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This website is an informal communication forum for staff members of the University of Oregon Library Staff Association. Contents and opinions expressed herein or on linked personal or external pages are those of individual authors and do not represent official statements, policies, or positions of the Library, the University of Oregon, Oregon University System, or State of Oregon.

The Christmas that wasn't so Christmassy

This month I have a Christmas story for you all. It is a story that I hope might cause you, by contrast, to feel warm and fuzzy about holiday times about which you previously felt bitter and resentful.

First, some background. I am, some of you may know, a child of a blended family; my mother divorced and remarried at a whirlwind pace while I was 15. I was the oldest until then, but my step-siblings, who have been with me half my life now, fit 13 and 16 months to either side of me. You might imagine the degree to which this was a challenge for all of us. However, harder for me than the issue of step-siblings, with whom I did and do get along fine, was the one of the assorted other relatives and traditions enmeshed and bound by the act of remarriage. This story takes place my sophomore year of college when I was 18. Jen, my older sister, also was then a student at the U of O. We were both living in Eugene, and when Christmas rolled around my step-grandmother (step-dad's mother) and her husband (step-step----oh, nevermind) invited both her sons and families for Christmas in the Napa Valley. We had this all figured out: Jen and I were to drive home in each of our cars (home being Ellensburg, WA); this would give us three cars for the six of us (mom, step-dad, brother, step-brother, me and Jen) so we could come back up at the best times for us pretty easily. The other of my step-grandmother's sons has three kids of his own, but they would drive down separately. And so the story begins.

We leave Ellensburg in a caravan to Seattle, Snoqualmie Pass being more likely cleared in winter weather than Satus along the Columbia. We get to Seattle without incident and head south down I-5. This is the last thing that happens "without incident" for quite some time.

Do you know what happens if your car's electrical system melts? It's really quite entertaining, if not especially helpful in the safety department. If you drive a car in which all the various electrical cables all more or less touch, if the cute colored plastic insulating the wires melts, well, the wires themselves start to touch each other in ways God never intended. The outcome of this is that the assorted knobs, buttons, and dials on your dashboard cease to cause the expected result. It's sort of like what happens what we get a new release for Janus. Turn on the radio, and oh, look! windshield wipers. It's not raining, so don't want those, but turning the radio back OFF doesn't actually cause the windshield wipers to stop. This requires a heretofore untried sequence of radio, lights, heater, and emergency flashers being flipped on and off in different orders. It's like one of those puzzles where you slide the pieces into the empty slot to rearrange the picture.

Eventually, some 25 miles later, it occurs to my mother, driving the car ahead of me, that it really isn't quite normal for my headlights to be turning on and off intermittently, in some cases independent of each other. We stop at a service station. We explain the problem and pop the hood. The service station attendant, complete with gray jumpsuit and, I'm not kidding, piece of hay sticking out of his mouth, stares into the engine compartment for a good two minutes before announcing this bit of wisdom: "Ma'am, I think something might be wrong with the electrical system." I am glad to note such fine mechanical advice is available to the townsfolk of the greater Yelm area. We continue south, lights a-flashin', until we reach Portland. We leave my car, which at this point we are pretty well convinced is possessed, with my now-husband's folks; they agree to get the repairs done if we reimburse them on picking the car back up in a week or so. We pile into the remaining two cars and forge ahead, stopping for the night somewhere between Roseburg and Ashland.

Day two: we arrive at our destination in the Napa Valley, two days before Christmas. Our hostess greets us at the door with a dish of Chex Mix. I take a pretzel and am promptly chastised; evidently there is a rule in this household that one may not take only one item from the chex-mix dish, even if this is only because one is taking off her coat at the time and isn't ready to settle down with a handful. Jen, on the other hand, is still at this point in time the pickiest eater on the face of the earth, with an eating repertoire that includes white bread, plain potatoes, corn, iceberg lettuce, peanut butter, and ice cream. Another apparent rule is that if one has been a granddaughter her whole life, she may eat only the peanuts from the Chex Mix. I can tell already, it is going to be a long few days.

It only gets worse when dinner is served; I am not a picky eater, but Marian manages all on her own to serve a meal consisting entirely of foods I abhor: pearl onions in sauce, an orange-almond-coconut concoction (coconut, I truly hate), brussels sprouts (one of a very short list of vegetables I don't really enjoy), shellfish (which not only do I not like, but to which I suspect I am also moderately allergic), and a seedy-nutty bread (which I'm sure many people find lovely; I don't like this quality in bread). This is effectively a complete list, by the way, of foods I could really do without. I think my mother is probably going to die trying not to laugh at me, especially when Jen is served a plain baked potato and soft white bread.

