It’s kind of hilarious that it’s Twitter Tuesday again since I’m about 10 hrs behind on Twitter right now. Not sure exactly why — while I definitely had stuff to do today, it wasn’t too crazy at work.
Oh well, time for me to stop blogging and start reading!
@Annefesto Oh no! It’s too early for that kind of tragedy. Bugs be gone!
9:02 AM Dec 13th from Echofon in reply to Annefesto
today’s awesome: get some pretzels, open a jar of nutella, dip, enjoy. you’re welcome!
9:29 PM Dec 12th from web
Me too! RT @s_francoeur: @val_forrestal Sigh…I wish I was at the #biblioball.
10:37 PM Dec 11th from Echofon
Finally read that article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Ed unpacking the modern uses of “friend.” Interesting. http://bit.ly/6EOCS5
8:52 PM Dec 11th from web
I keep forgetting to move my Open Access button from my fall coat to my winter coat.
11:22 AM Dec 11th from web
Called in sick to my food coop mtg tonight. If I go to sleep @ 8pm will I finally kick this wretched cough to the curb?
7:17 PM Dec 10th from Echofon
@Biggie_Smales Same for Ellie, pls! Playdoh? Puzzles? Duplo? Magnetic wooden dressing dolls? Candyland? Miss you guys! xoxo
1:12 PM Dec 10th from web in reply to Biggie_Smales
@Biggie_Smales shoe: 12.5; clothes: 7-8 top, 7 bottom; toys: lego clone wars vehicles; books: any Judy Blume Fudge book except DoubleFudge
1:11 PM Dec 10th from web in reply to Biggie_Smales
Jealous of the big snow in the Midwest.
10:34 PM Dec 9th from Echofon
@jrrnyc raspberry!
10:32 PM Dec 9th from Echofon in reply to jrrnyc
@mkgold Congrats on getting thru IRB! It can be a long road.
10:31 PM Dec 9th from Echofon in reply to mkgold
my inbox feels like a bad game of centipede: blasting one segment doesn’t get me any closer to finishing the board, it just makes 2 more.
9:21 PM Dec 9th from web
RT @zephoria: w000t! U.S. gov’t looking into open-access requirement for research it funds. See RFI: http://bit.ly/8gvhvT (yay!)
1:05 PM Dec 9th from Echofon
new flyer for the new course = done. should be making a flyer for the student survey in my research project, but too tired.
10:53 PM Dec 8th from web
@aegisnyc I know, funny, right?! Sometimes I still forget to answer when they call me that.
9:58 PM Dec 8th from web in reply to aegisnyc
Lately I’ve been feeling guilty about the compost. Our building has a courtyard which is sort of landscapey — not really a garden, but mostly plants + some brick area too. It’s pretty to look at + hang out in and a decent place for mostly little kids to play, we’ve got a sandbox and a kiddie pool and a bunch of riding toys. When a bunch of us wanted to start composting several years back we knew we needed a no-pest, no-smell solution. So we went with the compost tumbler: a big plastic barrel secured to a stand at its midpoint so it can be flipped over and rotated 360 degrees. It’s got a small, screen-covered spout at the bottom to allow air to get in but keep pests out, and since it’s mostly contained it doesn’t smell at all.
But (there’s always a but), it’s not exactly the easiest thing to use. Most food waste can go into the barrel (no fats or meats, but that’s true of other composters too), but it should be chopped into small pieces for best results. Food waste is “greens” and we need an equal amount of “browns” in the barrel, too, in order to make real dirt and not just slimy decayed food. Because we don’t have big trees (= dead leaves) in our courtyard, most of our browns are cardboard and newspaper, which also need to be torn into smallish pieces. So it’s kind of a pain to make a deposit in the barrel: first you dump your compostables in, then rip up + add the browns, then close it up and flip it a few times to mix everything together.
Once the barrel’s full the compost needs to “cook” down to become actual dirt. Depending on how attentive you are during this process it can take as little as two weeks, though we’ve never really gotten it down to less than a a month. And this is the bigger pain in the ass. Basically the barrel needs to be flipped at least 2x/day during cooking, which sounds easy but never really turns out that way. It’s heavy and a little dirty, so I never want to flip it on the way out in the mornings. We’ve tried making a schedule in which the compost contributors each take a different day, but inevitably we forget or leave town for a few days or get sick or… And it’s frustrating because we can’t put in anything new during the cooking, and it always seems to stretch on forever.
Last summer I had to bow out of composting because I was just too busy to deal with it. But I’ve felt guilty ever since, and moreso recently when we had to get rid of our Halloween jack o’ lantern. Yeah, we have a disposal, but we can’t put everything down there, and I know that composting is better. I guess the thing that is most annoying to me is that compost just happens. It’s ecomological! And if we had a yard* then I’d just have a plain compost bin and dump stuff in, cover w/a thin layer of dirt, and leave it. Easy peasy.
* I should point out that, all things considered, we are very happy non-houseowners. For all of the niceness of a yard I think the maintenance would kill us. It’s nice to have a super!
