it’s a thing like habit

maura @ 10:52 pm

I am tired. Bone tired. Then why am I browsing Adidas on Zappos? I don’t even (really) need new sneakers, though my old ones are probably about 2 or 3 yrs old, but they are still perfectly fine, really!

If I *did* for some reason decide to buy new sneakers, I’d get these for summer:

and these for winter:

How old am I, anyway, 12? Can an about-to-definitively-be-in-her-late-30s-parent (ooh, so uncool) really wear those and get away with it?

i am not a number

maura @ 6:57 pm

Here’s a list, in no real order and for no real reason:

1. What my iPod taught me this morning: Colourbox – “Manic” segues nicely into the Pixies – “Debaser”, ditto with Even in Blackouts – “Knowledge” and Spice Girls – “Love Thing”

2. Shoes I wore today: red Adidas Samba sneakers

3. What I’ve been thinking a lot about recently that will have to wait for another post: competition and grading, my college radio show, method shower spray.

4. My favorite of the books Gus has been into lately: The Monster in the Backpack by Lisa Moser

5. Last thing I ate: a spoonful of toasted coconut (yum) from the coconut cream pie that Jonathan and Gus made (eew, bad texture for me).

6. My favorite deprecated HTML tag: blink, of course!

you know it could have been so fine

maura @ 10:23 pm

Oops, it’s the end of the week and I’ve been a blocker again. It’s not entirely my fault: I had a stealth busy week. Summer classes started and I’d forgotten (from last summer) how intense they are — 3 1/2 hrs long (!) twice weekly. And I had a PTA-ish meeting at Gus’ school one day, and a Food Coop meeting another evening. And yesterday I got my library on at the LACUNY* conference. I presented in a session with some of the folks I’ve been interning for, see if you can find me (goofy photo and all).

* Library Association of the City University of NY, in case you were wondering

Now it’s the weekend and apparently I still have nothing to say.

I feel like I saw Gus for about 2 minutes last week, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered him much. Today he and Jonathan combined Spongebob and fine artisanal craftsmanship by making paper. Recently Gus has been moved to fits of hilarity by the part in Krabs vs. Plankton where Spongebob shreds a dollar bill in a blender and Mr. Krabs freaks out. He wanted to shred a real dollar, but we didn’t let him. So he got a bunch of paper and a green marker and drew 20 one dollar bills. Of course, then he wanted to shred them in the blender. When Jonathan mentioned they’d need to add some water, Gus immediately said “let’s make paper like I did in school!” So they did. Damn school, always making our weekends so messy with their creative learning projects. It’s drying now, we’ll see how it turns out in a day or so.

P.S. (mostly for Anne but also for other interested parties!) Read this article about Paul Reubens right now! He is a comic genius.

email, dinosaurs and washing machines

maura @ 10:17 pm

I’m too tired for a proper post tonight, so I’ll just report with pride that this week’s newspaper score (so far) is:

Me: 2
Times: 0

In your face, paper!

and we don’t blame you for that fiasco in france in ’98

maura @ 9:12 pm

Yesterday Gus came home from school with a Mother’s Day card he’d made for me. It’s really pretty: on the front he drew a picture of a flower with pastels, then he watercolored over and around it. On the inside he wrote the following (case sensitivity preserved here):

MOM
GRESE
SiNOMiN
BACiN
FLAWR

Let me translate for you as Gus did for me: “Mommy, this is what you feel like (greasy), this is what you smell like (cinnamon), this is what you taste like (bacon), and this is what you look like (flower).”

His teacher has told us that Gus is a fearless writer, that he dives right in and writes it down without asking or worrying about spelling. Which is exactly how I want him to feel about learning: dude, just jump in, you can fix any mistakes later.

I can’t possibly explain how funny and wonderful and amazing and incredible my kid is, but I think I’ve come close.

To all the mamas out there, happy mother’s day! I hope someone tells you that you smell like cinnamon, too.

stop that push and shoving

maura @ 9:48 pm

It’s been a little quiet around this here blag lately. Why? I’m not exactly sure. I’m on my one-week break between the spring + summer semesters, though I’ve packed it with internship stuff and Gus’ school stuff, so I’m not just lying around the house eating bonbons. I think I was a little down last weekend, maybe a bit of the end of semester blues. And the job search is looming, so that’s a tad stressful, too.

On the other hand, I’ve done some fun stuff as well. Yesterday I went on a field trip with Gus’ class to the Whitney Museum. I really needed a coffee after herding 21 kindergarteners (!) on 3 different subways (!!) during rush hour (!!!) to get from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, but sadly there were no walk-through espresso bars on the way into the museum. I wanted to see the Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit, but the kids were scheduled to see Calder’s Circus and I thought it would be bad form to ditch them. The Whitney’s educators were fantastic and the kids had a really fun time making sculpture with colored wires and volunteering incredible information: e.g. that a moving sculpture was like a see-saw which, by the way, is a lever. Little smarties.

