I'm a winner ....

I'm a winner in the "foundlove" contest!!

http://library.sdsu.edu/foundlove

Did you find love in Love Library? | Library & information Access | San Diego State University

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Name: Melanie (nee May )Thompson

Story: I fell in love in the Love Library during my undergrad years. I fell in love with words. I worked at the Love Library from 1975-1978, my sophomore through senior year. My job was typing headings on and filing the 3 x 5 cards for the card catalog.  You newest grads won't know what that means. We didn't have computers-for-all then. We had drawers and drawers and drawers-- long, heavy drawers filled with 3 x 5 inch file cards so people could look up books by author, title or subject. Under the tutelage of Librarian Bill Pease and my mentor Amy Tsuji, I would type the SUBJECT or AUTHOR or TITLE at the top of a set of catalog cards. The lowest floor of the library had a book repair area, receiving area , cataloging area,  a complex, organized method of coping the cards, sorting, correcting, proofreading the cards. And then, SHOW TIME: the cards had to go upstairs on display for the public.  I became so proficient (this is MY memory) at learning articles (A, an, the, Der, Die and Das, El, La, etc.) in SO MANY languages, that I was the "chosen one" to file catalog cards upstairs in the drawers for the public.  (You ignore articles when you're filing a title--it's complicated.)  I would look up words unbeknowst to me in the OED.. (Oxford English Dictionary)-- the behemoth volumes of dictionary that took many square feet of "Reference Area" just to house the great tomes on multiple pedestal wooden stands. I LOVED not making popcorn at the local theater anymore. I LOVED the people I worked with. I LOVED learning about learning and access to the floors and floors of book, the endless periodicals..... it was a nerd's paradise.... and I was a nerd and I learned life-skills that have helped me in crossword puzzles, in Peace Corps, in medical school, in motherhood, in book club.....And right this very minute, I can play Scrabble  on line with my kids and I'm kicking my friend's LEXULOUS bottom, I look up every word I don't know in my books and magazines and I keep my important things to do on nostalgic 3 x 5 inch cards.... My children will quote me as saying, "Books are our friends." Thanks SDSU. Thanks Love Library.

THOMPSONS IN THE ROCKIES

 The Monument, Grand Junction, CO

San Juan range of Rockies on the way to Telluride

The long awaited family visit: Malindi and Ryley fly into Grand Junction Wednesday evening and check out where I've come to live at the Residence Inn. Wednesdays are burger night down in the lobby and Tony, the friendliest employee at the Inn,  let me stow away 2 extra burgers for my kids' midnight snack. It came in handy. Thursday morning we hiked a little in The Monument National Park and drove the rim road, oooing and aahing all the way at the rock formations.


Then we were off to Ouray, a mining town tucked in between tall pointy mountains. We were happy to arrive after the 8 inch snow storm that morning or we would have been required to have chains for the car. We had pre-rented skis in town so Friday we traveled to Telluride for a very not-crowded ski day. 

Little Balls

Read my story about little balls-- a comment on The Appreciation Journal:

http://malindipineapple.blogspot.com/2012/02/candlepin-bowling.html

Blast from the Past!

Out of the blue today, I received a package from my high school San Diego friend Linda Smyth. She was going through old things and said she found a box marked 'important stuff.' It included every card and aerogram I sent her from Peace Corps Kenya. Some of them also had photos included. I read through many of them and in some I sounded so homesick and sad. (Sort of hard for me to read today when I'm so homesick and sad.) In some I was clearly in culture shock and pretty frustrated.  In some letters, I was in love, and Judd will tell you it wasn't always with him but I'll deny it. 


I'm happy to report, I'm much kinder and more polite when visiting new lands and people or tasting new foods and cultures.

Richard Greene, me, Judd, Tom Millsop in Jacaranda Park, Nairobi

"Congratulation on finishing Exams" card

Who blogs during the SuperBowl? I do !!

Flurries this week:  24 inches of snow in Denver and 1.9 inches of post cards at the Grand Junction Residence Inn.

