One Visitor This Week

 It was a normal go to work/go home kind of week. But I did have one visitor from the past! Our once upon a time student Alice came to visit at work! She was a bit blown away by how different the library looks now, post renovation, compared to when she worked there!

She is now a librarian at the public library in Buena Vista, Virginia. And I just learned from Alice and her sister, who was with her, that Buena Vista is not pronounced the way you expect it to be, based on the spelling and, you know, the way most people (from anywhere else) would say those words. 

I was all "I can't remember the name of your town..." and they said it, and I was like, "What? That doesn't seem right..." all confused. BUT Locals in Buena Vista, Virginia, pronounce the town's name as "BYOO-nuh VISS-tuh" (rhyming loosely with Beulah), rather than the Spanish “BWAY-nah VEE-stah”. Evidence to support the claim can be found in this news story. 

We grabbed Kellie to be in a photo with us because she and Alice worked together as students. Now Kellie is a staff member at our library, while Alice is at the Byoonuh Visstuh Public Library. Where they have, apparently, a divided library! Running out of space, they have located their chldren's section in a different building a few blocks away from the adult section. Their website attests to the truth of this odd fact. Here we are: me, Alice, Kellie.

Josie and I went to Microburst Theatre on Saturday. I thought it might be fun. It was not fun. All the plays were so dark, but fortunately they were only about 10-15 minutes long each. We left at the intermission--there was going to be a longer play for the second half, and it was going to be about robots and androids in a bleak future. I was in need of a laugh, not more existential angst. So that was a disappointment. 

October Books

 Before I dive into the books. let it be known that we had a record number of Trick or Treaters (I grew up calling them Halloweeners) come to our house. Josie had admonished me to do some decorating so our house looked more Halloween-inviting (I am the opposite of my sister Arlene in Halloween decorating!) and so I strung up some orange lights in the window.

I told each child they could take five things from our bowl. And between the fifteen children we had come, they took about 25 items. Yes!! Less Fewer leftovers!! Some of the children were babies and their parents did not take 5 things for them, and some of them were too little to count, so they just took what they could grab, hence we did not get rid of 65 items. But we had enough that we COULD have given out 65 items. 

First year ever (since we lived in North Orem) to give out 25 items!! Score!!

I finished a book last night after the Halloweeners were finished Halloweening, bringing my October total to seven books.

1. How to listen by Plutarch translated by Beneker (2026)--I was actually pretty amazed both by how much I liked this little book, and by how relevant to our times it was, given that "Plutarch wrote How to Listen (Greek: Peri tou akouein or De recta ratione audiendi, traditionally known as On Listening to the Lectures of Philosophers) between roughly 80 and 100 CE." (According to Google's AI, based on a University of Chicago site that I clicked on, but the "site could not be reached.") I read this book because it was on a display shelf on level five when I was watching the desk there. I really liked how he put some responsibility on the listener to find reasons to appreciate what a speaker is saying, rather than dwelling on the speaker's faults or our own boredom. It is a lovely little essay, in this case turned into a lovely little book.

2. Ferris by Kate DiCamillo (2024) is about a young girl who is nicknamed Ferris for the location of her birth--the ferris wheel!! Surprise for her mom to do labor and delivery there! The theme of this book is "every story is a love story" and that is what this book is all about. All kinds of love, all kinds of people to love. Some trouble, a death, a birth--all kinds of situations in this book.

3. Dear Elijah by Miriam Bat-Ami (1995). The author was a university professor of children's literature, and I thought Nancy might be interested in this book because of the religious element. Susannah's father is in the hospital for passover, and it is uncertain whether he will recover from significant heart issues, and so she begins to write letters to the prophet Elijah, for whom she has often had to open the door for when they have their passover seder. She shares her thoughts and concerns, her doubt and her burgeoning faith with him.

