The Library-Gestapo

The library has always represented a place of peace and sanctuary for me. I have loving memories of whiling away hot summer days holed up either in the school library or in the local library in the delightful airconditioning with a world of adventure on paper.


I introduced my boys to books and to the joys of the library when they were still very young and our local library was my sanctum during a brief stint at homeschooling. Those wonderful ladies, the librarians, kept my children excited, entertained and enthusiastic about reading and gave me a glorious and much needed break. The library was a safe place that I could go and I could take my children. It was a way of travelling through the world, having extraordinary adventures and meeting exceptional people without ever fearing for the safety of my boys.


The first school that my boys went to had another wonderful library, staffed with glorious ladies who valued reading, encouraged children to borrow wildly and generally believed that any use of the library would lure unsuspecting readers in.


It came as a rude shock to me, then, when yesterday I encountered the Library-Nazi and her SS second in command at the boys' current school. B1 had rugby training after school and I had thought that instead of wandering the school grounds for one and a half hours waiting for him to finish, B2 and I might use the time to do homework and read some books. Accordingly, I approached the head librarian to ask if we could use the library for this purpose and was told summarily that the library was not a "babysitting service" and if she were to allow me and B2 to use the library, then she'd have to let everyone in. Umm.. isn't that the point of a library?


Babysitting service? I hadn't asked her to care for B2 while I wandered off to go shopping. I was asking if we could sit at a desk, do homework and peruse the books in the library.


So what was her alternative to using the school library for this purpose? "There's a coffee shop down the road you could use". Mmmm... the point of using the library is that it's quiet and would allow us both to concentrate on what we're doing without being exposed to the volume of noise encountered in a coffee shop.


Did I voice my concerns? Well, yes. Some of them. But I'll admit that I was so dumbstruck at her attitude that I probably stood there doing a fine impersonation of a goldfish rather than calling her on her bizarre attitude.


So, the school library has gone onto the blacklist of Places I Do Not Expose the Children To and I'll be taking them to the local library more often instead. Thank goodness for the wonderful, hard-working and sensible librarians there!


An Addendum: http://curiousexpeditions.org/?p=78

Snakes Alive!

Image via Wikipedia

At the school assembly on Friday, the acting principal issued a snake warning. Not a fire warning. Not a psychotic-murderer-on-the-loose warning. A snake warning.
He went on to describe the apparent army of slithering reptiles poised on the brink of overrunning the campus. What fresh hell were my children being subjected to? I vacillated between stifling giggles at his comic descriptions and stifling a scream at my absolute horror. My maternal instincts were shrieking at me to snatch up my children and run as fast as I could manage. No mean feat with a 10yo and an 8yo.


Living in the hills as we do, we're pretty used to watching out for a plethora of dangers. Snakes and bush fires are par for the course at this time of year. The boys' school, however, is not in the hills. It's a mere 15kms from the centre of the city - that's just a 15 minute trip. We're not talking remote Australia here.


Yet here we were discussing the drill should any of the children encounter a snake. The dugites had been breeding and there were now squillions of the slithery little fellows on the loose. So now we have to add "stop, run and tell" to the traditional "stop, drop and roll" safety routine.

Food for Thought

This week has been a bad one in terms of the amount of cooking I've done.  Cooking is usually something I am passionate about. It relaxes me, it calms me and it challenges me. I pour energy and love into the food that I make and the act of creating appeals to both my creative and my scientific sides. Cooking is something that engages me intellectually, physically and emotionally. So why has this week been so bad?

My week was thrown out by poor internet connections. Seems ridiculous doesn't it? This week, I realised just how much I treasure my connectedness to the rest of the world. It's my way of staying in touch with current events and with like-minded people. As a result of being so cruelly severed from my happy world by a poorly performing IP, I went into a tailspin of anxiety and my family were left to fend for themselves.

You'd think that would be ok. After all, LomL knows how to cook. He knew how to cook before we were married, has cooked periodically throughout our lives together and used to work in a pizza shop in his misspent youth. LomL, however, does not feel the same passion towards food that I do. He doesn't feel the sensuality of it; the touch, the smell, the textures, the combinations. He just doesn't feel it. So for him, a take-away dinner is the same as something lovingly crafted in the kitchen. Don't get me wrong. He loves my cooking and compliments me on it regularly, but he doesn't get the same joy from creating dishes that I do. So this week, we've had take-away and frozen pizza. I feel guilty and slightly nauseated just writing that!

LomL often jokes that my idea of a quick meal is to make hamburgers from scratch and I wouldn't know a TV dinner or packet meal if someone threw them at my head. Sadly, that's probably true. My inherent perfectionism imbues me with terrible guilt about not providing properly for my family if ever I'm pressed for time and find myself going for the quick option.

I've found that, over time, I've become something of a food-Nazi. Certain burger restaurants (I use the term loosely) are completely avoided by us. Not least of all because I worked there as a teenager and because I was served scrambled eggs with shell still in them...twice...in a row. Pft. I guess the up-side is that I knew they were real eggs and not the powdered stuff. Similarly, we avoid military chicken joints too. Not because we don't love the taste of the food, but because inevitably, every time I eat there, I end up with a terrible stomach upset. Which does make me stop and wonder what precisely is in that chicken to evoke my usually cast-iron stomach into violent paroxysms.

I buy fresh food which has been processed as little as possible. Where available I buy direct from farmer's markets and I choose my butcher because he can source all his meat locally. I don't buy fruit and veg from supermarkets, or meat and fish either. I limit the number of sauces or pre-prepared foods that come into the house and though I don't stop B1 and B2 from eating anything that they like, I do teach them about eating things in moderation. Increasingly, I'm finding there's a strong grass-roots movement that fits beautifully with what we're doing in our family. It brings me great joy when I hear influential people talking about the same things that we practice on a regular basis -  Jamie Oliver in particular.

I believe that food plays an intrinsic part in our functioning, our moods, our energy levels and our capacity to realise our potentials. I truly believe that. I also believe that food should be a pleasure and not just a fuel.

This week, though, it was as much as I could manage to throw something resembling food at my family and return to my mire of depression at the failing of my internet connection.