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.

Happy birthday and happy new home, Pat!

Greg got back from Buffalo no worse for wear and had some grat pictures of him in his newish suit with his folks [mom, dad], neat happy pictures. We spent our brief morning together outside drinking coffee looking at all the birds flying around — goldfinches, woodpeckers, juncos, grosbeaks, finches, titmice, nuthatches, ducks, starlings, doves, chickadees — in a frenzy of ohmygoditsfreakingSPRING. It’s bittersweet for Greg and I because he finishes up his last semester which means the last final, the end of school, the full-family-and-friend graduation and then eight weeks of full-time bar review studying where as near as I can tell he has to sit in a room and mostly watch video tapes for an obscene amount of money.

All of this, especially the bar review will take its toll. I have two colleagues from work whose wives took the bar and they both gave me advice “Move out of the house” So I’m taking advantage of the time off I have this week (yay school vacation) to try to spend some quality time with Greg as he ramps up to finals and bar prep. Then I’ll move.

Easter is not one of those holidays like Christmas which I sort of mind, just a little bit. Easter doesn’t affect me too much one way or the other. It makes people dress nice, act happy and eat candy which seems okay. As I was driving today I even saw some kids on an Easter egg hunt on their front lawn, nice.

However, the fact that it’s not a total holiday like Christmas means that places like here, with a lot of Easter-celebrators, things go a little flibberty-gibbet. Greg has been gone for a few days visiting his folks and I have been home doing my thing. I got up early today to try to get a dress to fit that I bought at the thrift store. It’s a nice dress but it binds a bit in the chest area. Either this means that I am buxom (or fat) or the dress is too small (or fixable). I decided to see if I could remedy this with some sewing, remove a seam or two, add a little fabric. It was fun sitting around sewing, I haven’t done it in a while. I stabbed myself under the thumbnail not once but twice — a pain so shocking that I just sat up and opened my eyes wide “What the HELL?!” — and this was where it started. The dress didn’t fit, still, and putting it on made me feel so blobby and out of shape that I hurled myself poolwards.

I got dressed ate a quick breakfast and went to the pool only to find it closed. The schedule on the door said it was supposed to be open, but it wasn’t. The pool is staffed by teenagers, sort of Lord of the Flies-ish, so sometimes they’re late. We waited around a while, me and the other lady who was waiting, and then went home. I called, no answer. I checked their website, nothing. I checked the library’s website. It said they were going to be open normal hours. I called security, they thought the pool was open.

I’ve said this before but one of the reasons I think I became a librarian is because I believe that facts can, for the most part, be known. I grew up in a family that told a lot of stories, really interesting stories, but at the end of the day I was always wondering “What really happened?” I can be a little overly literal, some people call it dense, but I believe there is a trueness to physical reality that can be ascertained. The intriguing part is figuring out what you need to do to find it out. So, you can imagine the combination of fun and frustration that faced me as I tried to figured out what the hell was up with the pool. I called all the numbers. I emailed people. I checked websites. I checked lists of holidays. I asked other people “Do you think a community college would be closed on Easter?” and the whole time I realized I had no idea if Easter was the sort of holiday that would close things down in a small town. I knew Greg was at his parents’ house going to church in a suit and then having a meal with his family, but I didn’t know how Joe Vermonter might spend the holiday. This was a fact that could not be known, amazingly.

End of the story. I called around 5 and the pool was open. When I asked when the opened the resident teenager said “Oh, we opened at 4 today. I guess we didnt’ put up a sign” I got there and had the pool almost entirely to myself, a rare treat. I swam off my frustrations in a record-breaking (for me) 30 laps (5/6 of a mile, close, so close) and then left to go food shopping. When I got to the grocery store, it was also closed. They, it seems, had closed early.