two tidbits

1. I was eating some yogurt, then I realized that it was yogurt made from WATER BUFFALO MILK!!!

2. my humor profile:

Your humor has an intellectual, even conceptual slant to it. You're not pretentious, but you're not into what some would call 'low humor' either. You'll laugh at a good dirty joke, but you definitely prefer something clever to something moist.

You probably like well-thought-out pranks and/or spoofs and it's highly likely you've tried one of these things yourself. In a lot of ways, yours is the most entertaining type of humor because it's smart without being mean-spirited.


PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Conan O'Brian - Ashton Kutcher


The 3-Variable Funny Test!
You scored higher than 17% on darkness
You scored higher than 30% on spontaneity
You scored higher than 1% on vulgarity

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

brush with death

today i went on a tour of the "swing space" where the library will be (for 4 years) while they renovate this building. it's a warehouse. seriously. i don't know how they are going to fit all the books in there. i got to see my office too--it is about the same size, but with much less character, no window overlooking campus, no coffee shop outside the door, but i do get a whiteboard!

next weekend, i am going to NASIG with Jess which is going to be a blast.

lastly, a coworker and i had a proposal accepted for a journal issue to be published in the winter. We were sitting in my office talking about it, and she was rummaging through her purse pulling out her sunglasses, and we were talking about this and that and she reaches into her bag and pulls out..

NAIL CLIPPERS!!

Some of you may know how i feel about this death-tool. The sound of nails being clipped is akin to nails on a chalkboard, or the crunch of a cockroach under my shoe. I really hate it.

As you can imagine, I instantly recoiled. I was in a quandary! We just had this great collaborative discussion, and was I going to make it weird by asking her to put them away? Was I going to have to leave the room? Hide under the table?

She held the clippers up, with an "Aha! I found them" gesture. I literally backed my chair up. She turned the handle part around, preparing for clipping, then...she clipped a string off her purse!

I can't begin to describe how lucky I felt at that moment. I recovered, then told her that if she ever produced clippers in my office again, I would ban her. Well, I did think that, but I just told her about my clipper-fear and she said she had noticed the horror in my eyes, now that I mention it.

that was a close one.

ohh, my belly

Today, I am in a level 2 training class for Microsoft Access, kindly purchased by my employer. I had to drive out by the cataloging factory to get here.

Our instructor seems like a nice enough guy, but maybe a little ill-prepared. He has long wavy air in a ponytail and his self-described catch-phrase is "So far, so good." He loves Excel, apparently, because it has kinda been going like this:

Ponytail: Now we will go over [topic]. Does anyone use excel a lot?

3 middle aged women, me, and someone else roughly my age: [no response]

Ponytail: [Switching to excel] Here is how this works...[gives demo]...and it works the same way in Access.

And just now, he was leaning over the woman in front of me and said, "You're wearing Elizabeth Taylor's Passion, aren't you?" This launched a fairly lengthy conversation about the sense of smell as a memory trigger and the length and quality of his past relationships.

We talked about the recent Sopranos episode (we agreed it was sporadic and a little uncomfortable) and he showed us all photos of his recent trip to Utah.

There were a couple of times where I started feeling a little uncomfortable while he floundered around, so I answered a few questions for him. In spite of that, I am learning quite a bit. There was this database set up before I got here and I have some good ideas on how to clean it up.

So far so good, right?

Well, here's the thing. They have a free snack room. Yeah. Here is what I have eaten so far today:

2 cups (half-full) coffee (with caffeine)
Nature's Valley Peanut Butter Granola Bar
caramel squares
sour apple Jolly Rancher
Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie

Then we went to lunch. I felt a little bad about my stomach being so full of crap so I went to the grocery store and got sushi. I got back and felt like a snack, so I had:

1 cup coffee ( half-full, with caffeine)
1 bag animal crackers

However, I did, somehow, resist the Welch's Fruit Snacks. Blah. I just know if I can get home and make a smoothie, everything will be okay.

weekend activities

Saturday morning Lacy Coxx's GF left for Portland, forever. Lacy will be joining her in a couple of months. I am going to miss them.

But, Lacy is still here, so Saturday night we went to the Royal Renegades show at a country bar on the other side of town. Johni had the grand idea to get some Sparks, so we did the high school thing where we drank in the car outside the bar, then went out during the intermission for a refill. Wait, that wasn't just high school. btw, thanks Bevin for chronicling many memorable events so that I can refer to them later in life. In this case, 4 years later.

