Daydreaming a book

When my brain started going cross-eyed at the reference desk last week, I allowed myself to daydream a little, to work the snarls out of my thoughts before they turned into a gordian knot and I would end up staring dumbly at patrons asking questions such as: "Do you have any books on cats?"

This is what I did: imagined who would play who in a movie adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke's doorstopper of a book on an alternative history of England in which magic returns in the nineteenth century (think Tolkien meets Austen).

Jonathan Strange, young, impetuous magician -- Christian Bale


Mr Norrell, stodgy magician -- Ian Holm


Gentleman with the thistledown hair, fairy king of Lost Hope -- David Bowie


Arabella Strange, patient wife -- Kate Winslet


Lady Emma Pole, condemned to live half her life (she spends her days in England, her evenings in Faerie) at Lost Hope after Mr Norrell bargains with the Gentleman with the thistledown hair to bring her back to life -- Keira Knightley


John Uskglass, The Raven King, the mysterious father of magic in England -- Johnny Depp


One of the fae, a faerie we meet in Lost Hope whose dress is made up of beetles -- Nicole Kidman

Achoo

I suffer from a photic sneeze reflex. Apparently, I'm part of a minority.

Exercise hurts

If you want to torture someone, and they have never done an exercise like this before, make them do decline situps.

Then force them to do it again two days later.

The first time is incredibly difficult. The second time will leave you weeping like a baby. You are using muscles you hardly ever call upon, and they will protest in a painful way (think knives scoring your sides).

This is the ugly truth of exercise. The second time is the worst.

Thankfully it always gets better.

Muscles and looks

I conquered my fear of the free weight room at the Y. That bastion of testosterone, realm of muscled men, was no match for me as I marched in with what feminine pride I had, holding my head high in spite of my inability to lift no more than a fraction of what they could benchpress.

They grinned at each other and looked askance at me as I settled in to do sit-ups, and I realized that I was not leery of them so much as I was of being in a strange place and not knowing what to do with myself while those initiated into the mysteries of free weights could plan their workouts with ease.

I finished and, sitting up, noticed that they spent as much time standing in front of the mirror as they did actually working out. I didn't feel so awkward after all--if guys with thick cords of muscle, at the height of their fitness, still need to look in the mirror and reassure themselves of their appearance, then there's hope for the rest of us.

State dance

"Clogging is named and designated as the official dance of Kentucky." --KRS 2.101

Cultural literacy at its lowest

An exchange Jon had with one of his students:

student: "So how come they have different laws in Holland?"

Jon: "Holland's a different country."

student: "Holland's really cool. They can smoke pot and stuff there! I've seen pictures of coffeehouses that have little scales where they weight out the pot."

Jon: "Well, Holland's a different country. They do things differently there."

student: "So Bush isn't in charge over there?"

Jon (trying to keep a straight face): "No, he's isn't. Holland's a different country. They have their own laws and people in charge."

student: "So you mean Bush isn't in control outside the United States?"

Jon: "No..he isn't."

Words

I have not met a colporteur lately.

Jezebel was defenestrated.

Abrams Falls

Congratulations to my parents for completing a five mile round-trip hike to Abrams Falls in the Smokies this weekend. They might not think it was worth it at the moment, as their aches and pains are still quite fresh (believe me, I can relate!), but the falls were rather glorious in all their rain-swollen force.

First time for everything

Here is a list of the books (from what I can remember) that made up my very first order for the library:

Jesus for president: politics for ordinary radicals, by Shane Claiborne
Apples are from Kazakhstan: the land that disappeared, by Christopher Robbins
The new Christians: dispatches from the emergent frontier, by Tony Jones
Christ plays in ten thousand places: a conversation in spiritual theology, by Eugene Peterson
Human smoke: the beginnings of World War II, the end of civilization, by Nicholson Baker
Nonviolence: 25 lessons from the history of a dangerous idea, by Mark Kurlansky

Free food

Fannie gave us a package of english muffins (minus one). She didn't like them, and since she abhors waste of any kind, she brought them to us.

One of my coworkers said that, normally, she will bring in a loaf of Rainbow bread and offer you a slice ("Just one, mind you!").

An allowance

I'm spending the library's money, specifically on books on religion, international travel, and world history.

That sounds well and good--but it's rather hard. There's a host of considerations to keep in mind. There's the target population (the county, which is overwhelmingly white, mostly conservative), the mission of the library (to help make responsible, well-informed citizens), the purpose of the collection (to educate, but also to provide leisure reading--this is a public library, not a university library).

So, with all that in mind, I approach the catalogs. Is it any wonder I am overwhelmed?

I've been spending time in the stacks, communing (I can't think of another word, and since the library director used this term, I will too) with my sections. This entails not just staring at the books (though there's plenty of that), but considering the strengths and weaknesses of what the library has, looking for potential gaps, deciding what is outdated and needs to go, deciding what should remain in spite of low circulation counts.

So far, I've determined that the Christianity section has nothing targeted at my age group, that we need some more liberal books to balance out the Lucados. The Buddhism section is strong, though I think the books on Judaism and Islam may need some updating. We have two books on Voodoo, due to a patron request.

Trying to maintain a collection that serves the interests of the library's patrons while at the same time maintaining a balance of materials that cover a broad range of subjects is tricky. This means that the Christianity section will be large in proportion to the Islamic section simply because the majority of library patrons are church-going folk (there isn't a mosque in the county that I'm aware of), but we will devote at least shelf to books on Islam so that people can learn about it if they so desire.

All these considerations...

Stories

I am still thinking about Anne Rice's latest book, Christ the Lord: Road to Cana. Its simple prose belies its power. This book sets you quite firmly in the time of Christ: you can feel the dirt of Israel between your toes just as you can feel the keen political tension of a time when the Roman empire covered the known world, and yet above it all is the overwhelming sense of family and community, for the Jews were a powerfully knit people.
In the midst of all this is Yeshua, a quiet and unassuming man whose family and friends watch closely, knowing about his unusual birth and the Magi who gave him a king's ransom. He acts nothing like what they expect, not even knowing himself what is expected of him.
I think what makes this story so powerful is how human Rice makes Yeshua, even as he becomes aware of the entirety of his being. We emphasize with him when he gives up the love he has for a girl, giving her hand to another (theirs is the wedding at Cana), even as we are in awe as he comes into the fullness of his power after John names him at the river Jordan and baptizes him.

from the book:
"'It begins now at this wedding,' I said. 'And the wine you've drunk is for the whole world. Israel is the vessel, yes. But the wine flows from now on for all. Oh, I wish I could fix this as the final triumph, this lovely morning with its gentle paling sky. I wish I could open the gates for all to come and drink of this wine here and now, and that all pain and suffering and suspense would come to an end.
'But I wasn't born for that. I was born to find the way to do this through Time. yes, it is the time of Pontius Pilate. Yes, it is the time of Joseph Caiaphas. Yes, it is the time of Tiberius Caesar. But those men are nothing to me. I've entered history for the whole of it. And I won't be stopped. And I go now, disappointing you, yes, and to what village and town I head next, I don't know, only that I go proclaiming that the kingdom of God is on us, that the kingdom of God is with us, that all must turn and take heed, and I will declare it where the Father tells me I must, and I will find before me the listeners--and the surprises--He has in store.'" (p. 240)

If Yeshua isn't the most perplexing figure in history, I don't know who is. Thousands of years have been spent arguing over the message He proclaimed, and his followers are split into many branches of faith in spite of the central belief they all share. Who is this man?

