December 1, Sunday Salon

It has been a whole week since I last posted on this blog. It was a busy week with Thanksgiving festivities and a full few days at work. Perhaps this week I will finally have a minute to write reviews for the few books I've finished these past two weeks.

Cue the music, Little Drummer Boy, and have a listen while you read.


Weather: rainy and cold. We just got back from Seattle after returning our daughter to college. As we drove in to town I was shocked to see businesses open then noted that it was only 5:30 PM, it was so dark it seemed like midnight.

Thanksgiving day we spent with my family in Oregon. My eldest sister and her husband were the hosts. My folks, who are both in their 80s, live on the other side of town and supplied a goodly portion of the meal. My brother and his family drove up from California. We drove down from Washington State with our kids. Altogether there were sixteen of us that shared the meal. Right after the meal, mom got sick to her stomach and nearly fainted. We all got scared that it was food poisoning and within a few hours we would all fall victim to it. It was a strange ending to the event as we all scurried around to sanitize the house and refrigerate the food. As it turned out she thinks it was something she ate at home before they came over.

Food we contributed: Parker House rolls, Frog Eye Salad, Cranberry Wine.

The Civil War football game, UO v OSU. The next day a group of us (ten in all) tromped over to watch the big rivalry football game. My brother and his wife are Beavers, the rest of us are Ducks. The game was really close and only decided in the last few seconds, Ducks won by one point!

Today is the first day of advent. One of my favorite times on the church calendar is the four weeks of advent before Christmas. It is a time of preparation and anticipation. We haven't decorated out home yet but the church was all decked out in its finery for this time of year with the pulpit covered by poinsettias. Lovely.

Today's scripture lesson: Isaiah 7:14 "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

News from the library: as I reported last week, we heard the previous Friday that the library system was going to be brought back online on Monday and we were to wait until the trained person came to show us how to upload our remote files and to check for errors. No one came to help me until the very end of the day so I didn't have much chance to do more than to look at one day's data. My first day of data had 420 transactions with 155 errors. I knew things weren't good. Something was clearly wrong. The next day we figured it out. The data was recovered to a point in April, last school year. Almost every student has at least one error on their account. Some have fines back on their accounts that they paid last year, others have books on their account that they checked out and returned last school year, others have no textbooks at all checked out to them on their accounts even though they should have five or seven. It is a huge mess. The district has assured us that they are "looking in to it". We'll see if there is some solution other that going into every student account one by one and cleaning things up by hand. Sigh. Thankfully my daughter was subbing for my clerk who is still out sick so I had someone to help me.

Books read this week:

• And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini...this is a RHS book club selection and I really liked it. In a lot of ways it is more complex than his other books.
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender...another SOTH book club selection. This might be the most boring audiobook I've ever listened to, clearly the most boring this year. Ugh. My husband and daughter were champions listening with me as we drove to Oregon.

Currently reading:

• Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell...I am reading AND listening to this book. I am a fangirl of Rainbow Rowell's works.