Happy Things Friday

- Two EAs told me I looked pretty and they loved what I was wearing on Monday. I was wearing what I thought was an unremarkable black dress, but it was very kind of them.

-A grade three boy who is generally pretty challenging - hard to find books for, heaves around sort of sullenly, has trouble self-regulating - asked for a book, and I needed a few minutes to find it. He was leaning over a table looking at another book when I brought it to him and he looked up and said "Oh, thank-you so much, you're the best!" 

-My hairdresser said seeing me always makes her whole day. We discovered this place years ago when Angus wanted to get a red fauxhawk like his friend's for hockey playoffs, and she told us where they'd gotten it done. The place had such a nice atmosphere I started going there and taking Eve too. When I went in last week to make an appointment there were no customers and my stylist was sitting in a chair getting her roots highlighted, so came over to the counter with foils in her hair. One of the other stylists got a breast reduction and was so excited about it that when we started talking she pulled out her shirt to show me her new boobs. I love it there. 

-I met a baby named Watson and a Samoyed named Gary (no, those are not reversed) and a German shepherd puppy named Waylon and I just felt like everyone's naming game was really strong in those cases. Lucy and Waylon really hit it off, also. Once again I felt like a basic bitch for having a Lucy named Lucy, which is like the third most popular dog name, but I just always WANTED a dog named Lucy. And I am, for all intents and purposes, the basic-est of bitches.

-We were at bar night and Collette's husband Mark came in a bit late and said the sunset was amazing, so we all got up and went outside and it was, indeed, amazing - there were clouds that diffused the pink light all over the sky - and then our waitress followed us out and as we were filing back in we heard her say "holy shit!" and it was a lovely moment.

-Lucy coming to hang out with me during yoga, and, instead of lying on Eve's corgi Oodie that I put out specifically for her to lie on, deciding to lie right on my yoga blanket instead. It is, frankly, an annoying thing, but I'm having a really good week, so...

-On Wednesday my regular shift at my afternoon school was all viewing periods for the Scholastic Book Fair. This always stresses me out slightly, because it's often double classes coming in and it is absolute chaos - I spend the first three minutes going over all the rules and the next seventeen minutes trying not to flip out at the arrant flouting/ignoring of said rules, and often flipping out slightly. Usually the book club runs for one evening when parents are going to be at the school for parent teacher interviews or some other event. This brings in the most money of any book fair hours, because adults with credit cards are in the mix.

This evening is usually on a Thursday, which means I'm not at school. I ran or helped with nearly twenty book fairs but haven't ended up working any the past few years because of awkward timing. I realized when the other librarian showed up that this book fair evening was going to be right after my work hours, and it was only the other librarian and her son there, so I decided to stay.

It was loud and crowded and hot and by twenty minutes in I couldn't swallow. There were lineups practically out the door. People kept asking for stupid vending machine pencil sharpeners and cat diaries and strawberry erasers and I had to keep looking at all the stupidly shaped things to find the right one, and then go back to find the price, and there was only one debit/credit card machine so we had to keep doing a weird dance to pass it between the three of us and not step on each other while grabbing posters and pencils. There was so much math, and the calculator buttons were so tiny.

And it was SUCH A RUSH. I'd forgotten how satisfying it was. People are generally very patient, the kids are super stoked, and my very last family had six books and my calculator was dying, so I did the math in my head, and then the dad pulled out his phone to check my work (very nicely, not in an offensive way, I was happy to have the confirmation) and then showed me that I was only off my fifty cents (undercharging them) and sounded very proud of me. Further, I had had my head down over the books and table until then and only realized upon looking straight at him that the dad was a wholeass snack - fervently grateful that I hadn't noticed this earlier, because THAT would not have improved my math-under-fire skills.

We made eight thousand dollars, about three thousand of which comes back to the library in Scholastic books or cash or Scholastic credit. I have now committed to help with a fair at my Monday school in June. I will bring more water for that one. And not wear sleeves.