Anne Rice's story is a thoughtful response to that question.

The story ends with Yeshua healing a deaf-mute girl from his village, one he has known for a long time. There is no magic word spoken, no special wave of the hand. He engages her, requiring her participation in the act of healing, the seemingly innocuous act of teaching her to repeat the prayer "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one" accomplishing the unthinkable: opening her ears and unstopping her tongue.
Thus does a new age begin.

Greetings

Happy birthday, Mom!

Mis-hearing

Fannie thinks I'm getting dumber by the minute. Here's a recent exchange we had (according to what I heard):

Fannie: "Do you know what a Honda mumble mumble is?"

Me: "No, I'm afraid I don't."

Fannie, getting up and looking at me with disgust: "Honey, WAKE UP. What's wrong with you?"

Apparently what she really asked was if I knew what holiday it was.

Welcome to my life. We had a good laugh about it after she left.

Time to roam

The Eskimos have a saying, "Glorious it is when wandering time is come!"

Now that spring is sneaking in, and sweet little green things are rising up, there comes that deep-seated itch to go somewhere, to swing a pack over my shoulders and enter the woods.

The urge comes strongest in the mornings when I go out to the car, and the birds are singing, a call and response among the treetops. It is their call that filled my dreams in the deep slumber of winter, a distant memory of trees and sky and earth and rock.

The naming of names

I hope you have noticed my new profile picture. That is my lovely grandmother Juliette, who I get my middle name from. You can't see it at this size, but there is a "Love Juliette" note scribbled in the lower right-hand corner. It must have been a picture she gave my grandfather, probably during WWII.

Food is a good thing

Fanny has been in a better mood these days. She no longer gripes so much at us--it's more like good-natured grumbling at our apparent idiocy. We think she is eating enough now to function more like a normal human being (cutting back on food was one of her cost-saving measures--she was probably eating saltines for dinner, for all I know).

My coworker told me that sometimes I just need to say "I don't know," to her if the conversation is getting out of hand due to her incomprehensible mumbling and it would be best for both parties concerned to end it.

So I tried it on the phone the other day--it worked!

Fanny: "I'm at the bank!!! You know those mumble mumble mumble I was tellin' ya 'bout?").

me: "Um, I don't know."

Fanny: "Well anyways, I got 'em. GOOD BYE!"

Normally, this conversation would have stretched on and on for five minutes as I tried vainly to understand what Fanny was saying. Really, all she wants is someone to talk to (most of the time, she doesn't much care for what you have to say--sometimes I interject comments like "Yeah, I know about that," and she'll say, "Whatever, I don't care." and keep talking).

The beauty of a hawk is inspiring us this day

How funny is this. I wrote a post about my red-tailed hawk friend just 15 or so minutes ago, puttered around on the internet, then checked my friend's blog--and did a double-take. Apparently he is also up at this early snow-heaped hour, writing a post about my post.

That's the power of the internet for you!

By the way, he included a Robinson Jeffers poem in his response to my post that brilliantly captures what I was vainly grasping at. Read it below:

"Hurt Hawks"

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Beowulf

Beowulf is the dumbest movie I have seen in a while.

What little gravitas it may have had was ruined by the animation. They altered the story beyond forgiveness. And why was Grendel's mother wearing high heels?

Lord of the air

There's a red-tailed hawk that hangs out along a certain part of Winchester Road. The first time I saw him, I thought he was an overweight crow until I got closer and saw the thick body and curved beak. He was eating some unfortunate rabbit, brilliant red meat dangling from his beak.

I saw him again during an ice storm. He was surveying a field from atop a telephone line, ignoring the ice pelleting him. The last time I saw him, in better weather, he was on the telephone line again, getting ready to launch himself into the air.

There's something beautiful about the flight of a hawk.

Rhyme of the ancient mariner

I got a haircut last week, over a year after I thought of getting one. That shows you what a procrastinator I am.

I no longer feel as if I am carrying an albatross after I shower. Who knew water could be so heavy?

A name is a name

Fanny knows me by name now.

One of my fellow coworkers told me that she called him "Mr. Man" for several months before grasping his name.

I don't know whether to be proud or afraid.

The joys of asparagus

The season for asparagus is almost upon us. This makes me very happy. Having a side of steamed asparagus sprinkled with salt is the equivalent of reading a good book, of reaching the summit of some Appalachian mountain after a long climb, of turning the corner and seeing home.

Something unexpected

One day, I walked into the locker room at the gym, expecting little more than the occasional lady here and there stretching or tying her shoelaces.

Instead, I walked into a storm of flesh.

It was nearly an adolescent boy's dream, this riot of flesh, ladies moving to and fro, chatting and laughing as they got ready for work. Through it all, white towels flashed here and there, as quick as lightning, joined by the roar of hair-dryers and the cacophony of feminine voices.

I was dazzled, and not in a good way. A modest person, I unconsciously avert my eyes whenever I encounter someone's nakedness, with the understanding that they will do the same for me. When I encountered this crazy scene, I hardly knew what to do with myself, blinded by this unexpected change from the norm, not knowing where to look, somehow weaving my way to the back.

Undine

Since I liked Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else so much, I looked into what other books she had written.

Just because I like a particular book does not mean I will read everything else that the author has written--I have not read Ursula LeGuin's science fiction works in spite of the fact that I rank her Earthsea books up there with Tolkien, but when I saw that Hunt's first book The Seas was based on Undine, an early German story written about 1812 and somewhat similar to the Little Mermaid fairy tale, I knew I just had to read it. Fairy tale retellings and 'mythic fiction' are my particular favorite styles of fiction.

Wow. What a weird little book. If you want to know what it's like to be inside the head of a disturbed, somewhat mentally off-kilter girl, this is the book for you. I liked it for the lyrical, strong prose and for the unique take on a fairy tale, but I don't know if I will re-read it anytime soon since you are thoroughly inhabiting the mind of this unfortunate girl and it can be an uncomfortable experience. That, and the rendition of the sea as a living, somewhat careless entity creeped me out (I kept thinking of my experience swimming through a bed of seaweed... ugh).