And another fun thing is coming up this weekend: our building’s annual stoop sale! Huzzah! This year we mostly have lots and lots of old toys to sell, having convinced the little prince that it was time for many of the “baby” things to hit the road. Everything is piled up in our study and ready to go, and anything that doesn’t sell is going to charity the very instant the sale is over. Ahhh, nothing makes the OCD-ridden happier than getting rid of stuff. Good times!

i got more rhymes than i got gray hairs

maura @ 8:57 am

Yesterday on the way home Gus spontaneously told me about what he learned in school “from a book”:

1. Sea snails have shells to protect them from fish that want to eat them.

2. Sea slugs do not have shells to protect them. So when a fish tries to eat it, a sea slug throws up into the mouth of the fish, and the throw-up is poisonous and the fish goes away. And also there are some pieces of tentacle in the throw-up.

3. The only way to kill a giant squid is to get a long spear and put poison on it and stick it all the way through the giant squid. It has to have poison, a regular spear will not work.

(n.b., for all you librarians in the house, none of this has been fact-checked!)

So that’s the news from kindergarten this week. The ocean is a dangerous place, chock full of poison and vomit! Be careful at the beach, kiddies!

every time we go out of phase

maura @ 9:04 pm

This weekend has been very stupendously great, even though we just did perfectly normal weekendy things. I’m not quite sure how it managed to be so excellent, but I wish we could bottle it for repeat use. And we accomplished a lot, too!

Saturday: cleaned the house, grocery shopped, went to the Cherry Blossom Festival at the botanic gardens with the neighbors (where Gus + our neighbor joined the thousands of other little scofflaws wading in the muddy creek), had dinner with aforementioned neighbors, and I finished writing a paper (yay!).

Today: finished the cleaning, took the extra recycling to the Food Coop (5 months’ worth!), went to the playground, resisted the ice cream truck (with no whining!), had a diner cheeseburger lunch, went to a birthday party (J+G) and the gym (me).

Of course the above was liberally sprinkled with Nintendo, but also with lots of reading courtesy of the 10 new (used) books we picked up today from a free books box on a stoop on our walk home from lunch. Thank you, anonymous residents of Park Slope, for bringing Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (a library fave), two Arthur, one Tintin, and one Magic School Bus books, and assorted other good reads into our lives.

Maybe it’s the spring is finally here thing. Or the getting outside more thing. Or the clean house thing (well, for me at least). I hope these good vibes carry on over to the week, too!

i’m still blustering through

maura @ 8:08 pm

I have two more things to do and then the semester is over. How crazy is that? Then I will be 80% librarian, 20% non. That’s a pretty good ratio.

I’ve mentioned before how much I love library school, right? It’s been excellent. I’m learning cool new stuff every day, meeting interesting people, going to fun places (well, fun for those who love libraries, at least!). But I’m also getting a little antsy, more and more ready to have a job again. I love the variety of my days + tasks, classes + internships, but sometimes the running all over the place is tiring (thank god for the unlimited metrocard!).

On the other hand, I’m a little sad to only have 2 classes left. The other day I was asking a friend what she’s taking in the fall and she mentioned a class on scholarly communication that one of my favorite professors is teaching. So I took a look at the fall schedule. Why? Why did I do this? I’ll be finished in August, it should not matter to me! But I found myself wistfully looking at the classes offered in the fall, constructing an imaginary schedule for myself.

I am a giant nerd, I know. Which I guess is a huge part of why I want to be a danged librarian in the first place. For the learning. And the cardigans.

What’s the point of all this? I’m not sure, but I hadn’t blagged for a while and I thought you might miss me. Also I wanted to reassure you that I hadn’t spent the past few days cleaning my keyboard. We’ll return to our semi-regular posts about semi-interesting stuff next time.

something never ever to tell a neat freak

maura @ 6:18 pm

Did you know that you can gently pry up each key on your white and clear iMac keyboard and use a q-tip to clean out all of the accumulated gunk down there? You didn’t?? Well, now you do!! If you’re like me, the acquisition of this knowledge will temporarily paralyze you, enabling you to do NOTHING else until you’ve pried up a few* keys and cleaned ’em out. Here’s an OCD tip for ya: the space bar is the gunkiest. And another tip: don’t forget which keys go where!

* Okay, more than a few. But less than all, honest!

You may well be asking yourself, I wonder what events precipitated this cleaning frenzy? And so I will tell you.

The other night I was meditating in the living room when I heard a clinking-glass-thunking-something-dropping noise. When I finished with the counting breaths thing I went into the study only to learn that a full glass of wine had spilled on Jonathan’s keyboard. Aiieee!

Luckily he has another keyboard, of course. But he decided to see if he could save the winey one. First he ran water through it for a good 15 minutes to rinse the wine out. Since Mac keyboards have a clear back you could see all the wine in there getting pushed out by the water, which was kind of cool.

He left it overnight to dry, but of course it wasn’t dry in the morning. So he did what anyone would do: wrapped it in a towel and popped it in the oven! Kids, don’t try this at home. He baked it at 170 degrees fahrenheit on and off for two days, til the last of the moisture was gone. Mmm, crunchy!

After the bakin’ was done his space bar was acting wonky, so he pried up my space bar to do a little testing. And that’s when he found the gunk, and shared it with me. A whole new opportunity for spring cleaning!