I slept in on Mother’s Day and woke up to find that my mom had posted a picture of me from 1971. That’s me sitting down and my sister Kate in the baby carrier. We’re sitting in the kitchen of the house that my mom still lives in. The blur in the lower righthand corner is our old cat, Betty Duck, who was a kitten for a very short amount of time, so it’s neat to see him show up so small and cutelike.

Kate and I have gotten bigger and moved away, the cat passed on some time ago, and the kitchen has been totally redone but my mom stil sits around that table and I think at least one of those chairs survives. Even when all the individual parts have been altered or replaced, I can still look at a picture of this and think, as my mom tagged it, “home.”

The power went out last night during the last five minutes of The West Wing, which we now watch instead of the Simpsons because the show is in some sort of “wrapping up” phase. When the power goes out here it gets dark. Ola went to bed. Greg and I lit some candles and sat around for a bit talking in the dark about this and that and then we went to bed before 11. Since I grew up in a house with an electric water pump, I had actually never considered that living in a place with town/city water might mean that the water still ran into the house when the power was out. Since Greg had mostly not lived anyplace without city water, it had never occurred to him that the water might NOT run during a power outage. I made him an expensive bet (which I lost, happily) and thus the only anxiety from the power failure was wondering if the light in our bedroom was in the on or off position when we last saw it. It’s a pullchain. It’s hard to tell. The answer was off. The power came on this morning about 5 according to Ola. Not even enough time to start having to eat all the ice cream.

It’s a challenge, trying to make someone’s birthday experience nice when they’re in the middle of law school finals, don’t much like birthdays to begin with, and occasionally have some level of dread associated with reaching another decade birthday milestone. In my family we usually play “king for a day” games where you get to be in charge of anyone and everything. This appeals to my control freak instincts and most people don’t mind going along with it for 16 hours of a day. Greg prefers things a little more subdued and a little more subtle. So he vetoed my “Look who’s 30!!” newspaper ad, and didn’t want me posting a party invite to the everyone@ mailing list at the school. That said, I thought we did okay. Thanks to everyone who contributed photos to the happybirthdaygreg collection. We didn’t do much on the actual birthday day, just looked at pictures and had some pizza while Greg studied for his last final. I swam 30 laps as a tribute. It’s 5/6th of a mile, pretty taxing.

Friday Greg went to school while I stayed home and chopped vegetables, moved lawn furniture and coordinated cake delivery plans. Greg took his last final and came home to a house full of food, beer and friends and someone else willing to staff the grill for a change. Big thanks to Adam, Meredith, Rick, Sarah, Casey, Jill, Wayne, Stan, Hannah, Ola, Shamus and everyone who sent in photos and well-wishes.

Saturday he went for a 50 mile bike ride, beating his previous distance record by like 30 miles or so. I’m surprised he could get out of bed today, honestly. This morning we’re up doing our own noodley things — working on a talk for me, watching punditry and folding laundry for him — while the nieghbors listen to two radios at once, one of them loud enough to drown out their caged barking dog. Yeah, it’s that time of year again.

Please help me wish Greg a happy birthday today.

There was a crazy thunderstorm in the morning which made me wake up thinking something was being tossed down the stairs. Then I realized that I was in a hotel, in Houston, and it was not the middle of the night but rather a very grey and wet day. I got up and read for a bit and turned on my laptop to upload some pictures. The wifi in the hotel is “screw you” expensive, so I paid for the one day pre-talk and refused to pay for a second. However, something had happened. When I opened my browser to check out my talk, I got a “there has been an error” message, and then free wifi. Maybe the authenticator got the zap and the failure mode is to break with free access for everyone, not no access for anyone. In any case, it blew a lot of my morning but the weather was terrible anyhow.

Turns out that a lot of downtown Houston is underground. I went out for two meals with Jenny, just sort of “let’s walk around and see what we find” meals and we found… nothing. I know that conference centers are often in desolate empty parts of cities, but we seemed to be in the downtown core, at lunchtime, and there was still no one outside and no place to eat. All the ground level storefronts seemed weird and empty. Where I’m from, you only hide your retail areas because it’s freezing, not because it’s hot. Apparently in Houston, you bury them because it’s hot. Once we found the elaborate interconnected maze of tunnels spanning most of downtown, by following nearly hidden signs, we found the mole people busily at lunch and had some tasty jambalaya.

Today is my day off. My host is at a daytime wedding and we’re rendezvousing before dinner. The Hilton will hang on to all my bags, so I’ve been on my own with my laptop and a bag full of apples and soda. I got a $2 all day transit pass and headed for the museum district. I’m sitting in the MFAH cafeteria which has music just loud enough that you won’t stay long. I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum and the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, both of which seemed to be having some big tours/events at the exact moment I was there. I stopped in at the MFAH library and a really nice library student who worked there took me on a tour around the basement and I found a Barthele essay I’d never read before as well as a Jessamyn West introduction to a book of cat photography. Sometimes I feel weird bugging the librarian with a “hey I’m a librarian too, let’s make funny acronym-laden convertsation” but it went well this time and I may stop in for more book reading before the museum closes.

I tend not to post when things are going poorly and while last week wasn’t exactly poor, it wasn’t great either. For reasons unknown I’ve been having tooth pain in some of the same usual suspect teeth. I dislike the dentist, but mostly I dislike having to call dentist after dentist seeing if there is anyone who will see a new patient, one that probably should have called earlier, but didn’t. Big thanks go to Dr. Yoshikawa in Randolph and Dr. Endodontist-with-the-smooth-voice for taking a looksee. Of course the verdict was either “We don’t know” or “You grind your teeth” allowing me to explain here that unknown etiology is often a good thing because it means that most of the normal things (failed root canal, cavity, popcorn kernel) have been ruled out. I am doing well on ibuprofen. I think one of the big terrors for me was going to another state only to have a dental crisis.

So, by the way, I’m in Houston, Texas, preparing to give a talk about progressive librarianship tomorrow. I swam in the 24th floor pool which was sort of excellent except that it was way too chloriney (I assume this is because it’s attached to the hot tub and who knows what goes on in there) and it was connected to the restaurant/bar which meant that as I crawled and backstroked, lots of library vendors were walking through chuckling with their margaritas. I left the pool feeling better than I came, so that’s a win.

Apparently TLA — which I have always thought stood for True Love Always — is the second largest library conference in the country, second only to ALA. I hope the talk goes well. I have to admit being a little surprised when they asked me to come talk about progressive librarianship in Texas, but I guess this is as good place as any to start.