Another bump in the road occurs when it is time for bed and we find we get to sleep in an unheated basement room during the coldest snap in several years in the area, in the same room where a complicated videogame system has been set up for the younger kids. Joy. They are up at 5:30 using some sort of footpad device upon which they can run in order to the power the movements of the game character. Groan. We're up. We can see our breath, and during the night we had to get up to find clothes and sweaters to sleep in, but we're up. The younger kids couldn't care less that it's 40 degrees in the room and that we're sleeping. So, after a while, we head upstairs to breakfast…which is this elaborate pastry thing with, you know it, coconut all over. Jen gets frozen waffles; I try to choke down the offered meal, and am immediately treated to another lecture on my picky eating behavior. My mother invents an errand and goes to a local mini-mart to buy me some food to keep in the unheated bedroom. Nothing else truly untoward happens the rest of that day except another shellfish-based lunch menu. But, I have a stash of apples and cheese-n-crackers, so this is OK, I just plead not-hungry and await a chance to escape for a snack.

The next morning: Christmas. My step-dad's family has this tradition, which is that instead of asking what people want for Christmas, they consider what they know of you and choose something you would really like. Now, this is a fine tradition, if you do in fact know the people you are giving gifts to pretty well. And it can even be a fine tradition if you don't know them well but you ask some people who do know them well what sorts of things they would like, or if you choose a relatively general gift that doesn't really hinge much on taste. It is a not-very-fine tradition if you don't know the person, but this doesn't stop you from choosing something very taste-dependent and unreturnable. Dinner is traditional and unnoteworthy (yay!). After dinner, Jen and I get packed up to leave in the morning, intending to drive straight through to Portland, where she will meet up with her mom, and I will retrieve my car.

December 26 dawns…white. There are approximately two snowplows for five counties in the general vicinity of the Napa Valley. Neither of them has the hill on which our hosts live as a high priority. However, we figure, once we get over to I-5, surely that will be a priority and we'll be home free. The parents are worried about us heading out alone in Jen's car, however, so think they'll drive with us to the freeway, do a little shopping, have a fun day, and go back after the snow melts off.

Step one: down the hairpinny, hilly driveway. Jen's car, so she's driving. Manual transmission. Here is an important rule: avoid leaving your foot on the clutch in snowy or slippery conditions. Jen forgets this rule (well, she is a kid, just 19 …) and we begin a slow slide for the ditch, which was not actually a ditch, but rather a downslope to the next curve of the driveway, on the other side of which was the continuing downslope, and so on. I am in the passenger seat. Jen decides the car is going to go over the side and down the hill, so she thinks we had better jump out. I think not, since I am on the side toward which the car would be coming. I make sure my seatbelt is secure and prepare to be as small as possible if the car does in fact roll over. However, it's just as well she does go ahead and jump out (of the car she is driving, mind), since in so doing she removes her foot from the clutch, the engine dies, and the car slides to a stop. But then she won't return to driving the car, but also won't let me drive it. Car rearrangement: her dad drives her car with her in it and I go to join mom in their car. It's only something like a 30-minute drive to I-5. About 45 minutes later, when we are halfway there, a funny thing happens: we notice they are no longer behind us. What the…? We turn around and go back. Jen's car has died, for real this time. So, they (Jen and her dad) stay with the car while Mom and I drive into town…where we discover that if you live in this neck of the woods, tow-truck drivers aren't willing to venture out to tow you in snowy conditions. I don't know how they think tow truck drivers in the rest of the civilized world operate, but they don't think it would be safe for them to be out in the 4 inches of snow on the ground. Eventually we convince one. He goes back and finds the rest of our party building snowmen on the side of the road. This convinces him they are well and truly nuts; apparently making the best of the situation is a novel concept for him. Anyway, our parents pay a mechanic to "fix" (we'll come back to those quotation marks in a moment) the car, then they go off on their way, and we get some lunch and hit the road. It's only about 3:30, 6 hours after we left the house. We have the radio on and the heater running, and life is good. This lasts for about 35 minutes, whereupon the car dies again, so completely and suddenly that we are sitting still in the right lane of I-5--we don't even have time to pull over. Some fixing they did there.

We get out to push the car off to the side, since we think getting rear-ended by one of the idiots driving around old VW beetles and spinning themselves happily in circles on the freeway is not something we care to experience. We are wearing the style of the day on our feet: Keds. These are, in case you ever find yourself in this situation, utterly useless in trying to gain traction in snow to push a car. We try for a while, then get back in the car, hoping for the best and figuring eventually a cop will show up. One does. He turns on his lights as he pulls in behind us. He swaggers, as only a cop can do, up to the side of the car. Jen rolls down the window. The cop says (are you ready for this?) "You can't park here." California's finest, I'm sure. Once we convince him (by showing him where we slip-slided around trying) that we did in fact make a solid effort to move the car, he allows as how he maybe could push us with his car, which he does, to the side of the road. He calls a tow truck and leaves us there. It is coming up on 5:00, and moving toward dark in a hurry.

The tow truck shows up around 5:30. The driver is nice and not only drives us into the nearest town (half an hour), but drives us all over looking for a mechanic that hasn't already called it a day at 6. Eventually he stops at a phone and calls a mechanic friend of his at home, then takes us to that guy's garage. He replaces the alternator (should have happened the first time!), charges us overtime, and sends us on our way. 7:30 pm. Dark. Still hours to the Oregon border. Clearly we are not going to go straight to Portland. We do, however, make it almost to the border before we find a motel that both has vacancies and doesn't appear to have decorated in the roach-and-bodily-fluids motif. Portland has to wait another day. One bright spot: we already know for sure this will make a story one day!

