at home he’s a tourist

maura @ 9:15 pm

Last month during Spring Break we spent a few days in Philadelphia. The public school break is during Easter/Passover and the university’s break is tied to the public school break, which means that the time off was really, really late in the semester this year. Everyone was kind of strung out by the time break rolled around. I had originally wanted to just take a couple of days off and stay home, but Jonathan convinced me that it’d be better if we left town. I’m glad he did, since it turns out that we really needed that time away.

I always tell people that I grew up in Philadelphia, which is mostly true: we lived in the city until I was about 9, and then in one of the very close suburbs until I was 12. We did a lot in the city even then — we had memberships to the zoo and Franklin Institute, spent time in Fairmount Park, etc. One of my favorite photos of me as a little kid is in the Azaela Garden in 1973 — my flowered bellbottoms are teh awesome. My mom grew up in Northeast Philly and my grandmother lived there (in the same row house) almost until she died in the late ’90s. We moved away when I was in junior high but then moved back East, to Delaware, which is where I went to high school. Delaware is boring so I often went up to Philadelphia on the weekends with my friends.

I was actually in Philly twice last month: at the beginning of the month for the national academic librarianship conference (I gave a poster!), then later for break. It’s very strange to go to Philadelphia now, esp. as a tourist. I have more or less accurate memories of much of the geography and architecture, and Center City is a big grid, even easier to navigate than Manhattan. But things have changed in the past 2+ decades of course: there are lots of newer, bigger buildings, Wanamaker’s is now Macy’s, etc. Some things are not where I remember them: I thought that the Academy of Music, where my paternal grandmother, mother, and I would go see the Nutcracker every year, was much further north, closer to City Hall.

For our minivacation we stayed in a hotel in Society Hill, just one block from the arty movie theater where I saw Last Temptation of Christ (complete with picketers!). Just north of that part of town is the formerly run-down now newly hip + arty Old City, where I don’t think I’ve ever spent much time. My memories of the historic areas around Independence Mall are most hazy — I remember countless school trips, but not really any specifics. As it happened Independence Hall is currently shrouded in scaffolding for renovations, but the two blocks to the east have lots of pretty colonial buildings and open green spaces that were lovely to walk through.

Despite staying in a hotel only a few blocks north, we did not spend any time on South Street, probably the site of my clearest memories (along with the art museum). When I thought I was all cool and arty in high school I spent lots of time wandering up and down South Street, looking at punk clothes I was too chicken to buy at Zipperhead, browsing for records and used books. I saw Athens, GA: Inside/Out at TLA in high school when it was still a movie theater, and the Sugarcubes there in college when it turned into a concert venue. Probably best that we didn’t stroll down there last month: everything changes, and a quick look w/Google street view confirms my suspicions of chain stores and new construction. Which is neither unusual (I’m looking at you, East Village) nor bad, necessarily.

I do regret not going down to Jim’s for a cheesesteak, though. And at least in 2009 when the Google streetview cars took pictures, the ants and zipper were still visible on the old Zipperhead building across the street, which I’m sure Gus would have thought was cool.

words for evaluating

maura @ 9:39 pm

Tonight I finally finished my self evaluation for work. We’re using a new form this year so this is the first time I’ve had to write a narrative rather than just a bulleted list. It took much longer than I thought it would, in part because I kept gravitating toward the same words over and over again and having to pause to reword (thank you, thesaurus!).

Anyway, I got to wondering what my self evaluation would look like as a word cloud. So here it is:

In some ways it’s a bit surprising (also? really?). But library, information literacy, students, faculty, research, work, City Tech, and CUNY are biggest, which seems pretty dead on to me.

money, meet mouth

maura @ 10:52 pm

So I quit Facebook the other day. Jaron Lanier’s keynote at ACRL (which I didn’t agree with 100% but was interesting and thought-provoking) was kind of the trigger, though I’d been thinking about it and thinking about it for a year, maybe more. Also, unlike JL, my cats are not and will not be on Facebook.

I’d resisted for so long because of all of the accumulated social capital there, of course. Family members who live far away, old friends I’d lost touch with before the rise of FB, photos of my nieces and nephews, even library folks right here in my actual city that I don’t see as often as I’d like. But I’d always felt a little weird there, as I’ve blogged before. And I could never figure out a way to keep up with it, despite my best efforts (ditto Friend Feed, which I joined but can’t find the time for — honestly, even Twitter can be a struggle during the busy parts of the semester).

