My felted world

 

Today is another grab bag of pictures from my muppet world. We're still dealing with the really good photographs here. I'll do my best to cut myself off when I start thinking things like: "I don't love this one, but it has some really interesting qualities". I'm not sorting these or planning to caption them, but briefly put, they are some random shots, a whole bunch of co-worker and volunteers at the library muppets (and me too!), and finally some of my favorite "Nature in felt" photographs.

As this particular collection goes to press (so to speak) for you to see, my darling wife and I will have returned from the Boston area where we will have, hopefully, completed our visa interviews. As part of a one year visitor's visa one has to turn in a gargantuan pile of assorted documents in one of a small selection of cities. This is called an interview, but apparently is more of an in-person handover. After that the packet is submitted to the French officials (the "interview" is done by a third party company) and we simply wait to hear if our visa is approved. And if our visas are approved, well, good, because we're kind of counting on it.

I hope you like my puppet pictures. I'm a puppet, you're a puppet, everything's a puppet!

Birds in library and the muppets who love them

 

In the midst of my felt phase, during a brief interlude between turning co-workers and random passers-by into muppets, and looking for old photos I had taken that would lend themselves to being rendered in wool, I came across a giant book of birds.

"These are nice birds." I thought. So I snatched them up.

A little while later I remembered. "Oh yeah. I have a bunch of birds!" So I set them loose in the library and took some quick pictures of them.

Or something like that.

With all that done I returned to my muppet co-workers.

Oh, no, wait, I had one more bird left.

What to do?

Raise and raised again

 

I have to admit, it’s not the worst thing in the world, and it's possibly even a bit churlish of me to complain, but now that I find myself on the edge of retirement here at the library, after so many, many, many decades, they keep giving me raises.

These aren’t raises given to me because they think I’m doing such a great job. I've... actually never received one of those. These are raises that are the result of all kinds of automated and union mandated mechanisms built into the system. But it is a bit shocking that I’ve now gotten what amounts to three large raises in less than half a year. These are raises that would have meant the world to me ten years ago, even five years ago, and certainly twenty years ago would have been even somewhat life changing.

But to receive one now, ten weeks before my last day, this one a three-and-a-half percent raise, after already receiving a raise in the spring, and one at the start of the year as well? It’s astonishing. 

And faintly appalling.

Am I supposed to work forever just to take advantage of these things? Can I give them to someone else? How do I extract any value from raises that are based on time alone?

I guess there’s no good answer to any of that.

I'm just going to be out the future value of these raises.

So I will hurriedly appreciate the late blooming of my wages, eeking out a few last moments of joy. There will come no more. And soon I will fade away and disappear from the library. 

I will rejoice and revel in that extraordinary freedom. I am sure of it, though it oddly comes just when the going is at its best.

All the wonders of wool

 

I should get together with someone on the Internet who raises AI sheep because I am going through a lot of fictional wool!

Things are pretty busy here in my house in the last few months of finishing 31 years of working in a library, and preparing for and applying for visas to live in France, and beginning the great and stressful clockwork of winding down our lives here. And I would love to talk about it all, but having spent every available free hour turning pictures into muppety felt versions, I don't have time for that right now. I only have time to show the pictures!

We'll skip categories today and just show a selection of various felted scenes. I'll try to just choose the best ones, which will make future collections worse, but who cares! Let's seize the day!