Really what I want is for the city to do it. I’m sure there’s lots of research on this that I’m too lazy to google right now that presents all of the complicated reasons why it’s too hard to do, but it seems kind of easy when I think of it. The DSNY could collect food waste 2-3 times/week. They could take it to sites within the city to compost it up, using all of the leaves they (used to) collect in the fall for browns. There are industrial composting solutions that make it happen even faster than Mother Nature, if speed is an issue. Then they could SELL it back to stores or even to gardeners directly. Compost in, money out, w00t!
You’d think they could at least break even, right? I’m sure there are many reasons why this isn’t happening, but don’t tell me and burst my happy compost bubble.
I went to the CUNY IT Conference last Friday so this past week’s tweets are a little techy. I also presented at the conference, which was fun if a little nerve-wracking. When I got there on Friday morning and looked in the program, the room listing for our session read Theater. !!! Yes, the multi-hundred seat Theater. Thankfully, for some reason (tiredness? still getting over this dang cold? who knows?) I didn’t freak out, not even at the beginning of the session when the tech was buggy. It was quite the weird experience, with microphones and blinding lights and my co-presenter’s course blog on a seemingly million-foot tall screen behind us. Crazy.
So here’s last week’s twitterstream:
Learned lots of new stuff at tonight’s wine + cheese + Firefox workshop. I love my job! http://bit.ly/7UHHwl
less than 5 seconds ago from web
I love my RT days, but working from home makes it a little too easy to have a cookie for lunch dessert.
12:46 PM Dec 7th from web
@divanoir totally! Gus is getting the new super mario bros wii for xmas, let’s have a wii brunch sometime!
12:18 PM Dec 6th from Echofon in reply to divanoir
Wish I’d been able to make it to #acrlny09 last Friday. Thx to all the tweeters for the great summary, esp. @StJ_Libraries
10:11 AM Dec 6th from web
Watching a sensei @ Gus’s karate class teach 30 kids while clearly fighting a sore throat makes me feel like a whiner.
11:58 AM Dec 5th from Echofon
Still waiting for my kid to return from his field trip.
10:46 PM Dec 4th from Echofon
@ms_tinamarie Sorry to miss yours too! Too many great sessions today, wish I could have made it to them all.
4:18 PM Dec 4th from Echofon in reply to ms_tinamarie
# In the info lit presentation @ #cunyit, wish I could be at the WordCamp session, too. Where’s my clone?
2:42 PM Dec 4th from Echofon
At #cunyit? Want to sign up for the CUNY Academic Commons? Visit the computer lab in 436T all day to join #cunycommons
10:24 AM Dec 4th from web
@mikhailg yes, audio for http://bit.ly/6CP7t4 #cunycommons preso from #cunyit, tho quiet.
10:11 AM Dec 4th from web in reply to mikhailg
@zephoria Parents who are scared of video games do. As a parent, it always surprises me how many parents are still afraid of video games.
8:20 PM Dec 3rd from Echofon in reply to zephoria
RT CityTechLibrary Merlot+Firefox make for a great combo. Join us Dec. 8, 5:30-7:30 for Web2.0 Happy Hour http://bit.ly/7UHHwl
12:33 PM Dec 3rd from web
Twitter is the only thing I’m caught up on right now, bah.
11:04 PM Dec 2nd from Echofon
really hoping that this is my last superbusy week. i’m tired.
8:19 AM Dec 2nd from web
I have been absolutely unable to stop listening to the last Tracey Thorn record (Out of the Woods) recently. I bought it for Jonathan for his birthday a couple of years ago, right after it came out. But while I liked the single then, I just couldn’t get into the rest of the album. It’s a mix of quiet pianoey songs and faster electronic stuff, and for some reason back then I kind of resented the incursion of the softer stuff into the happy techno goodness. I guess I’ve been missing later-stage EBTG.
But that was stupid, because it turns out that the slower stuff is fabulous (duh for me). It’s always been those songs that really foreground her incredible voice. When I was looking for the YouTube link above to “It’s All True” I stumbled across this video for the version of The Style Council’s “The Paris Match” with Tracey singing. It’s still amazing all these many years later, and so much more convenient than having to go into the living room to fire up the turntable:
Her new record is coming out on Ben Watt’s Buzzin’ Fly label in Spring 2010, yippee!
It’s December 1, why am I still blogging? Well it’s Twitter Tuesday, for one. Also I’ve begun to suspect that my hair has stopped growing, and I needed someplace to say that. It’s just weird — my hair never seems to get any longer recently. I don’t cut it as often as I probably should, but once I do it seems to grow to its former length and then stop. Bizarre.
Last Week’s Tweets:
working on my CUNY IT conference presentation, hoping that my open office slideshow looks okay in powerpoint.
2:15 PM Nov 30th from web
@alevtina All those English comp classes w/the Ps — bet our stats are similar. Tho I did send some students to our Hs last week.
2:12 PM Nov 30th from web in reply to alevtina
Listening to Gus & his cousins play pirates in the other room. “Are there any girls on this pirate ship?”