4. Greenteeth by Molly O'Neill (2025) is a book that Josie had been listening to on Audible that she recommended, so I ILL'd it. It was very good, if a bit intense for me. I had to read it slowly over time, interspersed with other books. Jenny is a Greenteeth lake monster, Temperance is a witch, and Brackus is a traveling merchant who is also a goblin. Jenny, Temperance, and Brackus go on a series of quests to rid England of the Erl King. Jenny meets Temperance because Temperance is thrown into the lake to drown because she is a witch, and Jenny surprises herself by rescuing her, instead of eating her. 

5. Great writers & the cats who owned them by Susannah Fuller (2025). 17 cats, their writers, and at the end of each chapter "paws for thought" and instead of an epilogue, "Tailpiece." The book begins with the cat of Petrarch, who died in 1374 (Petrarch, not the cat), and moves forward to Dame Lynley Dodd, (born in 1941), an author of children's books from New Zealand. I met a lot of fine cats, and actually more than 17--those were just the featured cats, because some authors, like for example Ernest Hemingway, had many, many cats. Too many cats. (I sometimes feel like three cats is too many, but Hemingway owned 57 cats at the time of his death, and of course, during their feline lifetimes, others of their cat friends had died, so who knows the total? He named them all, too.)

6. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (2013) was an utterly delightful read! Our library has the second and third "project" books by Simsion, but I wanted to start at the beginning, so had to ILL this book. Don is a geneticist who is clearly on the autism spectrum somewhere, and he decides he wants to get married, so he starts a project to move him toward that goal. His best friend Gene (also a geneticist, but with a psychology bent) throws a spanner into the works by setting him up with Rosie, who does not meet any of the standards the marriage project identified. Together they start another project tied to DNA and quite accidentally fall in love. Fun read.

7. Somewhere out there: my animated life by Don Bluth (2022). Another fun read! Don Bluth, the man behind The Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go To Heaven, etc., tells his life story from his birth in Texas (his mother was a Pratt like Janice's mom--they are some kind of cousins, I am sure; and Samuel Pratt the one time Harp Professor at BYU was his uncle) to the farm in Spanish Fork, to the Disney Studio, to a mission in Argentina, back to BYU for a degree, back to California and Disney, starting his own animation studio, the move to Dublin, then Phoenix, animating all the way! 

(As an aside: Rachel, in her latest email, wondered what president of the US could write in two different languages at the same time, using both hands, and the answer was none, because it is unsubstantiated that James Garfield could do that. BUT Don Bluth tells of an animator from the Philippines he hired who could draw with both hands at the same time!! Using both hands, he could finish drawing a character pretty fast!)

What kind of information professional are you?

 So awhile ago, I got an automated request for purchase from a student who was asking for the video The Holdovers. I did look it up, and it looked pretty interesting--a group of students at a New England boarding school have to stay on campus during the Christmas break in 1970. I approved the purchase, but when it came in, Angie in ACQ let me know that it is R-rated (which I should have checked!!) so had to go in our Faculty Use Only collection (that is the rule here--I think it is silly, but who am I?) and the requester had been a student. So I had to write to her and tell her that she could not check it out, and explain why diplomatically. 

Except that I didn't know that she was an ESL student (from Italy, I think) so she did not really understand my explanation, but appealed to Adam, who did a library instruction session with a class she was in. Adam found a place where she could access it online on the regular internet, so that worked out. But I felt silly. I should have been a more careful information professional, and declined making the purchase, because I know the R rule. I just--didn't even think this movie would be rated R!! So I didn't check. And it is rated R for mostly the F word, which is annoying because all countries do not care so much about the F word. 

Then yesterday, I made the motherlode of information professional mistakes!! I read a post on Facebook on my cousin Ron's wife Deanne's page about "Mom has died" and it sounded to me like it was one of her children posting on her page that she had died. I have seen children do this before on several occasions, so it seemed like that was what happened. And Deanne is in her eighties, so if she suddenly died--that is not a far reach. Like, that happened to Heather Navratil, and she was only in her sixties. And her son did post on her page, so...

