Graduation

We made it fellow PLMIer's. I don't remember the assignment for this blog, so I will have to write about it later.  I've started writing this 4 times, but I keep going off on tangents trying to make the points I want to make with this blog. So I'm going to try again and just start off with my points. Point #1:  My dad said he was proud of me.  I can count on one hand the number of times I remember him saying that. a. When I won 2nd place in the spelling bee in the 7th grade.  b.  When I graduated from college in 1992.  c. Graduating from this class. /He might have said it to me when I graduated 8th and when I graduated high school in 1980, but I don't remember it.  Even if he did those 2 times that is still on one hand. Point #2: All of a sudden I feel there is a new respect for me. Why? a. When we were going outside to take our picture, Tre Hargett actually stopped by my table and spoke to my child first, then shook hands with my husband and spoke to and shook hands with my father.  Now I know that was probably because we were sitting near the door we were going out of and not intentional, but I'm taking that as a good sign. b. I actually spoke to several of my class mates where we were complementing each other and hugging. c. I also spoke to Chuck Sherrill and to Janice Perry, our regional assistant director and feel I did good by them. d.  I had changed my clothes when I got back to my dad's and put on my black jeans with the bleach spot on them and a green t-shirt that I had ironed the PLMI logo on, but I also put my pin on. Now Timmy, Kandy, and I had to go all the way back to Dickson and get a hotel room with a pool, so he could go to Fairview and work on his big truck that had broken down on Tuesday. So on the way: 1. We stopped at a rest area to use the bathroom and this short man that was the janitor or care taker of the place looked at me and out of the blue said so I think the bug trap is working good.  My agenda at the moment was to go to the bathroom, not to have a conversation with someone, but I stopped anyway and looked at the trap and said what kind of bug does it catch and he told me the Japanese beetle. I told him that was interesting because I had had the Agricultural Extension Office come to the library this summer and he brought some with him to show to the kids.  He proceeded to tell me how the trap worked and how he had figured out the best way to catch them, etc. I told him that it was similar to the boll weevil trap, that I used to have a job setting out traps to catch them and he asked me some questions about that. In the mean time, my daughter had come back out to check on me, so I finally told him I had to go to the bathroom.  When I got back out of the bathroom, he just started talking to me again saying he had figured out how to fix the boll weevil problem with genetics like they were doing with the mosquito, so I told him about getting a batch of eggs out of the lagoon when I was in elementary school thinking they were frog eggs. That the class was going to watch them change into frogs and that when they hatched they turned out to be mosquito's, so we had to put oil in the water to kill them.  So my take on this man is that he was a very intelligent man Science wise, but there was something not quite right about him.  2.  Then we went to Wendy's at a truck stop and this man asked was I in-line. I said yes, but I thought he was there first.  He said for me to go ahead.  All of a sudden there was an announcement over the intercom about showers and I didn't quite understand what was said about the showers, so I asked the man that let me go first and all of a sudden other people in the start striking up conversations with me. / Now my point about this point is that people don't normally just start talking to me like that.  I usually do that to them and these 2 times I didn't intend on doing that.  Point #3.  People don't realize what we librarians do.  When we were checking in at the hotel, my husband was telling the clerk about his truck being broke down since Tuesday and I told her that I had been away at Paris Landing taking a week long class that I had been going to one full week in the year for 3 years now, then I told her that I had been in Dickson in February when I was going to the Summer Reading Training, that I had had a presentation there.  This woman's reaction was, " Good grief, all that for the library." I was like , "yes mam."