i don’t even like talking on the phone

maura @ 10:55 pm

Phoning it in again tonight. I’m tired, we have to leave for familiness tomorrow earlyish, and there’s a heck of a lot of TV to watch. So here are some random thoughts/observations:

– I taught two classes this week. I miss teaching classes.

– I’m trying to use the inbox zero email management system. Maybe I’ll write a whole post on that soon — it’s proving trickier than I’d anticipated, but also has some benefits I didn’t anticipate.

– So rainy and hot this week. I am tired of being rainy and hot.

– How do things get so dirty? Seriously, I cleaned the kitchen today and it’s fairly incredible how dirty our clean house can get. I know it’s the city and the cats, but I wish it weren’t because I love those things.

– I hate to drive in Manhattan and it makes me a little sad that highways ring the edges, but the upside is you get the gorgeous views of the city while you’re driving, which never fail to make me a bit tingly.

– Fun thing that came through my email recently: the information literacy playlist, inaugurated when someone on the ACRL information literacy instruction listserv (ILI-L) who does a college radio show asked for suggestions. (This is a repeat if you follow me on twitter, sorry!)

– Tonight Jonathan made sticky toffee pudding, which was incredibly delicious and makes up for all of the pie I won’t eat over the next few days because I don’t really like pie.

what you see

maura @ 10:28 pm

Now that things are (somewhat) slower I’m trying to get back to some old, good habits, things I’d stopped doing when I was too busy or too tired. So I walked to work both yesterday and today. Today I even walked the old, preferable way, which is much more scenic and much less vehicle exhaust-y but takes between 5-10 more minutes. Which is nothing, really — barely a drop in the time bucket, practically zip in the great scheme of things. And something I should totally be doing for mental health, etc.

What I’ve missed in the past couple of months is new street/public art, which is everywhere! Photos of the stuff closest to work coming soon, but also there’s a great installation on a building on the scenic way to work. I didn’t stop to take pictures today, and anyway tonight I found much better photos than I could probably take. E.g.:

Really a cool project, and I haven’t even had a chance to walk around the entire building yet. I actually kind of adore that part of Brooklyn, that intersection of Livingston and Hoyt. True that it’s grungy and dirty and rundown and sad, plus the horrible commercial crowdedness of the Fulton St. Mall (where–UGH–xmas carols are currently being played so loud you can hear them 2 blocks away!). But there are amazing and beautiful historic buildings, and a Mexican grocery with 50 cent bags of chips for after summer-camp snacks, and lots of people people people coming and going and just trying to make it work.

Here’s an article about the artist, who sounds like a cool guy.

Image credit: sabeth718

puppy love

maura @ 10:29 pm

This evening I taught a class so I came home a bit later than usual. And apparently I came home at dog walking time, because there were all manner of dogs all over the place on my walk home from the subway. Big dogs, little dogs, jumpy dogs, dogs smelling other dogs’ butts, you name it!

I’m kind of really wanting to get a dog lately. There is no good reason for it, but I keep seeing these dogs and thinking how fun it would be to have a dog to play with. We have two cats who are themselves somewhat doglike: the one that likes me best runs to the door when I come home, and they run around the house crazily and try to jump out the window to catch birds. But they’re less snuggly than they could be, which I think is why I’m pining for a dog.

We do not need any more animals in this house for sure. No more hair, no more other maintenance. One of our humans in this apartment (guess who?) is lobbying for a snake of late. While snakes are cool, again, the maintenance, oof. His best friend just got a snake so it’s been getting harder and harder to deflect the snake talk recently. And his birthday and xmas are coming…

fishy thoughts

maura @ 10:35 pm

Today we went to the aquarium, because it was beautiful outside and that’s what Gus chose to do. It was actually a perfect day for it, not even very crowded. Weirdly, many of the animals were kind of hyperactive! Maybe it was the warm weather? The aquarium’s only partially outdoors, though.

First up was the moray eel. When we got to the coral reef exhibit the moray was just sitting there on top of the reef as fish swam by incessantly, typical eel stuff. But then it suddenly took off and started swimming around. It swam all the way down to the end of the tank, then looped around and came all the way back and stuffed itself into a hole. They’re so weird-looking when they swim, all snakey and slithery.

We also passed by the penguins. Usually they’re standing on the rocks just sort of staring at you, which often prompts me to wonder who, exactly, is in the exhibit? But today we were walking by the underwater viewing area and they were in the water swimming like crazy! They sped in circles around the tank, jumping out of the water and looping around below. It was as if someone had challenged them to prove that penguins are good swimmers. Or given them coffee. Or something.

