could it be worse?

I am indeed an old movie. I prefer to think of myself as an old Marilyn Monroe musical, but hey, who am I to argue with science?

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

out for a bit

I will be around town but not at work for the rest of the week so I wouldn't expect a lot of posts if I were you. My sis will be here and we'll be acting all professional, meaning no spitting in anyone's general direction, etc. I do my best to refrain from revealing any embarrassing secrets when introducing her, but I'm not promising anything.

I'm so, so tempted to put on my kitty cat sweatshirt for the last day of the conference.

ah, if only

From my horrorscope:
"Love and choice are on the agenda today, which could make for a very interesting day indeed. It could be that two men are interested in you [ha!], and you have come to a point where you must choose one. Or perhaps your current love has asked you to marry him [double big ha!], and you must decide how to respond. Whatever the situation, try to let yourself be guided by intuition. Matters of the heart should not be made solely by the brain."

Interesting....

sundays

I was out mowing my lawn Sunday morning when a lady stopped by. Turns out she's the niece of one of my neighbors. I was able to get the scoop on the ambulance I'd seen the other day (new neighbor apparently doesn't understand how to bug bomb a house) and hear someone else's opinion about the bad neighbors (yup, they're bad). That's the thing about working in your front yard, though. People feel free to come up to me and start conversations and since I'm doing yardwork, chances are I'm all sweaty and gross. I always feel very exposed out there.

Then I went inside and made myself a bloody mary.

no e

Right as I was getting dressed this morning, the electricity went out. This was after the thunderstorms had rolled through. It started to come back on for a second, but when I left it was still out. I had to read my book by flashlight! I didn't get to waste anytime making coffee or watching tv! I stayed in bed late but still got to work earlier than I have all week!

I am really hoping it comes back on soon, or that it's already, or I am going to have a smelly fridge when I get home.

thursday morning coming down

I had a lot of good interaction yesterday, but I went home exhausted and now feel, well, let down.

My tomatoes are starting to ripen, slowly but surely. Since there have only been a few, I've eaten them straight off the vine. One plant has little tiny red tomatoes, another bigger yellow ones and the third has longer fruit that I think will be red but I can't remember. None of those has ripened yet. It's been a nice morning ritual to go out and pour a watering can full of water over my pocket garden, perhaps pull a few weeds, while my kitty cat digs in the sand and chases fluff.

geek score, going up!

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Robin Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry. My creator studied algebraic geometry with Oscar Zariski and David Mumford at Harvard, and with J.-P. Serre and A. Grothendieck in Paris. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, he became a Junior Fellow at Harvard, then taught there for several years. In 1972 he moved to California where he is now Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. My siblings include "Residues and Duality" (1966), "Foundations of Projective Geometry (1968), "Ample Subvarieties of Algebraic Varieties" (1970), and numerous research titles. My creator's current research interest is the geometry of projective varieties and vector bundles. He has been a visiting professor at the College de France and at Kyoto University, where he gave lectures in French and in Japanese, respectively. My creator is married to Edie Churchill, educator and psychotherapist, and has two human sons and one daughter. He has travelled widely, speaks several foreign languages, and is an experienced mountain climber. He is also an accomplished musician, playing flute, piano, and traditional Japanese music on the shakuhachi. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

why i love lane

Lane, of Gilmore Girls fame, got married on last night's episode. She's always been my favorite character on that show, and I have many that I lovelovelove so that's saying something. She's a smart, funny, rock-n-roll, no compromises kinda gal. She's embraced her insane family. She and her husband even looked at one another after Lorelai's drunken pity fest on the microphone and said, "this is the perfect wedding!" instead of getting all pissed off.

On another tack (tack, right, like in sailing? anyway...), is GiGi a play on G.G., for Gilmore Girls? I just thought of that.

like herding slugs

I am trying to arrange a meeting with the liaisons from my colleagues' college. I am babysitting them during their serials review this year. Out of 6, I've heard from two with possible meeting days/times. Only one has asked any substantial questions. On the other hand, my faculty responded promptly and one invited the others of us to visit her for lunch over at her department (made by nutrition students, no less). I am so freaking lucky to be the subject li-berrian for the college I have.

one day older

Coffee date = canceled. While I was semi-rude in doing it over the internet, I was at least honest and didn't dodge. Perhaps there is hope that I will one day reach adulthood.

topped 500

This is my 501st post. Huzzah!

Annika, her adoring public and I had a fun party on Saturday. We all survived relatively unscathed, although she thought I was going to burn her up while we were singing happy birthday around a lit candle in a cupcake. She put her paw out to stop me from getting her any closer to the candle and everyone started freaking out.

We did the first grilling of the season and I ate probably 10 cupcakes.

tax time

I finished my taxes Wednesday night and left them for the mail carrier today. I'm so happy they're done. Apparently Houston is on the top 10 list of cities that procrastinate most when it comes to taxes. No surprise here. It's all part of a very careful plan on my end, though. I wait until the last minute, so I get my refund as late in the year as possible. That way, I have a few months less in which to bemoan the fact that I have to save my entire refund to pay for my property taxes. Of course, if interest rates were higher I'd want to get the refund earlier to get as much interest on the wad as I could. Maybe I should look into some high yield, short term investments, hmm?

On another note, my neighbors were either having a pre-Easter party last night or my neighbor's wife has left him and gone back to Mexico. They were blasting old classic Mexican songs last night quite late (for my neighborhood--hey, we've all gotta get up and work in the morning). I'm really not sure which because this morning, all was quiet and the neighbor's car wasn't there....