Why’d I quit? The usual reasons. Most corporations don’t care about privacy, but Facebook seems particularly sleazy about it. Also I hate that they’re making money with all of my stuff: my thoughts, ideas, photos, relationships, etc. Not that Google* and lots of others don’t do that, too, but the walled garden of FB makes it seem even worse.

* I have similar thoughts about Google and don’t use gmail for that very reason, but I am a slave to gdocs and my whole library uses gcalendar so there you go, clearly I’m a giant hypocrite.

I don’t miss it at all, but I do hate the way everyone seems to have moved their events + conversations over to FB without my even noticing. Because now when I click those fb.me links I can’t see anything, which is a drag. It’s insidious, really — I hadn’t even realized that had happened until I was chatting with a pal who’s a fellow FB quitter recently.

Anyway, despite my grumpiness I’m glad to have quit — I actually feel lighter and cleaner, if that makes any sense. And now I get to have this spiffy badge on my site, too!

now she’s in purple, now she’s a turtle

maura @ 10:16 pm

You may have heard about this newfangled invention the kids are all crazy over: text messaging.

Texting! OMG!

For the longest time we did not have free texting on our phones. Mostly it was stinginess thriftyness: I don’t like talking on the phone at all, but I also couldn’t really fathom that I would text enough to make it worth the money. Plus it bugs the hell out of me that we can have 40 million billion jillion unused phone minutes (see above re: my dislike of telephone communication) BUT the phone company has the gall to charge us, charge us!, for texting. Harrumph! Get me my tin cans and string, you whipper-snapper!

It was sometimes hilarious not to have a texting plan. Occasionally I get wrong-number texts, which are even more annoying when they cost $0.25 a pop *and* when the sender refuses to believe that you are not her/his friend. But now that we have a text plan, I can get into true identity SMS fights with ease!

I guess it was one text too many, but one day I said, “hey, maybe we should get a text plan.” And thus it was to be, and verily, we were texting by nightfall. Mostly I just text Jonathan. Thanks to the fabulous iphone emoji app, we can also send each other tiny pictures of hearts, clouds, food, drink, and smiling poop (scroll down on that page for the poop).

But recently I’ve started to text others more and more. My siblings + parents, esp. over the holiday. Pals, esp. when I am running late. Tonight was a breakthrough — Jonathan texted a new babysitter we’re hoping to engage, and I was texted by one of Gus’s friend’s parents. OMG this texting is amazing! No putting off phone calls forever because I don’t want to make them, no awkward small talk is possible in 160 characters. Texting FTW!

i traveled far and wide

maura @ 11:04 pm

I moved into my new office at the end of last week. New office! I’ve never ever had an office with a door all to myself. It’s pretty swell.

Want a tour?

This is right after I moved in. New chair, too!

Old wooden desk! It was here in the space, and lucky me, I get to keep it. It’s got loads of drawers and dividers and there was a little key in one of them. Mysterious!

One of my three (3!) bookshelves is small and blue with glass doors. Very nice, and the bottom shelf is perfect for my shoes. (I keep my work shoes at work so I can walk to + from in sneakers.)

Two (2!) more bookshelves, plus a table. Which right now is covered in bags with much of the contents of my old desk in it, because I haven’t had time to rearrange everything yet.

Whiteboard, file cabinet, and giant globe! Which also came with the office, and I couldn’t be happier. I love globes, so very cool.

Right now I’m only partially moved because I haven’t had a chance to move everything. I’m trying to bring a little bit over every day — it’s incredible how much I’ve accumulated in the past 2.5 yrs. Also there’s a small sticking point: my old file cabinet is legal-sized, and my new one is letter-sized (which I actually prefer). So I’ll need to get some new hanging folders, sort out the legal folders, etc. And all of Gus’s drawings and my other wall art need to come over, too.