I was all like "Did Deanne die?!!" And so I looked at who had commented, and her niece (in-law) Vikki had commented and it was like she had arrived at the same conclusion I had. Also Lavon had commented...and so I just jumped straight to the conclusion that Deanne had died. I SHOULD KNOW BETTER!! Do lateral searching!! DUH!!!

But no. I was quietly crying, because I really love Deanne; she is so kind and warm and wonderful. She was a good friend to my mom, and THEN she married my mom's nephew, Ron, and came into our family. 

So, I thought I had better let people know. So I emailed my brother and sisters. I told my kids on the family chat. Then I thought I had better let Mary and Pat know!! Look at me--bearing false witness all over the place!!

Thank goodness for Mary, who called Louise. Actually, a great-niece of Deanne's on the other side of the family had posted that her mother had died, and Deanne had shared that post without saying who the post originated from. So it was not Deanne who died!! I could dry my tears, and then start cleaning up after myself, apologizing to Pat and Mary. Sending a corrective email to my siblings. Letting my children know that I was guilty of bearing false witness. Ugh.

Today, my cousin Ron posted on Facebook: "There be has been some confusion from a Facebook post mom made and I am getting messages of condolence from as far away as Sweden. All thanks to Auto Correct. Let it be known that Deanne is alive and well and her mother died at least 30 years ago. The post was for her niece Doreen Kabatoff who died this past week." (At least I was not the only person suckered in! Vikki and I communicated via messenger, and she had read the post exactly as I had and also jumped to the wrong conclusion!)

I just looked in my posts on this blog, and I guess I did not ever post about the microsoft bear and my embarrassment over that back in the late 1990s. Probably 1998 or 1999.

So what happened then was that I got a forward (back in the day when email forwards functioned much like memes do today) from someone that I trusted, that told me to look in my computer's DOS and see if there was a little bear icon, and if there was, I had a virus in my code, and I should delete it.

I thought, "This is so stupid!! A bear in my code. How silly is that." But when I looked where I was told to look, there WAS a bear, so I deleted it AND forwarded the email forward I had received on to others! 

Well, that little bear was the microsoft bear and it was a part of the code that ran Java Script. I got an email back from my friend Craig Snow chastising me. "Don't the scriptures say not to bear false witness?" he asked me. Now Craig is Jewish, and I am LDS, and I fancied myself to be setting a good example for him--but instead, here he was, setting a good example for me, calling me out for not keeping one of the ten commandments. A calling out that I fully deserved!! It was stupid!! I mean, I could have just called my brother and asked him, right? But no, I just jumped right on spreading the lie.

Craig explained to me about the bear, and how my sharing this may have caused others to mess up their code, so I needed to contact everyone I had forwarded to stop them from deleting the bear, or to make sure they knew to put it back. (And I also had to restore my code to how it was before.)

Now, I use this example in my library instruction every semester as what not to do, and I blush with embarrassment each time. Here is the slide I have been using this year.

The Albert Einstein meme is there because he never said or wrote that quote ever, anywhere. Nobody knows who thought of that statement--it can't be traced to a source, but it wasn't Einstein, whose writings are plenty. I tell the students that people will say it doesn't matter because it is a good thought, and I say that it does matter because truth matters. There is a similar quote on a meme that was said to be by Gordon B. Hinckley, but it was really by Jenkin Lloyd Jones. While President Hinckley had quoted that quote in general conference one year, he correctly attributed it. But people doing memes did not, and they would say "It doesn't matter. It is a good quote." Yes, but let's give proper credit to the person who really wrote it!!

And so here I am, all these years later, doing the same stupid thing!! VERIFY before you SHARE. Now I have another bad example of embarrassment to share with students.

In other news: they finally got the prox lock installed on the harp practice room door!! We have been waiting about a year and a half for that!! Without the lock, we could not use the room, because harps are too valuable. A large harp costs about what an expensive pick-up truck costs. So hurray for them finally installing the lock!!!

And we made the harp room look lovely.

