I’m still getting my summer on and oh look it’s July already. It’s not just me thinking this, June was sort of a wash and moreso than usual. Wet and cloudy. This bodes well for the growingness of everything, but that includes the moss on our bones. My brain is mostly coming back to me which is nice because I missed it. I’ve had so much free time that I’ve become one of those dull people with immaculate homes. I’ve also realized that some of those back-burner projects are really just no-burner projects and I should stop pretending that I will be doing them. So, here is me saying that

• I do not think I will be re-covering that pillow made from an old carpet that was partially savaged by mice
• I do not think that I will be roasting that chicken in the freezer, until it cools down some at least
• I do not think I will be going through the steps necessary to reboot my purple bike at least until it stops raining for more than two days in a row (the bike requires resuscitation when it’s been idle for more than a few days)
• I will not be getting my pants hemmed; they were too big anyhow and I should just get new pants
• I will not be buying plastic racks for my postcards and I’m not even sure why but I’m watching myself not do it.
• I will not be installing a reading light by my bed, I will be reading in the living room instead.

Something I did do however, and what this photo is about, is registered for the National Marrow Donor Program. You can read more about it on the Flickr page, but it was free (may have a small cost associated now, there was some sort of a marrow drive when I signed up) and might save someone’s life. I’ve always been one of those blood-giving types and this seemed like a logical progression. I did some cheek-swabbing and sent my cells in. If I match someone who needs a marrow or stem cell transplant, they’ll let me know. Easy, and I can check it off thenot-that-long “stuff I did” list for last month.

I’ve had the fidgets this week. I’ve had all my days on the calendar basically blank. Sure there’s my MetaFilter job which is 5-15 minutes out of every hour, and there’s the ongoing library automation project which is going pretty slow motion, and there’s some upcoming writing I’m supposed to be doing, but my days are bounded by … nothing. I’ve got the absent-minded floatiness of someone without enough structure. Just this pat week I realized that my windshielf wiper fluid spritzer thing wasn’t broken, I had forgotten how to use it [to be fair, I was thinking it worked like the one on my old car]. So, while I’m watching myself for signs of premature dementia, I’m also suspecting this is what it’s like when I relax.

So, I did some things. I helped my friend Stan pack up his kitchen in preparation for his move down the street this week. I checked out the local hospital cafeteria with my pal Forrest [for fun, not because anyone was sick, when gumbo is $2, who needs a convenient illness as an excuse to visit?] I reordered my instant messenger buddy list and deleted about 400 people who I could not for the life of me remember. I set up both of my tents just to make sure they worked okay just in time for them to get totally filled up with water in our recent rainstorms, leaving little pollen rings inside them. I went to buy some gravel, but I guess they ony sell it by the truckload so they gave me a little bagful for free. I visted the local historical society with Jim who was up visiting. I went to a Solstice cookout/bonfire/frisbee/lost-in-the-woods extravaganza. I made cookies. I finished a few books. I straightened out my bookshelves. I planned a few future trips. I went swimming (though not outside, yet). I sent a few postcards.

So that was the first few days of the week. We’ll see what I get done with the last three. I think I did all the stuff from the list a few weeks ago, except maybe removing the flannel sheets. It’s still a little chilly at night here.

I gave my last talk of the season (i.e. through September) on Friday and one of the librarians in the audience made my day with this quote

Fantastic talk about libraries and CMS by the funny and animated @jessamyn. I swear she’s part Muppet. #nelaits

The talk, which I was actually pretty pleased with, was about content management systems, why they’re important to running a library website and how they’re not that scary. You can see the details here and read more about the day here.

Lat week was the wrap-up of three out of five of the things that I do that could be considered jobs. I taught my last class at RTCC, my last drop-in time happened and I wrote and presented my last talk. I’m back at home now, looking at a greenish sky and some very green trees waiting for rain and thinking about how my summer is going to go. I’m still working at MetaFilter — the site is turning ten next month so I’m going to New Orleans for a party (for work!) — and I’m still slowly automating the Tunbridge Library. Otherwise I’m going to have a shocking amount of free time. I’m not going to have much trouble with this, I’m pretty much never bored, but after getting into the habit of being out of town all the time (I was either gone or had guests here for all or part of the last eight weekends) it will be weird to get into the habit of being IN town.

