latter day bohemian

Let’s just go ahead and mark this down as the summer when I fell absolutely in love with vegetables again.  It’s not that I ever stopped liking you, vegetables.  It’s just that this summer has been so good, vegetables, that you’ve won me over again.  I’m like a new bride, giddy with excitement, swooning for love of whatever’s in the crisper, cut up and roasted with some olive oil and salt and pepper.

I know that all good things have to come to an end, and that eventually I’ll grow tired of your vitamin-filled goodness and we’ll drift apart, dear vegetables.  Ours is a May-December romance in the truest sense.  But you can rest assured that come the dark days of February, when I’m sustained only by the things that I’ve canned and the few items that farmers have managed to over-winter, I will be pining for you and longing for the dog days of summer, when we can be together again.

One from the vault…

…dredged up in honor of Brio, formerly Bacchus, winning the bronze in the America’s Best Restroom contest!

Things I Took Pictures Of While In Denver

Things I took pictures of while in Denver:

CouchSurfer Max’s ceiling (while he slept)

A beautiful airport

A not-so-beautiful airport

Ballpark food

Strange buffalo

Trains (from a train)

Things I did not take pictures of while in Denver:

• Linda
• CouchSurfer Max or seatmate friend Taylor (Tyler? the world will never know.)
• My walk to/from the light-rail
• the giant demon horse or the big blue bear
• myself with any of the above
• the mall where Linda and I hung out
• any of my myriad fast food meals (oh my aching tummy) at the airport
• mountains (well, ok, not enough photos)

I enjoyed my very brief visit to Colorado, and definitely would like to go back again.  Denver struck me as a strangely large, but rather nice city - one I would like to know better, though I suspect that were we to live there, we’d need to live downtown to have the lifestyle we’d like.  Somehow that seems to be a theme with us.  SB has described Colorado as basically his dream state - and this sight unseen - so I imagine we’ll be there more in the future, especially with Linda, Jeremiah, and their menagerie beckoning!

Etsy love

Why do I love Etsy?  A whole lot of cuteness for not much money at all.  My friend Tina and I both bought these charms - not matching ones, though - the other week, and I love them!  The absolutely only downside is that I managed to get one wet, so the kitties aren’t as cute anymore - but I’ve learned my lesson, and will take better care.

Get your own at homestudio.etsy.com!

Only Connect

(I had set a goal for myself to blog somewhere every day this month, but that goal was impossibilified by yesterday’s travel suckiness.  In lieu of yesterday’s post, an overly thoughtful one too too early in the morning.)

So it’s 7am and I’m in Atlanta, having spent the night in the airport after my flight out of Denver was delayed by a couple of hours.  Crying was involved, as was encouragement from several random strangers.  The random strangers are the subject of this post.

I really don’t like talking to people on planes.  It’s not so much that I’m antisocial as it is that I just want to zone out, read my book, sleep, etc.  That said, I talked to my seatmate for the entirety of the 2 1/2 hour flight from Denver to Atlanta, our conversation running the gamut from Aspergers to wilderness therapy to climate change as a concept to metadata.  At the conclusion, we exchanged warm farewells, aware that this was a chance connection, forged only because we were stuck in the airport and then in the plane next to each other for several unplanned hours.

When Erin Fae visited a few weeks ago, we talked about how we both really feel the lack of intimate friendships in our lives at the moment.  We both certainly have those sorts of friends - the ones that hang out in the kitchen while you’re making dinner, or call you at the last minute to go to the grocery store, or are comfortable being quiet together - but not as many as we’d like, and not necessarily in our same geographic regions, making the spontanaeity and comfort of the relationships a little more difficult.  We also talked about how it’s so much harder to make those kinds of friends as adults - and harder to make friends in general.

I guess that’s why I so value conversations like the one I had last night - or like Sunday night, when Max and I went to a bar near his apartment and just talked about whatever for an hour or two.  It’s so rare these days to have a real conversation with anyone, much less a total stranger, much less a conversation spanning multiple hours - so when they happen, it seems like a wonderful gift.

I guess the point of this - and bear with me, as I’ve had like 3 hours’ sleep in a cold and uncomfortable terminal - is that I’m thankful for opportunities to connect, to share a little part of my life with someone new, to step outside my comfort zone and be enriched by the experience.  I’m especially thankful when, as with Erin Fae, as with Linda, those moments turn into a wonderful friendship.