In Halloween news, the library invites the children of the employees to Trick or Treat, but usually only on Monday-Friday, because our desks are open late those days. This year, Halloween is on Saturday, so there would only be one desk open at night, so the children would not be able to traipse all over the library visiting many desks to get treats. So, our day for this was on Friday October 30 this year. 

Here are our desk students with our Halloween readiness. 

Grace made this little game for the children to knock over these cup-monsters:

And Anna and Grace were handing out the treats, while Alena had to hold down the other side of the desk, answering actual patron questions.

Anna also managed the coloring pages that children could do. We have fun and creative students, and they had a good time entertaining the children!

On this day 14 years ago...

Facebook wanted me to look back at the past today, and landed on this entry I wrote on October 27, 2012:

In 2003, Patrick wrote the most awesome story for a school assignment...it was a children's book called "Who stole the remote?" He asked his sister Nancy to do the illustrations, and it was completely an awesome book. Well worth the 105/100 points his teacher awarded him. And then...just like the TV remote in his story, the story itself went missing. Just like in his story, various members of the family looked and looked and looked for the story book, but it was nowhere to be found. Just like in the story, when the main character Zack starts to think the remote has magically disappeared, so too with the book. Until today!!! Today, David was doing some major house-cleaning for me like he sometimes does (and which is much appreciated) and HE FOUND THE BOOK!!! It was so fun to read it again--it is still excellent! And David had missed out on the whole story and the drama of the missing book because he was living in Brazil at the time Patrick wrote the story, so it was his first time seeing the book! He was kind of amused that Nancy used a little cartoon dog that David used to draw as her model for Taz, the villain dog of the story. So...nine years later, the lost is found! So happy about that...Patrick and Nancy, you should look for a publisher. Great book!

I ended up posting the story on my blog, with permission from Patrick and Nancy, but I did not share this lost and found story that I had written on Facebook; I just posted the story. So, wanting to retain the story of the finding of the missing book, which one commenter noted was a pretty good story in its own right, I am posting this here today! And a link to the original post of the story. Which is still an awesome story, I think.

Nancy's permission: Sure thing! And I think the dog I drew was inspired in part by David and in part by Mark Kistler (shade, shade, shade! we love to shade!) 

Patrick's permission: works for me

Posting Something

 Well, here I am again posting something. What happened this week? Well, Josie and her friend Meg went to California for a Chappell Roan concert, which meant I was cat-sitting. Like the Eurovision concert the kids went to in Vienna, you had to first enter a lottery to win a chance to maybe be able to buy tickets. It is a weird ticket world for buying concert tickets, me thinks. Anyway! She won the chance to buy! And then she was able to get tickets. So away she went, and the poor kitties had to make do with me. I honestly hardly saw them. I am not their favorite, so when I go downstairs, they do not make an effort to come out of hiding.

So Josie stayed at my sister Arlene's home in the San Diego area. As they were almost arriving on Wednesday, I realized that we were not that many days away from Halloween, so Arlene might have all her Halloween stuff out. I have posted about her Halloween enthusiasm before...in 2014. And actually, in 2014 we were there at the beginning of October, and Josie helped Arlene put some of the things out! So, third week of October? Of course she had her Halloween stuff out! No brainer!

As soon as they started driving up Arlene's long driveway, they knew they were entering Halloween land! (I will maybe post a video of the drive up the driveway. Or maybe not.)

I can! Nancy made the video sharing possible! (That is, sharing the video that Josie took on her phone.) Here is arriving in Arlene's driveway at night. Nancy titled it "Auntie Arlene's Haunted Drive":

Here are a couple of pictures of some of the things at Arlene's house. If you compare this first picture to one in 2014, there are now TWO skeletons playing a piano duet, where there was only one soloist 12 years ago.

The fireplace is now a crematorium--well, it was a crematorium in 2014, too. But it has more skulls and adornments around it in 2026!

Here are Arlene and Josie in front of the fireplace. I hope they don't get sucked inside! (They didn't.)