I’ve already been slashing through my back burner to do list including buying a bigger/better backpack, fixing the toilet, paying some large bills (Topsham has a new furnace, hooray!) and taking out the accumulating recycling. I got rid of four (4) computers a week or two ago and I’m going to get back to my occasional ebaying. Other odd things on the list include

• Getting some gravel to make more mossariums. I’m a little chagrined to have to buy gravel, but I’m even more tired of finding out of the way places to scoop it up
• Get the purple bike running and taking pictures
• Finishing some of the five or so books that I’ve started
• Crossing fingers for warm enough weather to remove the flannel sheets
• Getting a new driver’s license to replace the bent one I lost
• Getting a new passport for the old one that is expiring
• Write a lot of thank you notes
• Getting back in the pool, the pool that was closed for two of the past few weeks, putting a serious crimp in my stress-management plan.
• Recording more old tapes.

I think I’ve also figured out how to climb the hill out back to get to that really snazzy looking place up top with the great view and I’d like to start making walks up there a regular part of my weekdays. Solstice is coming up and it can’t come soon enough.

As most of you know, I’m not much of a foodie. I eat to stay alive most of the time, and to have enough energy to do the other things I like to do in life, most of which are not really cooking or eating food. I mean, I really like food but I don’t dedicate a lot of mental energy or time to it. If there were a food pill, I’d take it four days out of seven. When I’m home and not travelling I’m likely to eat exactly the same thing every day for a week and then change it up for the next week. I’m aware this may be a form of OCD. This has always been true, since before my weight loss kick (essentially successful, I weigh 130-ish pretty much steadily now) but it makes things simple now.

That said (I’m a huge fan of the phrase “that said” it’s like saying “but ignore that part”) I enjoyed eating my way through Montreal this weekend. I went up to give a talk at Library Camp and then stayed with some friends the rest of the weekend. Travels were just a bus up and a bus down — though I missed a quickie bomb scare that was right near me — which worked flawlessly. I tried to eat a different sort of meal every time I ate out. This is what I wound up with. Each bullet point is an approximate meal or snack.

• misc freegan food found on the way up: cookie, banana
• gyro/pita/fries
• free hot chocolate from hotel vending machine
• fruits & cookies & coffee at camp
• beer, blonde beer
• chicken stuffed with spinach & veal & steak frites
• bagels & cream cheese from this place (or another nearby bagelry)
• ham and cheese crepe
• indian food that could not be beat
• the donut featured above along with some poached fruit compote over brioche with fluffy sweet yogurt
• spiced nuts and a lime soda
• obligatory coming home cheeseburger

I arrived home to find that the pool was closed and would be closed all week and I am a little fidgety wanting to get a little exercise. However, I’m also home to my slightly empty fridge, my meager local restaurant choices and my big jar of cereal so I think I’ll be just fine.

Put another way, there’s a sublime beauty to these systems when they work, but when they crash, they crash hard. I’d like to share my trip home with you as part of my recovery process… “Hello I’m Jessamyn and I like to make logistically complicated plans.” “Hi Jessamyn.”

My keynote speech was at 11 on Friday. I figured it would be done by noon but I’d be talking to people afterwards. I arrived at the conference center with my backpack, already checked out of the hotel. By 12:30 I was at the hotel shuttle where the guy there gave me a ride to the Athens GA airport. We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly on the way to the airport. I thought I was being all smart, taking a short hop flight instead of potentially getting stuck in traffic driving to Atlanta. The plane was cheaper than the shuttle van, too. However, for some reason the short hop flight was 20 minutes late. I was in the front row of the nine-seater plane watching us fly past the Atlanta airport on the radar screen so that we could approach it from the other end. I knew, at that point, that I was in trouble. The little plane touched down and then we got in a shuttle van to the big airport. I still feel that if we hadn’t hit every red light, I might have made my flight which was also 20 minutes late. As it was, I got to the gate after they’d closed the doors but before the plane had left. Suck.

I’m always jockeying for different and better flights when I travel, so I figured I’d just get on another one pretty easily. However, there is something wrong with the Atlanta airport. There are too many people for not enough seats and being the smiling relaxed person with no checked bags trying to get on a different flight doesn’t make you stand out enough to get what you want; it’s usually my ace in the hole. At one point, I was on one of those courtesy phones talking to a reservations person saying “Look, can you get me in to Burlington, Boston, Portland, Providence or Manchester tonight? No?” Of course, this was not just about getting home. The larger weekend plan involved getting on a bus at the airport, a bus that Jim would meet me on at South Station and then we’d take a leisurely bus ride together up to Lebanon NH where my car was waiting and drive home to a nice Memorial Day weekend in the country. So, things needed to be reworked.

