Life in shuffle mode

Of kitties and mutants

Ok, SO I’m in the new place.  It’s very lonely with just me and three sleeping kitties. I mean, they’re adorable when they’re sleeping. But really no fun at all.

Not fun like when they chase each other and go skittering across the floors because they’re not used to them.  That is comedy gold.

Tomorrow’s the first day at the new job. I MAY MELT.

So anyways…

What is the deal with Twilight? Ok, I willingly acknowledge that it’s bad. Everything they say about Bella being a placeholder character is too true. Everyone’s too nice and too perfect, even when they’re disagreeing with each other, bladdy bladdy bladdy.

Now comes to the part I really don’t get–why do I want to go see the movie… AGAIN? For the THIRD time? LIke… right now.  I think it’s Stephanie Meyer’s mutant power.  To make you addicted to this book that no sane person has a right to be addicted to. And I say this as someone who captions crayon scribbles and posts them to Livejournal.

My brain may explode from thinking on the issue too long and hard.

Trufax

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, just to let family and friends know I’m still alive, here’s a bit of an update:

1) I have some writing things in the works.  When things’re a bit more signed and sealed, I’ll say more.

2) It’s almost time for NaNoWriMo, can you believe it? Want to hear the worst part? I have no idea what I’m going to write.  That’s a little scary–dedicating thirty days and fifty thousand words to something and you have no idea what it is.  In some ways, this is a metaphor for life.

3) The cats’re being cute again.  Gwenny keeps opening her mouth and letting out a teeny tiny “akk.” When that happens, I just melt into a puddle of goo.  Aggie’s being her usual ornery self.  She decided she wanted PK’s food this morning, so every time PK would come up for air, she’d try to stick her face in the dish.  She didn’t succeed though.  The only end result was that she neglected her own food, and when PK was done with her bowl, she went over and finished Aggie’s. I’m absolutely certain that no lesson was learned.

4) James starts training for his new job next Monday.  He’ll have to get up at a normal hour and that’s frightening.  Of course, we’ve been on nights and evenings for so many years that it’s like living in a whole different timezone from the rest of the universe.  This will be good, though.  It’s about time to get back to something normal.

5) I have a confession to make: I STILL haven’t finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I think it’s because I don’t want it to end.  I want to find out how it ends, of course, but if I stop at around page 567, then Harry is forever on his journey to his final destination.

It is possible that I may just need therapy for this.   Can you imagine that conversation with the therapist?

“So you want Harry to be perpetually suspended within Voldemort’s clutches.”

“You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

What HASNT happened in the last week?

Been pretty busy!  Got everything into storage, and we have the bare minimum plus some things my husband couldn’t do without (25 in monitor? you have a laptop, dude!) in the car and a cargo carrier (thanks to dad for getting the thing on there, I sure as heck couldn’t figure it out, thanks to the total lack of instructions from the manufacturer) and finally made it to Kansas.

Along the way we had to take Aggie to the vet, she’s been biting her stitches. She looks like a little alien with her collar on.  It just brings out the weirdo in her, with those huge fish-eyes and thin Egyptian features. I have pictures and I’ll post later, so the whole internet can see how goofy my cat is.

The older two cats didn’t eat too much on the trip, the packing and moving and trip have all been a bit traumatic for them.  But it’s OK. Apparently Gwennie ate their food for them.  I swear, she’s even wider than she was before. I know she’s a kitten, so she’ll use it all in growing, so I’m not too worried. Especially if you see her paws.  They look like the paws of a big cat cub.  She may very well grow to lion size some day.  Which is funny cos her sisters are both under six pounds a piece, fully grown.

It’s been nice catching up with my mother in law.  My sister in law is supposed to bring the kids over at some point, which is good.  We have prezzies I got them stuff that’s local to Pittsburgh… stuff from the zoo, from Kennywood (Happiest place on earth, yo!) and Kings.  My youngest niece (who didn’t believe in vikings until we had a long talk about the existence of Vikings, ninjas and Pirates when she was three) is a bit…ornery.  She scrunches her little face up and pouts over stuff and it’s just… funny.  So we got her a stuffed Frownie.

We’ll probably drive out to Eureka next weekend to visit the other grandparents.  It’s a really pretty drive through the foothills.  I just hope we make the drive in the daylight so I can actually see that stuff.  I’m sure we’ll also be visiting the hubby’s friends and such.  I’m sure the visiting portion of this adventure  alone will be exhausting.

Incommunicados! O noes!

Yup.  Going off-line for a few days (not that I’ve really been here this week much anyways, I’m just sayin’).  It’s been a long and busy week though.