One thing I did not see (in the group of pictures Josie sent via text) was the petrified cat, which you can see at this post from 2014. (A day earlier than the 2014 post I linked earlier, so not the same.) So I asked about it, and Arlene does still have the petrified cat! Here it is in 2026, I wonder if she put it out somewhere...It looks more weathered than it did 12 years ago.

On Thursday morning, Josie and her friend spent the morning at the beach, where it was sunny and the water was warm. (Josie was a little bit concerned about how warm the water was at the end of October, honestly.)

Gorgeous!! Love that sky! That water! That sand! Speaking of sand, Josie's friend Meg had never been buried in the sand, so she asked Josie to bury her so she could have the experience. (I, too, have never been buried in the sand more than just maybe a foot or something, but I do not actually want to have that experience.) Also, Meg had never been boogie boarding, so they bought some cheap foam boards and shared that experience, too. (Josie forgot to ask to borrow some from Auntie Arlene, which she probably could have done.)

Meanwhile, I had a visitor at work! Ikaika is now the collection developer for Music for the Hawaii State Library. He was in Utah for a sad reason, his uncle's funeral. But it was a happy reason for me, because I got to see him!

That selfie looks pretty good, because Ikaika took it! He asked about both Patrick and Josie, because they are friends, and was quite jealous that Josie was going to a Chappell Roan concert, and wished he had gone with her. However, he lives in Hawaii, and who knew that his uncle would die and he would come to Utah the same week that Josie went to one of her concerts?

Here is the proof (and thank you, Josie, for letting me live vicariously through you!):

When Josie got home at 10:30 last night (this was a super quick trip!! But they did a lot for how little time they had!!) all the cats started to meow, meow, meow, calling to her!! They missed her!

All about Patrick

 So--in my last post I talked about my email woes, and how I lost an entire year of correspondence which OIT got back but then I didn't know how to deal with it. My library IT guy suggested that I just import all the lost email, including the junk, and so I did that. 

The email program imported everything into my deleted items folder, so I spent 14 hours last weekend sorting through them--most of them came through as "unread" so I would read them and decide to keep them, what folder to put them in, or to delete them again. 

At 1:20 on Sunday afternoon, I stopped sorting to go visit a friend. When I resumed a half hour later, I went to move an email that had to do with Patrick into my folder called "Patrick." It was the first one under the "inbox"-- I have done some editing and proofreading for him during his PhD program, so those things were in that folder. Also, when I shared his Iceland video with people at work, some of them sent back comments or compliments for him and I had that stuff in the folder, too. 

Well, I clicked on the email to move it...and there was no Patrick folder. It was disparu! So my first thought is "user error"-- I must have accidentally dragged and dropped it somewhere, right? Only--it was nowhere. Not in any of my folders, not in junk, deleted items, or recover items. It was just gone.

I wasn't too upset because Patrick was going to defend his dissertation on Friday (today!) so really, all the emails didn't matter anymore, and any way, he had the other side of the conversation, right? But still--it isn't okay for an entire file to disappear, is it?

So on Monday, I did a Help Desk ticket. Ernie came to help--he couldn't find the file anywhere, but he sent Matthew, the IT guy who helped me before. Matthew got me onto the web version instead of the desktop version, and there were all the Patrick things in the deleted items folder on the web version. Still not on the desktop version. 

But I am okay with that. Now I know to go to the web version to look for missing things, although I really prefer using the desktop version. If I want to find those old Patrick emails, at least they do exist somewhere.

Matt the IT guy said that our email program, which I won't name, has sync issues all the time, so a missing folder did not even surprise him. Nothing of all the weirdness that I have had with my email over the past few weeks surprised him! Email is just weird.

There is another IT guy who seems to always get my printer problems, and he feels exactly that way about printers. "You would think they would be better by now," he says, "but they're not. They are terrible technology."

If they can be cynical about technology, I guess I can, too. 