8:34 AM Nov 29th from Echofon
@lwaltzer Wasn’t it great? Jonathan & I want to see it again. The digging scenes were so much fun.
8:31 AM Nov 29th from Echofon in reply to lwaltzer
“I’m not as lovely as I could be.” “None of us ever is.”
9:52 AM Nov 28th from Echofon
not that anyone needs them, but apparently I’ve got some google wave invites — ping me if’n youse want ’em.
3:56 PM Nov 27th from web
What’s more fun than an enormous model dung beetle? Searching for the eggs in the dung, of course. http://twitpic.com/r6rt6
1:13 PM Nov 27th from Echofon
Mmmm, cornbread & sage sausage muffins are good for breakfast, too.
9:43 AM Nov 27th from Echofon
there’s no smiling in kung fu. this is an embarassment!
9:59 PM Nov 26th from Echofon
@boonebgorges transferring files to my mom’s new laptop here. nothing says holiday like family tech support!
1:09 PM Nov 26th from Echofon in reply to boonebgorges
RT @notjonathan Roasted sw potatoes & cauliflower, kale w/bacon & onions, cornbread & sausage dressing. Someone else make the damn turkey.
7:53 AM Nov 26th from Echofon
@listentomyvoice they can stuff it! I’ll take education over $$$ any day, man. 8:47 PM Nov 24th from Echofon in reply to listentomyvoice
Today’s the last day of NaBloPoMo, and all I can think of is the stupid song that Dora the Explorer sings when she finishes her quest: “we did it, we did it, we did it, yeah!” Gus hasn’t watched that show in forever, but my nephews are still little so I’m sure that earworm took hold sometime over the long weekend while we were visiting.
So yeah, I probably should have written a few more substantive posts this month. But I think I did a decent job overall. Definitely more library-ish this year than in years past, which I guess is understandable given how much headspace I devote to my job.
And speaking of which, apparently there’s a conversation going on over at Friend Feed re: my post about the plagiarism article that I wrote last night, so I should head over and join in. Bye!
Right, day 29 here and I am suffering a bit more than usual from the Sunday night gloomies. Maybe it’s a sugar crash (Jonathan made chocolate chip cookies today), or maybe a delayed tryptophan reaction. Most probably it’s the classic post-family event letdown that always hits when the chaos subsides. Silly to have gloomies tonight, anyway, since I have RT tomorrow and thus don’t even need to leave the house for 33-ish more hours.
So anyway, I have been mopey all weekend about writing my next post* for the academic library blog, which is silly, too, because it wasn’t really all that taxing. You know, finding the space + time without children playing video games at high volume, etc., etc. But tonight I finally finished it. Jonathan read it and proclaimed: “it’s dry, and you talk about nuances of academic writing,” which is pretty much spot on for my goal for that piece, so go, me!
* I don’t want the pingback, so if you want to read it click “acrlog” in the sidebar over there on the right.
Today we got up, got ready, and got in the car to drive back from my sister’s place in Delaware. My sister, brother in law and 2 nieces followed in their car. Along the way Gus slept for 2 hrs.
When we got back to Brooklyn we said hi to the cats, changed into fancy clothes, and hopped on the subway into the city to go see The Nutcracker. It was a great time, though Gus’s attention did fade in parts. But everyone loves champagne and gummy bears at intermission, and Lincoln Center is so fabulously retro.
After the show we headed to a fancyish restaurant in a nearby fancyish mall. Just inside there’s a big (like 10 feet tall) metal statue of a naked man, and of course the kids ran right over so they could get all Finding Nemo: “he touched the butt.”
The restaurant was lovely. We had a great seat by the window and the kids watched the city go by. All of the kids got complementary cotton candy for dessert, and Gus had ice cream too. Probably not the best idea.
We went to some sort of weird electronics showroom in the mall afterwards where nothing was for sale. When we were looking at the netbooks Gus accidentally on purpose pried up the security tag, which immediately started beeping. We hustled him out of there quick.
Once we got home the kids played Super Smash Bros Brawl for ages. Feels like we’ve only just now gotten them to bed, and I’m pooped.
Moral of the story: extra sleep + no physical activity + loads of refined sugar = crazy kid. Hope he sleeps it off.
Yes, that’s right, it’s Buy Nothing Day! Once again we here at mauraweb! are sticking more to the spirit than the letter: we did buy the kids lunch, because they were hungry and we didn’t have time to eat at home. But we’re spurning the shops, oh yeah, even though Gus could really use some new shoes and a coat. Take that, consumerism!
Wish I could be making something crafty today in honor of BND, but I’m taking advantage of this relatively quiet spot in the afternoon here to draft a library blog post. Keep on keeping on, chickens!
Bacony kale & two kinds of stuffing. Now that’s Thanksgiving!
Edited to add: Looking at this on the day after, I feel like I should annotate it. Clockwise, from 12 o’clock: cranberry sauce, roasted sweet potatoes, traditional stuffing, turkey w/giblet gravy, bacony kale, cornbread + sage sausage stuffing, and roasted cauliflower.