We had an afterparty at the house and there were some fun and weird goings-on, including an abhorrent event where an old geezer (who we knew, but didn't know was creepy) tried to get us to sleep with her. Ick.

Lovely KT brought us some chex mix and dessert chex mix (aka puppy chow) which I am enjoying now.

The point of this is to say that the afterparty was only possible because of our new cleaning plan which involves the brilliant idea of cleaning up after ourselves. We also recently rearranged the living room, so here is what it looks like. For those of you who have seen it recently, the main difference is the mantle and absence of blanket-curtains.


Also, since I am talking about the house, I took this photo of the yard last week.


Compare it to the one from the week before and see the progress.

be there or be un-smooth

Jess Webb told me this today:

...Southwest Airlines will launch new flights from Philadelphia to Columbus (thrice-daily)[...]starting July 2...

Yes!! Do you realize what this means? That you can come to jetgirl! Johnnie and ScootKing are planning the best thing that Columbus has seen since the 90s. The way I understand it, it will be a monthly party with DJs, dancing, performances, and other great stuff.

I was thrilled to hear about this idea because, even though I am 30 and approaching old, the shocking lack of fun queer-woman social activities glared out at me as soon as we moved back here. There is an equally shocking number of queer women here, but everyone just stays home I guess, because there isn't anything fun to do. Those days are now over, thank god. I will give you the website and details once I have them so you can start planning.

Since I am on a smooth-related kick, I will offer you my latest smoothie recipe, which, I must say, is Divine:
2 kiwi (peeled, of course)
1/4 cantelope (or musk melon, as my dad calls it)
1/2 scoop soy protein powder
water & ice

if you weren't sure your blender could do the fabulous things mine is doing now, put your fears aside and get some kiwi and cantelope. you won't be sorry.

not so smooth

I've never been a proponent of being "in the closet" at work, in fact, I try to make it clear that I am not straight or married whenever it comes up. I don't subscribe to the "let people have their assumptions" idea.

Sometimes, though, I am a little smoother than other times. I went to a lunch with my library director (50s, straight, while male) and somehow I smoothly mentioned it, probably something like this:

Oh, yes, my partner and I just bought our house and she is in school full time, so....

Pretty smooth, right?

Today was not a smooth day. I ran into a couple of my coworkers 5 feet away in the coffee shop and we were discussing their kids and so on. The one coworker and I have already had this conversation and so she is in-the-know. The other coworker asks me, Do you have kids, are you married?

And here is what I say.

Uh, well, I'm gay and my, uh, partner is a woman, so we can't get married.

What the grarg is that? I feel like I let down the whole U.S. of Queer with that ridiculous response.

She said, But you can still have kids, right?

It was so kind of her to just glaze over my unnecessary awkwardness and move the conversation along. She started talking about these two girls who found each other because they had the same donor dad, and was a little mushy (in the emotional way) about it. So it all worked out fine, but I came away from it with a resolution. The next time someone asks if I am married, I will fall to the floor as a distraction so I don't have to worry about the cool-ness of my response.

Really, here is what I came up with (for now): No, but my partner and I are planning a committment ceremony.

That is so much smoother.

Allow me to introduce you to...

My latest obsession: Smoothies.

At the coffee shop where I work, people are always yelling out "Very Berry!" or "Strawberry Banana with Whip!" So they are never far from my mind.

The weekend of my birthday 2 things happened to fuel this. Duke mentioned that he usually gets frozen mangoes from Trader Joe's and makes a smoothie in the mornings. Also, as part of my birthday celebration I got a massage, right? Well, while I was there, our fabulous energy worker/massage therapist made a smoothie with some powdered spirulina mix. That, I think, is the moment when I got the fever.

Our food source has been pretty regularly offering us apples and oranges, so I got a blender from Amazon with this gift certificate I got from participating in this health screening at work. I knew it was a good sign when it arrived OVERNIGHT with Super Saver Shipping. Score. We had just gone to the store, where I happened to pick up some frozen fruits and soy protein powder. It also happened that Johny wasn't feeling well at this time, so we had some juice.

Here are some things I have learned in my few weeks of smoothie-in-a-blender experience.

1. Make sure you really peel everything.
2. Don't use any combination of the following: tofu, soy milk, soy protein powder. It takes away from the flavor if you use more than one.
3. Blueberry juice really goes with anything.
4. Don't just peel the orange and throw it in.
5. Don't try to get people who don't like smoothies to drink them. You will be disapointed.

