look ma! no hands!

Today I lead my first professional book group meeting. K is on vacation so I got to take the reins of her book group :) I did have on training wheels due to the fact that it was "fiction of choice". There were no discussion questions or anything like that; everyone was just supposed to bring a fiction title they had enjoyed and wanted to share with the group. There were 13 ladies but only a few had brought anything to share. Luckily I took about 6 books (many of which you can find in a previous post "recent reads")to the meeting so I ran my mouth enough to stretch out to an hour. I was really nervous for some reason. I mean, I've presented at 3 state library convention programs and have done countless presentations in library school plus I teach computer classes to senior citizens...why on earth the book group made me so nervous is beyond me! But I ended up having an absolutely gr8 time and look forward to maybe having a group of my own sometime in the future. I'm ashamed to say that I've never participated in a book group either and I have no excuse. Many are held during the day, but it has gotten easier to find them being held in the evening. I'll just have to find one when I get through with school. My therapist consistently mentions that I need to try to get out and socialize more so that would definitely qualify while not making me as uncomfortable as other social situations might. I do say proudly that I'm 1000% more social than I used to be and I have several friends who can back me up on that!
Anyway, enough whining!
¡Buenos tardes!
htw

things that make you say hmmm?

We librarians certainly deserve our own comic strip. I get the RSS feed for this one, Unshelved.

I think it speaks for itself.....

Dewey's always such a smartass....

¡Buenos Tardes!

htw

alright...I retract most of my previous statement

A)Dr. B rocks!
B)we watch funny youtube videos before class
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYmsr8Sy4K0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIqhUCZgwXQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cCdoXIlKMw
C)Dr. B bought us pizza and brought boocoodles (I scientifically measured) of snacks and drinks
D)I hate, hate, hate, hate planning

I don't know why that is really...Dr. B has a certain way she wants us to do this and all the planning and no doing has just frustrated me beyond belief. The other team members are all "let's do this," "this would be great," "wouldn't it be neat if we could" and I want to yell "WE HAVE ONE MONTH PEOPLE, ONE MONTH....2 CLASS MEETINGS, COUNT EM', 2!".....but that would be rude and these people will be responsible for half my grade so I keep my smartass mouth shut, for the most part (I'm only human). We have to design and launch a comprehensive website for the University of Alabama's School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) Internship Program AND design and publish a 10-15 page student handbook for the program. We have 3 teams: website, handbook, and content. I'm on the content team. I figured I could flex my BS muscles and have a little fun. We are hoping that the majority of it will be a "cut and paste" affair using the various forms, pamphlets, and other goodies SLIS has produced over the years to come up with one good product to replace all the rambling. In fact, that's what I should be working on right now, but no....blogging again.

My hectic race to the educational finish line has begun, kicked off by petsitting three clients at one time for a combined total of 3 dogs, 6 cats, a garden-full of plants to water (bearing all water restrictions in mind of course), and lots of mail and newspapers to keep up with. To make it spicy, two of the dogs have a touch of stress diarrhea (always fun) which I hope will clear up tomorrow so I won't spend all my time cleaning. To those who think petsitting is terribly glamorous, living in other people's houses, watching cable tv (my favorite away-from-home fetish), etc...just remember that animals crap and it's now your job to clean it up.

Alright people, I'm going to get at least SOME work done before I make my petsitting rounds (thank goodness they live relatively close by, I can go in my PJ's :D) and go to bed.

Buenas Noches
htw

live from t-town!

So, here I sit again (FOR THE FOURTH TO LAST TIME) in Gorgas Library at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. I have 45 minutes until class starts and am sitting here, practically meditating, trying to stem the tide (pun intended) of anxiety about this class. The assignment we've been given for the class makes me feel very much like I have paid $700.00 some odd dollars to do the professor's job for them. This professor is the Internship Coordinator for SLIS and that resulted from the assignment for the last Project Management class; to reorganize and streamline the internship process. Our assignment, and I do appreciate the early warning, is to develop an internship website to be officially attached to the SLIS website and a print manual to be included with orientation material for new students. All of this will have to be presented to the dean of the school. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the professor's job? I've complained about doing projects that have no purpose, i.e. setting up an imaginary networked computer lab for an imaginary small community college but that one pissed me off most because the professor just TOLD us to do it. I can turn a computer on, but networking 20 of them, which I just barely understand conceptually, was a crap assignment because I didn't know what I was doing. I found someone who knows something about it and had them do it and try to explain it to me. I learned nothing, but the diagrams were glorious. This seems like it will be the same. I apologize for not being able to LEARN about project management and PERFORM project management at the same time! Hell, I don't even balance my checkbook because it's too much trouble! Ahhhh, just one more thing to piss me off before I leave...thank goodness I'm not planning on walking at graduation or E's prediction of me flipping them off would be closer to coming true...maybe I could even work up enough anger to moon them all, who knows? Needless to say, I won't be here on August 11th, so walk on people, walk on.

Oh well, I better go make an appearance and claim a good spot....maybe start spreading the cheer around so I'll get a good grade from my peers since WE'RE GRADING EACH OTHER! (isn't that supposed to be the professor's job too?)

