Visiting Michigan

This weekend I was in Michigan taking care of family. On my way out of town I visited my friend Chuck, who has recently purchased a Very Fast Motorcycle. Detroit cops seem to have better things to do than pull over speeding motor city kids, so we were able to get some riding in.

Right now, I find the following things equally therapeutic:

Petting Clay and Mike’s rabbit*

Doing 100 mph on a dark road with the visor up

Getting in a really good Tango with a strong lead who brushes his teeth**

* The dog rabbit. He hops up to you and demands to be petted. The more you squish his face and pull his ears the happier he gets. I’m serious. This is a really good bunny.

** This hasn’t happened in ages. Volunteers accepted.

The call of our Zombie Masters

Now that the students are back in town I have company on my morning commute. Dozens of us trudge up the hill at 8am, shuffling up the steep slope to campus in unison, a long line of sleepy students and faculty heeding the call of our zombie masters.

Gack

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.

Ithaca

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 my 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 Lab of Ornithology. 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.

Notes from the field: Beekeeping

I removed some frames of honey from the Cornell Organic Farm 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. My partner got stung in the head twice, causing one side of his face to swell up to Muppet-like proportions. I do this because it is such a peaceful, meditative hobby.

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.

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.