Pennsic, accents, and the SCA

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.

Shoes

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 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.

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.

Morning Ralph

You know that old Warner Brothers cartoon with the coyote and the sheepdog? The sheep dog and the coyote both come into work and punch the time clock, and one goes “Morning Ralph” and the other goes “Morning Sam.”

Remember? That one?

Ok, so I’m leaving work last night, and I see somebody from the reference department coming in for her shift just as I’m leaving. And of course I say “Morning Ralph,” because of course everyone in the universe has the same cultural touchstones as me right?

And of course she has no idea what I am talking about, and of course I’m a big freak.

True Living Room Confessions

There are mushrooms growing in the corner of my living room. I discovered them when I moved the wireless router upstairs and removed a tangle of cords. There they were. Three little mushrooms. Growing. In the carpet.

I live in one of those beige apartments where everything is new and clean and entirely characterless, so mushrooms in the carpet, even beige mushrooms, seem out of place. I will be moving in a few weeks, so we took this discovery in stride. I decided to leave them as conversation pieces. “Welcome to my home, have you met the mushrooms?”

On a cinematic note, the mushrooms bear an uncanny resemblance to the ear in the opening scene of Blue Velvet. Of course this has nothing to do with libraries, but if it makes you feel better I will call the reference desk and ask for a book on common living room fungi.