Our recent Shipment included nothing less than Fresh Mangoes. I was so excited. Now, I am drinking this lovely concoction (One mango, one apple, juice of one orange, 1/2 scoop soy protein powder, ice, water)


Yes, that is a short straw. I cut it off for the glass.

the winner is...

Salmon totally guessed my friend's baby's name: Quentin! As soon as she emails me her address, I will make and ship her a cake The apples are waiting and I can make it vegan if you want.

I went to this CIC conference on Monday and Tuesday. It's always interesting to get a larger picture of what is happening in library-land and see what other libraries are doing. There was an interesting demo from Endeca about the new NCSU OPAC interface which allows faceted keyword searching. There was some assigned speculation about whether this kind of thing is the future of the OPAC and people were saying insane things like "what will catalogers/non-public-service staff do?"

Hi, the work still has to be done, we still have to know what we own, even if the patrons just use WorldCat.

There was the obligatory presentation on the technological advances of the NextGen. They were talking about things like "multi-tasking" and actually showed screenshots of a person's desktop while in the process of said "multi-tasking".
The worst part was when this person said that she didn't think that people would be "multi-tasking" this way once they got older. Who ARE these people?

It wasn't all bad though, there were some good conversations about how libraries are/should be allocating resources to address the issues of their users, an interesting talk by OCLC about their recent survey and a great keynote by David Weinberger where, in part, he responded to the article in Nature where they found that the wikipedia is just as accurate as Brittanica and how that upsets the traditional view of authority in publication.

Plus, the food was good.

now it is raining

i charged up the batteries so that I could get some nice shots of the yard, but it keeps getting dark at night, and today I was inside while it was 78 degrees outside and when I left work it started raining.

So you are stuck with these:

Here, Zoey's left ear is curved like a bull horn, but in retrospect, I'm not sure I captured the true hilarity of it.


Here, Puck is the softest model cat, as usual, but he is blurry.


Here is a through-the-rain "before" shot of our yard in early spring. I am hoping to be able to capture various "during" and "after" shots as the season progresses.

I planted some garlic in the fall and it is coming up nicely. I don't know how long I have to wait until I can harvest it, but I think it might be a little while. In this picture, it is in the brownish area directly to the right of the yellow forsythia bush:


Tomorrow, I am going to visit my grandma and go to a baby shower for my friend from Kindergarten. She wore note earrings and sat at the cats table with me. In my class, there was a Dogs, Cats, and Rabbits table where we were arranged by body size. I'm not sure that would fly today.
Note Earrings called me on my birthday (which she didn't really know was my birthday, although she knew it was in March) to tell me she'd had a son and since he was born in March, she thought of me.

How strange is all this? My BF from high school, and now this baby? Anyway, she had this dramatic f-ed up situation with the father and now is living above a funeral home and cleaning for the rent, which actually seems to be a pretty good deal. I have to admit I am pretty excited to see the baby. His name starts with a Q, and if you are the first to guess it, I will send you an apple cake.

routines

I've just watched America's Next Top Model for two days in a row. I am rooting for Molly Sue even though she choked on the commercial just now. We'll see how she works out.

Today was great though because I finally broke my wednesday-piddling-around and made some freakin-progress-already on my first tenure-related research project. Whew. I need to justify that day each week somehow.

I was a little inspired by Bevin's new method for organizing her life and Johnny and I have started doing the dishes after every meal. It is so amazing. It is like the whole kitchen is clean all the time, just because the dishes are done. I highly recommend it for any of you who have dishes-related arguments, or messy kitchens.

I'm also trying to work in a little yard work. You will certainly be subjected to some photos of the spring foliage popping up in the yard. It is quite lovely, and makes me look forward to when it gets warmer and we can have cookouts in the yard. I can't wait. At least it isn't snowing here!

just hang up for two minutes, gawd.

Maybe I shouldn't be by now, but every time I hear someone on their cell phone while using the bathroom, I am shocked. Am I an old lady? Am I a prude? Why do people talk on the phone in public restrooms? Not just "Hi, I'm peeing, Bye" conversations either, these are real conversations about what happened at the party over the weekend, making plans with boyfriends (yes, I can hear his voice too), and "why was she wearing that" conversations.

I need to have a planned response, in case I get to the point where I can't take it anymore. What should I do? Bang on the wall? If it wasn't illegal I could get a phone reception canceller or something. Any other ideas?