However! The good news about Patrick, even better than finding the missing "Patrick" folder contents, is that Patrick successfully defended his PhD and got a "1" grade. According to Wikipedia, "1 in Austrian universities is the highest possible grade, meaning "Sehr gut" (Very good / Excellent)."  

I keep telling Patrick he did "very well." I guess that I am understating it? After he finished presenting his defense, I messaged his girlfriend Hadis and said, "I think he did well!" And she responded, "He did amazing!" You see? Understating it.

Bruce and I were up at 5 AM to participate on the Zoom. Nancy and Zoë are there visiting and were at the defense in person along with Hadis, and Nancy told me there were about 24 people there, and I think there were around 13 on the Zoom call, including also Kelli, our oldest daughter. That is a lot of people! And the askers asked hard questions. (Mind you, I do not understand a lot of what Patrick does. That is why he is the expert!)

So here are some pictures they sent me, to document the day!

1. Sent by Nancy at about 4:58 AM. Is he singing "The hills are alive with the sound of music?" Seems like Maria would spread her arms like that running through the hills of Austria!

2. Sent by Hadis at 5:01 AM. Patrick is waiting, but ready to go, looking all Austrian, I think. Definitely Austrian clothing! (One of the askers did not like the word "contactless" in the title because someone has to pick up the book at some point, right? I forget what word Patrick himself preferred, but he had to change it because of one of the peer reviewers, who preferred "contactless." I think maybe "noninvasive.")

3. Sent by Nancy just after 6:00 AM, when the committee had given their verdict: Patrick passed with a "1." Hadis had made and decorated the lab coat and hat for him. (He is doing "the hills are alive" again!)

4. Hadis sent this to me at 7:40 AM. The back view!

Look mom, no--well, PhD achieved, and Publications achieved; but only a half-time job (which is wonderful! Hallelujah! He is teaching at a university to cover for a maternity leave, which is good experience, and pays more than not working does!) and no money (to spare!--he is earning enough to get by. Once again, Hallelujah!)

Well, I was hoping Nancy would blog because she is really there, and I am not, but Patrick said she has to do homework. And then, at the same time as each other, he posted a laughing/crying emoji and I posted "And yours in DONE." That's okay--Nancy will be next.

Kelli noted that we have four doctors in our family: me, Andrew, Austin, and now Patrick. Nancy next!

September 2026 Books Read (plus more)

 September felt like a very busy month, and still I managed to read seven books.

1. Girl with brush and canvas: Georgia O'Keeffe, American artist (2019) by Carolyn Meyer. I grabbed this from the America 250 display in the library because I needed a book. I think it was a day that Josie had an appointment. I really liked this work of historical fiction, but it was very well researched and felt biographic. I guess it is actually a biographical novel, because it is told in first person, but obviously the story was not told by Georgia herself, but by Carolyn Meyer. Still, well done. A good read.  

2. Restart (2017) by Gordon Korman was recommended by Diana G. Chase Ambrose has amnesia after a fall, a chance to change his life for the better. Because he was...not a very nice guy. But he didn't remember that. Thougth provoking and also funny in places, because that is the way Gordon Korman rolls. I am very proud of Gordon Korman, who has been a published author for most of his life, who is Canadian, and who is only six years younger than me. I was a university student when he published his first book. You can read about him here. (My favorite book of his is still McDonald Hall Goes Hollywood. Laugh out loud funny, imo.)

3. Short Stories in French (2018) by Olly Richards--I mentioned this book before, as I was slowly reading its eight short stories over the course of several months. The book has comprehension questions and vocabulary lists, and the stories were of interesting variety. I have started the second book with more intermediate vocabulary--I will probably take months to read it, too. It was delightful to read and understand.

4. Portuguese Irregular Verbs (2003) by Alexander McCall Smith was on the display shelves when I was working at the fifth floor help desk, and it is thin, and I like the author (No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series) so I started it when the desk was quiet, and finished it because I liked it, even though the protagonist of the book is quite insufferable. Poor Professor Dr. von Igelfeld never quite gets the girl, the job, the prize...easy for the reader to understand, bewildering to him.

