Larocque and Roll

February’s catch February 28, 2007

I’m not likely to finish the book I’m currently reading before the end of the day, and I have some time to kill, so here are the books I read in February.

~ Heather O’Neil, Lullabies for Little Criminals (6) (It’s one of the Canada Reads books. I’m afraid I didn’t like it all that much - I found the narrator to be too precocious, too prone to exaggeration, and too bleak.)

~ John Green, Looking for Alaska (7)
~ Gordon Korman, Born to Rock (7)
~ Poppy Z. Brite, D*U*C*K (8)

(These three I read in two days; none of them were very long, and they were all pretty good.)

~ Christopher Rice, Light Before Day (8) (SO much better than the first book of his which I read, despite very dark themes.)

~ Sue Haasler, Time After Time (4)
~ Sophie Kinsella, Can You Keep A Secret? (3.5)

I feel stupider for having read these two. At the time, I wanted something fluffy to read, but this just turned my brains to mush. (Note to Julie: Put down the Shopaholic book, and back away slowly!)

~ Charles de Lint, The Blue Girl (7) (Like meeting up with an old friend and finding out nothing has changed, but they have all sorts of new stories to tell you.)

Right now, I’m working my way through Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it’s a facinating read.

Thoughts on blogging February 25, 2007

One of the benefits of staying home sick is having a lot of time to watch TV without interruption. The downside is that occasionally you come across a video getting waaaaay too much airplay, and it gets stuck in your head. I’m looking at you, Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” - damn you and your “to the left, to the left” [1].

The other thing it gave me time to do was come up with five reasons why I blog.

1. Keeping in touch.
Everyone in my family participates in regular email correspondence with each other, some of us more than others. I’m somewhere in the middle as fas as consistency goes, and I like to think that my blog is a way of filling in the bits I forget to tell them in my irregular emails.

It’s also a way of keeping in touch with friends and enemies across the country and in other exotic locals.

2. It’s all about me.
I’m not so modest that I’m not going to say I don’t enjoy having a soapbox on which to stand and have my say or show off my talents and hobbies.

3. A sequence of events.
I’ve never been good at keeping a diary or any other sort of time-monitoring device because I tend to get distracted, or I forget, or something like that. Having a blog helps me to remember roughly what I was doing around this time last year.

4. Creative outlet.
When I was in high school, I loved to write, and I did it quite a bit. Then I hit university, and… not so much with the creative writing any more. It’s been like that for a few years, and having somewhere to write where it’s read.

5. I don’t have a fifth reason.
Seriously - two days lying on the couch and I couldn’t come up with a fifth reason.

Another thing I couldn’t come up with? Enough people to tag. Let’s see - J, Julie, Randal, and Mary-lynn. And anyone else who wants to do it.

[1] Which, as I’d sing along with the video, I’d inevitably point to the right. I’d blame the fever, but I’m usually that spazzy without illness.

Man of the house

I have a new man in my life. He’s 8 years old, black, and furry.

Meet Bing.

I adopted him from a friend who’s had him for a few years, and he’s a perfectly sweet cat. He arrived this afternoon, and has been cruising around, getting to know the place. He’s especially fond of the cat door to the basement.

So, in addition to being a librarian blogger and a knitting blogger, I’m now becoming a cat blogger. This is some kind of trifecta I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about.

Is there a doctor in the house? February 21, 2007

Well, Beth is, but that’s not the kind of doctor I want right now. It seems I’ve caught the stomach flu bug that’s going around town - yesterday morning I was a little queasy, which turned into full-blown yucky by noon, so I went home. I’m home again today, nursing a sore tummy, drinking ginger ale, and occasionally trying to nibble on graham crackers or toast.

On a positive note, I can watch all the Food TV I want and it doesn’t bother me. Except that I’m really hungry and totally pissed that I can’t eat anything I’ve seen prepared today.

Oh, and I’m super-extra pissed that I didn’t get to gorge myself on pancakes last night (yesterday being Mardis Gras and all.)

Beth - I promise I’ll do the meme as soon as I can!

I love you - I really do! February 17, 2007

Sometime last week when I upgraded WordPress, I lost some stuff which I haven’t been able to recover [1]. Such as the original About page, my NaNo excerpts, and my Blogroll page. That last one is the one I’m most disappointed about, because I don’t have a backup of it [2] anywhere else.

I’ll do what I can to get it up and running again tonight.

[1] Jody did what he could to help, but alas, it was not meant to be.
[2] Not that I had backups of any of the other pages, but I’m not as sad about loosing them.

I’m not fast, but I’m slow February 14, 2007

Yesterday I was having a conversation with someone about bands that were popular when I was in university, and I completely blanked on the name of the duo who released an album called “Kombinator” which had several catchy tracks on it. I knew there was an ostrich and a cornfield on the cover, but that was it.

I can’t remember with whom I was having the conversation, but if it was you, I finally just remembered the band name - The Inbreds.

Ta-da!

(Oh, and today was St. Valentine’s Day. I got a heart shaped cookie at work and a cute heart shaped box from my mother.)

