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Carol and I picked our wedding day seven years ago, in part because it was about halfway between my birthday in March and her birthday in July. (I for one never thought about it nearly coinciding with Mother’s Day.) Having been married before, the planning of the event didn’t hold much excitement for me. I mean, I wanted to BE married; it’s just, at some level. I just rather have eloped. But Carol hadn’t been married, and I didn’t want to cheat her out of “her day”.

Most fortunately, my father was, among many of his other skills, an amazingly good designer of weddings and other celebrations. So when Carol and I went down to Charlotte in April 1999, Carol and Dad dealt with color schemes – PLEASE don’t ask me what the color scheme of the wedding was – and decorations for the reception, while I concentrated on what I wanted in the service itself: the Scripture, the music, etc., with Carol’s input.

The wedding was a careful negotiation: one of my new brothers-in-law, John, as one of my groomsmen (hmm – his birthday was yesterday, but he died a couple years back) and I got to use my then eight-year-old niece Alex as the flower girl. Stuff like that.

The event turned out to be bigger than either of us had originally thought, and as I mentioned last year, at a church we longer attend, but all of that is temporal.

Baseball figures into our anniversary this year. I’m going to the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh…with my father-in-law. Then he, his wife, and my wife will rendezvous somewhere. She’s been a good sport about this.

Happy anniversary, honey. (Geez, I don’t know why I wrote that’; she STILL doesn’t read the blog.)

It’s Mom’s Day. My mother is the person I know least likely to operate with an agenda. She is overwhelmingly nice. Sometimes TOO nice. A telemarketer calls and she says she’s not interested, and doesn’t understand why he doesn’t then hang up. (Because he still things he can still sell to her as long as she still on the phone.)

My father was the disciplinarian when I was growing up. My mom actually tried to spank me once, but it was a half-hearted effort.

She had a lot of guilt about being a working mom; the correct verbiage now is “a mother working outside the home”, but we’re talking the late 1950s and the 1960s. We would go to her mother’s house at lunch and after school. My grandmother was a strange, paranoid woman who told us about bogeymen, “bad people” and the like in such terrifying detail that both sister Leslie and I tended to believe her, whereas baby sister Marcia saw through the BS.

So, my mom was upset that her children’s minds were being filled with so much rubbish, even a decade after the fact. We tried to assure her not worry, that we were OK, that none of us ended up as mass murders or committed other felonies.

We could really tease my mom. She was not a great cook, and in fact, my father was much better in the kitchen. But she tried. Once, she made something from a recipe she found. It had weird green specks in it that we thought were awful. There was a detergent at the time called Oxydol, which advertised having “green bleaching crystals”, and for years we made reference to this disastrous meal with “green bleaching crystals.”

I think one of my favorite times with my mother was when I was 12 and Leslie was 11. My father smoked at the time, but my mother never has. So we sat at the kitchen table and we all lit up. Then we all coughed our brains out. Neither Leslie nor I ever were smokers.

So, there are some random thoughts about Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.
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Happy birthday, Rocco.

Wow. The work move is today, postponed from yesterday. Probably the last I’ll say about it (lucky you).

If some of it seems a tad cryptic, well, there’s a reason for that.

One of the things that makes transition easier is information. If there had been a real opportunity to ask questions, I would have queried why, when six units were moving to this space, why five of them had been attending meetings for a month, while the sixth was not even informed?

With newer information, I might posit this question: Why are all of the folks moving to the third floor of this new building required to paying parking fees? And being threatened with being fired if they park without paying?
Free parking would have been at least one upside of the move – not for me, but still- yet even that has been dashed. The folks on the fourth floor of the new building (two folks I know from church) and the second floor of this building (a guy from the Bradley birthing class I attended) are not paying, and indeed one of them laughed at the suggestion. Surely, the fact that our folks were paying for parking when they were downtown, where parking is at a premium, oughtn’t impact parking at the CW, where parking is plentiful. Someone had the audacity to suggest to me that those driving are helping to subsidize the move, but that can’t be it. Of course not.

And I’m sure the building people have forbade us from having food at our desks, but it certainly can’t be true that someone has been assigned to check to make sure we don’t have hot plates at our desks, can it? That would suggest that we need to be treated like children, rather than the professionals we are, so I’m sure that’s just an ugly rumor.

And speaking of rumors, I heard that someone has forbidden any signage for individual workspaces, i.e., name plates. That can’t be right. Over 200 people from a half dozen programs going to a place with a standard look and feel would certainly require some differentiation. I have this old name plate from when I was a teller for about a month nearly 30 years ago just waiting to be dusted off.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20001117/REVIEWS/11170306/1023 Sammy

So, in conclusion, my reticence about this particular move does not come merely from:
-not wanting to move
-the inconvenience of where we’re moving to
-the realization that we’re less likely to attract library interns because of our new location
-missing downtown
-my bad memories of the last time I worked at that location
-moving from an office with a door to a cubicle
-moving to a smaller space
-getting an e-mail dated this past Wednesday at 9 pm informing us that when the computer files are migrated at the end of the day yesterday, some of our files are moving into something called the archives, and that we should move said files to another area if we don’t want them stored in the archives – since I was out of time at the time, reading this Thursday at 4 pm, that news was particularly distressing to me
-not being able to listen to music
-having to become one of those clock-watching people who HAS to leave at 5:30, even when I’m in the middle of something
but for those reasons and…others.
Cockalorum http://www.answers.com/topic/cockalorum

Just back from conference #2 of the month. I presented there too.

