I said less than thirty words out loud yesterday. It was rainy, I stayed in and worked on an article I’m writing for Library Journal, listened to sea shanties and tried to get Sadie the cat to like me. The day before was an explosion of noise and chatter when my Mom and sister came to visit the place I’m staying here in Kittery. We walked around Portsmouth, went to Strawberry Banke, ate cake and took a bunch of pictures. Last night I made the mistake of going out to get some food at right about the time all the outlet stores closed and people got on Route 1 to go home. I had a bizarre flashback to high school when I used to drive up to York Beach and sit in traffic like this for what seemed like hours. Today the sun is back out, I’m going for a hike and enjoying my last day of being 37.

post office: 1 bill, 2 postcards (Brazil, Amsterdam), 1 contract to get notarized, 1 package slip too late for the package window, 1 letter from a stranger saying thanks.

thrift store: 2 shirts, 1 belt, 3 picture frames, 1 six foot knitted scarf, 1 basket shaped like the state of Washington, 1 red bra, six dollars.

libraries: 1 wifi connection tested, 1 broadband committee meeting, 1 flyer created, 1 hard drive defragged, 5 librarians.

phone: 1 call dad, 2 calls mom, 1 call sister, 1 call lauren, 1 call gary price

swim: 18 laps, 32 laps, 22 laps, 30 laps (yes that’s almost 3 miles)

I was talking to a good friend on the phone yesterday and she said “So what are you doing this weekend?” and I said “Absolutely nothing.” which is basically true and yet not like it sounds, or I am kidding myself. I have been gone two out of the last three weekends and the one I was home for began Friday night at 1 am when I got back from Baltimore. So, where most people have weekends that sort of represent “Hey you’re not working, go do stuff!” I have weekend that say “Hey you’re home, get organized, do laundry and get ready to leave again!” I leave again on Thursday to spend Labor Day weekend in Kittery/Portsmouth.

When someone asks what you’re doing over the weekend, answers like “go to the post office” and “cook dinner” and “write thank you notes” don’t seem like answers. I typed up a bunch of nice thank you notes, wrapped up a wedding gift, and signed a ton of legal documents for a MetaFilter Project and went to the post office where I had two T tokens, an envelope full of clippings from my favorite correspondent and a package from Mom. As I left, the lady at the PO said “Happy birthday!” and I realized she’d read it off the package. Don’t even try to keep secrets in this town. I’ve been trying to give the new roommate some townish advice like that. He’s from Queens and the fact that we don’t have house keys was a little surprising to him. I’m sure it will only get worse.

I make no bones about it, I am not a relaxed person. The Virgo Month of Leisure is an important part of remembering to take some time off. Of course, since I don’t have just one job to close the door on, the idea of “time off” is amusing at best and at worst preposterous. Let’s see how I’ve been doing at this leisure thing over the past few years…

• 2005: trip to New York, trip to Indiana
• 2004: Slow month, possibly the first since this all started.
• 2003: I move to Vermont full-time, I start a new job.
• 2002: Greg on the scene, I am working on a book.
• 2001: I start a postcard project, we know what happened after that.
• 2000: Burning Man followed by the hospital
• 1999: driving cross-country & my barn roof blows off
• 1998: in Guatemala

I really don’t think of myself as that busy, but it’s been years since I took anything like a few weeks off without bringing work with me. Since I started working with MetaFilter, it’s a rare weekend that I don’t put in at least a few hours. And yet, all of my jobs and work don’t usually seem like WORK. When I’ve got a deadline on a project and I have to really shift into hyperfocus mode then I feel busy, but the rest of the time, not so much. I see that as some sort of measure of success, being able to get published, go travelling, get paid, meet people, learn things, live someplace excellent, and have it seem like no work at all. Now I’ll work on sleeping better.

Roommate update: it looks like I have a new roommate, though I haven’t met him yet. He’s a first year law student from Haiti and he drives the same sort of car as Ola. I’m sure there will be a bumpy transition for the two months that him, me and Ola live in the house at the same time. She should be heading out on her Peace Corps adventure sometme after the election and then it will just be me and him. This means we’ll have sort of a full house for a few months, so we’ll be down one guestroom.

I may have timed it right so that I arrive on the doorstep of the Virgo Month of Leisure exhausted and ready and able to do some relaxing. Or not. This past month was a flurry of writing, travelling, socializing and fretting about talks and roommates and the rest of 2006. Now I think I just have drop-in time to manage and a lovely Vermont Autumn to look forward to. I’m heading home from Chicago tomorrow, more in the way of updates from the trip then. My two talks went well. You can read them online here

• On The Fly Tech Support, or “Hey, this isn’t my job!”
• Search – It’s Not All Google or is it?

If this is your birthday month, make sure you give yourself a little slack Virgo; you’ve earned it.

“Alone, alone, oh! We have been warned about solitary vices.
Have solitary pleasures ever been adequately praised?
Do many people know that they exist?” – the other Jessamyn West
It’s feast or famine around here. While the “eat less food, exercise more” plan is easy and doesn’t involve any wild swinging one way or the other, the travelling thing is not as stable. I came back from DC/BWI with a tickle in my throat that soon turned in to a football behind my sinuses and then became a copious flood of blech from my nose. It’s gone now. All I had to do was sit and write, mostly, so it was not difficult to manage. Garlic, ginger, Nyquil, sleep, water. One of the bits of wisdom that seems to come with age is being able to recognize when something you’re dealing with is “more of the same” and when it requires a different sort of attention. Odd to think that anything here could be “more of the same” but there it is. I went from having people to talk to almost every waking minute of my days, to having most of my conversations come out of my fingers instead of my mouth. Rattling around this house has been satisfying. The baby birds are out with their haphazard feathers eating all the sunflower seeds, and I saw a fox cross the road.

I head to Boston this evening to go to the wedding of some dear friends and then off to Chicago to do a one-day training for librarians on tech support and power searching. I’m a good communicator about tech support stuff, but I’m less confident with my power searching, compared to everyone else out there. I’ve been struggling to put what I know into words and slides, when what I really want to do is sit down with everyone and learn as I teach. This would happen to me sometimes when I was teaching tech skills in Romania a decade ago. People would stay after class to talk to me, but they seemed to want me to pour knowledge into their heads. They didn’t have questions, they just wanted answers. I never knew what to do in that situation. I assumed it had something to do with the weird post-Socialist state that Romania found themselves in, in the post-Revolution 90’s, where learning had always been something that people in power deigned to parcel out to chosen acolytes in tiny increments. It’s a hard mindset to undo. Librarians aren’t like that usually, but sometimes they are.

I was on a podcast yesterday, talking about libraries and nerdy geek stuff, and MetaFilter. I don’t know if you’re into the wholepodcast thing, but if you are, you might like the Library Geeks Post-Social episode, a production of my friend Dan over at OneBigLibrary.