etc.

The first in a young adult fiction bender I’ve been on recently. All thanks to ALA where I picked up fistfulls of YA galleys. After having been too busy to read for about a month, I’m reading just about anything I can get my hands on now.

Kat has just moved to a new town, a new neighbourhood, a new school, and is trying to come to grips with all of this newness at once, complete with overwrought teenage angst. The “lesson” in the book comes when Kat meets Erin, another New Girl, who is melodramatic, clingy and overeager. The long and short of it is that Kat doesn’t like or trust Erin, but grows quite fond of the group of girls Erin introduces her to and by the end of the book Kat and her new friends find a way to accept Erin and all her eccentricities. While I have read better YA fiction, I was pleased that this book wasn’t preachy, which it could easily have been. It was quite clear what the moral of the story was, but Scott managed to stay pretty even-handed about it. This one is due in hardcover from Fitzhenry & Whiteside in Fall 2003.

Surprise! It’s all CSS now, no tables, no nothing. It looks good in IE5, ok in IE6, and if you use Netscape, well you’re on your own. Mozilla, Opera, Lynx users, you tell me.

The move (literal not virtual) went very well, we had two strong and trustworthy helpers to whom we owe our first born. We managed to get the first floor of the house painted before the move (also thanks to helpers) and we’re taking the rest of it a room at a time. We’re still living amongst boxes and it feels like they will never go away, but others have assured me that they will get unpacked, one day none of our stuff will be in boxes, one day I will be able to burn that packing list that has been duct taped to my forehead for the past few weeks.

Our first week in the neighbourhood we located the important amenities: grocer, hardware store, library, transit stops. I spent a lovely morning in our library branch, talking to the librarians, getting another card (since I’d lost my old one) and generally exploring the building and holdings. The branch is housed in a beautiful old house, with plaster walls, large windows, vaulted ceilings and timber beams. They’ve done a great job of maintaining the original charm of the building, the circulation desk is the the large foyer, the stacks are on the second floor and while they’ve since put in central air, they’ve held on to the old ceiling fans. The day I was there was fairly cool but the fans spun lazily all the same.

The one surprise has been the neighbours. To our left lives a crusty old guy who hardly ever wears a shirt and has a small yappy dog, and to our right lives a very large family, or three small families, complete with grandparents and poor family relations (assumed on account of the expletive laden “conversations” we’ve heard through the walls).

Well that was a rather inauspicious way to celebrate the first birthday of e-j.com. Since I have complained enough about the trials and tribulations I have faced at the hands of certain nefarious hosting companies, I will complain no more. Suffice it to say that the domain is now mine (well, sort of), I have secured a new host, and I bitched enough to get e-j.com hosted for free for the next little while.

SO MUCH to catch up on. You go away for a few days and everything changes, including Blogger Pro. Some small surprises are being planned as a belated birthday treat for e-j.com readers, one year later. Watch this space.

For some, this book might come as a startling revelation. For those who know a little something about corporate perversions like McDonald’s and the Walt Disney Company, it is a little less surprising. As is fairly evident from the title, this book is about fast food: the growth of the industry, the marketing, the North American obsession with it, the globalization prospects. It’s clear that Schlosser has done his homework with this one. He starts with a fairly exhaustive history of the industry (fascinating how the people who were responsible for McDonalds knew the people who were responsible for KFC, who knew the people who were responsible for Wendy’s, etc.) and then moves into a very engaging discussion of the industry’s workers, the hiring policies of most fast food companies, the conditions under with which workers have to perform, and their foiled attempts at organization. And then there are the bits about the food itself, which are more than enough to frighten even the most hardened freeway-fast-food types. The book tends be a bit draggy at times, but ultimately it is worth trudging through those bits to get the complete picture.

This book pleased me. Not only have I been looking forward to it since I first read about it over at librarian.net (or maybe it was jessamyn.com, can’t remember which), but I also managed to snag a copy at conference prices at ALA, AND I got Katia and Jessamyn to sign it. Lovely.