All of which I love, seriously! Mmmm, organizing. But I just don’t have time for it right now. Which is tweaking me ever-so-slightly in an OCD way because I’m not sure where anything is (though I did find my post-it notes today, which have become my most critical office supply lately). The absurdity of filing something in my old cubicle today did not pass unrealized, too.

you make your little ways

maura @ 9:36 pm

All week I felt like there were lots of things to blag about, but then this weekend Gus has been sick and the resulting time slowdown has meant that all will to write has evaporated. And now I’m annoyed at myself for not having taken better advantage of the lying-around-on-the-sofa time (or maybe that’s just a case of Sunday Nightis).

I was going to do a cathartic post to try and get my frustration with this year’s schoolbus situation out of my system. Short version: because they’ve added another school to the route, the morning ride is 1 hr 15 min to get to his school that’s 2 miles from our house. Which doesn’t seem to bug Gus much, thankfully, but I still find it maddening (while acknowledging how lucky we are to have a schoolbus at all).

Then I thought maybe I should blag about how we spent last night thinking about whether to buy a small house + land in Vermont (not that we were looking — the link swam through my twitterstream). But that’s really not all that interesting, either. In the end it was about a 4 hour “hmm, maybe…” run of thinking about the house. It’s just too far and I can’t see how we would go there very often. Though it is, funnily enough, only about 40 miles from my dad’s house.

And now I’ve just spent 15 minutes looking at the Catskills version of Craigslist, looking for land that we could build a tiny house on (not that we have the time or $ for this anyway). I’m not looking to leave the BK, but we do have such a nice time whenever we get to travel to green foresty mountainy lakey places, and I miss the occasional nature, esp. in the fall, which is such a lovely time for nature.

But now it is time for Mad Men — we’re almost done w/season 3. And we are *not* moving to Ossining.

new year

maura @ 12:06 pm

Tomorrow Gus starts 4th (!) grade. Really school started last week, but since they only had one day (Wednesday), tomorrow feels more like the real start. He’s pretty happy to be back in school: one of his best friends is in his class this year, and he loves riding the schoolbus with his pals from our neighborhood. The 4th graders get to do lots of awesome stuff like go to camp for 2 nights (again) and build a Lenape wigwam in Prospect Park with a Native American Technology Specialist. He’s going to have a ball.

Fourth grade was my favorite year of school, hands down. For that year (and for half of 3rd grade) I went to a smallish Montessori school — I think there were maybe 10 or 15 of us in the 4-6 grade unit. We had a huge open classroom and lots of interesting stuff to work on. We got the blue sheet with our work for the week on Monday, and once we finished the work we could essentially choose what we wanted to do. I was kind of obsessed with geography in 4th grade so I spent lots of my free time with atlases and globes learning countries and capitals, drawing flags, and labeling photocopied maps. Or I would park myself in our small library and read.

Fourth grade was also when we lived in my favorite of all of my childhood houses. It was a twin but pretty big even so, with 3 floors and a basement and a wrap-around porch (which I used to drive my remote-controlled car off of) and a pretty little Japanese maple tree in the front yard. My sibs + I slept on the 3rd floor, and my bedroom was really long and narrow. The closet was all the way at the dark end of the room (near the wall that was shared w/the house next door) and I remember being absolutely certain that that side of the room was somewhat evil, what with the darkness and the closet. Maybe I just read too many Narnia stories.

One of the coolest things about that house was that it had front stairs–which went up from the entrance hall next to the living room–as well as back stairs–which were sort of tucked into the back corner of the kitchen. Both stairs met at about the same place on the second floor, and if you were chasing someone (or being chased) you could run up the front stairs down the back stairs and (slam!) out the back door into the yard. Or the reverse, onto the front porch.

The neighborhood we lived in (in suburban Philadelphia) was great too. We could walk or ride bikes to parks, playgrounds and the little commercial district in the town. My mom sent me out to the little grocery store to pick up milk, and I walked to piano lessons, friends’ houses, and girl scout meetings. I guess we do the same with Gus here, in many ways, though he’s still less independent than I was at his age. We do send him to the corner store to pick up milk, but we don’t let him cross streets by himself yet — he’s not very tall, and the cars drive really fast in our neighborhood because our streets are so wide. I can’t quite decide when he’ll be old enough to go to the park with friends + no adults. Maybe next year.

sunday sunday sunday

maura @ 11:30 am

We spent last week at the beach on vacation with my family (my mom, 2 sibs + their families). It’s always a fun, if somewhat chaotic, time (7 kids under age 9!). The weather was great: we only had one rainy day, and much of that day it was only drizzly so we ended up taking the kids to the beach to hunt for shells anyway. It was lovely to meet my new nephew, who turned 4 weeks old last Friday. In my annual seafood-eating event I nommed steamed clams picked up by my mom + brother on the way in, an amazing lobster roll + clam chowder from here, as well as yummy broiled crab cakes from here.

