Re: Bringin’ the Awesome!

A summer of field work can turn grad students and student workers into zombies and here to prove this are the good folks at the Toolik Lake Research Station on the North Slope of Alaska doing their tribute to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. Those are mosquito head nets that they are wearing, by the way. Note the size and ferocity of the bloodsuckers swarming the camera lens.

Re: Happy Anniversary to Me!

July 04, 1942 Independence Day parade in New York. Taken by Life magazine photographer, Andreas Feninger. From Life’s on-line photo archives hosted by Google.

Let the bells ring out and the people cheer! June marks the two year anniversary of this blog. Can’t believe it myself. Time goes by so quickly. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d do without blogging now. The notion that my wisdom can be instanteously shared with the world is just so addictive.

Thank you, gentle readers, for stopping by and I hope being both amused and informed by my posts. So what is the appropriate gift for a second blogiversary? Paper? Plastic? Binary code?

Re: Poetry Corner II

After watching a bunch of us, myself included, wobbling around in Tree Pose, I was inspired to pen the following. If you don’t know, Tree Pose is a yoga balance posture. You stand on one foot with the other leg raised and then lift your arms up. The theory is that by keeping your core tight, you can balance on one leg flamingo-style forever. This theory has been disproved by my class every evening so far, but yoga teachers are optimistic folks.

The ultimate Zen question—

If a group of students in Tree Pose fall over in yoga class,

Do they make a sound?

Miss Method: not afraid to drive the Information Highway with an expired poetic license.

Re: How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I took off a week from work at the beginning of June specifically to get my plantings in. The growing season is so short here that if you don’t put your plants out immediately after June 1st you just needn’t bother. I’m pleased to report that I accomplished the following the during my mini-vacation:

• Planted six large containers with about a hundred dollars worth of flowers (about $15 per container)
• Bought six bags of locally produced fertilizer (the locally produced compost not being ready yet)
• Received two flats of scrounged plants that a friend of mine rescued from the garbage bin at a local greenhouse
• Visited the  Hobbiton Farmers Market for the first time this season
• Bought cukes and salad greens which was all that was available at the time. Don’t ask me how the guy selling the cukes got them to mature in the first part of June which is very, very early in our growing season. I’m thinking “deal with the Devil.”
• Watched “School of Rock” with my 16-year-old nephew who came by my house to hang out.
• Carefully listened to same nephew explain in detailed length about the alien race he will be playing in the upcoming “Warhammer” RPG tournament.  In my day, we didn’t torture the mundanes in our lives (like our parents) with descriptions of our sf/f hobbies. They just assumed that we were geeky or goofy or both and we assumed that they wouldn’t be interested and couldn’t understand it anyway and both sides were able to live in peace. I miss those days.
• Returned defective DVD to local mega-chain bookstore and discovered that they have a new returns policy–items must be returned within 14 days. Received store credit anyway so did not share with clerk private opinion that store returns policy was seriously defective.
• Picked out location for new greenhouse in backyard. Let the ground breaking commence.
• Excited to see new rosebush coming into bloom for first time. I got this bush as a cutting from a gardener friend of mine just last year.

Re: Poetry Corner

I’m taking a hatha yoga class where the instructor encourages us to journal after each pose. I was hot, sweaty, and sprawled on the gym floor when I came face to face with an expired insect and was inspired to scrawl the following poem in my notebook ….

On the floor in yoga class—

a dead fly in permanent sivasana*,

nevermore to buzz another “ohm”.

*sivasana translates as “corpse pose”

Re: Geeks Rule

Resolved today at this morning’s committee meeting:

• We need minions and should hire some immediately ’cause doing the work ourselves is a definite drawback to most of our projects.
• We each definitely need a personal toady who can stroke our ego and lip off to people we don’t like.  Think Iago, the mouthy parrot from Disney’s “Aladdin”.
• Steampunk is cool.
• Oh, yeah, and some stuff about use statistics as well.

In our own defense, it had been a long holiday weekend, the library was stuffy and we were deprived of caffeine, sleep, sugar, and anti-histamines …

Re: Owl-sha

Boreal Owl in Box

Originally uploaded by dr.Ozda

While myself and several of my colleagues were stuck in a two and a half hour Safety training, my co-worker, dr. Ozda, was snapping pictures of this boreal owl in its nesting box whilst precariously perched on top of a ladder on top of a doghouse. Had there been an OSHA inspector anywhere in the neighborhood, he would certainly have been cited for violating the very safety regulations we were being warned against. And he was still having a better time than we were.

Safety is overrated.

Re: Heard Around Hobbiton

“I’m not a doctor, but I boink one at home.”–Wife of a doctor as relayed to me by my massage therapist

“It’s one thing to leave work dressed up. It’s another thing to jingle.”–Fellow dancer explaining why it’s difficult to come to dress rehearsal in full Middle Eastern dance costume after work

Re: Mine, All Mine!

At long last, ultimate power has fallen to me! True, it has only taken fourteen long years of faithful service and the temporary absence of most other higher ranking employees with signature authority, but finally I have been named the acting department head. For the next two days. (Never has the term “power vacuum” been more significant ….)

Just had the plumber go tripping through, measuring things and looking at the ceiling tiles in an alarming way. Apparently, they need to run cooling water over to the vault on the opposite side of the floor and they can’t use the water source over there ’cause the water is more pure over here. (Hey, that was my take away from the conversation).  The term “impending disaster” suddenly seems very signficant as well ….

Re: Book reviews

During my recent sojourn to far Numenor, I had a long layover in the Gondor airport and, as a result, came up with two new books which I’d like to recommend to you.

The first is Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book”. This book just won the Newbury Award for Young Adult fiction and, may I say, it richly deserves it. Although I knew of the author, I hadn’t read any of his work before and I was blown away by his poetic, lyrical story-telling.

Briefly, “The Graveyard Book” is the story of Nobody Owens, a young boy who escapes the murder of his family as a toddler, and is watched over and brought up by a graveyard full of ghosts.  But why was he targeted for death and why is the man Jack still hunting him? A dark, but not scary story in which vampires and werewolves are the heroes.

The second involves cats and libraries so you know that it’s just irresistable to librarians. “Dewey: the Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World” by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter is, on one level, a biography of the title feline, Dewey, who was found as a kitten in a book return in Spencer, Iowa in 1988. Myron, the director, and the library staff adopt Dewey who becomes the mascot of the library. On another level, however, it is also the story of how a library (and its librarians) can rally a town and serve as its community center.  The struggles of Vicki to keep Dewey, the library, her community, and herself going despite hard economic times, personal loss, and petty-minded, small-town politics will ring true to librarians everywhere.  A word to the wise: don’t read this book on the plane as you will find yourself sobbing at the end.