I haven’t yet read Revolting Librarians, the 1972 publication to which this collection is a sequel, but not for lack of trying: my library doesn’t own a copy, my local public library only has one copy and it’s in Reference, and the single copy at the University of Toronto has been missing for years. So, having said that, I can’t really attest to how good a job this does as a followup book (which is probably beside the point), but I do wholeheartedly endorse it as thoroughly readable and enjoyable, even if I don’t always agree with everything every author says. I’d even go so far as recommend it to my non-librarian friends for insight into the wacky world librarians live and work in, a world they only glimpse through me. Perhaps then they might understand why one of my favourite bits in the whole book is this haiku: “Dear Melvil Dewey/I really don’t fit in your/decimal system.” And there’s more where that came from too.

This morning I woke up with sunlight streaming in through our bedroom window. Sunlight. On Monday night Mike set his alarm to get him out of bed early for a golf game on Tuesday and about one hour before it was supposed to go off I started out of a deep sleep and gave him a nudge because I was SO SURE he had slept right through the alarm. He hadn’t. It was 6 am. And sunlight had woken me up. Sunlight.

It’s good to be here.

Here is what my week is looking like:

Monday – sign mortgage papers at bank; final visit at The House.
Tuesday – meet with lawyer, sign more papers.
Wednesday – pack.
Thursday – House closes, pick up keys from lawyer, clean.
Friday – clean and paint.
Saturday – clean and paint.
Sunday – move.

Posts will be irregular, if at all. We get our DSL connection at the new place sometime next week so check back then for musings and pictures and tales, oh my!

• Keep your eyes on my swap list of goodies at Swappingtons. Only three books strong right now, we’re building bookshelves once we get into The House, which means I will be selectively weeding my collection and adding to the list.

• We packed and packed and packed all weekend. If it wasn’t for a BBQ at my folks’ on Saturday, I wouldn’t have seen the light of day all weekend (thanks folks). Before Saturday we had 5 boxes packed. By the end of the day Sunday, we were almost done. Friends and colleagues were panicked for us on Friday when I told them we hadn’t really started yet. They have no idea what good little worker bees we can be when we have to.

• Yesterday must have been Meryl Streep day on Bravo!. We had it on all day while we were packing and watched Music of the Heart and Defending Your Life and bits of other films she’s been in. She has this remarkable ability to breathe life into the most colourless role/script/film (even one of Albert Brooks‘ misses).

• Funny Cide [via hoopla]
• cover art for The Order of the Pheonix in the UK/Canada and the US [via loobylu]
• if I wasn’t packing and moving I’d be playing Scrabble in the city
• why you shouldn’t go to graduate school [via IA]
• Webby winners
• an open letter from Martha [thanks aer]
• the answer to your cat’s Halloween costume prayers [thanks all]
• get all the fodder you need to freak out rush-hour subway commuters right here

I’ve been a bit scattered of late, what with the packing and assorted moving arrangements that need to be made, and trying to tie up all sorts of loose ends at work before I leave on vacation for almost a month, and working on that chapter I’m writing for that book I think I mentioned some months ago, and doing all that last minute committee work that needs to be done before the big conference.

About this time two years ago I thought I would never be busier than I was then. I was finishing up my first year of library school, which meant writing papers and studying for exams; I was planning a wedding; I was looking for a place to live post-wedding; I was planning a vacation, also post-wedding; and I was looking for a job for the summer. It seems I was wrong, that wasn’t the busiest I have ever been, I am busier now than I was then, and that was two years ago and it seems that these things run in two year cycles and today makes two years that we’ve been married, so there you go. It all makes sense to me although it might be a bit of a stretch for you.

Mike got a lovely new ThinkPad last week, complete with bells and whistles like a DVD-ROM. Nothing revolutionary for most but for us it meant being able to watch those region encoded DVDs we bought in London last winter because his system allows you to change the region code on the DVD player up to four times (some background: encoding DVDs by region is an initiative that continues to be spearheaded by movie studios and TV execs to control the release of DVDs in different parts of the world to account for regional differences in theatrical release. Most DVD players are region encoded too, although you used to be able to buy a universal DVD player back when the technology was new, but all that has changed now. So North America is region code 1, Europe is region code 2, etc.). So we switched to region 2 last week and watched the entire first series of The Office because no matter how busy you are you must always find time for The Office.