Things I did today

Denver edition:

• woke at 5am, tossed and turned, took pictures of my CouchSurfer Max’s ceiling
• was showered, dressed, and on my way to the light rail by 6:30am (the time for which I’d set my alarm)
• light-rail to the ‘burbs, breakfast w/random GSLIS grads
• opening plenary, 1st session, nerves setting in
• lunch w/David
• first conference presentation ever! entitled: “Okay, This is Just Too Weird: Identifying Outreach Opportunities in Facebook” and coming soon to an institutional repository near you
• climbed on a rock to take pictures of the mountains
• 3rd session (not as interesting as advertised)
• light-rail back to downtown, drop off stuff at Max’s, walk back to the 16th St Mall and then to Coors Field
• bleacher “rock pile” seats for $4 to watch the Rockies vs. Nats.  Add 1 Blue Moon ($6.50) and 1 chicken sandwich and you get 1 happy E.
• leave after the 6th inning out of sleepiness, walk back to Max’s with a stop for airplane snacks.
• Fin.

A Year in a Life

I’m done with my Project 365 (or 366, as it was a leap year).  Just over a year ago - a year on Thursday - Shane accepted the job offer that resulted in our move out here.  On the same day, I applied for the job that I now have.  I can’t believe it’s been a year already.  Our lives have changed so much since then!

While this move was very, very hard on me, I think it’s been a really good thing for our relationship.  I feel like we’re much closer, much more stable, and much more aware of needing each other.  I’m so thankful for that, and for the awesome dude that is currently asleep in our bedroom with our cat.

There are still times when I’m horribly, achingly homesick for the life we had back in Champaign - our friends, our favorite places, our 7 minute commutes on our bikes, my wonderful job and coworkers, our big sunny apartment with the garden and clothesline - but for the most part, I think we’re both really happy out here.  And that’s a good thing.

Moving Uhgain

So, in the next 6 weeks we get to pack up our apartment and move again. The reason for the move is a good thing - the actuality of the move is going to suck as always. I spent some time this morning getting heavily addicted to Apartment Therapy. The dozens of beautiful and uncluttered apartments/homes have lead me to want to seriously declutter before this next move - well, the beautiful apartments as well as the knowledge that this time around, we’re doing most of the moving ourselves, with no handy work-paid-for mover men.

Since I know many of you have downsized, live a rather spartan lifestyle, or somehow make do in extremely tiny (Brooklyn!) spaces - how do you do it? If I wanted to make a dramatic cut in possessions - how would you recommend that I start? What have you gotten rid of that you now regret? What seems necessary but really can go? What strategies do you employ to keep the clutter from coming back?

(This is x-posted from my LJ with no regrets or apologies - only thanks for good advice!)

Another Thursday night at the desk

Just for the sake of having something to write, here’s a short list of the questions I have answered since 5:45pm.

• A request for guest wireless, which I set up with a smile.
• Print problem #1: the print server is slow.  Fixed itself before I could get to it, as is generally the case with tech problems.
• Print problem #2: frames will be the death of us all.  Whenever a patron comes to the desk with a sheaf of half-printed papers, I know they’re trying to print from a) Blackboard or b) Yahoo.  Right on both counts this time, and one more patron now knows how to right-click.
• Another request for guest wireless.
• “Do those copiers send faxes?”  No.  Go to Kinko’s.
• A request for back-issues of GW publications - specifically “By George”, and specifically the most recent one.  Special Collections is closed, so I steal one out of my coworker’s mailbox.  Mental note: put it back before I leave.
• An IM from a friend who is trying to find publication dates on a series of books.  The reference collection lets me down.  I totally marked this on the stats sheet even though it wasn’t technically a question from one of our patrons.
• “Where’s the bathroom?”
• “If I need something from a library in the consortium, can I just go there?” Yes.

Do Breast Self-Exams Do Any Good?

I don’t really know what to think about this article from Time, which argues that conducting regular self breast exams may actually be worse for women than not.  They argue that while self exams do lead to early detection - they frequently lead to the detection of benign cysts, resulting in unnecessary biopsies, scarring from these unnecessary treatments, and emotional scars from the imagined scare.

What this seems to indicate (to me at least) is that women need to be educated as to what they’re looking for - not just that they need to do an exam.  In gyne instruction, we were trained to teach doctors to teach patients to look for anything that changes from month to month - and to not necessarily panic at every little lump and bump.  Healthy breasts are full of all kinds of nodules and other weird-feeling bits of tissue, fiber, and ductwork.  They change from day to day, month to month.  Being aware of these normal changes will make it easier to notice when something abnormal pops up.

The results of this study also point to a trend towards overtreatment.  I’m not sure what I can say about that, so I’ll just let it stand.

Regardless, I feel like it’s really irresponsible to discourage women from doing a simple, painless, easy thing that might lead to early detection.  As the daughter and granddaughter of breast cancer survivors, and also as the daughter of an oncologist, and also as a former gyne instructor, I think I know what I’m talking about.