This year I got sick (and Jonathan, too), which unfortunately kind of harshed my vacation mellow and scrapped many of my more ambitious leisure plans. I only read two books (both before the sickness hit), didn’t catch up on personal emails, and didn’t learn how to knit either. It’s just a head cold, but even though I tried to slow down and take it easy I’m still on sick day #6 (I think?). The inherent instability of vacation time means that I can’t quite remember when I got sick, maybe Tuesday? It was a bummer, though the vacation was still fun overall.

Now we’re back and I’m simultaneously trying to manage re-entry and recovery. Today is stretched before me in all of its Sundayness, and I’m a bit at odds. It’s hot + rainy. The cats missed us and are meowy + needy. Gus wanted a playdate but his desired pal is busy. I should clean the floors and go buy my niece a birthday present. I think the former is a pipe dream (also, Anne Lamott told me to clean less), but maybe we can swing the latter this afternoon. But resting needs to be at the top of the list, I think: classes start Thursday, so things are about to ramp up sharply. Full speed ahead!

i go swimming

maura @ 2:46 pm

Gus is back in swimming lessons. He loves the water and can swim well enough to hang out in the deep end, but he’s still kind of spazzy and doesn’t know the actual strokes. Since we live on an island and he’s getting on in years, we decided it was time for him to really learn how to swim.

I was in 3rd grade when I first took swimming lessons, the second half of 3rd grade during which I went to a Montessori school and we swam once/week with school. (The first half I’d gone to the local Catholic school, which is part of another story.)

I can’t remember much about swimming before then. I don’t think I was afraid of the water. I had a great-aunt who lived at the shore (Ventnor, NJ) so I swam in the ocean every summer. We must have gone swimming in other pools too, at least occasionally, but I don’t really remember.

So I wasn’t exactly a swimming newbie in 3rd grade, but I don’t think I’d ever had lessons and I didn’t know any of the strokes. Even after I could swim enough to head out of the shallow end I must not have had much experience with the deep end or diving boards, because I vividly remember standing on the diving board adamantly NOT wanting to jump in, while the swim instructors encouraged me to.

Did they give me a gentle nudge to push me in? That I can’t say for sure. I thought that’s the way I remembered it, but now that I’m an adult and a parent I’m somewhat skeptical that it really happened that way. I mean, what sane adult would push a scared little kid into the pool?

Another piece of evidence against the pushing is that I don’t remember being particularly afraid of the water afterward, either.

A couple of years later I took swimming lessons again at a local pool in the summer. That must be when I really learned how to swim. I even ended up taking diving lessons in junior high. Yet another blow to the potential reality of the pushing memory?

Now I’m an okay swimmer. I know the strokes and can use them, but I’m not very good. A couple of years when we belonged to a gym with a pool I tried to swim. It’s certainly good exercise — it wore me out much faster than the elliptical or other machines. But chlorine really bothers me so I stopped, then we ended up quitting that gym. I still love swimming in the ocean each summer, though.

bloc bloc bloc till the weekend

maura @ 11:20 am

Things I Have Done This Morning While Procrastinating Writing:

– Caught up on Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook
– Skimmed the Times
– Scooped the catbox
– Laundry
– Mended a shirt
– Fixed my sneakers w/Shoe Goo
– Unloaded the dishwasher
– Loaded the dishwasher
– Checked the liner notes on the OMD record with the song from which this post is titled
– Considered taking apart the pipes under the bathroom sink which lately is draining slow

The Same, Yesterday:

– More mending (Gus’s pants and camp towel)
– More laundry (caught up on vacation backlog)
– Moped
– Wrote some mopey journally stuff in a text file that I will probably delete
– Packed up the shoes we ordered for Gus that are too small and have to be sent back
– Surfed around to see about new sneakers for Gus (why do they suddenly outgrow all of their shoes all at once [and so urgently]?)
– Caught up on my New Yorker backlog
– Finished a book