But most impressive was the octopus. Gus is a huge fan of cephalopods and, having spent the morning researching colossal squid on the internet, was primed to ogle the octopus for a spell. Its tank is rather small and usually the octopus is squeezed up into the corner of the tank, all smushed together and rather difficult to see. But today was different! When we got there the octopus was lying vertically alongside of the front of the tank and we had a great view of its head and body. Then, suddenly, it stretched out to practically its full width, unfurled all of its tentacles, and moved slowly to the middle of the glass, changing color from milky white to reddish-brown as it moved. It settled in on the front of the glass, all splayed out with the tentacles suctioning right on the glass, and turned back to white again. It hung out there for a while and *then* moved to the opposite side of the tank to resume the vertical arrangement it started with. I finally dragged Gus away after about 40 minutes.

I realize that this doesn’t sound so impressive as I type it, but it was truly a big deal. Seriously, I think this is more than we’ve *ever* seen it move in the 9 or so years we’ve been going to the aquarium, maybe even more than all of those other times combined! I think somebody gave the octopus coffee, too.

bussed out

maura @ 10:26 pm

We’re home today, having only taken the quick trip north. Where quick = the length of time we spent in Montreal, not the length of time we spent on a bus. Lots of sitting, oof.

Tired tonight and lots of TV to catch up on, so please enjoy some of my random photos from the trip!

We stopped at the Duty Free on the American side of the border on the way up, and in addition to cigarettes and liquor there were many somewhat unusual finds:

Who doesn’t love the full set of Lord of the Rings Pez dispensers? Look at that Gollum head!

Enormous candy abounded. I’ve only ever seen a Hershey bar this big at Hershey Park!

Also how would you even eat this gigantic lollipop? Wouldn’t it get all icky before you had a chance to finish it, like Homer’s sandwich? (Okay, how weird is it that I can only find that clip in German? Copyright stinks!)

When we got through Canadian customs we were waiting to reboard the bus near a door with this sign on it. I get that it means first aid, but it *looks* like it means “extra bandage-wrapped hands in here!”

And then there was poutine, and there was beer, and there was great rejoicing. Followed by cafe au lait and tarte de sucre, not pictured here. Candy bars were brought home as well, one Coffee Crisp and one Crunchie for each of us. Heaven forfend we ever move to Montreal because we will clearly become enormously fat!

this totally still counts

maura @ 10:48 am

This conference has been an interesting experiment in connectivity detox. I’m typing this on Friday evening at about 10pm, but I won’t get to post it until tomorrow because I’m too tired (and in my pajamas!) to go to the hotel lobby and it seems silly to pay for wifi in the room just to post my blag.

When we got here yesterday we thought we’d pay for wifi today, but then we were barely here at the hotel all day. There is wifi at the convention center — I won’t mention which toll access publisher sponsored it. But before our paper (at 8am!) I tried to connect and couldn’t get on. Which was probably just as well — what’s the etiquette on livetweeting your own session, anyway?

I finally figured the wifi out later on and greedily caught up on twitter and email. Otherwise I’ve been grabbing wifi in the hotel lobby as we’re coming and going, and using that to face time with Jonathan and Gus.

I guess that’s enough. Since it’s Canada here I’m not using the phone for internet, which means no connectivity except for wifi. And there’s been less wifi than I expected. I admit that I’m a little twitchy, much more so than when we were in a similar situation in London 2 1/2 years ago. There’s the usual email and rss and twitter reasons to use the internets, of course, but I also feel like there are lots of conference tweets I want to catch up on since there were sessions that seemed interesting yesterday that we couldn’t go to.

Fingers crossed there’s wifi on the bus home tomorrow. You’ll know we’re wified up if you see this post in the morning!

je suis sur l’autobus

maura @ 9:17 pm

What’s the prompt? Need a prompt. It’s too easy to write about today, which I’ve mostly spend (and am still spending as I type this) on a bus. A sadly wifi-free bus, which is a bummer because as we’re sitting here waiting waiting waiting to clear customs I’ve had to turn data roaming off in preparation for finishing the ride to Montreal.