I particularly liked this quote, which probably doesn't make any sense outside of the context of the book, but maybe you can appreciate its irony:
"The possibility that this might be the truth swoops near my head like a bat at dusk, a bat that soon flies off in the other direction uninterested in me" (p. 186).

This girl is so engrossed in her version of things (convincing herself that she is a mermaid; that her father did not drown at sea, but is waiting for her out there; that her friend melted into water after she kissed him) that, even though she is aware of it, she refuses to acknowledge the truth.

Library of Congress on Flickr

Answering the nation's need for womanpower, Mrs. Virginia Davis made arrangement for the care of her two children during the day and joined her husband at work in the Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas. Both are employed under Civil Service in the Asse
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

Check out some neat pictures on flickr. The Library of Congress has uploaded two collections of photographs to flickr as an experiment to see what the response would be in user-tagging and the like.

While the collections have uninspiring titles like "1930s-40s in color" and "News in the 1910s," they are pretty neat to look through.

I just want a good read

A friend introduced me to the reading website Goodreads. You can see that I've added a list of books that I'm currently reading to my sidebar. I'm having too much fun with it, especially categorizing the books I've read so far. My goal is to encapsulate the theme or feel of each book, as this will help with reader's advisory (not that the library does a booming business in that part of reference, but it'd still be nice to appear to be the all-knowing librarian: "Oh, so you want a space-age book that reads like a G.K. Chesterton mystery...?").

I haven't gotten too creative, though my list of shelves is growing. I've created the shelf "mesmerizing" for those books that have stayed with me long after I've read them, either because the prose was incredible, or the story was so real, or it was profoundly affecting. Mesmerizing was the only word I could think of that came close to describing the world-changing feel of these books.

I've just thought of another way to categorize books: character-driven and plot-driven...

Money, money

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I don't want that tax rebate. It's just going straight into savings, in spite of what Bush wants us to do. Why are we increasing our debt just so consumers can continue spending? It's supposedly to help cushion the fall as the spending ballon bursts, but consumers are still going to have to learn to spend less--why dangle that carrot in front of them?

Americans do not understand the concept of living within their means. There's a commercial playing now, where some guy goes into a store to look at big-screen TVs, and the song is: "I want it all...and I want it now." That summarizes the state of things.

The cynical misanthrope in me just had to say something, whether or not you wanted to hear it.

People

Fanny called the library one morning and told my co-worker that Heather French Henry had run for governor of Kentucky.

She called me later that afternoon demanding to know if the tie between Clinton ("that girl out there...not the man!!") and Obama ("that black boy out there!") had been broken during one of their races.

You can appreciate how discombobulating it is to deal with someone who still knows quite a bit, in spite of being slightly off her rocker.

The patron saint of modern electricity

This is how I imagined Tesla while I read the book The Invention of Everything Else. If you have not seen the movie The Prestige, you should.

Electric prose

The invention of everything else is awesome. It focuses on the life of Nikola Tesla and a hotel maid Louisa, and the unlikely friendship that ensues when she is caught snooping through Tesla's papers in his room. A surprising blend of magical realism and science, it is a meditation on time, love, creativity, memory, and all other sorts of things, with a dash of time travel and homing pigeons. The author is a powerful writer.

I saw a blinding light...

If you're interested, Project Blue Book, 1947-1969, UFO Investigations, is free to look at online at Footnote. Just click on the "Browse all titles" link near the top of the homepage and look it up in the alphabetical title list. The website has a special partnership with the National Archives to digitize and make available some of the stuff they have.

That's right--this Project Blue Book is for real, a collection of case files made by the Office of Special Investigations on incidents of UFOs. Whether the subject matter of the book is real is up to the reader to decide.

My admirer

If I interpret Pope's tail behavior correctly, it would appear that this strange little creature absolutely adores me. According to the article "The 9 most common tail positions and what they mean," if, while the cat approaches you with his tail held straight up (a sign that he welcomes you), "the top third of the tail twitches as the cat nears you, this means that he totally adores you." (Planet Cat, page 221).

The extent we go to to convince ourselves that these vain animals actually consider us worthwhile...

Another day at the library

A girl gave me a hug at the library because I showed her where 741.5 is. The sweetness of it took my breath away.

The closed door

Pope does not understand a closed door. There's a subtle principle behind it, no pun intended. Once you are on one side of a closed door, that generally means you're there to stay for a while, that you have some purpose in being on that side of the closed door.

Not so with the cat. He will mew and yowl so that you see his little pink tongue and black gums and look at the closed door and look at you and look back again. So you open it and let him pass, and shut it again, because there was a reason why it was closed. Then 20 seconds later comes the mews and yowls and scratching at the door because, you see, a cat simply cannot tolerate a barrier in his domain. No sooner do you let him out than he wants back in, as soon as he sees that door being shut.

Timid mouse

I was not impressed with Mansfield Park, though it was amusing to see Bionic Woman playing Maria Crawford. The engagement scene at the end was rather cute, but that's about it. I think they tried to modernize Fanny Price for the audience, but the result was a confusing character who did nothing but act timid, in spite of her low-cut dresses (which were oddly lower-cut than those of the Bertrams). You couldn't understand how she would stand up to Sir Thomas when he tried to force her to accept Henry's proposal. Oh well.

Autumn update

Autumn is walking now. I told Jenni: "Now the struggle for independence begins."

Fanny

One day I said "Good morning!" to Fanny as she came in the door. She scowled at me and kept walking, then looked over her shoulder and scowled at me some more.

The associations we come up with

Cumin smells like hiker b.o. after several days.

Jon made lamb korma the other day, and every time I got a whiff, I was immediately transported into the woods. The memory was so strong, I could remember my dirty fingernails, the pack sitting on my hips, the knot of an ache in each of my calves, and the scent of hiker b.o. whenever a breeze came our way. Of course, none of this overrides the joy of being outside, summiting a mountain, seeing bear scat on the trail, seeing trees so tall you lose any sense of exactly how high they reach.

By the way, milk is cheaper at Krogers, according to Fanny.

How people are

For the sake of storytelling, I'm going to name the cantankerous older lady 'Fanny.'

For once, I successfully helped Fanny on Saturday. Instead of leaving in supreme annoyance at me, muttering about who knows what, she accepted the article without complaint and walked away. I had asked the other librarians at the library what exactly it is that she wants from us, just so I could have a framework within which to place her incoherent jumblings (i.e. I can safely assume that she will not be talking about the exotic flora of Hawaii or the dingos of Australia). It turns out that she wants us to read out-loud the headlines from newspapers of the various places she has lived, like Chicago, Louisville, etc. So when she came in muttering, then randomly interjected "Hit Maysville" (Maysville is another place she has lived) in the midst of these ramblings, I was prepared.