Did someone say “knitting”? February 10, 2007

Remember when I was lamenting that I didn’t have any knitting projects to fill the void left by my finishing my mother’s socks? Well I don’t really have an equally demanding project to stimulate my attention, but I am working on a few other little things at the moment.

First are the squares for the cancer blanket the knitting guild is working on.

The yarn was from a grab bag the guild president bought. It is a pleasing shade of blue, and I’ll be sorry to be finished with it. (On a side note to Cynthia: I have four squares for the Warming Grace blankets which I unearthed a few weeks ago. When I get my act together - surely, I will be dangerous if that ever happens - I’ll mail them off.)

Next is the scarf.

The stitch pattern is called “seafoam”, and it comes from the Vogue Knitting Stitchionary Vol. 1: Knit & Purl. I like this pattern - it’s not exactly mindless, but it doesn’t require me to devote all my attention to what I’m doing. However, I’ve almost finished the ball and I don’t have any more of that particular colour, so I’m going to frog it and do something else. It’s a shame because it looks so cool. Maybe I’ll just redo it at a narrower width.

Finally, we have the project which was meant to be the sock-replacer: Fetching with alpaca.

Don’t get excited about it - for starters, the yarn is a dark brown, even though it looks orange there. Also, the yarn is much too thick for the project - either I have to find bigger needles or yarn that gets gauge closer to what the pattern calls for. I think I’m just going to try to find yarn that’s closer to what the pattern calls for and save this one for something else.

And then there’s this

I love the material - the plan is to take it apart and use the material for other projects. What exactly I don’t know yet, but it will come to me.

Now we come to the fun stuff. At work, a couple of the librarians booked all the display cases for the month of December to give everyone a chance to show off our crafts we’ve made over the year. I promised a friend I’d make him a We Call Them Pirates hat because it’s the kind of badass thing he’d wear. I’ve decided this is going to be *my* contribution because it’s the kind of practical, show-offy yet clever thing I’d do.

Beware the Books of January! February 5, 2007

I read four books this month, and nothing really lept out and captured my interest.

Jacklyn Moriarity, A Year of Secret Assignments (4)
Gordon Korman, Son of Interflux (6)
Libby Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty (6)
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Match Me If You Can (7)

The Korman book I read multiple times in my youth, and I’m struck how well it stands up. There are some dated references, but not all that many.

Seasonally appropriate February 4, 2007

It’s hard to imagine that just two days ago, I was wandering from the MTCC to another building nearby without a jacket, mittens, or scarf without being cold. Now that I’m home in North Bay, and the weather has finally started being seasonally appropriate, I can’t imagine not wearing a hat, scarf, handwarmers and mittens just to walk to my car. Tonight it’s -22 and dropping - so cold that the snow squeaks when you walk on it.

The other seasonally appropriate occurance was the considerable snowfall we had between my leaving Tuesday and my arriving home last night, which was somewhere in the neighbourhood of two or more feet. I had to dig my poor little car out of a considerable snowbank when I got back to the train/bus station. And this was on top of the snow we already had.

So! The conference! I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath to hear how it went, since I was not so much writing about it while I was there. I’d have to say that this was one of the better OLA conferences I’ve been to in recent years. I went to many excellent sessions, and only walked out of one which was largely irrelevant to my interestes (in addition to being not at all what I hoped it would be.) If I were to list all the people I met and want to extend greetings to, I’d be here until tomorrow - suffice to say, if we talked, I’d just like to say “HI!” and I look forward to emailing/speaking/meeting with you over the next little while.

The biggest problem with these conferences is that I always come away with a million ideas which I’d like to implement (A wiki for the employee manual? Sure! A blog for my department to publicize our recent aquisitions? Very necessary! Genealogy podcasting? Why aren’t we already doing that!) However, I feel like Cinderella - I can work on a plan for these things, but only when I’ve finished the library stats for this month, and the January vacation/overtime logs for the department, and writing the scripts for the virtual library project, and the other hundered or so things that crop up on a daily basis.

I love my job, and the administrivia is just part of the job. I just need to manage my time better. And be more organized.

* * *

The night before I left, I downloaded some iTunes-y goodness to listen to while on the train. Regina Spektor’s “Begin to Hope” got heavy airplay - most noteably, “Fidelity,” “Samson,” and “20 Years of Snow.” And I’m sort of embarrased to admit how many times in a row I listed to Mika’s “Grace Kelly” - it’s just that perky and infectious and fun.

Friday night in the Big Smoke February 2, 2007

Yet another day of running around and doing stuff.

I forgot to mention I met Jen Wednesday night - I don’t think I totally freaked her out, but she did give me a deserved “And you are…?” look at first. Sorry about that. And today Jorge and I met for coffee, and had a lovely chat. Next time, I promise I’ll give you more warning and we’ll hit the pub.

There were other things, but it’s late-ish, I’m tired, and I have to pack. I’ll post tomorrow or later this weekend. How’s that for being vague?