Wrongfully Accused Nifflers and Such

Today, I am normalizing owning my own imperfections. Let's start with lunch:

I cannot find the recipe for the life of me now, but two weeks ago (last week I didn't cook because I got lazy and the week was short), I made a salad that involved spring mix, almond slivers, cranberries, and (maybe) pomegranates. The dressing involved apple cider vinegar and (probably) olive oil, but maybe not. This one, friends, was a disaster for two reasons:

Despite knowing better, I added the dressing during meal prep. Although that's fine when the base is something like kale or broccoli, this is not a good idea with spring mix because everything gets super soggy almost immediately.

Also the dressing became vinegary by Tuesday. Upon checking the label of the apple cider vinegar, I learned it had expired over the summer.

Y'all I could have died. Or just been really sick at work. In reality the consequence was nasty lunches and two of them are still in my fridge because I'm scared to clean out the containers at this point. Either way kids, the moral of this story is check the labels of things that are only sparingly used.

What else hasn't been perfect?

Over the course of forty-eight hours last week, I lost my primary set of keys and my glasses. Both were eventually recovered. Yes, I accused Violet the cat of being a niffler. She got cleared in the case of the keys (I think when I brought in groceries, the keys had gotten dropped and slid underneath the driver's seat of my car).

That said, I found my glasses straddling my bed frame and in the wee hours of morning prior to said spectacles going MIA, *someone* had hopped up on the nightstand, walked across it, and then traveled over the back of my head, as she journeyed to her self-proclaimed spot. In the process of all that, I heard a thud, but didn't have the motivation to check it out.

Since the evidence is merely circumstantial and this only created a temporary inconvenience, no charges were filed against my feline roommate.

At the day job, I have an imperfect cart full of biographies which need shelving. That section didn't get straightened last week (because it didn't get shelved) and has a look of epic disaster to it. Typically when I shelve nonfiction, I do it numerically, and since bios are almost last they often are neglected.

The homestead is a little bit of a hot mess of Amazon boxes, clean/ dirty laundry, and random cat toys. The health department isn't after me (yet), but I'd want four hours of prep time before entertaining guests.

Also, I've been drinking three cups of coffee lately, as opposed to two.

Also also, there have been MANY days lately when I didn't decline snacks at work. One of those snacks was an exceptional blueberry cake donut. Absolutely no regrets.

If I had to grade it, overall I'd say my life has been sitting at a solid B/ B-minus. Nothing on fire, no pending disasters of epic proportions, marginal stress, but I could do better.

Honestly, I really don't want to do much better as I'm not unhappy.

What's ahead amidst the imperfection?

Next week is four fun-filled days of full-throttle check-in/ checkout, meaning every student, first through eighth grade, will check-in/ checkout books. Roughly that's about 1,150 kids and probably four-thousand books changing hands (That number feels high; I need to pull the report on this one to know for sure-- I'm curious).

My Dia de los Muertos plan needs tightening. Plus, before Thanksgiving, I want to start book reviews with everyone.

And Wednesday afternoon, hours before the much-anticipated fall break began, I got a random call from Scholastic regarding the book fair I had put off scheduling (y'all I'm probably the only librarian in the universe that doesn't get giddy regarding book fair). Knowing I needed to bite the bullet on that one, I answered the phone and ended up scheduling not one book fair, but two because Scholastic is running some specials (librarians, give me a holler if you want the deets).

Book fair one kicks off December 7th.

Anyway, the whole book fair conversation took a second. Consequently, I had to rush through some other things, and I didn't get to setting up the library for tomorrow morning's professional development, so I had two choices:

Suck it up and stay late. (It was already "late", technically.)

Suck it up and take care of it over break.

Honestly, I chose the latter because I had crashed after the book-fair-deal high and was pretty tired. A couple of hours (max) of moving furniture doesn't bother me in regards to things I could be doing on a random day off, so I popped in Friday afternoon and took care of business.

Professional development setup.

The biographies are still a hotmess though. Everyone will live. The end.