I had this friend I went to school with from about 2nd to 9th grade named Ray. His mother was the den mother when we were Cub Scouts together. I was in Ray and Pam’s wedding in October 1976. Pam just sent me this newspaper clipping from 1961, which, if you can’t read it, indicates that I was helping with the packing for supplies for a “Negro tent community in Tennesssee”. No doubt that my apparel was my father’s idea.
You may notice that they gave full street addresses for the girl Penny and for me; they don’t do THAT anymore, do they? You will also note that they misspelled my last name as Greene. Even then, I hated it when they screwed up my moniker.
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My friend Judy, who drove me to Boston to be on JEOPARDY! in 1998, is taking the show’s test in NYC tomorrow. Another friend called me to give pointers to a colleague who is also taking the test. They are all Albany librarians, so I wish them the best of luck.

Got this e-mail recently:

Got plans for May 19, the day that the movie The DaVinci Code is slated to open? If not, go to the movies. If so, then go to the movies sometime that weekend before May 21. Just don’t go to The DaVinci Code.

That’s the advice being given to Christians by Christians who know how Hollywood works and know the best way to get the bean-counters in Hollywood to
listen:

“May 19th is the date the Da Vinci Code movie opens. A movie based on a book that wears its heresy and blasphemy as a badge of honor.

“What can we as Christians do in response to the release of this movie? I’m going to offer you the usual choices — and a new one.

“Here are the usual suspects:

“A) We can ignore the movie.

“The problem with this option: The box office is a ballot box. The only people whose votes are counted are those who buy tickets. And the ballot box closes on the Sunday of opening weekend. If you stay home, you have lost your chance to make your vote heard. You have thrown your vote away, and from Hollywood’s point of view, you don’t count. By staying home, you do nothing to shape the decision-making process regarding what movies will make it to the big screen.

“B) We can protest.

“The problem with this option: It doesn’t work. Any publicity is good publicity. Protests not only fuel the box office, they make all Christians look like idiots. And again, protests and boycotts do nothing to help shape the decisions being made right now about what movies Hollywood will make in the next few years. (Or they convince Hollywood to make *more* movies that will provoke Christians to protest, which will drive the box office up.)

“C) We can discuss the movie. We can be rational and be ready with study guides and workshops and point-by-point refutations of the lies promulgated by the movie.

“The problem with this option: No one’s listening. They think they know what we’re going to say already. We’ll lose most of these discussions anyway, no matter how prepared we are, because the power of story always trumps the power of facts (why do you think Jesus taught in parables?!). And once again: rational discussion of history does nothing to affect Hollywood’s choices regarding what movies to make.

“But there’s a fourth choice.

“On May 19th, you should go to the movies.

“Just go to another movie.

“Save the date now. May 19th, or May 20th. No later than Sunday, May 21st — that’s the day the ballot box closes. You’ll get a vote, the only vote Hollywood recognizes: The power of cold hard cash laid down on a box office window on opening weekend.

“Use your vote. Don’t throw it away. Vote for a movie other than DVC. If enough people do it, the powers that be will notice. They won’t have a choice.

“The major studio movie scheduled for release against DVC is the DreamWorks animated feature Over the Hedge. The trailers look fun, and you can take your kids. And your friends. And their friends. In fact, let’s all go see it.

“Let’s rock the box office in a way no one expects — without protests, without boycotts, without arguments, without rancor. Let’s show up at the box office ballot box and cast our votes. And buy some popcorn, too.

“May 19th. Mark your calendars now: Over the Hedge’s opening weekend. Buy a ticket.

“And spread the word. Forward this e-mail to all the Christians in your address book. Post it on your blogs. Talk about it to your churches. And let’s all go to the movies.”

Spread the word. And go to the movies on May 19.

So, if Over the Hedge becomes an unexpected box office smash, you’ll know why.

Truth is, I’m one of the 14 people in the country who hasn’t read the DaVinci Code, haven’t been compelled to read it, haven’t purchased it with the intent to read it, and wasn’t that interested in seeing the movie. The e-mail makes me more eager to see the film, especially on the first weekend. The reality is, I haven’t seen ANY movie this calendar year, and I doubt either this OR Over the Hedge will be the first.
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I feel fortunate that the two NYC tabloids have have a firm grasp on theology, judging by their headlines last week, when Moussaouri got life, rather than death. (A more typical headline: “No Way Out” on the Troy Record.) Personally, I was touched by some of the families of the 9/11 victims who testified, essentially for life over yet one more death.