At one point I was confirmed on a flight for 8:45 am on Saturday and on standby for a flight on Friday night. I was going through my MetaFilter and Facebook contacts to see if there was anyone who had a place I could stay overnight with. I’d called Jim with a “please stand by” message. There were two available seats on the flight to Boston and I was number two on the standby list, a list that was different from the list that I saw on the screen which I was not on at all. I put my trust in the lady at the gate, and not in the computer screen, but it was difficult. The flight loaded. The waiting area emptied out. My name was called. I whooped and got on the plane, making a quick call to Jim to meet me at Logan in a few hours with his backpack. I had nothing to read, so I slowly paged through the Sky Mall catalog and schemed for what we’d do next.

The first genius plan was to see if we could rent a car for a few days and just drive on out of there. The rental places that weren’t sold out were charging holiday weekend prices, total non-option. Then we checked other bus options (the last Dartmouth Coach bus had left the airport 30 minutes earlier) and found there was a Greyhound bus going from South Station to Montreal, stopping in White River Junction, so we decided to get on it. From Logan to South Station is either three subway lines or one bus and I was sufficiently bleary-eyed that we wound up on the subway(s). The line for the bus was already over 20 people long when we got there at 11. We ate some cheeseburgers and waited in line. By the time the bus was set to leave there were easily 80 people in line. They added a second bus. They split us up by how far we were going. I realized the bus also stopped in Hanover which was closer to my car. We got on the road at roughly midnight.

The bus was cold and noisy and full. I called The Google and asked for the name of a taxi service near Hanover. I spoke to a guy who said it would cost $11 to get a ride to Lebanon (I was expecting… something more outrageous) and he drove up about ten minutes after Greyhound dropped us on the side of the road by Dartmouth. Our driver was from Georgia. We got a ride to the car and drove home to Randolph along a totally empty highway, stopping for milk at the local Cumby’s. By the time we got home it was 4:30. The birds were singing. I did manage to arrive home, with my boyfriend, and my stuff, before what I call “Saturday” though it occurred to me that my early-riser friends were already awake and getting things done. We hung a towel over the window to blot out the brightening sky and set to work getting some serious sleep.

Now it’s Sunday and Jim’s taking a nap and I’m typing this up. My favorite thing about Spring-into-Summer is how you can sleep in and still have a good chunk of daylight left to do things in. We climbed up the hill behind my house yesterday and found there’s a little clearing on top with a chair and a stunning view of town. That’s enough for me to declare this weekend a success. And all the traveling, though long, was mostly enjoyable. I’m often a little raised-eyebrow to all those “The journey IS the destination” people, but I may be starting to get an idea of what they’re talking about. I like being in a state of having finished these trips, and I certainly don’t mind making them. Happy Holidays.

I’ve made a few more mixtape recordings and attached the mp3s to their accompanying photos over on Flickr. Since I’m often hanging out at the computer for work or for play, pressing record while I’m doing that is just not that difficult. I’m a little surprised I’m doing this while the weather is nice, not crappy. I’ve also recorded a few “hey you made this tape for me” tapes that are not popular music, so they’re not part of the public listing but maybe soon will be.

It’s Spring which means my landlady was in the backyard trying to chop down a tree and I have stopped wearing socks. Well I did stop until the temperature plunged into the 40s a few nights ago and I put the socks right back on. I did put my sweaters away however, so that’s either a sign that Spring has come, or a come hither nod to a huge blizzard.

My talk at MLA went fine. I felt it suffered from a lack of narrative, but I’m always my own worst critic. My talk was about Intellectual Freedom and Social Software and it went pretty well. I had a quick trip to Springfield MA which was a lot of fun. That trip was bordered on two sides by visits to the Tunbridge Library where I have slowly and with help been putting barcode stickers on books as part of our slow crawl towards automation. I had the genius idea to do a work party, but chose Mother’s Day as the day for it (dates and times and especially holidays are often a bit of a furze to me) and as a result it was a party of one. That said, I got 900 books stickered. That said it’s difficult sometimes to have a party that no one comes to. I’ll try to plan better next time.

Other big news is that my digital divide book proposal about tech training in the unconnected library “Without a/the Net” has been approved (accepted? okayed?) by Libraries Unlimited. Haven’t seen the contract yet. Pretty excited and a little aghast at myself for taking on another project, but this is one I’ve been wanting to do. Wondering if writing books about technology is approaching the “dancing about architecture” realm of nonsense. Hoping that’s not true for another few years maybe.