Apparently, she must think that the internet is accessible by a button that can somehow read your brain telepathically, so that when you "hit" it, what you desire magically shows up on the screen. Hence her impatience over the fact that you must TYPE everything in.

When all hope is gone

For those of you woefully unaware of the delights that Austen's writing offers, I want to point out that, for the premiere of 'Masterpiece', PBS is putting on an Austen-palooza that runs from now until sometime in April. They've remade several of Austen's books, yet again...but a janeite never tires of these remakes.

Persuasion aired last Sunday. We enjoyed it, even if it was a little rushed. The story was compacted into 1 1/2 hours. One barely had time to appreciate the severity of Fanny's situation before things immediately started looking up again. That was my only complaint. It didn't quite overtake the 1995 version--Ciaran Hinds is a wonderful actor, but, like the 2 most recent Pride & Prejudice movies, I would highly recommend both versions of Persuasion.

Characters at the library

This past weekend at the library was crazy. I think the entire town of Winchester decided to show up--maybe it was their New Year's resolutions to use the library more or something--I've never seen anything like it.
A broad cross-section of the population uses the library, which means you see people from all walks of life, including some eccentrics. I've already met one, a cantankerous older lady who starts talking at you from twenty feet away and doesn't let up until 10, 20 minutes later when she gets fed up with you and leaves. When you first meet her, you think she's mad at everything, but then realize that's (mostly) just her way of talking.
She's very opinionated and insistent. She spent 10 minutes one day preaching at me about how I needed to get a digital TV before 2009--she was quite adamant I needed to get one NOW. She calls the library frequently, sometimes just to let us know that bread and orange juice are cheaper at Kroger. The other day, she told me "it's all going down," due to the new governor, whom she hates with a passion.
On Saturday I met another eccentric, a man who appears to be suffering from numerous mental disorders, including schizophrenia. I didn't realize this at first, just thought he was extremely nervous and frustrated over his email account. That guy got me so confused over exactly what he wanted me to do. Every time I would repeat what he told me, he would change it ever so slightly. The situation was like a gordian knot--you couldn't see how it began, nor how it was going to end. He also got way off tangent by telling me part of his life story, and how there were people out to get him, etc. etc.
The library director rescued me and spent another hour with him, calming him down. She told me later that I did just fine, but since I was a new face at the library, he was nervous.
Another day at the library!

Iorek is awesome

The Golden Compass is very good. I think anyone not familiar with the books will wonder what the brouha is over the movie, as there is nary a whiff of any real religious overtones. The typical menacing Catholic-looking evil guys are there, but then this is the standard stereotype to use in the movies for any evil religious-type organization.

The idea of Dust has been neutered. It's all about free will now. Who can possibly find anything wrong with that idea? I find this rather interesting, as free will comes into play a lot in the books, but not in a way that many religious people would like at face value. I say "face value" because once you scratch past the surface to see what Pullman is really getting at, the "aha" moment will come.

The girl who plays the protagonist Lyra is phenomenal. A complete unknown--a schoolgirl plucked from the crowd of thousands of wanna-be Lyras--she holds her own next to Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. I just realized that my "daemon," the snow leopard, is the same as Lord Asriel's. Those of you familiar with the books will see how odd this is.

The exiled polar bear king Iorek Byrnison alone is worth seeing the movie.

I just made something

I can't believe it! I actually made my very own mashup. It's quite simple and not very useful for anyone but myself and a few janeites (if that). I mashed together RSS feeds from two different Jane Austen blogs, AND sorted the entries by publication dates so that they will be interfiled in the output page. You can see it here: Jane Austen.

This is about the extent of what I can mashup. If you look at the "Create a Pipe" section of the Yahoo Pipes website, you will see how complicated it looks, at least to a layperson like me. (You have to have a yahoo account to look at it). If I had more time, I could probably figure out a few other ways to mash things up by looking at what others have done. I'll save that for a rainy day.

For some really cool mashups, see the Mashup Awards website.

Flickr mashups

Here's something useless but fun, accomplished through Spell with Flickr.

Things mashed up

I'm nearing the finish line with my Learning 2.0 posts!

Mashups are web applications that take data from two or more sources and mix them together (mash them up) to make a new application. For an example, see 1001 Secret Fishing Holes (though one wonders how 'secret' these locations are if they are posted on the web). I've noticed that a lot of people use Google maps in their mashups to do things like show the birthplaces of Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Celebrities, or America's Most Unsafe Cities.

As is the case with any web 2.0 application, there are cool mashups mixed in with a lot of pretty useless ones. Just from browsing the Mashup Directory, I haven't found any mashups that I will use in the future, though this Census Dashboard one is pretty cool. Many of the mashups I looked at either did not work properly, or made no sense. Any "about" pages they may have had tended to be on the rather sparse side--a rather frustrating recurrence.

Part of the reason for this uneven quality of mashups is due to the fact that most of these creators are amateurs, like you and me. Some of them have hit the nail on the head and created rather interesting mashups, while others have some work ahead of them. For now, I'll stick with playing around with Flickr mashups .

Podcasting makes me think of aliens

Our next lesson is on podcasting. It looks like there is a lot of cool stuff out there--it's not just music. There's podcasts on just about anything you can think of, even one on homesteading (unfortunately none just on goats--which would be rather weird: what would you talk about?) Entertainment, politics, health, home and garden, you name it, podcasts cover the whole world of information.

I'm going to return to a personal concern of mine, related to the one about youtube: what about hearing impaired people like me? There's not very many podcasts out there than continually provide transcripts for each show. A quick google search (I only looked at the first two pages of results) turned up two podcasts that had transcripts for shows talking about deaf people, which makes sense...but I'm not really that interested in deaf culture, besides the fact that I just happen to be almost deaf.

This doesn't really bother me, as I am a book person and get my current events stuff from watching TV and reading the newspaper, but this is more based on my personality rather than being hearing impaired. What about those deaf people out there who enjoy this kind of stuff?

Musings on youtube

Youtube is a black hole that will suck you in if you are not careful. One video leads to another, and another, and another, and before you know it, you've just spent all day staring at computer screen.

But it's FUN!

Some of the things I've watched on youtube:
-a praying mantis capturing a mouse (I couldn't believe it!)
-a bike messenger race through New York City (you will cringe, as the camera is mounted on the biker's helmet)
-a showdown between a scorpion and a spider
-gypsies dancing in Romania
-flatfoot dancing
-fainting goats fainting on the field

and...
my very own husband setting off the fire alarm at his school (see below for the video)!

Like any web 2.0 application, youtube has it good points and stupid points (I'm sure there are plenty of frat house parties and other similar wild things that college students will live to regret when they get a job and their employer finds this out). It's good for learning about some really interesting things--where else can you see the Roma gypsies dancing, or a praying mantis catching something--anytime and anywhere? Many people, librarians included, are using youtube as a cheap way to post presentations on a variety of things, like how to do successful research or explaining how something like social bookmarking works (as the people behind the Learning 2.0 here at EKU have taken advantage of).

