Taking Off

I'm off to Michigan and Ohio on Wednesday, combining a trip home with my dear friend eb and a quick visit to Nieces 1, 2, and 4.

I never even finished blogging about my last trip, and here's another one. Aren't I the jetsetter!

Losing It

In the past week or so, I have misplaced or temporarily lost:

house key: mislaid for 4 days after I took it off the keyring to take it running.

office keys & church key: missing for 40 minutes until I determined I had dropped them in a friend's yard (during that 40 minutes I managed to lock my car keys in the car and had to have the apt manager let me into my apartment to retrieve another car key, because this all happened during the aforementioned period when the house key was AWOL. And yes, this is a separate incident from the week before, when I inadvertently left the same keyring on my desk at work and we had to have Seminary outside the next day).

floor fan remote control: this was missing for several months. I found it Sunday, and have again mislaid it, less than 24 hours later.

Visa card: apparently missing since Saturday, though I didn't discover its absence until I tried to buy something at the bookstore today. I retrieved it from the Kroger service desk tonight.

Kroger Plus card: probably gone forever. It was last seen in the company of the aforementioned Visa card, but the Kroger manager claimed no knowledge of it. Probably not a big loss, provided I can have my accumulated month's purchases transferred to my new card. If I spend $17 at Kroger this week, I'll earn a $0.10/gallon gas discount for two visits in September.

Dare I ask what's next?

Cliffhanger

So sorry to keep my faithful readers hanging. The presentation (a training session at a school inservice conference) went well:

• The pimple didn't erupt.
• If I said Texas instead of Tennessee, no one called me on it.
• I slept later (not longer) than I meant to, but it wasn't a problem.
• The room was full. I didn't have enough handouts, but now I know for next time.

Like many other things in my life, I spent waaay too much time preparing for what actually transpired, but it's water under the bridge now.

Easily Persuaded

It turns out that I needed the print copy of my latest audiobook, The Distant Echo, for more than just the fact that one cd has some unplayable tracks. The story is set in Scotland, and the narrator reads with such a heavy Scot accent that many placenames and proper nouns are undecipherable to my ear. So it's nice to have the print copy to refer to. The danger, however, is that when I look up a passage, I'm tempted to keep reading beyond the point to which I've listened.

Since I've been listening, however, I've started talking to myself with a Scottish affect, saying such things as "Where are me keys?" This is not a new phenomenon. When I listened to The Last Town on Earth, a story set during the 1918 influenza epidemic, I started with a bit of fear whenever someone near me coughed. During the epidemic, that could have been a deadly sound.

I think I had better not read something like How to Commit the Perfect Murder. Who knows where I would end up!

A Prayer on Presentation Eve

Please help me to not oversleep. Or perhaps that should be, please help me to at least get a couple of hours in.

Please, keep me from saying Texas when I mean Tennessee.

Please make sure there are more than 2 and less than 40 people in my session.

There's a nice blemish about to pop out on the side of my nose. Please delay it for a day.

148 Days to Go

It's only August 5 and I'm already feeling nervous because I don't have my 2009 appointment calendar purchased yet. I'm afraid to think about the deeper implications of that.

Holiday Road (and Food) Sign

Guess what state is home to this billboard?

Enough is Enough

I love* my public library, but three trips in one day is a bit much, even for me. Here's how it went down:

I stopped at lunch time to pick up a hold (Blue Balliett's The Calder Game), and at the same time returned two audiobooks (visit 1). Then I motored on down the street to UPS and the post office, where I opened another book in the car and discovered one of the discs from a book I had just returned.

So, after the post office I headed back to the library for visit 2 to return the errant disc. While there, I decided to ditch the J.A. Jance I was listening to (terrible narrator, stiff writing and boring story) in favor of another Val McDermid.

However, while later ripping the cd to put on my mp3 player, I found that half of disc 3 is unplayable, thus necessitating visit 3 to pick up the print copy (we don't have it at work).

I really can't complain much, however, since on all 3 visits I managed to snag a precious spot in the curbside 30 min parking, rather than having to venture into the dreaded parking garage (had to go around the block once on visit 3 to wait for a spot to open).