Did he drive south to win back his sweetheart, or did he have to get on the road for work? We may never know.

we're living in buck rogers time!*

My office is right next to the photocopier. Usually I hear people come, copy, and leave, but this afternoon all I hear is **mutter mutter** BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP (which, by the way, is the sound of the Copy this please dangit button being pressed repeatedly).

And then, finally, the copies.

*something one of my colleagues said in a meeting this morning

cafe au lait

So my campus coffee date/stalker just called and I put him off until next week. Please help me think of an excuse to get out of next week's date.

Please.

Why don't I want to meet him? Well, it has to do with a little brush off followed by a weird sparkly rainbowy email.

Um, yes. I will keep you posted.

or, curmudgeon

"Regarding comprehensive misanthropy as a justified inference from the available evidence about mankind, it turns disgust into a systematic world view."*

Ah yes, the anecdotal misanthrope. Or, if you are gathering numerical data, the scientific misanthrope.

* from Scott McLemee's The Silencer in Inside Higher Ed.

around the block

Hallelujah, praise the lord of the feet! I did something this morning that I haven't done for 3 months: I jogged. Those of you who've heard my tale of woe will recall that I jammed my left foot about 3 months ago and was forced to stop wearing cute shoes (for the most part) and to stop running. I could no longer resist the need this morning, so out I went. I was slow and I didn't go far, but so far my foot is not protesting.

geeeeek

Astoundingly, I only scored 25.83826% on the geek test. Who knew?

fun roundup

The first night in NC, my pal came to pick me up and took me to Sushi Thai. Yummy! I ate so much over during my visit that I had a bellyache all of the way home to Texas. Friday night we went to First Friday for the Art Walk thingy in Raleigh. A bunch of galleries were open and we visited three of them. The first was a big place with a lot of studios and gallery space. There was a nice bluegrass band playing and that was the highlight of the visit, along with the purchase of the Keith Norval coloring book. I wanted to get one of his prints but I am too poor. At one of the other galleries, everything was either cut off testicles or carbuncles and I am not kidding. I'm blanking on the third, so it must've been uber exciting, no? Oh! It was where the onion head guy was. There were some cool stylized pics of gunslingers. We ate fish & chips (finch & chimps) somewhere in there and afterwards we met the potential new beau of my pal and his friend for dessert. Oh, it was good. I ate a lot of desserts during my trip. They were all good.

Saturday we had lunch with some friends, then coffee, then took a nap. Then we got pizza and headed over to see Hank III with two of my pal's pals. I got a little bit stomped on during the Ass Jack part of the show and it was totally worth it because I was able to push up to the stage and shake everybody's hand (except Hank, darn it) after the show. I am able to report that after that we did what we always do when we're together: madlibs and singing (shouting!) to Journey back at the ranch. We finally settled down for sleepy sleeps and woke up feeling very sorry about it all in the morning.

I finally felt less sorry on Monday morning, after 10 hours of sleep. The end.

symposium roundup

Last week I was at the NC State Undergraduate Assessment Symposium. I guess last year there were so many li-berrians that they added a track just for us. I got to be the very first presenter in that track this year. I had an hour to cover a lot of material and to have my group do 3 activities. I can't believe we made it through everything. I hope that everyone came away with a better understanding of why kids are the way they are when they get to us, and by that I mean why they have such varied information literacy skills.

I went to several other programs and the best were the keynote speakers (who knew statisticians could be so interesting?) and the other folks in our track. The worst was a gen ed assessment talk and I was so bored I doodled all over the dude's powerpoint slides but couldn't escape because I was in the front row. I think that librarians really understand a lot about assessment even though that isn't the sole or even the major goal of our jobs.

i'm baaaack

Lots to tell about the symposium and following activities, but I also have two classes to plan for, so y'all will have to wait a little bit.

oofy oufy offy

I'm taking off for NC tomorrow and I'm not taking a computer, so I may not be blogging much for a bit. Sorry for you fans of live conference blogging--was it worth checking out a work laptop and then hoping I'd be able to get internet access, etc. etc., especially when I am dragging an inordinante amount of paper with me? Well, no.

So, short story long, I'll be back in ac next week.

die!

To my colleagues: this is why I was giggling so much before 10am.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

swarm

On Friday night we attended a dance performance on campus. It was outside, in/under a sort of barn thing that the architecture students use for various things. There's a big cement floor and a roof and not much else. The advertisement noted that the performance was for mature audiences only as there would be "some" nudity. "Some" my blinding white butt. The two lead dancers were completely naked and shaven. The dance itself appeared to represent the life cycle of some kind of social insect. It looked more like termites to me than bees or wasps, but with artiste types, you never know. So there was lots of twitching and bumping and learning how to move types of movements and if you were in a good location you got to see a lot of, well, everything. Toward the end, after the two lead dancers had been lifted up off the ground in these neck brace thingies (symbolizing the mating flight?) and then fake humped each other, the female lead was dancing around and then was reaching for her crotch area (my view was somewhat obscured at this important juncture) and then a silver ball dropped onto the floor.

"Did that just come from...?" I asked myself. Yes, yes it did. The audience was looking a bit shocked but mostly smiling and chuckling and for the rest of the performance I kept my eye on that ball. As soon as it ended I told my friend I'd buy her dessert if she'd go pick it up. She had to race the GE, but she got to it first and I got a picture. And then we went to get pie.