first day

I started the day reading books to a first grade class at Washington School. Dem kids was kewt! There was a low chair set up for me. And they'd all signed their names to a "Welcome, Mr Ingersoll!" sign which included a snapshot of the class standing at attention. Yes, I brought that home.

The children all gathered on the floor before the reading chair and I did my best to hold the book open wide and often found myself reading the text from the side or upside down.

I started with The Eye of the Needle. They really got into it. The Eskimo boy goes out to find food for himself and his grandmother but he is "SO hungry" that whenever he comes upon a piece of meat -- whether a tiny fish, a salmon, a seal, or a walrus -- he gobbles it up and promises himself he will find something bigger for grandmother. At last he swallows an entire whale and slakes his thirst by sucking down a river. When he goes home to grandmother she rescues the bounty her grandson has swallowed by making him pass through the magic eye of her sewing needle, which releases the fish, the seal, the walrus and the whale.

Then I read And Tango Makes Three, the gay penguin story. The male penguin couple Silo & Roy build their own rocky nest, just like all the het penguins. But they have no egg. One finds an egg-shaped rock but brooding it produces no chick. "Why do you think that was so?" the first grade teacher asked. One of the boys tsked, "Because it's a rock!"

Some kids seemed a bit dubious about penguin boys in love but nobody protested when the zookeeper introduced an egg into Silo & Roy's nest and the two raised a chick the keeper named Tango. When I got to the page that showed the family swimming together among all the other penguins, one child cried out, "There they are!"

So that was fun. A good Drop Everything And Read Day, eh? Maybe I'll do it again next year.

I then caught the bus to the Claremont branch. I was at the Circulation Desk all day (though in the future I will split my time between it and the Information Desk). My only real beef with the RFID self-checkout machines was their whirring fans. Except shortly after noon all the computers started fritzing. Hassle! Curiously the self-checkout machines seemed to be available more often than the staff machines.

Still, I was glad to be out in the world again, away from the closed-in cubicle life.

Somewhat to my horror I see the break room has a television!