1) Had an interview outside of Chicago.  Fantastic place.  My sister was talking like she’d move there regardless of whether I got a job in the area or not.  She met a lady when they were walking around the village who let them play with her dog, and showed them around their house.  Coming from a borough where no one knows anyone elses’ name, I’m sure it was quite different for her. Proceeded to spend about oh, an hour in the Loop walking around (in the rain!) looking for my car.  We just wanted to go to Pizza Uno (which you can do here, but it’s DIFFERENT, I SWEAR!!!)… I couldn’t remember which lot of the ten or so in the area around the former Music Mart that we’d parked in.  On the up side, Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee is like…gourmet after you’ve been walking around in the rain and cold in shorts for a while.

2) Did a lot of quality sleeping on Tuesday.  It was magnificant. Oh yeah, and my poor little kitties got spayed.  They’re all doing well, and they got quite used to their big red kennel.  PK was supposed to be the last to recover because she’s the oldest, but she escaped her confinement in the dining room and shot up the steps a few hours after we got her home.  Gwenny the muffin-pants has taken to sleeping on my pillow with me again, so I suppose she’s all better.  Aggie may never forgive us.  All of her meows are both questioning and accusatory,  which is a lot of range for a squeaky little meow.

3) Wednesday was crazy “move your stuff outta the house” day.  I don’t think my knee will ever recover.  My dad was uber-helpful stacking things in storage.  I bow before his awesome spacial relationship skills.

4) Thursday involved more moveage, but here’s where it got tricky: they had torn up the cement in front of our storage unit and we had to walk everything around through the indoor units and over to our row.  Denny’s coffee never tastes so good as when you’ve had four hours’ sleep and your ‘everything’ is broken.  I can’t remember what else I ate. I’m sure it was good.

5) Today…*gasp* I’m going to actually haveta do something today, aren’t I?  I’m sad, sad sad.  It’s ok.  I’m going to procrastinate for a bit by eating breakfast and buying some more plastic bins at Walmart.  In my own defense, I had to actually *make* breakfast, which involved eggs and batter and such.  Sausage may come into play before it’s all done and over with.

I love the interwebs!

And stuff in the public domain.

Now, thanks to the webbernets, you can be READ THE RIOT ACT!

Freshman Orientation idea

Gotta orient those little buggers… Here’s an idea I thought was cool:

An idea a speaker used at this year’s ACRL conference might work for a freshman orientation. It’s called WikiWhacking. It has become almost impossible to input a noun into Google and not have a Wikipedia entry be in the top 10, really top 5, results. You could have students call out nouns and try it. This could lead to an explanation of how Google ranks results largely by number of links (most students don’t know this in my experience) and thus Wikipedia is a self-propelling link machine. This, in turn, could lead to a discussion of the virtues and vices of Wikipedia and segue into the virtues of the library’s databases.

- Red Wassenich
Austin Community College Library Services
Austin, Texas

(from the ALA ili-l library instruction mailing list)

I think this is cool because it involves them and gets them thinking and trying to stump the computer. I always like activities that are sort of a… back door to learning.  I figure enough teachers are going to take a front door approach, if I use more of a ‘trick you into learning’  (mostly I use it to ‘trick’ them into learning a secondary concept in addition to the first) then at least it’s fresh and shiny and new when I do it.

It’s quit nerd of me, but I will admit to all the webbernts that I love teaching and the art of instruction, and I love inspiring students to think of something new, or learn how to be self-sufficient in some way.

social networking, you little rascal

This article has been brought my way via the Special Libraries Association newsletter.  Apparently MySpace and SecondLife and other social networking sites are doomy-doom-doomed.

I dunno, everybody seems to have a MySpace but me. I just never got into it.  I have a LiveJournal, where I’m loved (I do so love to be loved) and I just started messing with Facebook (it seems OK, not really my “thing” though–if it weren’t for the alert system saying someone’s written on my wall, etc, I’d never go there).  I get the sense that they appeal to a very particular demographic.  I guess it depends on if that demographic outgrows it, or these things outlive their usefulness.  There’s also the next latest-greatest thing to worry about.

I suppose time will tell.

The Vampire Chronicals

I’ve started on this set of books from Scholastics.  I really like the first one (which I’m about half way through).  There is something archetypal about the characters, but I mean that in a good way.  There’s a sort of stigma with archetype that I think is a tad unnecessary.  Mostly  it’s because I suspect that these characters become archetypes because there is something intrinsic in the human condition that needs these things and seeks them out, and where they do not exist, seeks to create things like the lonely or unlikely hero, the orphaned boy who must go on a quest…even things like the evil step mother.  I think it’s the story that is built around this framework that can be bland and uninteresting.  I do not believe that it is the framework itself that makes the story unworthy.  That is simply blaming the easy target for the writer not doing his or her job.