So instead I will write about languages. Many of the middle schools in our part of Brooklyn don’t offer languages in the earlier grades or even at all. I can understand why–their time is limited and they do offer lots of other great stuff. But preparing for this trip and listening to folks speaking French on the bus has me thinking about whether we might want to try for some language lessons outside of school, as tiger mothery and scary as that sounds.

I love languages, though I never gained true fluency in any. I had some French as a little kid in Montessori school, then I chose French in junior high and the first 3 years of high school. The last two years of high school I took Latin, which kicked ass–so very excellent & rules based and so helpful for etymology, too. I also had a tiny bit of German in high school, maybe 1 trimester? (We had a very strange high school schedule).

In college I was determined to fulfill my language requirement with the most off-the-beaten-path choice possible, which means that 2nd year found me in the introductory Sanskrit class. It was wicked hard (oh, the extra time of transliteration) but really fun. In some ways taking Sanskrit made me take college itself more seriously–I had goofed off a bit during 1st yr and my grades weren’t great, but Sanskrit was pretty much sink or swim. It rocked.

I flirted with learning Old Irish in archaeology grad school, even bought the books! They are very handsome, we have them still. But it’s really hard and I don’t even know modern Irish and then I changed my research area so it seemed like less of a good idea.

I haven’t had any language study since then, though there are several languages that I’m fond of. Icelandic because it’s so old. Finnish and Hungarian because they’re so non-Indo-European. Japanese would be so practical, since we’d like to visit one day. Spanish is, of course, the most practical of all. It would probably be relatively easy to pick up because of the French and Latin experience of my youth, and would enable me to eavesdrop in my day to day life much more effectively.

Even though I’m far far from able to converse, it’s still amazing to me how much French I actually remember. I’m sure I’ll forget it all when it’s time to order dinner, though as long as I can say poutine I’m sure I’ll be okay.

like leaves in the wind

maura @ 10:50 pm

I’m jumping from task to task right now, having a hard time focusing on getting done what needs to happen: blagging, packing, tech prep, last minute email answering, figuring out where to get poutine.

Tomorrow I’m off to Montreal for the American Anthropological Association meetings. My research partner and I are presenting about one small part of our huge honking research project on Friday morning, yay! It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a really academicy conference. Yes, we wrote a paper, and yes, we will probably read it. But our slides are good, and I think it’s okay to read a paper sometimes (she reassures herself).

Once again I’ll be traveling without my laptop, with just my ipad. I flirted with bringing the laptop for a long long time, because we will be on a bus for a long long time. But it’s just not practical to schlepp it around with me. So we’ll see how much I can get done on the bus with the pad, yo. (Fingers crossed for wifi!)

I’m looking forward to visiting Montreal again, even though it’s only really for one day. Maybe we’ll go to the archaeology museum! And the rad library, too. Right this very minute Jonathan’s verifying the quality of the poutine and tart sucre place we’re eyeballing, yum. Considering bringing an extra suitcase to stuff with coffee crisps.

Ah, go away, I have to pack!

ack!

maura @ 11:31 pm

Conference presentation Friday, slides to finish, laundry to do. Weird things afoot today, what with the Occupy Wall Street eviction and the Georgia Tech FERPA fiasco. Very very very very very very tired. Too tired to even hyperlink (oooh, how 1996!) those for you, though I trust you can muster all the power of the internets to find them.

Too many videos lately, so here’s a picture. Lynda Barry is so excellent, no?

what i had for dinner tonight

maura @ 10:36 pm

Date night! At a restaurant we love, that we haven’t been to in forever. It was yummy.

Wine: Lambrusco. Like grape soda for adults!

Appetizers: ravioli stuffed with beets in butter and poppyseeds, gnocchi made of chard + cheese in brown butter. (Mmm, buttery!)

Mains: rabbit with gravy on polenta with oil-cured black olives (I could eat that every weekend and not get bored); saltimbocca (pork with prosciutto and sage) with smashed roasted potatoes

Dessert: shared a pear cake with chocolate chunks and vanilla whipped cream

Also there were some fancy after dinner drinks, not tokaj but looks like it, don’t remember what they were called (hint: it was Italian). Very yummy.

I never knew what tokaj was until reading The Golden Compass, and now I have a very strong association of the book and the drink. We got a bottle once with a very thin long neck and a pretty scrolly gold label. Also Hungary! A very interesting country, not in the least because Hungarian is not an Indo-European language.

Thus ends tonight’s randomfest. Tune in tomorrow for tales of woe as I try to finish up all of my work before heading up north to the anthropology conference later this week!