BTW, I finished 8 books in July, the most in a month since I started keeping track again last year. It helped that two of them were short YA's and one was Eclipse, which I started a long time ago. But still...


*Well ok, I love the idea of a PL. My feelings for my current PL are firmly in the "like" zone.

Pedestrian Safety

In Idaho I saw do-it-yourself crossing guard equipment for the first time--colored flags pedestrians can carry from one corner to another as they cross busy intersections.


My aunt said they have the flags in some towns in Utah too. Good thing, given all those Utah Drivers out there!

Food-Free Post

This morning my coworker J and I went to speak to University Seminar instructors. They teach the optional "Intro to College Life" class that has a library component, and we encourage them to come to the library for a session with a librarian. For many first-year students, that visit is only their first or second time in our library, and we count on that opportunity to introduce them to what's here (I sure wish that class was mandatory!). A large percentage of them will never come back with another class to work with a librarian. I went to speak to this group on the same weekend a year ago, though I did it solo last time. So how did the two experiences compare?

• I'm noticeably fatter this year.
• I stayed up just as late last night as a year ago, but it wasn't to work on slides in my office.
• I knew many people in the room this time, and several offered kind praise about my past work.
  
• I'm back in my office blogging after the presentation, nearly at the same minute of the day as last year. To be honest, I haven't listened to that Lyle Lovett cd very much since I got it. Today I'm listening to The Joshua Tree and feeling very "in the groove." (I think I need to get the remastered edition I linked to here. What do you think?)
  
• I don't have all the answers, but I understand the situation much better, having actually taught a few of these classes now. I think we made some improvements in the program last year, but we still need to make the instruction more active and digestible. I'm happy to have someone to partner with this time around.
• Last year, I came back to the office and did some follow-up work, and then probably went home and lazed away the afternoon. I had some work to do back then, but really no understanding of what was coming once school started, and nothing like the long to-do list I have now. This year, I'm already late to a Church/seminary activity that's going to run until 8 or 9 pm, I haven't finished the follow-up work from this morning, and I'm not sure when I'm going to work on the training presentation I have to take to a county school inservice conference next week.
  

Here's one thing that's possibly different. Last year I was new and excited (as excited as I ever get, which maybe isn't much) about working with these instructors and teaching these classes. Now, the bloom is off the rose and I've been around the block once. I've struggled all summer with motivation and interest (yes, I struggle with that every day, but it's been really bad this summer), and I haven't worked nearly as hard as I should have on various projects, including this one. But talking about it with J this week and talking to the instructors this morning, I felt a tiny spark of something like enthusiasm. I wish I could stay here for a few more hours and gently blow on that spark to nurture it into a flame. Instead, it's going to have to fend for itself against the wind while I go off to other activities (for which I have a whole other set of motivation problems!). So, I'm hoping it stays nice and dry for the next several days. If it's raining Monday morning, that little spark doesn't have a chance!

Holiday Food Again

Another stop on the holiday rounds was Pirate O's, a gourmet grocery store in Draper. I passed up the candy g-string, but came out with a Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate Mousse bar (never seen that flavor before), some Roasted Raspberry Chipotle Sauce, a Mozartkugel ball, some Botan rice candy, and a Lindor Hazelnut truffle (should have gone for two Mozartkugel's instead). I also bought what I seem to remember was a Schluckwerder marzipan loaf, for some odd reason having decided I didn't want to pay for my favorite brand, Niederegger. Not sure why I was taken with such an odd spasm of frugality, but I was.


The best part of Pirate-O's, however, was actually not the candy but the meat and cheese locker. All the cold beverages, meats and cheeses are in a separate freezer room, separated from the rest of the store by a strip curtain door. I could live in a room like that! The comfy temp seduced me into picking up a bottle of Izze Sparkling Grapefruit, but I again decided I didn't want to pay that much money, and took another trip back into the cooler to return the drink to the shelf.




*I know this post sounds terribly snobbish, but the fact is that I take my food confectionery seriously. Lest you think I'm an elitist, you should know that I consumed an Idaho Spud (from Maceys grocery) while writing this post.