Youtube could be a way of enhancing library websites--librarians could make short videos that take patrons on a virtual tour of library resources, for instance. Students at universities might appreciate this. I have several concerns. One is the students living off-campus who may not have a robust internet connection that can support streaming video. Will they be left behind?

Another is more personal--what about hearing impaired people like me? I really don't have any use for videos that talk a lot for the obvious reason that I can't understand them. Is there a possibility of adding a closed-caption option to videos on the internet so that people like me can use them?

For now, the only thing I get out of youtube are the videos that rely more on visuals than sound--which is why I watch a lot of animals, or people doing things.

For a rather bizarre youtube video that is more of an inside joke than really interesting, see March of the Librarians.

Jon set the fire alarm off

Here's Jon on youtube...

Ghost riding

Sometimes you find some very random things through your serendipitous browsing of the internet...

I was looking up web design and came across a website that let you make free websites. It had some sample websites, which I looked at to get an idea of their functionality, and I came across this website, Ghost Ride The Whip. Apparently, ghost riding is when someone puts a car in neutral and they get out and dance beside it while it is rolling. It was started by some hip-hoppers in California, but anybody does it, as you will see from this youtube video below.

Putting the old ways to rest

Google Docs is awesome.

It's not as robust as Microsoft Word, but it has all the features I need for pretty much all my writing. If I want to mess with inserting footnotes and all that minute detail, I'll just look at my document in Microsoft Word. It's as easy as that. I can also look at it in PDF or HTML or whatever else I feel like.

That's the beauty of Google Docs. You can access it anywhere, and it is compatible with proprietary software, so there's no headaches of trying to convert documents back and forth. The layout of Google Docs is also straightforward, so there's no steep learning curve. All your basic editing tools are laid out at the top--cut and paste, font magic, insert a photo or table, etc. There's no slight fear of hitting the wrong button and messing the whole document up, as has happened to me with Microsoft Word. (Don't make me tell you about the time I spent with a library patron wrestling with Microsoft Word just to get it to format a single line).

If I were still in school (ha!) I would definitely use Google Docs, if only because the flexibility it affords--I can work on a document anywhere there is internet access and not have to worry about losing my USB drive.

No more school, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks

It is finished!

I managed to slog through the last class I will (ever?) have to take last night, trying to take notes and pay attention (management topics are rather hard to focus on). It's rather strange--I feel like I can officially call myself an adult now that I've completed graduated, even though I've been one for a while now. While my current job is not completely full-time yet, I consider myself successful--not many library graduates find a library job right away when they get out of school, at least not in their field of interest.

Side note: I've been going to school for 23 years (I'm 26)...think about that.

From the bountiful offerings of the web

A lot of web-based applications have popped up on the web. They are usually free, which is nice for those who don't want to shell out big bucks for Microsoft Office or some other expensive software pack. The one I find particularly interesting, and have actually used even before this lesson, is Google docs. It is similar to Microsoft Office and lets you create or upload documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The cool thing about this is that you can access your documents wherever there is the internet. You don't have to carry around a USB drive and lose it (like I did). All you need is a free google account. This will be very attractive to students who want to be able to work on their documents anywhere, or who tend to forget things (like I do).

Wikis, again

Editing the Learning 2.0 @ EKU Sandbox page was obscenely easy. Look for my edits under Favorite TV Shows: Pushing Daisies and Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.

Wikis can be started by just about anyone who has something to say. I guess I could start one on my dream of goats... But I won't. Wikis can be useful for people who want to collaborate on projects together, or for teachers who want to create a website of resources for a class. It could be a good exercise for students to contribute to a wiki. Website creation is not just a random slapping together of links and words--it is something whose purpose needs to be carefully thought out.

Wikis

Today I am learning about wikis. These are basically webpages that can be edited by just about anyone--though, in an effort to prevent erroneous editing, most wikis require editers to set-up an account before they can change or add things to the wikis. The classic example is wikipedia, which I've linked to a lot from my blog. I am a shameless user of this resource, if only to familiarize myself with the wealth of information out there and to see what other users have deemed worthy to include as reference links in their posts. For an example of a really cool entry, see the post on J.R.R. Tolkien. If I'm frustrated with an internet search on some particular topic, I will look it up in wikipedia to see if there are any worthwhile reference links to check out.

Wikis would be very useful to libraries, particularly for behind-the-scenes work. With so much stuff to be aware of, and people located in different parts of the building, it can be hard to keep track of what is going on. Wikis would be a way of consolidating all this information in one place. Giving a particular group of people permission to edit a wiki would enable them to post information to the wiki themselves, instead of relying on a webmaster to do it.

I would love to see a wiki set up for the technical services department of EKU, especially for the serials portion. My supervisor and I each have huge amounts of information related to the journals of EKU, and no good way of sharing it. A wiki could be a way to keep track of projects, publishers, misbehaving journals, etc.

(I feel very funny writing and saying "wiki" a lot).

Delicious links

For those of you who have not noticed, take a moment to admire my wonderful, ever changing list of links immediately to the right of this post, titled "my del.icio.us".
These are all websites I've stumbled across in my unending journey through the web and want to find again.

The beauty of del.icio.us is the ability to tag websites with terms you find meaningful. This tagging feature is particularly helpful once your list of websites to find again grows unwieldly (271 websites and counting..yikes!). I've generated my own variety of tag clouds there. Check out my del.icio.us page to get the full effect.

This tool has become very important to me in my work both at EKU and Clark County. There are tons of websites with information on electronic resources and library technology, as well as countless reference tools that I find invaluable.

Del.icio.us could be a neat tool to add to a library website. Users may appreciate being able to see what their librarians have deemed worthy to bookmark, especially as the wealth of information, both the good and the bad, continues to explode on the web.

What's a tag cloud?

Instead of just being listed alphabetically, varying tags have been "weighted" according to the number of times they have been used in a particular setting, in this case the Michigan State University library catalog. The more times a tag has been used, the larger and bolder it looks in the tag cloud.

I find tag clouds useful, simply because they offer various ways to search for something besides the search terms I used. Instead of wracking my brains for alternative ways to search, I can use tag clouds as a way of reaching materials I may not otherwise ever see.

Tag clouds are created from tags used by people to tag items of interest with terms they think useful. If I were to tag something in Michigan State University's catalog, that tag would probably show up if someone were to search on a related subject. This method, while it seems suspicious to the scholarly researcher, has proven to be quite useful. The odds are quite low that someone is going to take the time to maliciously apply erroneous tags to materials in the hopes of messing up someone's search--who has the time to go through the canon of Renaissance literature in some library's catalog and apply tags like "Fluffy_the_tiger" or "cotton_looms"?