Needless to say, we as a rule do not plan Christmas trips any longer. Us kids and now our kids show up at Mom's at some point. We don't try to coordinate. We don't set itineraries other than notifying of the approximate week we might be up, and calling when we leave home. And nobody, but nobody, makes any Chex Mix.

--Lara N.

"I forgot about the package until I had found a seat on the Metro. I sat down and noticed a weird smell. Since nobody was seated around me I figured that the smell must be coming from me.

I opened up my briefcase and discovered that it was the forgotten package that was stinking up the place. It smelled like rotten Indian food. Obviously this package had been sprayed with nasty chemicals when it went through customs.

Since I did not want to deal with the smell any longer I left the package on the Metro when I got off at my stop. Obviously it was not the material I had requested from the British embassy. As I left the Metro station...

Are you curious about what happens next? So am I...and so are the characters.

Submit the next part of the story for January's newsletter. The editor will post one submission for next month's Pass-the-Story adventure. Additional submissions may also be posted for entertainment value.

Ideal length is < 500 words.

FROM THE FACT FILE: ANNOUNCING THE WINNER

Who got the Final Words?

(You may review the quotations in the November Fact File.)
The answers:

1. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson
4. 1984, by George Orwell
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
6. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
7. Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
8. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
9. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
10. Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt

Watch the January issue of the LSA Newsletter for another contest From the Fact File.

The LSA Holiday Potluck will be held on Wednesday, December 13 from 11:30-1:30 in the Browsing Room. This is one of LSA's most popular events with festively-decorated tables and great and diverse food. Please join us to help ring in the holiday season. Because this has been such a popular event, and we have run low on food in the past, we are requesting that those who are able to do so bring dishes to serve 8-10 people. Sign-up sheets for food will be posted in the Library Staff Lounge. Those unable to make it to the Lounge may email Linda Hodgin (lhodgin@oregon) with their contributions. The categories are: 1) Bread; 2) Casseroles/Side Dishes; 3) Desserts; 4) Salads/Relish Trays. Please bring your ready-to-eat dishes to the Staff Lounge by 10 or 10:30 AM the morning of the potluck. Also, we are looking for volunteers to help with set up, serving and clean up. Please contact any member of the Social Committee to volunteer: Ann Muller, Susan Mincks, Pam DeLaittre, Linda Hodgin, Heather Ward or Stephanie Midkiff.

For the convenience of those of you who have not yet paid your dues and wish to do so, there will be a table for that purpose at the potluck. Dues are $6 per year and the year runs August 1 through July 31. If you pay by December 31, Library Administration will match $3 for every membership. Also in keeping with past years, there will be a Toys for Tots box for those who wish to make contributions.

By Stephanie Midkiff

November was National American Indian Heritage Month. Although the first "American Indian Day" was declared by the State of New York in 1916, a month long recognition of Native Americans was not achieved until 1990. The Library Diversity Committee (LDC) hosted two events in November in recognition of the original peoples of this land.

A lunchtime showing of the Miramax video "Smoke Signals" was hosted over two consecutive days. Several library faculty and staff showed up to watch the movie, a story of two Coeur d'Alene Indians who travel from their Idaho reservation to Phoenix to retrieve the remains of their dead family member and discover truths about themselves along the way. "Smoke Signals" was winner of the Audience Award and the Filmmaker's Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and is based on the book, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" by the acclaimed Northwest writer Sherman Alexie.

The LDC hopes to host future videotape showings to coincide with other designated heritage months.

Currently showing in the Special Collections Display cases, just outside the Knight Library Browsing Room, are ten photographs from the Lee Moorhouse photograph collection. This display shows black and white prints of Cayuse, Yakima, Walla Walla, Wishram and Pocatello Indians-dating back to the early 1900s.

Part of the Library's Special Collections and University Archives, the more than 6,000 glass negatives of the photographic works of Major Lee Moorhouse were deeded by his family to the UO Library in 1949. Some of these pictures were published in Moorhouse's book, "Souvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs" in 1905. His prints are also housed in the Smithsonian Institution, the Oregon Historical Society and the Umatilla County Library.

The Moorhouse collection is considered to be an important collection of ethnographic photography that documents Native Americans at a particular time in their history.

Rosella Thomas

Name Change

The Library Diversity Advisory Group has simplified its name to Library Diversity Committee (LDC). The activities and projects we have undertaken are typical of the work done by other library diversity committees. Also, Library Diversity Committee is easier to remember and more to the point!

Diane Sotak

Joanne Halgren, Interlibrary Loan, received the first ever ALA Virginia Boucher/OCLC Distinguished Interlibrary Loan Librarian award in July.

Richard Bear has published several 16th and 17th century works at his award winning website Renascence Editions

Been to an interesting conference? Send us a brief report for publication in the next newsletter. Thanks!

Staff profile:

Heather Ward, Reference