meeting, two of them asked me to take them to the horror section so they could look through his novels.

We got ‘em, Mr. King—we got ‘em.

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*From Just After Sunset, which I highly recommend.  It’s a nice mix of what Mr. King does best.

**Also from Just After Sunset.