zzzzzz

I'm back from sunny, humid, sweaty, busy Florida. And I'm pooped.

I see London

Oh my goodness. These are brand new to me, unusual but kinda cool. I think this is my favorite one.

raindrops

It's rainy and cold here. It's supposed to be rainy and warm in Florida. Which is better?

Two lilies bloomed out front today:



It looks like a lot more will be blooming while I'm gone (rats).

T-minus 32 hours

I can hardly believe it's time for Annual Conference again! I'll soon be winging my way to sunny Florida for a meeting- and reception-filled visit to several of the finer Orlando hotels and Conference Center. I've never been to FL before, so I'm not entirely sure what to expect. I'm taking plenty of SPF with me, despite the fact that I will more than likely be inside during virtually all peak sunburn hours. I have yet to find a suitable hat, but hopefully I'll figger that out tomorrow. Must protect my already freckle-ridden nose from further sun trauma. Several of my librarian pals are also going, and at the very least we'll all have dinner our first night. We'll all end up at a lot of the same receptions, I'm sure.

To sum up, if I seem to disappear from the face of the earth for the next week or so, I'm not actually dead, I'm just in Florida.

bad blogger

Wow, it's been an entire week since I've posted. Bad me! Sk88 had two shows in the meantime, both of which went really well, and I've been lucky enough to have K. visiting all week while helping out on a horror film being made near Harrison. The movie-making's been really cool and fun to watch, but having K. here has been better than I can put words to. I'm a big sappy ball of mush - happier than I can describe and using capital-letter words (L, M) all willy-nilly because they feel true. I know! Watch out for that apocalypse, 'cause this gal's in Love.

'an over-stimulated librarian'

Bookslut did an interview with Chuck Palahniuk. !

signage

I think that this could very well replace our current Reference Desk signage.

wtf

split personalities?

for the crafty geek:

paper, love, and glue

black and white

I decided after I posted that photo of Brodie that I liked it better in black and white:

oh and

I took a photo of Brodie the other day that I thought turned out well. He was on the verge of sleep, thus sitting still for once.

incognito mosquito

Bill and I walked the dogs at Millpond Park on Saturday afternoon. There were a lot of mosquitoes, but I managed to only get a few bites. I'm so paranoid of mosquito bites these days.


This was the gross man-made pond that stagnant water had apparently at some point flowed into. Who makes a friggin' heart-shaped pond?


This was written on the railing at the scenic overlook (scene being the gross pond). It's out of focus, but I thought it was funny enough to post anyway.


Bill encouraged me to take a photo of the water. There it is.

meta

from Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman:

p.12
Chain bookstores always amaze me, because it seems like someone has written a book about absolutely everything. I think that's why bookstores have become the hot place for single adults to hook up - bookstores have a built-in pickup line that always fits the situation. You simply walk up to any desirable person in the place, look at whatever section they're in, and you say (with a certain sense of endearing bewilderment), "Isn't it insane how many books there are about ____?" Fill in the blank with whatever subject at which the individual happens to be looking, and you will always seem perceptive.

p.18
Whenever people look back at their grammar school days, they inevitably insist that they remember feeling "safe" or "pure" or "hungry for discovery." Of course, the people who say these things are lying (or stupid, or both). It's revisionist history; it's someone trying to describe how it felt to be eleven by comparing it to how it feels to be thirty-one, and it has nothing to do with how things really were. When you actually are eleven, your life always feels exhaustively normal because your definition of "normal" is whatever is going on at the moment. You view the entire concept of "life" as your life, because you have nothing else to measure it to. Unless your mom dies or you get your foot caught in the family lawnmower, every part of childhood happens exactly as it should. It's the only way things can happen.

p.21
Like all great '80s music, [Shout at the Devil] was inadvertently post-modern: The significance of Shout at the Devil had nothing to do with the concepts it introduced; its significance was the concept of what it literally was.

p.22
John Hughes movies like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles were perfect period pieces for their era - all his characters were obsessed with overwrought, self-centered personal problems, exactly like the rest of us.

p.23
As long as I can remember, all good rock bands told lies about themselves and dressed like freaks; that was part of what defined being a "rock star." Motley Crue was a little more overt about following this criteria, but that only made me like them immediately.

p.31
Listening to Clapton is like getting a sensual massage from a woman you've loved for the past ten years; listening to Van Halen is like having the best sex of your life with three foxy nursing students you met at a Tastee Freez.

p.33
This may sound trite, but things really do slow down when you're about to have an auto wreck. There's that little moment of clarity where you remain spookily calm and find yourself thinking something ridiculously understated, such as, "Gosh, this is going to be problematic." But as soon as your paws instinctively clutch the steering wheel with nature's biological death grip, everything kicks into overdrive. The vehicle suddenly moves in three different directions at once, there is a horrific metallic sound coming from somewhere, and every fabric of your existence is pushing the brake pedal into the floorboard. The impact happens in half a moment and then - just as suddenly - everything stops and then you freak out. That's when it feels like your heart is going to explode, and you feel your hand shake as you inexplicably turn off the radio. The scariest part of any car accident is the first thirty seconds (when you realize you're not dead).

------
More proof of how big a geek I am (not that there's anything wrong with that): while typing out the above quotes, I was looking at my notebook (not the screen), and I realized I type HTML along with text without any break in the thought process, as if tags are just another sort of punctuation mark.