Check out UK's new library catalog, and AADL's catalog for some more examples of tagging.

Go wild with your tagging

I am supposed to consider the joys of tagging for another lesson in the EKU Learning 2.0 series (I am woefully behind):

Maybe some of you have noticed that I've been adding tags to some of my posts. They're not very useful right now, unless I can find a way to get them to display in the right column. Their usefulness grows ever clearer as I realize how helpful they would be in finding some long-ago post. Several times I've had to scroll through my entire blog, trying to find my post on those evil creatures of hell: cave crickets. Imagine how much easier it would be if I just added the tag "cave_crickets" to that well-worn post. All I have to do is click on that tag, and a list of the posts I've created on cave crickets will magically appear.

Now that I've opened an account on flickr, I plan to be diligent in applying tags to each picture. There will come a day when the number of photos on my flickr account will outnumber the grains of sand on a beach and I will be very thankful that I can gather together all pictures of Pope being stupid, or all pictures of our hikes in Damascus, VA, etc.

North & South

Jenni met a fellow Janeite (I can hear Dwain's cries of horror) who loaned her a BBC production of an Elizabeth Gaskell novel, North & South. It takes place during the Victorian age and tells the story of a minister and his family who move north to a mill town because he objected to some religious detail the bishop wanted to force him to acknowledge. They meet a mill owner, Mr. Thornton, who is very business-oriented but still interested in being educated.
There are plenty of clashes between Mr. Thornton and the minister's daughter, Margaret. Of course they fall in love. It's not just a love story, though. There is a lot of commentary on the social and economic issues of the time. The story focuses on the hardship of the mill-workers and the contrasting concerns of the mill-owners. It was very interesting.
The movie was beautifully shot. The scenes within the cotton mill were gorgeous while disturbing. Tufts of cotton filled the air while the looms worked, like snow, yet it was quite clear how damaging it was to the workers, who breathed the stuff in daily and suffered for it. One of the millworkers says, "When I think of hell, it is white."

Literature and faith

A friend recently asked me my opinion on a particular book and how it relates to the Christian faith. I plan to give it some thought because I wish to respect the concerns some people have concerning the book, while at the same time respecting the concerns the book itself raises.

This has made me think about the activity of reading itself, always a rather dangerous thing, and the relationship between reading and life. For children, this relation can sometimes be obscured so that the two are interchangeable, and in other cases it can heighten the similarities and differences between the two so that the reader's understanding of life is transformed, or challenged. We hope for the latter, but sometimes welcome the former.

I know that reading helped me while I was growing up, not only in the more mundane function of developing a better understanding of language that I could not hear, but in dealing with the frustrations of a life that I felt was rather unfair, and still feel the effects of. We all have thorns in our sides that we wish to escape, and for me, reading was my form of escape. For children, they tend to want to escape the thorn of not being an adult (funny that we adults long for childhood when we spent all of it wishing we could grow up faster) or something like that. Reading is one way of doing that.

I used to be all for letting a kid read whatever they want. Now I hesitate, since there are clearly some books that children simply are not mature enough to process or understand fully. How do we determine what books should be saved for later, and what are fine to read whenever? Do we seek to protect a child from the "bad" things of life, knowing that they will have to come to terms with them sooner or later?

What about issues of religion or morality? Should we try to protect children from different ways of thinking, or allow them to work through it on their own? These are hard questions to consider, especially for parents who want to raise their children in a particular faith. It is tempting to restrict the reading of any kind of literature that opposes their particular faith, but such control tends to lead to children determined to read such "rebellious" literature.

So what is a parent to do? My personal inclination is to allow children to read a broad range of literature they so desire, making sure the literature falls within their reading/maturity level. How else can we understand why we believe what we believe if those beliefs have not been challenged? God has survived much worse attacks than that of some book advocating atheism.

Having worked at Joseph-Beth and seeing the kinds of books available, I know that I would be more reluctant to let my kid read series like "Gossip Girls," which advocate a selfish, consumerist, back-stabbing way of life than some book in which faeries and goblins roam, or where the protoganist has encountered some devastating life event and questions the purpose of life.

I'm going to get off my soapbox here, since I'm sure only one person is reading this to the end. :)

It is finished

I break my blogger fast (I doubt any of you would have really wanted to read what I was thinking about, namely controlled vocabularies and strategic planning and all that fun stuff).

I have just turned in my COMPs essay and must now wait to find out whether I am a librarian or not.

I do get a second chance if I don't pass this time.

A "better" accent quiz

Jon says this is a better quiz than the other one.

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Northern You have a Northern accent. That could either be the Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Buffalo accent (easily recognizable) or the Western New England accent that news networks go for.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

What do you sound like?

Here's an interesting quiz.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
Philadelphia
The South
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Clows on the web

I found this endearing essay by my very own dad on the internet. The Clows in the Red River Valley appears to have been written in 1969 (wow, dad existed back then?). There's some funny tidbits, such as the sheriff who drank moonshine, and how my ancestor Charlie Clow accidentally became an American.

This essay popped up in my rambling genealogical search. I'm getting used to doing reference work, and genealogy is a big deal at Clark County (and just about everywhere else, to hear those patrons talk), so I'm researching my own family history to get acquainted with that kind of research.

So far, I've determined that bucketfuls of Clows emigrated to Prince Edward Island (imagine my proximity to Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon!) from Suffolk, England, and from PEI to the Red River Valley in northwestern Minnesota. I also found out that my Grandma was born on the White Earth Reservation in MN (as reported on the census). So I've got some small amount of Ojibwe (Chippewa) blood in me.

An altogether very enjoyable way to work!

A mouse is just a mouse

I helped a lady at the library who had no idea how to use the computer. This observation didn't hit me until after she had left--I could have demonstrated a few basic things for her. My perspective needs to be adjusted. I'm used to working at an academic library where everyone knows how to use the computer and is keeping up with the trends. At the public library, they offer beginning computer classes. By beginning, I mean they literally start at the beginning, demonstrating how to turn on the computer, use the mouse, etc.

This is one of the reasons why I like working in libraries, and why public libraries hold a special place in my heart. They are the poor man's university, often the only place where people can access information through free books and the internet.

Fashionable disability aids

This is a hearing aid.

In animal print.

Is this a style of hearing aid my audiologist will recommend when I go and get checked out?

Killing ourselves thinking

The power of the brain amazes me.

Somehow I am able to go from whining about a paper, the initial composition of which is like pulling teeth, to knowing exactly what to write and tying it all together in a logical fashion. It's that in-between period that I can't understand. What happens that enables the finished product?

All I know is that while your conscious part feels dead, somehow the unconscious part is plugging away, percolating ideas while you sleep, while you stare aimlessly into space. I first discovered this while studying for exams--we would study late into the night, force ourselves to sleep at least 4 hours, then get up and study a little more before the test.

