Today I Skimmed Schmaltz, and was Rawked at by a Raven.

Raven with Sausages by quinet

The schmaltz came from a mess of chicken soup I made. A thick layer of chicken fat rose to the top overnight and was skimmed off and used to season the cat’s breakfast.

Chicken soup for the soul by tsheko

The raven is a Common Raven, who was hanging out in one of the San Francisco parks that I walk through on my way to work. Common Ravens are more common out here than they are back east.

They are about the size of a small dog, and live shoulder to shoulder with their smaller corvid friends the Crow and the Western Scrub Jay. All three species enjoy Rawking, poking at things with their substantial bills, and Making Trouble.

What alliterative things happened to YOU today?

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My mother, the real librarian (not a digital muckety muck thingamajig like me), will be visiting me here in San Francisco next week. Since she will be hanging around with non-Midwesterners, I thought it would be good to provide her with an introduction to west coast language. I know, right?

• I know, right?

  Rumored origin: L.A.
  Literal meaning: “Can you believe this thing we are talking about? It goes without saying, and yet we are saying it.”
  Connotation: “We are all in agreement here. Also, I have never read Beowulf.”

• Hella

  Rumored origin: NoCal.
  Literal meaning: Intensifier. “Their pie is hella good.”
  Connotation: “I am twelve.”

• Yeah yeah yeah

  Rumored origin: Coffee-fueled Berkeley undergraduates
  Literal meaning: “I agree so strongly that it can be quickly dismissed with a rapid exclamation.”
  Connotation: “We are getting things DONE in this conversation.”

• Chill

  Rumored origin: The 1960s.
  Literal meaning: “Good. Calm. Without trouble. Easy.”
  Connotation:”I have had lots of therapy and/or drugs.”

Got more? Send ‘em in!

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My friend Maysan Haydar has always been cool. She introduced me to Bratmobile and Swing dancing back when such things were hip. She got a tongue ring before everyone else. She was the first person I knew to dye her hair purple.

She escaped from Flint, majored in Linguistics and moved to NYC to write for The Nation. Now she’s a social worker. Oh. And she wears the hijab. Here’s an excerpt from an article she wrote for the book Body Outlaws about why she wears the veil, and what it’s been like.

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The worst part about this post is that I pretty much just lifted it from an email to a friend. Don’t tell, ok? Bad blogger.

I’m running around with alligators hanging from my ankles this week. The work-related travel starts Saturday, so Things Must Be Prepared. Stuff Must Get Done. The NSDL waits for no man.

I have this fantasy where I sit in a hip London sushi joint upgrading this site whilst eavesdropping on conversations in a variety of awesome UK dialects. That’s my idea of a good time. It could happen.

We cleaned our gutters this weekend. I made bread and soup. I created a JSP interface for tying item-level records to their associated subassets. I brushed the cat. I tried to teach my friends’ daughter to say "mop" like the trashcan droid in star wars.

Life in Ithaca is domestic and lovely.

I’m also reading a Great Long Book  Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
My favorite quote, which reminds me of the much-mentioned view outside my window:
"In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it"

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1. Rearranging the books, playlists

Sorry I haven’t updated in a few weeks. I’ve been busy downloading music from this quasi-legal Russian mp3 site. But not at work (hi library colleagues). And there was some vacation involved. And dog-sitting. And basement wall dry-locking.

Speaking of the theft of intellectual property, at work recently I’ve been looking at online digital collections and identifying nifty interface elements we can borrow for the cataloging/digital library software we’ve been making. There’s some pretty rad stuff out there.

I’ve been liking the NYPL’s Picture Collection Online, in spite of it’s bass-akwards name. (Adjective Adjective NOUN, people. We don’t call you the Public Library New York, do we?) Plus, it’s the only library search interface I’ve seen to contain the word “bollicky” in the source code.