5. When rain clouds gather (1968) by Bessie Head takes place in Botswana. A friend on Facebook, Ruth, has a friend named Charis (who is a music person and friends with many of my friends, though I do not personally know her) and they recommend books to each other. They are reading their way through 150 place books, set in different countries, and this was the one for Botswana, and it was good. Blurb on back of book: The poverty-stricken village of Golema Mmidi offers a haven to the exiles gathered there. Makhaya, a political refugee from South Africa, Gilbert, an English agriculture expert, Paulina from the north work together to revolutionize subsitence farming. The pressures of tradition, the opposition of the local chief, the harsh climate--threaten to bring tragedy, but hope remains for the future.

6. Heartburn (1983) by Nora Ephron is also a biographical novel. It is about her own breakup with her second husband, Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein Watergate fame) and it was thinly disguised to the point that Bernstein wanted to sue her, but I don't think he did in the end. Nora Ephron is best known for her screenplays, like Sleepless in Seattle, for example. 

7. The correspondent (2025) by Virginia Evans. Oh my. Very touching. I loved this book. I read it in a day. I had placed a hold on it months ago because it is our Book Club book for October, but it came too soon, so I returned it so the next person could have it, and then by the end of September, I was the third hold and worried that I wouldn't read it in time, but then suddenly my hold came on Friday, and by Saturday, I was finished. So beautifully told! Life is hard, and this had been true for Sybil, who is a letter writer, and an e-mailer, and a note-writer, but not much of a talker. She has a very painful relationship with her daughter, and this sentence just resonated with me: "You think of me as your mother, but inside I am just a girl." Yes! Me, too. This book is Beautiful.

Plus more: Monday was a terrible no good very bad day. I was upset with myself over many small things, but they added up to feel heavy. Just silly things like I left work too late to stop and get gas, I didn't remember to get the envelopes to mail things to Nancy, things like that. Although, I also needed to deposit a check that came for Andrew, and when I really looked at the check, it said, "Void if not cashed by October 26," and I was freaking out because it was the 28th!! But then Rachel said, "It is only September still; you have lots of time."

Then, we decided that Josie would go to her PT appointment, and then take Rachel's car over to Linda's house, where it is going to live for awhile, since her PT is in Springville, halfway to Linda's house. But holy traffic jam!!! Josie had to call and reset her appointment because it was clear that we weren't going to get there in time or maybe at all. So since we were in two different cars, she called me to say to just drive straight to Linda's. It took one hour and fifteen minutes to get there!!! It is like a 15-20 minute drive. Maybe a half hour if driving slow. Crazy!

I took a picture of Rachel with Trevor and Linda:

It has been 13 years since Trevor's bike accident. That is a long time. The car will be happy at their house. They have more driveway space than we have here.

Monday or Tuesday, I should mention, Microsoft did this new thing to Outlook, and we now have to sign in with Duo, or two factor authentication. This messed up my LibCal Calendar, so that happened, but I didn't have time to deal with it that day. 

Tuesday, I took a picture of our one tomato plant. Because it is ginourmous and taking over the yard!

I was watering it so carefully while it was always 100 degrees, and then I stopped and have not watered it specifically at all--it just gets what the lawn sprinklers give, and what the rain gives upon occasion, and apparently that is what helps it to thrive.

We had Panda Express with orange chicken for Rachel on Tuesday for her "last" meal. For her birthday, I got Panda Express and didn't get enough food. This time I got LOTS of food...and then Rachel was leaving and didn't even get to eat lots and lots of orange chicken.

Wednesday was MTC drop-off day, which Nancy wrote about. I was also feeling a bit "off"--probably because I have become used to having Rachel around, and she just walked right off to the MTC all ready to go, and maybe I wasn't feeling really ready. I am a sentimental old lady. 

