Every year as part of the summer reading program, I make a little bet with the participants. It is another way to encourage them to read. As I mentioned in response to one of the comments made on my blog the other day, the kids seem to love to see adults do "wild and crazy" things. I thought it would be fun to share some of the pictures we have taken in response to the bets.


This first one is from the first summer after I tool over responsibility for the young adult (ages 11 - 17) services at the library. I promised to shave my head if the kids read more than 250 books. Each week, we raised the bald-o-meter flag to track how well they were doing. Now, keep in mind that I only had 16 participants that year. As you can see, they read 307 books. That's an average of just over 19 books per kids over the summer.

By the way, if you were wondering why my head is so warped, our IT person decided it would be fun to take to pictures (1 from above and the other from the front) and merge them in Photoshop to show how proud we were that they flew past the goal!

One thing that was so exciting about this was that it really got everyone talking about the library in general and being excited about summer reading. Whole families would regularly go down to the young adult area of the library to check the progress on the bald-o-meter. It also made the progress of reading less of a competition between each individual against the rest, but a team effort.

Fantastic Sams kindly donated the shave job. They were probably thrilled the the statewide and local papers send photographers to take pictures. I don't think that I will ever live down the quote, "It feels like a peach!," which was also highlighted in the Sunday edition of the statewide paper of being one of the most significant quotes of the week.

For years, I would do school visits and hear, "Dude, that's the guy from the library who shaved his head."

With all of the excitement that surrounded the simple shaving bet, I decided that it was important to top that with something really interesting. We came up with dying my hair a wacky color. Since I work at the GREENville Public Library, we thought we woud opt to go with green.


I have to really thank Ray's mom for this wonderful picture. She dedicated a lot of time into turning my hair green. We had to bleach it banana yellow because we were concerned that the green would not show through my dark brown hair. Then, she applied the lime green hair dye, which resulted in this interesting mug. I think the kids brok the 350 mark that year, with about 26 kids participating. (That is all from memory, though, since we didn't have my scalp as a surface to record the final numbers.

While, I probably have brought about my hair loss with my scalp-altering antics, it is definitely worth it. The young adults definitely look forward to finding out what crazy thing I am willing to do for the bet.

I mentioned that this year's bet is to be a second tattoo. Some of you also wanted to know what I might get and where. Well, here are my options:

This is the international symbol for library. I was thinking that I might want to get this in blue on my left bicep. It would be appropriate for a library-related activity.


I have always wanted to get the Starfleet symbol as a tattoo. You know me, Mr. Trekkie. It would be a cool choice. The first one is the version from Star Trek: Voyager and the second is from the original series movies. I am not sure which I like better. I was thinking I would get this on the side of my left calf to mirror my current moon tattoo.

I do also eventaully want to get this on my right bicep: