wish list renaissance
And thank you, Tim!
5/31/2003 08:53:48 AM  



sugarsugar
If you have a problem with this legislation, then a) you're a fizzy beverage distributor or b) you've never experienced thirty pre-adolescents on a post-lunch sugar and caffeine high.

Health issues aside, it's hardly what you'd call an optimal learning environment. Because the staff made an issue of it (me included), soft drink machines were pulled from our campus last year. Though there's still no shortage of corn syrupy "fruit" drinks and highly-flavored "water."
5/30/2003 07:06:32 PM  



you people are just full of surprises lately!
Stephanie did two really cool things for my library!
5/29/2003 03:26:43 PM  



send a message
I've always wanted a Programmable LED Scrolling Sign. But not for work.

For the rear window of my car. Just imagine the fun.



Of course, you'd have to assume that SUV driver behind you with the Calvin-peeing-on-Darwin turtle decal can read. A pretty big assumption.
5/28/2003 05:05:45 PM  



miscellany

Saw The Movie. How unbelievably anticlimactic.

It's hot. It's damn hot and my shorts don't fit. Which is only relevant if I'm willing to blind my neighbors with my shockingly white thighs.

Some relatives drove from Milwaukee to Seattle last week and made a "side trip" to Sacramento - but didn't give me enough notice before they left for me to give them my updated phone/address info.

I'm reading stuff about Portland. Did you know Mt. Hood erupted as recently as 1865? Portland real estate ads have become my new porn.

The resignation form letter is on my refrigerator.

The lengthy power outage that made my Friday afternoon a living hell (100 degrees + no computer) managed to carry the havoc over the long weekend. It screwed up the new alarm system, which screeched every time anyone entered or exited one of the four doors in my building. And no one came to fix it. All. Day.

Does anyone have any Vicodin?

5/27/2003 04:05:08 PM  



and maybe a movie
Well, here's a small bone from Fox for still-dismayed Firefly fans. Nathan Fillion/Captain "Tight Pants" Mal, is "completing audio commentaries for a complete DVD set of the Fox series' 15 produced episodes, including three that never aired."
5/26/2003 06:19:53 PM  



I don't care if anyone important is reading this anymore
Another mailbox surprise today.

A resignation form letter and an exit survey. Without any kind of explanation.

After panicking for five minutes (is this some kind of message? do they want me to beat them to the punch before they can my ass? whatwhatWHAT?), I tracked down some other folks who could hopefully shed some light.

"Yup, all [non-teaching] staff got it. Administration thought 'it would be a good idea.'"

What?

When we're all excruciatingly jumpy from one day to the next? After slashes to our already paltry pay? This is a good idea? This is supposed to do what for flagging morale?

If the intent was for its mere presence to make people consider filling it out... it has, indeed. At least one.
5/23/2003 05:47:49 PM  



where six bucks buys a whole lot of crazy
Parrot hat. Blurry picture. Visiblog.

When I made my last Oriental Trading order (where else can you find such a plethora of fantastically cheap school giveaways?), I found a whole page of felt animal hats for six bucks. I'd be the queen of Crazy Hat Day!

Of course I wanted the chicken, but they were sold out.
5/22/2003 06:52:50 AM  



like school in the summertime
Home Despot - now thinking twice about ripping off the little guy.
5/21/2003 04:01:07 PM  



daaahhhhr
Normally, I'm thrilled! ecstatic! enraptured! to receive a big box of freebie bookmarks in my mailbox. The kids love them, which lends me a temporary period of coolness. Especially the LotR sets.

Love 'em.

But you'll never guess what today's batch are promoting. No. Really.

Dumb and Dumberer. They've got to be kidding me. Sending these to a school? A school with a few hundred students probably not even old enough to be admitted to the movie.

May just as well send bookmarks with Joe Camel, for all the negative parental attention they'd generate.
5/21/2003 02:10:58 PM  



temper[ature]'s rising
The hotter it gets, and the further along into the last trimester of school, the more easily I see myself donating every heavy thing I own to charity and fleeing to the cool piney woods.
5/20/2003 03:20:34 PM  



wagons north
We're all set to check out Portland in mid-July. Got some convenient digs downtown, right off I-5, which will make for a blissfully straightforward trip, if a long one - jump on I-5 two blocks from here, stay on it for, oh, eight hours, and get off practically right at our hotel.

And since driving in city centers is not exactly our forté, I'll be ordering up two of these.

What to see, what to do? So many choices. I'd like to check out OMSI, stroll the Esplanade, and maybe see a garden or two.

Of course The Pilgrimage is non-negotiable.
5/19/2003 06:59:48 AM  



no rush
Bad sci-fi fans, or just aging, cantankerous ones?

In either case, we're not going to fight those rabid lines and crowds to see you-know-what for at least two weeks (when the real die-hards will be on their second, third, and fourth views).

We saw X2 last night, though. It kept me mildly amused, which is no less than what I expected.

Too bad we didn't expect the ticket price to shoot up yet another buck. We knew it had at Century, but did Regal have to follow suit? Ugh.
5/18/2003 02:53:30 PM  



in a New York 840 minutes
It took the better part of a year, but I finally Netflixed all seven episodes of the American Experience series on New York. I couldn't recommend it more enthusiastically. But don't expect fourteen hours of dry discourse - the presentation is epic. Brain and Kleenex should both attend the screening.
5/17/2003 11:10:51 PM  



ending the week with a little poetry
From a student anthology. Of all places.

A Short Note
to My Very Critical
and Well-Beloved
Friends and Comrades

First they said I was too light
Then they said I was too dark
Then they said I was too different
Then they said I was too much the same
Then they said I was too young
Then they said I was too old
Then they said I was too interracial
Then they said I was too much a nationalist
Then they said I was too silly
Then they said I was too angry
Then they said I was too idealistic
Then they said I was too confusing altogether:
Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant
or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight or are you gay?

And I said, Hey! It's not about my mind.

--June Jordan

5/16/2003 11:42:05 AM  



bon chance
Our district is dotted with new buildings conceived in boom times.

And now we're lucky to have money to staff them. You know that I may not last long in my brand-new library, but there's also a whole new elementary school that won't open this fall.

That is, unless the parents step up. Good luck.
5/16/2003 07:17:04 AM  



Texas Instruments in the hizzouse
"Yo yo, check this. He may be a professor, but he be the bus driver too, 'cuz he'll be taking you to school... Wrist strap with metal clip for some of that bling blingy... Eight plus seven equals Fifteen? Damn straight."
5/15/2003 05:17:51 PM  



are you jealous yet?
Now we can program tv recording from anywhere. And watch recorded shows, theoretically - our bandwidth may not support that well.

Windows Media Center rocks.
5/15/2003 12:33:15 PM  



you can have your bath and tv, too
Look what I found while leafing through D's porn!

List price from $29,000.
5/15/2003 06:38:54 AM  



it's baaaaaacon!
Rob and co. have been at it again.
5/15/2003 06:29:28 AM  



any excuse
I can't post to the visiblog right now (I'm testing Dano/New Blogger/whatever, which seems to be fupped). But you can still look at the Manitoba Files. Miscellaneous stuff from grade school, unearthed and seeing the light of day by popular demand. And you all know how much I like to scan stuff.
5/14/2003 08:57:16 PM  



my subtitle still applies
So J. walks into my office with a long box. "We found this buried in the corner of Admin storage."

Well, I like a good mystery as well as anyone. I open the flaps, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a whole pile of mission-critical supplies for which I'd been submitting requests for months. Stuff that lets me get new books on the shelves. To my knowledge, my requests had been denied due to budget woes. I limped along with makeshift supplies and stuff bought with my own money.

And, even though it was delivered in my name, it was never delivered to me. That was four months ago.

While the treasure made my day, I'm understandably feeling a little psychotic about the whole incident.
5/14/2003 05:02:03 PM  



I miss Firefly, too

2. The Holodeck.
I mean, it's cool and all. But do you really believe that people would use it to re-create Sherlock Holmes mysteries and old-west saloons? Come on, we all know what the holodeck would be used for. And we also know what the worst job on the Enterprise would be: Having to squeegie the holodeck clean.

Go read the Top Ten Things I Hate About Star Trek right now.

Via Timbu, who I happen to have attended grade school with (yes, one day when I was bored, I got out one of my old yearbooks and started Googling people). Blogs make the world a lot smaller, no?
5/13/2003 05:21:29 PM  



!!!!!!
I just wrote a very long entry. And I didn't copy it to the clipboard before hitting post.

You'll understand if I don't feel like re-writing it.
5/13/2003 04:07:25 PM  



babies everywhere
Lucy Jane is simply gorgeous!
5/12/2003 03:27:27 PM  



thank you!
A neighbor sent some gifties to my library! And I got them today, and it was really such a treat. I admit I'd almost forgotten about the Wish List, and it had me a bit baffled at first.

And just when people had been acting very, very badly all day - such a nice, nice thing :-)
5/12/2003 03:14:19 PM  



no more cereal hair!!!
I love the kitties dearly, I do. Mostly.

But they need to stay off the clean kitchen counters. I'd like the chance to mess up my own white counters. If we ever get a house, one of the things that I'll be looking for is a kitchen with a door that closes.

Training, you say? HAHAHAHA! You've never met Elli, have you?

D. thinks we should spray citrus or eucalyptus all over the counters - supposedly they act as a repellent. Of course it would end up all over me, probably daily. I don't know that fixing a gross problem with a messy solution is the best idea.

I read, somewhere, that double-sided carpet tape is pretty effective. That's almost barbaric.

I wonder if it works for cats with selective amnesia?
5/12/2003 06:15:34 AM  



film = sanity
Which weekend scare - Ringu or Identity? Or both?

A dose of John Cusack would probably do me very much good. John Cusack, a big fat pizza, and some pear cider. Now we're talkin'.
5/9/2003 03:09:56 PM  



howdee, neighbor
There's this guy that moved in across from us, where the frat boys used to live. A middle-aged man, one who verbally hurls (wouldn't Verbal Hurl be a good name for a blog? You can use it if you want to) himself at you whenever you meet.

Yeah. Introverts aren't really comfortable with that. It's kind of scary to go outside now.

When he moved in, he gave me his name somewhere amongst his rapid-fire blindside Inquisition. Before I was able to hide, he told me that his friends call him "Z-Man."

So guess which name I can remember.
5/9/2003 06:18:32 AM  



new information - it's ulceriffic!
So many bureaucracies to deal with, issues to grapple, fears to beat down, and new threats to ignore, all while going about my business with the usual energy and optimism. The only way to do that, I've found, is to internally repeat the following types of mantra all day: "Big Picture. Future of America. Readers make leaders." And so on and so forth.

The only thing keeping my dress size from stressrocketing this month is all the manual labor I've been doing. Now that the books are in the building, they have to be dealt with. Most of the circulating collection is set (some teachers should get gold stars and a Krispy Kreme every day, every day), but the heavy textbooks are still a work in progress (did you know the seventh-grade reader is as heavy as my college chemistry book?). They'll live in their boxes while I crack away at them, slowly.

I would've been able to open for circulation tomorrow, but there's still one bit of crucial cabinetry work that needs to be finished in the main desk before they'll even let me bring my circ computer out. I was told "Tuesday." It's now a contractor's end of Thursday, and... At this point I'm almost ready to set up shop on the floor.
5/8/2003 03:27:01 PM  



because I just don't know what else to say about it
Well, fuck.
5/7/2003 06:57:18 PM  



at least there's BBQ
Open House Night. Whoring the Book Fair since 7:30 am. Will be until 8:30 pm.

A nap would be perfection. I need to get a little couch in here. Or at least a cushion beneath the desk.
5/6/2003 04:41:46 PM  



not to toot my own horn, but
I think you're missing out on some useful ideas if you're not reading my reusablog every now and again!
5/5/2003 05:07:51 PM  



library days, library nights
I enjoy using the public library so much more because of:

1. Automated self-checkout - no guilt (not that I should really give a care, and not that it would stop me, but) if I check out something personal or doofy. And no lines.
2. On. Line. Holds.
3. Proximity. We now live within spitting distance of the Central Library, which is all real-oldfashionedlibrary-looking (well, at least half of it - it's as architecturally schizophrenic as the next library), has decent hours, and of course the biggest public collection in town. Our previous neighborhood library... yeah, not so much.

But don't think I've forgiven them past injustices (pardon the site restructure-induced broken links/images). I just can't let it come between me and free reading.
5/5/2003 04:34:14 PM  



sweet glorious scream-free rapture zone
I'm eating lunch in my new office. The office with the mini-blinds and locking door, and not in any way viewable from the building exterior. Just me, fruit and nut-type stuff, and some low-key alternapop.

There is a little reward for hard work, after all :-)
5/5/2003 12:24:14 PM  



spies... or soaps?
The baddies finally have their claws in the device that will ??? the world, you just found out your two best friends are dead, you wake up in Hong Kong - where your boyfriend arrives to tell you that you've been missing for nearly two years - and the dipweed has gone and remarried.

That's some cliffhanger.

Maybe she'll end up with Sark, after all. Hmmmph.
5/4/2003 11:24:52 PM  



even though I don't know who you are
To the person who described chai so pleasingly in their blog, enough that I finally tried some (or at least a Jennie-proof boxed interpretation)... thank you, whoever you are.

Yum.
5/4/2003 01:25:27 PM  



that's okay, I like to chew my air
The 2003 "State of the Air" report was released today.

"Sacramento region air quality sixth worst in the nation."

Yet another of a hundred good reasons to head north.
5/1/2003 04:37:34 PM  

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