You can tell I’ve got a talk I’m supposed to be working on because I’ve decided it’s a terrific time to figure out how to record my old audio cassettes on to my computer. Actually the how is less of an issue than the why which is what my Dad asked me when I said I was doing this today. “Why?”

But just in case, here’s the how: get a tape deck, and a RCA jack to 1/8″ audio cable. Plug it in to the line in jack on the computer. Run Audacity with the monitor settings set to “on” and you can listen. Press record and you can record. Export and you can play your MP3 recording through iTunes. I discovered that I actually did have decent taste in music, not like I thought I might find otherwise. My first recording experiment was a tape I made for my friend Sophie (one of the Moms of Amazing Leo) sometime in the 1985-1987 range. You can download the recorded version here, crappy hiss and all. Or, what the heck, you can just watch almost all the videos on the YouTube.

As much as this was a super-fun experiment (and a good first tape choice) I can see myself getting so caught up in recording my musical history that I fail to have a present or, more catastrophically, a future. Tricky stuff, choosing what to document where every minute you spend recording something (textually, auditorially, whatever) is a minute you don’t spend doing something else. I’m aware of my minutes lately, but this was a fun project. Thanks to Forrest for the loaner tape deck. Here’s what was on side 1.

• Blondie
• dBs
• Ciccone Youth
• Talking Heads
• Brian Eno (not really a video)
• Hüsker Dü
• Martha and the Muffins
• XTC
• Midnight Oil
• The Cramps (not really a video)
• Devo
• Robin Lane and the Chartbusters
• Joe Pop-o-Pie (no video)

I got back from eight days on the road Friday night. I’m used to getting home on a Sunday or a Monday so having a whole weekend available is sort of great. I came back to a Vermont where people were out and about doing things and being pretty cheery about it. The weather passes for warm, the mud has receded, the tree leaves are visible. There was a festival in town, the Fiddlehead Festival (my pix), which I went to with a few friends. I saw sheepdog demonstrations and ox pulls and had a localvore lunch with a few hundred neighbors. Then last night I went out to a friend’s birthday party which mostly took place in the driveway near her outdoor pizza oven which we put pizza after pizza into. The evening wrapped up with home made strawberry shortcake, pound cake, present opening and coffee.

When I was in New Jersey more than one person asked me why I lived “so far away from everything” as I was explaining the ups and downs about working for a teeny rural library. I explained that I like the lazy pace, the casual dress code, the lack of traffic and honestly the lack of humans. I enjoyed the proximity of everything at the Jersey Shore and I’ve got some longtime history with Amherst and the environs as well as my friends who live there, but I’m okay with frequent visiting. Waking up here every day where it’s quiet and slowly, subtly, greening is the thing I always miss when I’m away.

I have been working on a slow-motion project that I thought I could mention once I was finished, but now that it’s ground to a halt I will mention it now. I got a package of fifty US state postcards at the Tunbridge Post office for a few bucks. This was a month ago. I figured “Hey I know someone in every state, right?”

Wrong. I know someone in every state except North Dakota and West Virginia.

The project started out like gangbusters. I set a limit of five postcards a day at the outset. I sent postcards to family, friends, librarians and other random people I’d exchanged mail with in the past. Things started to slow down after the first 30. Once I was down to 15 I started trawling facebook looking for friends in regional networks. Once I was down to eight I took them to the Computers in Libraries conference and specifically sought out people from distant lands like Missouri and Mississippi. Then I asked Twitter when I was down to five.

Now I have two left. Does anyone know anyone in North Dakota and West Virginia? It’s embarassing for me because I stayed in Fargo at one of the most fun library conferences I ever went to: NDLA. I stayed with a librarian and her family who had the same last name as me and we watched a Daniel Johnston documentary. However, I’m not sure if she’s still working at the same library and I felt weird pitching a postcard into the void as if it was somehow cheating, so I’ll wait. And West Virginia, I’ve been there too. I was totally surprised it would become a sticking point.

So, at this point I’ve sent 48 postcards (plus a few extra for states where I got multiple requests). Including the cost of the postcards, that’s under $20 for a project that kept me busy and problem-solving for well over a month and hopefully cheered up a few folks in various states of the Winter that never ended. Hooray for the mail!

update: mailing the 49th and 50th postcards today, thanks everyone!