Also funny: the spellchecker suggests 'Lenore' as a replacement for 'lawnmower.'

somewhere they're meeting on a pin head

Holy wow, it's been an eventful coupla days. Saturday evening I was feeling restless and in need of some excitement so I hopped in the car on the spur of the moment and headed down to the Lager House to see my pals and labelmates The Fightin' Hellfish. As it turned out, I got to meet a certain fella I'd been very much looking forward to meeting, and we hit it off mega. So now I'm all schoolgirl giddy and can't keep from smiling all the time. I am seriously ridiculous.

important and hard to see

I put in John Henry this morning to listen to while I got ready for the day, and the first track, Subliminal, just took me right back to the time when the record came out.

I remember using the lyric "as I went through the windshield I noticed something" as the subject line in an email to my mom, and her freaking out because she thought I had been in a car accident.

I remember being on the They email discussion list that grew out of the gopher/ftp stuff we all used to run back before The Web came into existence and the obsessive detail people on that list went into when analyzing lyrics. The backwards part at the end of Subliminal sounded, to someone, like "smearin' lemonade and mothballs on the windowsill," and even now I can never not hear it that way.

I've lost touch with most, if not all, of the people from those days. I miss them. It was such a good community and when we met up at shows it was like we'd all hung out for a thousand years, even though many of us hadn't ever met in person before. I know that K is studying to be a librarian in PA, and that J got married and had a baby and lives macrobiotically in Minnesota. But that's about all, and even that information is at least a year old. I'm going to have to see if I can find some of those folks one of these days. I looked today and tmbg.org hasn't been updated in over a year. But all the old interpretations of song lyrics are still there. Man, this takes me back.

ringing all the warning bells

Okay, so it's clear that I've been listening to far too much emo music lately. Read through a few of my recent posts and christ am I whiney! Here's me promising not to be so serious here all the time.

Today is totally gorgeous out! I missed most of it, of course, being inside working, but there's still some sun left. And Brodie is quietly snoring, laying in a patch of sun with his head on my feet. How much better does it get than that? And I'm going to see Harry Potter 3 with coworker friends in a little over an hour, and then heading to the Bird with a friend later on. Woot!

The dating scene is looking up these days. It seems I may not be the lame old lady hermit I sometimes mistake myself for after all. There are a few prospects on the horizon. Whether they turn into dates or friends, I'll be happy.

Listening to: Guster - Keep It Together
Mood: nearly giddy with optimism

how could I miscalculate

This morning I dreamt that I was with a fella. Physically, he was two people at once, one an ex from several years back (let's call him F) and another a current potential interest (this one'll be G). He was more G, or was G more of the time. He also had some characteristics of T (most recent ex).

We met and fell into an intense Love. For some reason we were separated for a few days due to some extraneous circumstance, a conference or something. Something happened. I was unaware of the details, but I knew something had caused him to feel differently about me in some way (not necessarily not love me, but just - change in some way). Of course there were obstacles so that when I finally reached him I felt a bit desperate about it - it was imperative that we speak.

When we met he was wearing a white-with-very-subtle-blue-stripes casual dress shirt. We embraced and no words were spoken but all was resolved, it seemed. There was a very mild sexual interlude, almost too mild to exist. Then, though, everything changed slowly. He made some comment about a scar on my hip and said something about people finding scars sexy (this is a conversation I had w/T in real life about five months ago). When I started to speak, he turned his head so that I could see two long, stitched-up scars, one on either side of his neck and running from below his ear to under his chin. It was obvious he had attempted to slit his throat on both sides and I didn't know what to say. I woke up before I thought of anything.

I've got my own take on it, but anyone else care to analyze?

the bullet or the chapstick

Today I had the first post-break-up conversation with my most recent ex. It's been over a month, but I was hesitant. Via IM, which I was not very optimistic about, but it was okay. Mostly it just made me remember why I'm so sad when I think about him. I do want him to be happy, but I take a little comfort in knowing it won't be easy for him to find someone with whom he connects so well. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. I don't have the big scary jealous feelings I used to when thinking of him living his own life and me not being included, though, so apparently time is doing what it's supposed to.

swoon

We had Sk88 practice tonight and a few songs in I almost passed out. It was a little bit scary, but mostly just annoying. I caught myself wavering so I didn't actually fall, but then I was all hot-and-cold and had to drink some ice water and sit down for awhile. I am such a whiner - I hate being weak.

The bandmates and I went to the big evil W store before practice and I saw a friend and an old ex-bf shopping together. I wanted to say hello to the friend, but wanted to avoid the ex, so I just pretended I didn't see them. I felt like shit about it, but I did it anyway.

I feel like Neville (who died of ennui) tonight. I hope I have some good dreams.

chat

Wow! I just participated in a chat with Ellen Wittlinger, author of Hard Love and many other great books. It was amazing! Not only did Ms. Wittlinger have lots of fascinating things to tell us, it was a veritable authors' get-together. Nancy Werlin was the host, and Annette Curtis Klaus, Gail Giles, Alex Flinn, Lara Zeises, and several others participated, too. Everyone had great questions, too. Woot!

the right idea

As my pal Kate put it, this is the way to do it.

kids these days

Take a look at this article (login: anneland - password: anneland). Thoughts?