One day last week when I got back to the Inn after my usual 9-10 hour day at the VA, I opened  my room and met a flurry of postcards which had been slipped  under the door. I recognized some of the pictures from MY collection of post-cards--(I like to send post-cards from places I'm not, but I used to be )-- Amish Country in Lancaster, PA; NYC; "The Creation of Adam" from Rome; the Chicago Bears; Kauai, HI; Busch Gardens, Tampa Bay; Charlotte, NC....  Some of the messages were in handwriting with initials I did not recognize; some from best friends back in Maine. I finally "got it."  

That Judd  (!)(my Maine-and-only-man,) must have passed out postcards and my address to suppah club, to Ryley's overnight party....heck, maybe even on street corners--I was getting post cards from all over...

I learned a new concept too.... One postcard said this:

 "-Fancy tuna!
 -Is this the pose for a lonely prince?
 -Call me king.
 - how about you drink it from my mouth? - Ouran"

Malindi would have liked it here

Malindi would have liked it here.

Malindi was a little bookle girl (4? Or 6?), when we watched a movie of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I even have a remembrance of watching it with my mother, Grandma Gerrie, on one of her visits to Maine. My mother, displaced from the Midwest to San Diego, was not used to New England gardens…. where everything withers and wanes and appears dead for many months of the year and then burgeons and blooms magically in the spring. It’s not a secret so much as a surprise.

This weekend I went on an explore (isn’t that what Rabbit and Pooh take Tigger on?) to downtown Grand Junction and, by accident, I followed a sign to a Secret Garden.

I walked down sunny Maine [typo or Freudian]-that should read Main Street, past the specialty shops: knitting, bikes; music; antiques….and there was a sandwich board sign (without a body in it) pointing down the alley-like break between storefronts to “A Secret Garden.” I stood there for a moment deciding if I was just going to the corner bagel shop-with-free-wi-fi that I knew about, or take this, not-really-dark alley, to somewhere new. I took the road less traveled and went down the alley.

I found a square building that looked like an old garage. The sign out front said “Augusta’s Secret Garden—Tea House and Gift Shop.”  I still hesitated, but Augusta, Maine: Augusta, Grand Junction—I knew I was meant to go in. Glen Miller’s Moonlight Serenade was playing. How many people know all the words to that?  The building had been converted from the storage unit for the Montgomery Wards that had been on the front of Main Street. It was now a vintage clothing store/tea house. Glittered pinecones and feathered bird statuary bedecked  table displays by a glowing fake fireplace. The 3 x 6 inch bricks forming the walls had been painted to look like 10 x 15 inch stone walls with painted ivy and bunnies included. An impressive tin ceiling gave ambience and decorative tutus and butterfly costumes and taffeta-studded hats hung all around.  In the back, vintage clothing by the rack was being fondled by patrons.  But me, being just interested in brunch and not pinafores, I had high tea and scones at one of the front tables. My homemade, warm blueberry scone and gingerbread came on someone’s Grandmother’s tea plates. Augusta herself waited on me. My plate came with a spring of shrubry and a dried rose.My bill came with in the shape of a teacup with my name on it.  I got a punch card for free treats if I come 5 times. The place was a dream world for a little girl’s birthday party.  In that regard, it was “a secret garden”—a surprise that I wasn’t expecting….. and Malindi would have like to be here with me.

 

A Room with a View

Ever sat through a Space Summit?  No, not the 'let's get to Pluto by 2025' kind of summit. The kind of space summit where you hear 'let's move the file room to the basement so we can move IT to 312 and then move XYZ to the 7th floor and split the extra room into 8 cubicles. But this isn't quiet enough and that doesn't have medical gases available and the other place has supporting walls and this place doesn't have supporting walls and that doesn't have windows.....THAT kind of Space Summit.


Today, I identified primo space WITH a window. 


Judd would like it here: a 4th floor room with a window overlooking trees and mountains--no privacy curtains necessary.


Judd said government employees where he used to work would, as regular as messy elections, take the newspaper on break to "the library" as my dad always called it. And sure, in a 2x3 foot stall, what else could you do but read a newspaper?  But here, wow, something very freeing about viewing the birds and the sun and a smattering of clouds and the Rockies while deciding on 3 squares or 4, on bunching or folding....

My only fear, while I'm still on this awkward  'best-interview-behavior' every day, is that someone heard or saw my camera while I took these pictures in the bathroom of the executive suite....