Four Blanket Night, Part 2

Well, there was no heat after work on Thursday, even though the landlord had been by to bleed the radiators. My upstairs neighbor was freezing too. I called again yesterday morning, and we finally discovered that it wasn't a bleeding problem, but the fact that the pilot light on the hot water heaters in the basement had blown out sometime over the summer. Easily fixed, so now it is toasty warm! Yay!

Four blanket night

It's cold down here! For the third winter in a row my radiators need to be bled, and I still don't know how to do it. This means that I have no heat in the apartment, even though my thermostat is set to 75 (I have no idea what that is in Celsius, but it's nice and warm). I talked to my landlord on Sunday about it and he is supposed to come in today or tomorrow, but until then it's been downright chilly in my apartment.

I come home from work and put on my wooly robe and fuzzy slippers and wrap myself in an afghan (blanket, not nationality). I light candles and pretend that they are giving off heat. Last night I put yet another blanket on my bed, bringing the total up to four. I'm practically living in my flannel jammies. And it hasn't even dropped below freezing - my place was 14 degrees Celsius this morning.

Hopefully I will have blessed, blessed heat when I get home tonight.

Skinny equals happy

A few weeks back my friends adopted a new catchphrase. It came about because Karen caught her boyfriend Steve admiring his behind in the mirror, thrilled that he'd been losing weight. He delightedly proclaimed that "Skinny equals happy!"

And it has been a happy, happy week in skinny world. All the girls will get it
(and Steve). I've been a size 10 for years. As long as I can remember, I've been a 10. A couple of weeks ago I went shopping for jeans at the GAP because they were having a great sale. I think they are being all screwy with their sizing all of a sudden, because now I fit quite comfortable into a size 8. Not only that, but I went shopping today for some more jeans (because I'm bored of my clothes and am doing a wardrobe purge and replace), and I fit into a size 6! I know that I haven't lost that much weight, if any, so this must be some "let's make the women feel good about their weight and change all the sizes" thing, but hey, I just bought a jeans in size 6!! Hee!

And on that note, take a look at an open letter to the totally impractical size chart for women, which Judy blogged a few days ago and I'm shamelessly stealing.

This one is for the librarians

The reason I haven't posted in a few days is because on Tuesday we switched over from DRA to Sirsi, so the past three days have been a combination of staff training (as I am evidently the department expert on everything from Sirsi to making a printer work), damage control, soothing patrons, and catching up on a two month backlog of processing.
In fairness I can say that Sirsi does not suck as much as I was dreading. I don't understand, however, why I could not for the life of me find a copy of Bernard Corwell's "The Last Kingdom" on cd in Workflows, but it popped up no problem on the web catalog. I had to get the database control number from the web catalog, and then plug that back into Workflows to find it. And there are other irritants, but hey, we can check in and check out and put things on hold, so it's a start.

Nature, it's a wonderful thing - especially if you can eat it.

I went apple picking this morning. The last time I did this I was knee high to a grasshopper, so I don't remember anything about it (although there are pictures of me in a very fetching apple-picking outfit). This time a group of us drove out to Media (yes, it's a place) and picked a bushel of apples (four different kinds). We even had a little red cart to pull our boxes of apples along in.

Of course, none of us brought a real camera along, but my cell phone has a crappy-ass 640x480 camera.


Look, I'm communing with nature!

The orchard also has a pumpkin patch, and a store where I bought peach butter and strawberry-rhubarb butter and a huge bread stuffed with sausage and peppers and cheese and onions (lunch for the next to days). And there were fried mushrooms and apple-cider doughnuts and soft pretzels and caramel-chocolate covered apples.

And when we finished Micaela and I went to a mall and bought pretty new clothes.

It was a very good day.

Yup, it was good!

Saw Serenity last night - and yes, it was worth the anticipation. So good!

Fall!

Yes, today is the official first day of fall in my mind. I put on a sweater AND a jacket this morning before leaving the house. Yay!

Also, I'm going to Serenity tonight, so my joy is unbounded.

I'm looking for a book, it's got a red cover...

All librarians and bookstore clerks probably have had to deal with the person who comes in to find a book and all they can tell you is the cover colour. If it hasn't happened to you, I'm sure you've at least hear stories about it.



