Headmaster Jenkins had contacted Edward's father about doing some restorations on a rare antique chair. When he came to the store to pick it up, he and Edward's father appeared in the back room only to find - to Mr. Jeffries' utter horror - Edward sitting on the chair, oblivious to all else, eyes flitting fast across the pages of a book.
Mr. Jeffries nearly couldn't breathe he was so angry. His face got all red and splotchy and he couldn't form proper sentences and Edward was so confused as to what was going on that he set the book aside and stood up and offered to get his father a glass of water. Headmaster Jenkins must have been too intrigued to express what Edward would later discover to be his normal boiling rage.
"Why were you sitting in that chair, boy?" he asked in his calm, strange tones.
Edward blinked at him like he was stupid.
"Chairs are made to be sat on."
Headmaster Jenkins' mouth nearly flickered from its normal straight line into a smile. Nearly.
"But surely," he continued, "You are furniture people. And furniture people know that a chair such as this is not just any chair."
"A chair is a chair," Edward said, not liking the way this man spoke, so slow and low, like he was doing you the favor of letting you in on a secret. "And a book is a book. And I'm much more interested in books, thank you. Besides, I'm not furniture people. They are." He nodded toward his father and the open door beyond, where one of his uncles was evident standing with a customer and a lamp.
Day 108: This...
It seems like I write a haiku
When I don't know what else I should do.
Too tired, too stressed -
Ah, you've heard all the rest.
It's kind of a cop-out, that's true.
And so I'll write limericks instead
With words I just pluck from my head.
Not much better, I know,
But it's something, and so
With that done I'm now going to bed.
Day 109 - 110: STRESS... Okay, so this should not have been stressful. I agreed to make a video advertising Summer Reading events at the library for Tweens (Ages 10-12) and Teens (Ages 13-18) so that people from our library could take them out to schools and have Media Specialists at the schools show them to kids. It's pretty standard stuff from a video-making perspective, but there were a couple problems: (1) I'm used to working in the video editing programs on my Mac computer at home, which are unbelievably user-friendly and have a lot of shortcuts so things don't take too long to accomplish. But since this was for work, I had to do it on the PC at work in Powerpoint, then figure out how to adapt the Powerpoint presentation into a video that could be burned onto a DVD. This takes time (since you have to do a lot of things the long way) and (2) It takes focus. Doing this at work while I was also supposed to be doing about twelve other things, including the main part of my job description, which is helping people find books, reshelving, etc... well, it was a miracle I managed to get ONE of the two DVDs done in those 2 days. Technically it was three, because most of my Day 111 was spent finishing the Teen DVD....
Day 111: So I finally finish one DVD on the day when I was supposed to have two ready. I'm stressed out at this point, especially since I'm nearing the end of an 8 hour shift, when my boss (who isn't really involved at all in this project; I'm doing it for someone in a completely different department, so really she shouldn't be sticking her nose in my business) comes over and says she wants to look at the DVD and give me feedback on things I can change. This was about forty-five minutes before it was time to go home for the day, the last day the library would be open before Easter weekend. They needed the DVD the following Monday morning. So she sits down and watches it and comes up with this list of things for me to change, and it's waaaaaay too much to do in 45 freaking minutes. And they're the sort of things that aren't even really important content kind of feedback. It's all stuff that's more a personal-aesthetic kind of decision. So at this point I had to choose between yelling at her or bursting into tears, and I did the latter. It made her feel so bad that she ended up shelving all the books that had amassed on my cart while I was desperately trying to finish the DVD.
BUT... all that being said, the DVD is not my Good Madness for the day. Instead, on my way home I wrote this song in honor of my boss and the way she made me feel:
Day 112: Even though I fully intended to finish the DVDs over the weekend, I needed at least one day away from that insanity to regain a little composure. So I went and hung out with Melissa instead. I got to meet the adorable new kitten Zoe and we had a crafty afternoon, during which I made this picture:
But something about the girl under the tree just didn't seem right to me, so when I got home I ended up cutting out a new figure, so the most recent draft looks like this:
Day 113: Ok, so today I finally sat down and got to work. I worked at home (And got paid to do it! Probably part of Shelley feeling bad about making me cry...) and finished both videos. The sad thing is that all that ridiculous stress was over about four minutes of actual video.
Here's the Teen Summer Reading video:
Here's the Tween one:
Day 114: I watched Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash (of OK Go) lock themselves in a studio for 8 hours and try to write 8 songs. For some reason, this made me feel like creating something unlikely, so while I watched them I made a teacup out of Post-It notes:
I even tried to drink out of it, but it kind of dissolved after the first sip:
Day 115: I started humming and liked the random melody that came, so I recorded it and came up with some harmonies. Here's the "Hum Song" that resulted.
Day 116: It was Dad's 60th birthday, so I decorated the guitar in his honor. Sadly, I don't have a picture but I will update when I get one.
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