Somehow, things made more sense after sleeping than before. We no longer had to cram stuff in--it was already neatly organized in our thoughts, like a book had been written and filed away while we slept, and all we needed to do when taking the test was to pull that book out.

Meet my daemon

We are family

We went to Aunt Opal's 90th birthday celebration in Springfield, Ohio this past weekend. Debbie has a large and rather rambunctious family. I'm still a little shell shocked from all the noise, but it was neat to meet some more of her folks and see how far the Noble & Ryman side of the family extend.
Aunt Opal let Jon and I root through one of her desks (which looked like it hadn't been touched since the 40's), so we had a lot of fun looking at old pictures of the Ryman family, various papers, the inevitable bullet casing, pocketknives--all the stuff you find in old desks. I think this is why I like to go antiquing--not necessarily to buy anything, but just to look at old things and imagine their history.

Tagging and cataloging should be friends

Tagging is Web 2.0's answer to cataloging. Basically, you assign a word or term that you think is important to whatever item you want to find again, like a website or a picture. This is particularly helpful when you've accumulated a big list of pictures and want find all the pictures of your pet porcupine Prickly. You can tag those pictures "porcupine" or "Prickly" or "pet" or whatever term is meaningful to you.

Tagging becomes pretty cool when you can share your tags with other people, such as on the website LibraryThing. You can see if other people have used the same tags as you, or if they have better tags. This social aspect of tagging ties into the concept of Web 2.0, where people can share information and even create information together.

Some libraries are joining the tagging bandwagon, such as UK Libraries with their Encore interface or the Ann Arbor District Library, which allows its patrons to tag materials in the catalog.

I think this is all very cool, even if some librarians don't. Some catalogers are decrying tagging, saying it is akin to letting a bunch of typing monkeys go wild in the world of information, which should be carefully organized and categorized just so. I think they're missing the point of tagging. It's just another form of organization, albeit a much more relaxed one.

Besides, I think the popularity of tagging should be a clue that users don't find much use for the standard library catalog (what do you expect if the standard subject heading is "cookery" not "cooking"?), which is static in comparison to the dynamics of the web. I'm not advocating the abolishment of subject headings (they're still quite helpful for researchers), rather pointing to the need for libraries to evolve and take advantage of new technology.

The unending search for knowledge

A search on Wendell Berry in google turns up 1,150,000 hits. How much of this is actually relevant to what I'm interested in is anybody's guess, but google does a pretty good job of pulling the good stuff to the very top.


A keyword search in EKU's library catalog, eQuest, turns up 92 results. A subject search in eQuest brings back 9 hits, while an author search brings back 69 hits ( the man is a prolific writer!)

Obviously the results list for these searches in eQuest is much smaller because the search was limited to just what the library actually owns . This is good for those of us who are physically stuck in the Crabbe Library and just want to know what books there are for us to touch.

Searches in eQuest will bring back much smaller, precise results, especially if one limits the search to subject headings or author headings--those carefully controlled terms that only a select few can establish, and which are only applied to those records that are explicitly about those certain subjects, or written by those particular authors.

For example, the subject heading "Berry, Wendell, 1934- --Criticism and interpretation" will only be attached to records for books that are actually studies of Mr. Berry's books, so one can be pretty certain that searching by this subject heading will bring back only relevant results, not some children's book that happens to have the words "berry" and "interpretation" scattered somewhere in the text.

Compare this with a google search, which does not rely on actual assigned subject headings, but on different factors, such as the number of times a certain word shows up in a website, and what part of the website it appears in (in the title of a website, or down at the bottom?). But while a google search will inevitably bring in some irrelevant results, it still does a pretty good job in pointing out many websites of interest. Hence, the googlization of the world (of which I am a happy partaker).

My favorite way of searching for books is to do keyword searches in Amazon. When I find a book of interest, I'll search for it in my library catalog, or worldcat (notice the worldcat search box in my blog?), to see what subject headings it has been given, and search library catalogs by those subject headings. I've found quite a few things of interest this way.

And the pile of things to read grows and grows..

Making friends

A junco made friends with us on top of Grassy Ridge in Roan Mountain State Park, TN.

We were admiring the view of Roan Mountain and the surrounding ridges when Jon whispered, "There's something coming our way." No sooner had he said that than this little slate-colored bird fearlessly stuck its head around the rocks we were sitting on. We must not have appeared threatening because it approached us and took its time hopping a circle around us on the rock, pecking here and there, clicking its beak, fixing us with a curious eye now and then. I could have reached out and touched it.

While we're on animal matters... a mouse landed on my head while I was asleep in the Fire Warden's cabin on Roan Mountain. It must have been making a flying leap for our food bag, which was suspended from a mouse deterrent hanging from the ceiling. I don't think either of us was very happy with the situation.

Resumes

I'm working on my resume and not enjoying it at all. How does one convey that you are knowledgeable about something even if you don't know it all? Writing down my skills and qualifications always makes me feel as if I am over-stating myself. I hate these types of grey areas, especially in such a changing field as libraries where technology keeps leaping forward like Hagrid's skrewts.

I just want to say: here I am. I do a good job because I am always learning.

Here there be dragons

Fairy tales are more than true,
not because they tell us that dragons exist,
but because they teach us that dragons can be defeated.
G.K. Chesterton

There's something fishy here

Dwain and Miah had a sushi bonanza last night.

I think I can safely say that I will never, not ever, like the taste of raw fish all by itself. Having tried it twice over the past year, I can safely add it to my list of abominable tasting things (which is very short, thankfully) and never try it again.

However, the sushi rolls (rice, seaweed, various veggies, some raw thing or other) were quite delicious.

In-laws

In-laws
Originally uploaded by ozimanndias8

The Edwards...

I'm trying to figure out how flickr posts to blogger.

A tooth

Autumn has a tooth now. If only it were this easy to excite such declarations of pride in our loved ones.

We saw her last Saturday, and I can't get over how she keeps changing. Perhaps the most unnerving of all was the fact that she has started thinking. She would gaze at you with a somber expression and it was quite clear that she was sizing you up. Not unlike suffering the steady gaze of a cat (of which I suffered plenty last night).

Down to the creek

A place that I consider very dear to my heart is no longer in the family. My aunt and uncle have moved away from their place in the country. They had no choice in the matter, so I am quite happy that they have found a wonderful new home.

But there is still a queer sensation in my stomach as I think about the lane Jenny, Rosie, and I walked down countless times, gravel crunching underneath as we laughed and talked about everything--boys, friends, school, books, everything silly and serious that concerns growing girls.

The cats and dogs would always keep us company, the cats pretending that they just happened to be heading our way, the dogs too stupid to care about pretense. They would leap and prance, snapping at the air, happy to be going somewhere. There was nearly always a hawk in the air, hunting in the fields bordering the lane.