¡Adiós!
htw

a movie to get excited about...hopefully

I love Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and it is coming to the big screen (again)! I haven't seen any of the earlier adaptations but I'll have to read the book again and try to catch the two other films that have been made from it (The Last Man on Earth/Vincent Price/1964 & The Omega Man/Charleton Heston/1971)before I watch this most current. Post apocalyptic, vampire-ridden earth...the redux ;D The trailer for this newest movie is up and running...enjoy!

¡Adiós!

htw

archaeological laundry

I just read a great news report about a collection of historical letters found stuffed in a filing cabinet in the laundry room of a deceased (2005) Austrian banker! His family must have found the treasure trove while cleaning out his home to put it up for sale. Can you imagine the legal proceedings if they had not cleaned the house and the new buyers found all of it? What a mess it would have been.
Among the collection are letters by Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Peter the Great, Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Pushkin, John Donne, Queen Elizabeth I, and Ernest Hemingway. The letters, ranging over 500 years of history, are to be auctioned off July 3 by Christie's of London and are expected to bring in over $4,000,000 dollars. Ah, to be rich!

¡Adiós!
htw

recent reads

I've GOT to get my second book read for Reader's Advisory Roundtable next week. We're doing short story collections, not my fav. However, I've managed to spice it up in my usual fashion as I'll be bringing Laurell K. Hamilton's Strange Candy and Larry Niven's The Draco Tavern. Strange Candy was very good; I always like seeing the early efforts of my fav authors as it makes me feel better about some of my own brain vomit. I haven't started The Draco Tavern yet, but I am looking forward to it. I like science fiction and Niven is practically ancestor-status in the genre so it should be pretty interesting. He's been writing for something like 40 years and has put stopovers for interstellar travelers at the Draco Tavern in his many of his books; this effort puts all of those vignettes together in one book. Bring it on.


I've got about 20 books checked out to read right now and I seriously think my eyes were bigger than.........my eyes? My brain maybe? Drat my inability to speed read! Things I have finished reading AND enjoyed include:

The Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead

Robey Childs is only 14 when his mother sends him to the battlefields of the Civil War to search for (and bring home) his father. What follows is a brutal, bloody account of the evil that men do in the name of war and survival.

The Sacred Bones by Michael Byrnes

Move over DaVinci Code! This debut novel has the same roller coaster ride feel but with better writing (IMHO). Plus the author describes more of the scenery which made me want to visit Italy and the Vatican even more! Here's the first line from the blurb: At the crossroads of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish faiths, an ancient artifact is stolen from a long-hidden vault located directly beneath Jerusalem's Temple Mount . . .

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

If you haven't read The Kite Runner, climb out from underneath that rock and get a copy. Follow on its heels with this equally stunning novel which looks at the intertwining lives of two women in Afghanistan. Hosseini seemingly climbs into people's brains and writes, verbatim, what he sees and hears. Brilliant, heart-breaking, horrifying, beautiful....

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

Anyone who knows me KNOWS that I do not read nonfiction lightly. It's just so BORING to me unless it is extraordinarily narrative. Enter Eat, Pray, Love. I have wanted to read this book since I read the first review and now I am nearly finished. I will be ordering this one for my personal library! It will be too wordy for some, too preachy for others, too pagan for a few but I love every word that I've read. It makes me wish I too could afford to sell everything I own and take a year across the pond to discover who I am.
__________________

I have others waiting to be read and some that were just not worth the effort to write about (either indifferent or just plain bad) but rest assured I'll be on the lookout for more. Once this whole school thing is over, I will be gearing my reading back up to pre-grad school levels. Any reading I do at work I refer to as "recommendation development" for management's sake :)
So, here's to everyone getting in a little "recommendation development" today!!!!

¡Adiós!
htw

OMG ! ! !

End of school a scant 4 weeks away! I bought a huge, gloriously tacky, absurdly expensive frame for my diploma. It's really quite obnoxious and entirely appropriate. Since I've suffered for it, that thin sheet of pulped wood will be shoved in everyone's face for quite awhile. I wish I could be more circumspect about it, but there it is, sorry.......sort of. I will definitely have to take a pic and post it here when it finally arrives. Technically graduation is Aug 11 but I'm not going to darken their door for a good long while if I can help it so no one needs to make any travel arrangements. It takes a period of WEEKS for the diploma to be mailed to you (which they do for everyone...you don't even get if you GO to graduation) so I figure, with my luck, I'll be seeing it around Christmas. If it happens to come earlier then it will be a wonderful surprise :)

¡Adiós!
htw

The perfect gift for any occasion!

The Spoiler T-Shirt!

sterilized cockroaches vs. orange juice

That's what I thought too!

There is a scientist, Paul Rozin, studying the psychology of disgust. This little experiment, involving dipping a sterilized cockroach into a glass of orange juice then soliciting someone to take a drink from the glass (no one would take him up on it), was intended to demonstrate the universal concept of touch transference:

"It's a fancy term for cooties. If something repulsive touches something benign, the latter, even if it's physically unchanged, becomes "infected."

Taking this concept further are two researchers who teach marketing at Duke and Arizona State University, Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons. In a series of studies resulting in an article in this month's Journal of marketing research, "the researchers found not only that some products--trash bags, diapers, kitty litter, tampons--evoke a subconscious feeling of disgust even before they're used for their ultimate messy purposes, but they can also transfer their general ickiness to anything they come in contact with."

Enjoy your lunch today! ;-)

¡Adiós!

htw