Day 156 (3 December 2010) – Grab Bags at the Library!
Before explaining the title of today’s post I am very excited to report that my niece Stephanie arrived safely in Nantes late last night from Spain and is secure (and warm) in our home. She’ll be staying with us for a little more than a week. Undoubtedly, I’ll have several things to report about her visit and some photos, too. But she took off to Ikea with Melinda today so I was left to my own devices. And one device you all know I like a lot is the library.
Arriving at the library I was warmly greeted by my librarian friend Céline. She proceeded to tell me in French about this little holiday game they are playing at the library this month. Get this. They’ve wrapped up library items (books, CDs, movies) in bags, green for adults, purple for kids. If you want, you choose a bag and then get surprised by what you find. Bags have 3, 4 or 5 items. I understood about half of what she was saying, and more than half of the first half. I was too busy trying to make sense of the half of the first half I didn’t understand to follow much of the second half of what she was saying, if you get my drift. Fortunately, Céline then told me the whole thing again in English, of which I think I understood close to 90%.
Anyway, game for this sort of thing, I took a green bag with 3 items. When I got home, I opened it up and found a book, a CD and a DVD:
- Book – Le Vacillement du Monde by Alain Nadaud
- CD – Nuevos Sonidas Af’no Penuanos
- DVD – Arbres
I think I’ll have better luck making sense out of the CD and DVD than the book. And what a fun concept for a library to do! Nothing like a grab bag. It’s how my brother Scott sold old cereal box toys to the neighbor kids for more than the cost of the cereal!
French Sabbatical 
The buyers of those cereal box toys got one hell of a deal as they are all probably collector’s items by now. On the other hand, the toads that I sold are all dead.
what does Scott do for a living now? just curious! Great concept, love it. Do you think the three items in your grab bag reference each other in any way?
Your Nantes library has come up with a really neat idea … is it a fund-raiser? Do they charge for the grab bags? Or perhaps that’s their way of getting rid of “library discards”? Whatever, it must be fun.
Also, ’tis always fun to read your blog, Andy – and there’s no charge for that!