We would cross the road at the end of the lane and forge our way through the sharp waist-high prairie grass to the creek--for the creek was nearly always our destination, a hidden place. You never knew where exactly its path was until you nearly fell in, for the creek was always changing its way through the grass, subtly, slowly with each passing year.

It seems we grew up there, though I know we hardly went there as often as memory misleads me to think. But we went often enough that it has become a backdrop for my childhood--the prairie grass and the wide open wind mixing with such sensations as the smell of woodsmoke and the harsh scrape of Grandpa's mustache when he kissed my cheek and the crisp page of a book in my hands as my parents and I all sit quietly together, reading.

All this serves to tell me what this queerness is: I am grieving.

I should also mention that this paper is a management paper.

Ugh.

I have read too many quasi-scientific papers in which the behaviors of the human race have been reduced to numbers that somehow fit into an equation that purports to predict how they will act next.

Jon told me, "Welcome to the scientific method."

He also said that if psychologists can predict what people will do 20% of the time, they are considered geniuses. He would never have approached his adviser with results that abysmally low in his soil science experiments.

A ring of fire

I finally understand why I procrastinate.

When I am working on a project, particularly a paper, it tends to take over my life. I live and breathe the project to the point where it becomes like the ring of fire that encompasses Frodo's life towards the end of his quest. It becomes the only real thing in my life, and everything else a shadow, while the paper is being formed in my mind, random ideas being knitted together into coherent sentences.

Even my dreams are affected (I am a wonderful sleeper, to Jon's chagrin, except during these times), becoming like fretful little squirrels in the face of the behemoth that has taken up residence in my head.

I don't like it. So I procrastinate.

Lolcats

Here are a couple silly pictures from a silly website I found out about through facebook:

Will the circle be unbroken?

A lady I worked with at EKU passed away unexpectedly last week. Her desk was on the other side of mine, behind a flimsy cubicle wall. Throughout the day, I could catch glimpses of her movements through a crack in that wall--picking up a journal, sitting in her chair--myriad actions that reminded me that someone was on the other side, always ready for a little chat...

I don't know why I dwell on such an ordinary memory, something that doesn't indicate our growing friendship, other than that remembering those fleeting glimpses makes the present all the more stark: her chair is empty, the computer screen on her desk black.

The ordering of love

Madeleine L'Engle passed away recently.


I don't remember when I first read her books. My memory of them is timeless, like that of my parents. They've been there since before I can remember, before I even knew that memories are something to be made and cherished, what the older folk meditate on in their later years.

Electronic resources madness

The past couple of days have been a little crazy, work-wise. A librarian emailed ERIL, an electronic resources listserv, asking if anyone had started compiling a list of publishers and their perpetual access policies (for those of you happily unaware of what this means, I think you should remain so, if not, go here for clarification). I innocently responded that I had started such a spreadsheet and would be happy to share.

Well.

If I counted correctly (I can't make the picture above any clearer), I got about 170 responses within the past two days, mostly of "me too!" emails. There were even some responses from abroad: Hong Kong, France, England, Slovenia, Beirut! Obviously this is a big issue.

The cool thing about all this is that my supervisor, electronic resources librarian Kelly Smith, and some other people associated with ER&L (Electronic Resources & Libraries) are going to start developing a wiki (a website that can be edited by anyone) that will be based on this spreadsheet so interested people can contribute to this ongoing project.

Animals everywhere

Here is some of the wildlife we saw:

1) wild turkey

2) Southeastern five-lined skink

We almost saw a black bear.

These don't count:

-deer

-squirrel

Wise old sages

Hooray for Professor Dumbledore!

Oh the things I never knew

I found out about some funny quizzes through the blog of one of the librarians here at EKU :

What Kind of Guy Will You Fall For?
	You would fall for the geek. If you're looking for love, consider spending a little more time studying up in the library. To you, there's nothing more attractive than intelligence, shyness, and kindness; your future love may have four eyes and zero social skills, but he'll make up for it in brains and heart.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Which Disney Villain Are You?
	You are Lady Tremaine. You're the evil stepmother little girls have nightmares about. Hooray for you, who helped kids learn to love their birth parents and do everything possible to avoid stepparents. Next time, though, be careful not to get in between a girl and her dreams.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

Which Harry Potter Character Are You?
	You are Dumbledore. You're the wise sage in any group. With your guidance, any situation can be resolved in the fairest way possible.
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

The merry-go-round of web 2.0 applications

I'm not too interested in learning about all the web 2.0 applications out there simply because there's so much out there! You can create online "to-do" lists, make your own wiki, join all sorts of social networking sites, make your own travel page, etc. etc. etc. etc. If you want to dive into the madness yourself, go to Web2List yourself.

We're supposed to write about something that might be useful for work. So here's what I found before I got web 2.0 fatigue: Connotea. This is a "free online reference management" tool that lets you save citations and webpages to your account for easy access later. This is certainly a helpful tool to recommend for researchers. I haven't explored it too much--I wonder if it allows you to save citations from databases that the library subscribes to?

For fun, here's a link for all you scrapbookers out there: Scrapblog. This is a free website that lets you create online scrapbook pages. Here's a sample scrapbook: Old Wind Gap Postcards. This has a nostalgic flair to it. Here's another one, made by one of the PLCMC people who created the original Learning 2.0 playground: My favorite books (warning: this contains some Jane Austen pictures).

Sense of s p a c e

The personal space bubble of people from abroad is quite different than that of Americans. Jon and I were routinely elbowed off various trails in the Smokies by large Indian families. They weren't being rude, though it was hard to be gracious after several close calls with the dangerous edge to nothing but a graceful dive into the welcoming arms of the rocks below.

Out in the mountains

Jon and I just got back from a weekend in the Smokies. We stayed at Standing Bear Farm, which is located about 200 yards from the Appalachian Trail, right on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. It is nestled in a little hollow, with mountains rising up on either side--absolutely beautiful!
The cabin we stayed at sat on top of a stream (though there wasn't much of one while we were there). When Jon first stayed here, back when he was hiking the AT, he said the sound of running water lulled him to sleep. There was an outhouse and a snug shed with hot water for washing up and showering. Everything the body needs--though I was a little nervous about going into the outhouse with 2 huge wolfish spiders nesting in the corner, until Jon investigated and told me that they were dead.
We biked through Cade's Cove, where I had my first accident on my bike, and hiked up to some old growth trees above Laurel Falls on Saturday. On Sunday, Jon climbed the road on his bike up to Clingman's Dome while I did some hiking. We met up at the top and admired the spectacular view of the fog. On our way back down, I drove behind him while he descended on his bike. I had a hard time keeping up with him in spots--he was going over the speed limit of 35 mph!
A very pleasant way to spend the weekend, though I'm a little sore from all the activity!