You all might know about this already, but coolperson Marguerita clued me in to the new TNT movie “The Librarian“. Unless April fools came early this year. Or USA Today isn’t a legitimate news source…

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EEE! I’m quite excited about being linked on Metafilter, but was it just me, or did some snarky person imply that the name Librarian Avengers is a possessive plural? I’m so confused. There aren’t even any adjective-noun agreement issues, and hello, avengers serves as a collective noun anyway. It’s like saying “dental hygienists” or “sports team.” This is really bugging me people. I’m wasting valuable rant time here reading linguistics texts and trying to figure this out. Besides, I stole the name from the Lesbian Avengers so am I really to blame?

Oh wait, I just realized that the snarky person was being snarky about the entry below mine. Never mind.

Hmm. Or maybe they weren’t. Hell.

A few weekends ago the charming Alexandra came out to visit. Although she, Pedro, and I all have degrees from the University of Michigan’s School of Information and took a few library and archives classes, none of us really consider ourselves librarians in any sort of traditional work-in-a-library way. This might be of interest to any of you potential library school students: Information School can lead you to choose strange and unusual jobs. Beware!

Anyway, while she was here we went out to a local sheep farm and met the nicest people, dogs, sheep, and pigs. We don’t really have access to stuff like this back in metro Detroit, so we got all excited and Alexandra took lots of pictures. And since Alexandra is a champion craftsperson, in a few weeks one of those sheep will be turned into a sweater or something. I’ve always thought that if some sort of Y2K event occurs, we are going to load up the bees in the Jeep and drive to wherever Alexandra is. She’ll take care of us. She would just knit up a nice four-bedroom house, and then cook a six-course meal out of acorns and dandelions.

If some horrible Y2K type event DOES occur, Ithaca is actually a rather nice place to be, considering the amount of locally grown food and the homebrew philosophy that sort of permeates the place. Mmm, homebrew. Gotta go.

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Ok, hello. I’m back. Vacation involved lifting entirely too many heavy boxes, but I managed to enjoy myself. I spent a few days at the geektastic Medieval reenactment festival Pennsic, and the long drive back from Pennsylvania across Central New York was an unexpected treat.

For some reason I never knew this, maybe because when you live in Michigan you are only allowed to say nice things about Michigan, but New York is darn pretty. There are all of these green mountainy things, long swooping valleys, and huge tire-sized turtles that stomp across the road and scare the heck out of you. Plus, after five days of camping I was singing the praises of every flush toilet along the way. Yay technology.

It was kind of strange to turn on the cell phones and get messages from concerned friends and family members worried about the blackout. Let me just say, if there is any place to be during a major loss of electricity, it is Pennsic. These people have tents that are better decorated than my house. It is not unusual to see a huge pavilion lined with ten oriental rugs, and filled with a long dining room table, an armoire, an antique full-length mirror, a dressing table, and about a thousand candles. People bring full kitchens, propane-fuels refrigerators, hot-water showers, beds, enormous gates, and enough clothes to clothe an army, which, incidentally, there also happens to be. We, on the other hand, brought our backpacking tent and some sleeping bags. All week, people walked by and asked if my tent was the “armor tent.” Yes, people set up special little tents for thier armor. As a seven-year employee of the Michigan Renaissance Festival, the weirdness of all this did not come as a complete surprise, but I have to admit being somewhat taken aback by the full-scale reproduction of a Viking encampment that sprung up across the road. They even had their own bus, with, I assume, oars that stick out the windows. Oh, and I’m told that every year there is a party for all of the librarians who attend.

Back when I was a spoiled undergraduate and could study whatever I wanted, I took this class in American Dialects. One of the interesting trivia factoids I learned was that people tend to take on the dialect of wherever they feel most comfortable, or they identify with the most. This might explain why a grandmother will still have her Irish brogue after 30 years in the States, while a theater student will return from a summer in Stratford calling trucks “lorries” and referring to her mother as “Mum.” This is all to say that I must like it here in New York.

I don’t know if it’s the smoke-free bars, or the truly excellent pizza, but I’ve been finding myself calling carbonated beverages “soda.” Now, as anyone with a self-promotional website can easily claim, I am entirely without pretense, so the substitution of my native “pop” for the exotic, foreign “soda” comes as a surprise. But I can assure my fellow Michiganders that I will continue to drink Vernor’s Ginger Ale and put gravy on my french fries.

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