party of one

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.

nostalgia at 1 min = 1 min

mixtape

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.

so far away

roofline

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.

mail call!

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!

holidays

My favorite part about holiday days isn’t so much how the town empties out (and its pretty empty here even on a work day) but how the whole world seems to quiet down. My internet world is quietly muttering about chocolate. My email inbox is empty. MetaFilter is subdued. The lack of buzzbuzzbuzz in the periphery gives me some freed up cycles to do a lot of weird maintenance things.

I upgraded WordPress on both my blogs. If you are reading this, it worked.
I added a few new stories to the Donald Barthelme page and contemplated a redesign but I don’t think I’m there yet.
jailbroke and customized a loaner iphone; no good for calls, good for everything else.
I’m bringing a ton of stuff into my apartment that I brought back from Topsham

Topsham is my “rise from the dead” story for today. I have friends moving in to caretake the place and it needs a lot of work. I’m approaching this work like a long distance runner, but it makes me bolt awake eyes wide open wondering “what next? What now?” Yesterday I went with a friend and brought home some books (OED and Encyclopedia Britannica, you are home now) and my tent and some photos and a big container of clothes. When I looked at the clothes there was this whole “Oh wow, I forgot all about that t-shirt!” experience. I’m generally pretty good at compartmentalizing; this brought back a big chunk of time I’d long since filed away, in good ways and bad. I looked at my Burning Man outfits, my tie-dyed socks (really?), my orange coveralls, and my shorts that were too big on me even then and now aren’t even options as clothing. There were a lot of Greg’s clothes too, things he left behind that I never even knew were still there. I’ve split the stuff into “to wash” and “to get rid of” piles and I’ll be looking at old photos today and hanging up my spurs that were a 30th birthday present from a friend I’ve lost track of.

A few people got in touch with me to say that they thought my last post might be a “hey I think I need to leave Vermont” post, which it wasn’t. I’ve been a little melancholy lately — family stuff, not too much personal stuff — and looking at other people’s plans makes me investigate my own more closely. This is the best time of year to go see Topsham. The snow has melted, the grass is greening up and not yet so tall that you can’t see the shape of the land. I feel like such a weird schoolgirl having a dysfunctional love affair with a piece of property. Every time I go up there, even as the house continues to silt in and deteriorate and the barn leans more and the taxes go up, I look at the 40 acres of field and hill and woods and things seem rich and full of possibility. It’s a tonic to an otherwise bumpy set of weeks.

another thousand dollar dinner

I have been lucky enough to have eaten some really nice meals lately. I guess luck may not be the right word for it because I’m usually just as happy to eat hummus and pita. I don’t know if it’s my palate or just that I’m happier when people aren’t serving me food, but some of it is in the take it or leave it realm. I like but do not love fancy dinners and in these troubled times I have an awful lot of guilt spending [someone else’s] money on [what I think is] overpriced food. I got Mexican corn on a stick as a side dish — you know the stuff they sell on the street, slathered in butter and white cheese — at a restaurant called Bespoke and it cost six dollars. None of this is to begrudge the people who took me out to meals where I had great times talking to people, just sort of mulling over my general discomfort with fancy spendy things.

I was at Yale speaking this weekend, in case you’re wondering who in jehu’s name was taking me out for some fancy victualizing. I was on a panel talking about the ethics of Library 2.0 which was an interesting topic and got a lot of responses. We each had about ten minutes to speak so I prepared five slides and some loose notes. Other people, more academic types, had whole big powerpoint decks, excerpts from their books and whatnot. I enjoyed listening to them and talking to them at dinner, but felt my typical disconnect. I have a hard time figuring out whether this is just me feeling weird at some sort of brain-level, or if I really was the odd person out at this high level academicky thing. I ask people and they say I’m fine so that’s really all I can do.

I came back to snow that was mostly melted and a note from my bank saying that I could pick up the two mason jars that I’d dropped off a week ago. There was $167 worth of nickels, dimes, quarters and pennies, more than I’d thought. That and thirty bucks would have paid for the hotel room you see above. My big eternal question is how to redistribute some of this money so that rural technology funding becomes as much of a genuine option as conference hotel rooms and thousand dollar dinners as far as our priorities go. My concern — and I always have one or two — is that I may need to leave my rural wonderland in order to figure that out. My second concern is that once I find the place where I feel totally and completely comfortable, it will be the end to my agitation for better things for other people. Hard to say. I sleep well at night and that seems to be sufficient to smooth out the day’s ruffled feathers.

change

We had two days of sunshiney melt here and had that day where everyone goes for a walk outside and says “Oh hi, how have you been since you went inside for Winter?” when they run into their neighbors that they haven’t seen for months.

Today it’s raining, all the better for me to get in my car and go to an airport. Destination: Crystal City Virginia for a Computers in Libraries conference. I’m giving a few talks (preview) and mostly getting a chance to catch up with librarian pals and do a little (more) travelling. Next weekend I’ll be on a panel at a Library 2.0 Symposium at Yale which will be an interesting affair where I expect to do much more listening than talking.

This photo is from a recently solved problem. I took some of those poster hanger doinker things and stuck them to my 80Â° walls and now I have a place to display my poscards. I’m planning to get a ton more of the stuff and make my angley walls into an ever-changing art gallery. Buying the hangers in sets of two is a little spendy relative to their wholesale price, so for the first time in I think ever I’m thinking of a scheme whereby I buy hundreds of feet of the stuff from the wholesaler and then start a little business selling the stuff on eBay. Because I need a new hobby/business/money-making scheme like I need another hole in my head.

And speaking of money, I went to the bank down the street to deposit my change jars. My sister (whose birthday is tomorrow, wish her a merry one) has something of a change problem and I wanted to do a little proactive change hygeine. So I brought my change jars to the bank. It went like this… I put my two big jars of money on the counter. The banker lady filled out a deposit slip asking “How much do you think is in there?” I said I wasn’t sure. She said “Guess.” So I said “Okay, $150. Maybe?” She filled out the slip and said they’d count the change and mail me the deposit slip with the actual amount on it. She said I could come back later for my jars. I sort of can’t wait to see how much was in there.