Also on Wednesday Nancy's blog roll finally updated! I guess it was getting into the spirit of moving day, since Nancy and family moved and Rachel moved. It mght as well move, too!

And then, at work, I did put in a help desk about my Outlook/Calendar problem, but told them I didn't have any free time on Wednesday afternoon because I didn't. And then, Adam brought me this folder of Lena Stein-Schneider music which had gone to Ellen for scanning for ScholarsArchive, and said it was all finished, and that reminded me that last week when I was spending quite a bit of time at home with Rachel so she had a person to walk with and talk with, that my opera singer friend in Germany had sent me an email asking about some Lena Stein-Schneider pieces, only I couldn't remember which ones because the titles are all in German. So I looked up her name which is quite unique, and my email didn't find it. Well, my email is bad at finding things, so I used the built-in copilot option to look for it, and it told me that I had NO emails from her. It found her name, but only in emails from me to her. So weird--I knew that she had emailed me often in the past year, which is only as long as I have known her, since some time in 2025. 

So then I scrolled down in my email to try to get to a few weeks ago...and my email ended on Monday at 12:47 (that was September 28) and if I clicked on "find more on Microsoft Exchange" the more started on September 29...2025. Literally one whole YEAR of emails to me were gone.

So I put in another help desk. But...no time for it on Wednesday, because I had to take Josie to the PT appointment she missed on Monday due to the traffic jam. (We made it on time going via the Freeway--but only because her appointment started 15 minutes later than we thought, so we ended up being about ten minutes early.)

So this morning, the IT guy came. He fixed my Microsoft/Calendar problem, although the calendar glitch HAD double-booked me, and I didn't notice, so a poor student got stood up by me because I had to be at the 5th floor help desk for the same hour his appointment was, and the next appointment, too, only Tim took that one, and it was a football player, and they had a good time. Probably better Tim than me. 

But the IT guy could not find any reason for a year of emails to disappear. Like, my SENT folder is fine, just my RECEIVED folder is not fine. There was nothing in my "Deleted Items" folder, and nothing in the "recover" folder. So he told me he would scale it up to OIT.

And he did, and a few hours later, they found my email, and by the end of the day they told me it was all in my "recover" folder...and that thing is a beast. Over 9000 items, and the display is not super user friendly, and everything that looks like what I am looking for turns out to be SENT from me, and is already in my sent folder, so then I have two of them?

I think I will just send an email to the library telling what happened, and saying, if you sent me something important and I didn't do it, because I have been away a lot the past two weeks, please send again, because I do not have it.

AARGH. So frustrating. I did email my friend in Germany and ask her to resend her email, which she did. So I have that. (Now I just have to find the music and THAT is also frustrating me extremely.) 

Totally feeling frustrated over here!! And I still forgot about the envelopes!!! (I did get gas on Wednesday, so at least I succeeded at one thing. No, two things. I did deposit Andrew's check, too.)

But tonight I went to a lovely dance recital at the MOA. This was the follow-up to the Mimi Chen Ting exhibit I wrote about in April. Dances inspired by her art. It was lovely--good music, lovely dancing. 

It happened that a girl asked me if she could sit by me, and then her friend came and sat by her, and we had a lovely chat. Her name was Zuzu, named after the character in "It's a wonderful life." And she said her aunt worked in the library and I said who is your aunt, and she said Lili Sharp, and I said, how is she your aunt, and she said she and my mother are sisters. And I said, so Betsy is your grandmother? And she said yes, how do you know Betsy? and I said I worked with her at Orem Public Library, and she said, oh my other grandmother worked there too, Kathy Homer, and I said yes, I knew her too. So small world. And I told her that also my son David is friends with Tracy, who is her uncle. I don't remember how David knows Tracy. Maybe they were in a musical together? 

Anyways--we had a nice visit! And I am feeling slightly less frazzled. I will try to get ahold of myself--maybe I need some stimming, which I had never heard of before, but Nancy talked about here. Maybe I need a baby to hold and rock! I will try to dream of one tonight.