Pugilistic Periodicalistas
Our tickets arrived today! Chris got tickets to see three Royal Shakespeare Company plays in Ann Arbor this November. Two of them have a high Patrick Stewart content.
If you’re looking for me, I’ll be the one up next to the stage sitting on Chris’ shoulders going “woo!” and lifting my shirt.
Hey Mark Andrews – are you gonna be there or what? Shakespeare BABY!!! WOOOO!
I just took a ride around Cornell’s Bebe Lake, a mile-long loop where the Loch Ness Monster is said to be submerged, having being used as a prop in a silent film back in Ithaca’s glory days. I took the bread-ends that we’d saved in the freezer all winter, hoping to feed the ducks, but they were ungrateful today and paddled off.
We saw an Amazon rainforest-caliber slug on the way back. It was as long as my hand, and had tiger stripes and two sets of antennae. Also, a horse chewed on my bike handle. We biked up to the horse barns, and the foals were friendly and curious.
This afternoon there were cardinals, goldfinch, titmice, doves, junkos, hairy woodpeckers, flycatchers, robins, chickadees, and a Northern Flicker hopping around our bird feeder. Hummingbirds zoomed around the garden, and two male deer with a full set of horns trotted down the road in front of our window.
I live in a Disney movie.
One of the things I managed to learn in Librarian School is that you can (and probably should) research everything. So about an hour into The Food Poisoning, I got online and found a bunch of handy tips, which included such things as “drink tons of water” (no matter what happens to it afterward). The handy tips seem to have helped, and I’ve now worked my way up to drinking ginger tea WITH HONEY. The best part is I can rest assured that I’m vomiting in a reasonable and well-researched way.
Who knew the bathroom floor could be so comfy? Thanks, McDonald’s baked chicken salad!
I am in The City this week, visiting friends and shopping. I’m currently being sniffed by this dog, and am looking forward to watching the final game of the World Cup this afternoon at a pub where folks actually care about football. Go France! And Italy! I don’t care as long as the footwork is amazing!
Lizz and I went sari-shopping (sort of) in Jackson Heights yesterday. I was thinking about trying on one of these, but the whole process was way intimidating, and I felt like a cultural-appropriating jerk. Plus even the ugly saris were over my budget. Still, wow.
If any enterprising readers want to go shopping or Darwin-exhibiting between now and Wednesday, send me an email (ericaATlibrarianavengersDOTORG). I’ll be bopping around all day while everyone is at work.
The hot news this weekend is that we got a new kitty. I swear, I just went to the pound to pet the cats. But there she was, a four-year-old fluffball with a penchant for laps. She only has about six teeth, so she looks surprised all of the time. We’ve been on the Maine Coon rescue list for several months, but nothing had really come up. Then I found the cat of our dreams sitting in the Humane Society three blocks away. We named her Plover.
We brought her home Friday, and I spent the weekend doing cat-integration. There were about five minutes of fur-wrenching, then a truce was called. Now the house is swarming with cats. Two cats can make an impressive swarm.
Last week I met a swarm of digital librarians. My work hosted one of Cornell Library’s Digital Preservation Workshops. I helped show off our homegrown catalog and a/v player (which generates spectrograms that you can muck around with!) and our very-exciting-for-library-geeks data entry application. So man, can I just say? Talking to digital librarians? Very exhausting. You guys? Pretty intense. I found myself saying things like “Why yes, the animal behavior table in our data model IS tied to the hierarchy nodes in the taxonomy tree”. And then I went home and drank.
Today I animated a vector image of a woman singing for an educational flash animation illustrating the difference between the larynx (humans) and the syrinx (birds).
What did you do at work today?
In my travels, I discovered that WikiCommons has a nice-if-random collection of GNU public licenced images, which led to a debate with Cow-Orker Rafe on the proper pronunciation of the word “Gnu”. Turns out we were both right. Geeks pronounce the operating system “G-noo”, and English majors pronounce the wildebeesty “Noo”.
Noo! Noo!
We went to Toronto last weekend. This weekend we’re heading to NYC. If you’re in town and want to get sake with some webgeeks, let me know. My birthday’s on Sunday. I’m turning 30. Hooray!
They let dogs on the subway in Toronto. See? Proof of Canadian cultural superiority:
