Circumstantial evidence suggests that one of the construction crews ruptured a sewage line on campus this afternoon. A horrible odor undulated up the hill toward the library, rather ruining my enjoyment of lunch, campus, and the act of breathing.

In my current sleep-deprived state (finding a spider on the ceiling right before bedtime can make for a restless night), I could only muster up the energy for a list.
Things I have seen in Ithaca recently:

• Squirrels raiding our bird feeder using what looks like a tiny rope and pulley system. Clever little bastards.
• Big frikkin’ waterfall a block from my house.
• An old man out running with a Walkman. He waved each time we passed each other on the loop around the lake.
• A friendly dog leaping on a Frisbee outside the Veterinarian Fraternity.
• Hundreds of underdressed undergraduates returning to campus, getting very excited about things like decks of playing cards and free checking accounts.
• The empty aisles of the local Target store after three days of back-to-school frenzy. It looked like Vikings had raided the hardware section. All that was left were a few drop cloths and a toilet plunger.
• 1 big grouchy falcon
• 2 dead squirrels (Connection?)
• Hills. Calf-developing, 45-degree-angle, don’t-drop-that-bowling-ball-or-you’ll-kill-someone, Swiss Alp-style hills.
• Orioles, goldfinches, cardinals and other birds with irrefutable fashion sense.
• Students throwing stones across the library roof in order to make a nifty PLOINK! noise and incidentally contributing to the erosion of the roof drainage system. Never underestimate the power of a nifty PLOINK! noise. The big “Stone Throwing is Prohibited” sign on the roof seems only to have institutionalized this pastime. I often watch people walk by, see the sign, get this “oh yeah, I forgot about the stone thing” look on their face, and then toss a stone. Way to go with the totally intimidating sign. I think we as librarians have to accept the fact that we are not, in any way, sources of fear or respect among potential stone throwers, and our stern signs are really just sad attempts to influence a demographic that we can never truly reach or even understand.
• Beavers. Two. Swimming in the pond outside the bird observatory. Their tails are HUGE.
• A storm brewing that looks like it will hit just in time for my walk home, giving me the much needed shower that I missed this morning due to the no-sleep-spiders-will-eat-me incident mentioned earlier.

We removed some frames of honey from our beehive last week, and in the process I managed to get stung three times on the hand, so there was no typing for awhile. Still, I didn't get the worst of it. Chris got stung in the head twice, causing one side of his face to swell up to Muppet-like proportions. We do this because it is such a peaceful, meditative hobby.

Ok, hello. I'm back. Vacation involved lifting entirely too many heavy boxes, but we managed to enjoy ourselves. We 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 our neighbors if our 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 theatre 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 Vernors and put gravy on my french fries.

Overheard at library: "PubMed? Thats the bar you go to when you visit ClubMed."

The sex life of the library
Apparently there have been at least two masturbation incidents in the stacks this week. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked in a library, but some people find the library to be quite arousing. Is it the books? I'm told that Henry James can be rather risque. Or maybe the stacks create a feeling of public-privacy, an alone-in-my-room sort of feeling that works to the detriment of hapless female shelvers. And yes, there is often a hapless female shelver involved. It happened to me. I think. He left fast, so it was difficult to tell. I moved to a closed stacks collection soon afterward. Bleah.

Note from my mother, the small town library director:

"Well I just had my picture taken with a green bean and a carrot. They are running around promoting the farmer's market that the community center is having. Another thing they didn't tell you about in library school. I have a horrible feeling that's it's going to be on the front page of the paper."

So now that I live in New York, my habit of wearing all black in the summer has a certain cachet. In other states, however, there are apparently things called "summer clothes" which are pastel in hue and employ an efficient use of fabric. I discovered this while at a party with Chris in Austin, where my black mules became an object of some amusement. "It must still be cold in Michigan." a helpful Texan proclaimed, "since you still have your winter shoes on." Up until that point, I had only been familiar with three categories of shoes: Cute, Hiking, and Work. Now, apparently, there was some mysterious fourth category, a shoe only used for two months out of the year. A summer shoe. A quick survey revealed that every woman at the party besides me was wearing rubber thongs on her feet. Yes, those things that people wear in the shower when visiting locker rooms or suspicious motels. Fortunately, I work in a library where extreme office temperatures and the wearing of cardigans is expected, and the issue of summer shoes has not reared its head.
...
That, by the way, was my summer shoe story which I promise never to tell again because I have officially worn it out. Some stories are so easy to pull out in certain situations that they get overused, tired and worn. Others never wear out, and their telling becomes a sort of ceremonial chant. The shoe story ends here.
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In other news, my department is running a workshop this week, and as a result I spent a small part of my day sorting tea into different colors and arranging it in rows.
It was a weirdly library-like thing to do, all of this sorting and arranging, and although I know that tea is often presented this way, I still felt the urge to affix little catalog numbers to each row of tea.

If this is a symptom of someone who needs a vacation you may rest easy. I'll be in Pennsylvania all next week.