confessions of a southside catatonic chataholic

... is one of nature's masterpieces.'
~ George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Sometimes, though, they might better resemble Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' :) My whanau are the ultimate soap opera. Things get thrown, insults are hurled - and that's just me. When you put all of us together it's anybody's guess as to how things will shake down. It's never boring and the bonus is that they are the milk and cookies of my Tuesday post :P It's Tuesday and this is a 'My family and other animals post' or, you know, 'Stuff about my insane family.' So you get one family-related post and a bonus success story relating to the new Auckland Libraries '1 city. 55 libraries. All yours' idea :)



Remy is my nephew. As in Remy Etienne LeBeau aka Gambit from X-Men. Reme (rrrrrrrrroll the R) is Maori for lamb (those damn transliterations). The two are totally different. Unless...you're my 6 year old niece. Tiana-Jade, a sibling's daughter, is a kohanga/kura kaupapa baby so she thinks and talks in Maori. She's fluent in English but sometimes that doesn't always guarantee that what we say is how she hears it. What we were saying as 'Remy' she was hearing as a clumsy pronunciation of the rolling 'R' and is absolutely convinced that Remy the Pooh is actually named Reme...for the Lamb of God o_O My sibling isn't particularly religious (although we were all raised Mormon, god help us all) so I'm not sure how Tiana-Jade would end up knowing/thinking about Jesus in any way. Eep. I couldn't help it though, I almost fell off my chair laughing when she greeted him with, 'Hello, Reme!' I've never seen a more rotund lamb in my life!

Success story! A lot of our customers have taken to the idea of requesting titles from across all 7 areas (Franklin, Papakura, Manukau, Auckland, Waitakere, North Shore, Rodney) to heart :) In fact one gentleman requested 400 graphic novels and they all came in pretty much at once. Now, instinctively, I heard a lot of people moan just a little and say things like, 'You can only issue 35 at a time so why bother?' or 'You can't read them all at once so why would you do that?' and, once, even 'All of that staff time for books they won't be able to read in time...' and I'm here to say YOU'RE ALL WRONG. He not only requested them, he reads 35 of them a night. THIRTY-FIVE. I think our frontline staff can definitely count that as one extremely satisfied customer. I hope they celebrate that success :P