Last year, San Francisco's Adobe Bookshop was the place to be for these colour seekers. For one week it shelved all its stock according to colour. Check out the NPR interview on the project.

Shiny!

No, I don't mean the new movie Serenity (although if you got that, I'm sure I'll see you in line on Friday)

I mean Shiny Shiny: a girl's guide to gadgets. I like going there to see what's the prettiest of the new tech toys. Sometimes it takes a bit more that megapixels and gigabytes, it takes a nifty silver/copper finish or a mink iPod case. Sometimes I'm just shallow that way.

First there was Zork, now there's Hamlet

Once you've taken the Hamlet test, what else can you do but play the Hamlet text-based adventure game?

I remember playing text-based games like Zork (along with Lemonade Stand and Eliza) on my Apple IIe (yes, evidently I'm old now).

I always sucked at all computer games as I have a woeful lack of game logic. I've needed the cheat guides to get me through every adventure game I've ever tried. King's Quest, Starship Titanic, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest - if I've tried to play them, I've failed miserably at it unless I had step-by-step directions telling me to "go there and pick up this, dummy!" Even then, I wasn't so good. No wonder I've stopped playing.

**UPDATE**
It looks like the Hamlet game is gone for now - bandwidth exceeded. Hopefully it will come back soon so I can use such useful text-adventure commands such as "take skull" and "commit incest"

Interesting book

I was busy going through some new books yesterday, and I ran across this one:



Heavy words, lightly thrown: the reason behind the rhyme
The seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhymes
by Chris Roberts

It looks like fun - I shall be adding it to my "to be read" list

Is it too soon...?

Katrina: joke du jour

Q: What's George Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

From the fine folks at boingboing

Rex Libris

As I am ever on the quest to find cool librarian stuff, I must report that there is now an action adventure comic book called Rex Libris. Rex is a public librarian who travels across space and time to retrieve unreturned library books and unpaid fines.

I am a muse

My friend Jen found a really cool comic strip generator online. Cool in the sense that I can see how other people could make some funny stuff, but I'm way too creatively stunted to make anything remotely enjoyable. Good thing Jen is here. She made a little strip inspired by my frustration in finding a good ringtone for my new cellphone.


And no, I did not end up with Vanilla Ice as my ringtone. I have the theme to Blackadder (although I did try the Dr Who ringtone first).

Whee!

Working in a library rocks - I just got a copy of Terry Pratchett's new book 4 days before it is due to be released. I know what I'm doing this weekend!

Personal library fun!

Do you have a whole collection of books that are all higgely-piggely? Do you long for some sense of order? Now you can catalogue your books online using the Library of Congress style.

Library Thing allows you to catalogue up to 200 books for free. If you have more books than that, you can buy a $10 lifetime membership and catalogue unlimited books. And your library will be viewable online (or not, if you don't want it to be).

I'm so doing this just for the sheer glee I feel organizing things. Yes, although I might seem like a laid-back, messy person, there is a small kernel of obsessive organization lurking deep in my psyche.

*UPDATE*
I've got a pretty good start on my library now (because I've been entering books like a madwoman all evening). I've put a link on the sidebar. Check it out!

Hurricane Katrina Volunteering

If you want to more than donate money to the Red Cross and you live too far away to get down and pitch in, you can help another way. Volunteers are needed to help compile missing person posts from a variety of sources in one database. Just head on over to the PeopleFinder wiki

We lend out books, movies, and music already. What's next?

For some people, it's not enough to be able to take out books and movies and music and such from the library. They want something more, dammit! Well, how about people?

A library in Holland is lending out people to library patrons. Need an alcoholic? A homeless person? How about a homosexual? Yes, all these and more are available at the library in Almelo!

Pet Peeve #234

I just finished reading a trilogy of romances by Kathy Love, and I finally put my finger on why I was a bit irritated by them. The story was great, I liked the humour, the plot, and the characters, but there was something a bit off about the dialogue. It's because the author did not use many contractions at all while writing the dialogue. Now, I don't know if this was the author or the editor who decided that her characters don't say "I'm" or I've" or "haven't", but it is weird to read dialogue that is completely lacking in those small idioms.

Online quiz fun!

Hey, take the The Ultimate Canadian Test and see if you can beat me! I scored 90 Canada speak and 87 Canadianess. And I got 30 out of 30 questions right! Yay me!