etc.

Cold, cold, cold to-day. So cold that I pulled out the mittens, so cold that we brought out our two little space heaters, one for the basement, where we spend most of our waking hours, and one for the bedroom, where we spend our non-waking hours. We usually wait until the Very Last Minute to turn our heating on (which came ten days ago) and it’s got to be pretty damn cold in here for us to pull out the space heaters. And guess who still hasn’t prepped her front garden for winter? Yay me, I win!

At the moment I am listening to a fabulous album by a group called Les Charbonniers de L’Enfer, which is, according to their website, “the only québécois a capella group specialising in the research and interpretation of the oral tradition repertoire.” I was supremely happy to see that cogent description on their website because I have no idea how to describe this band to you. I borrowed the CD from a colleague (who has the most brilliant and eclectic taste in music) and she described them as performing in the “call and response” tradition with some very experimental vocal arrangements. Again, pretty meaningless until you listen to them, but suffice it to say that they are absolutely ace and I can feel my musical horizons broadening as I type.

I went grocery shopping to-day, which in & of itself isn’t particularly blog-worthy, except I that never go grocery shopping, it’s something the mister has always done (along with the cooking and general pantry maintenance). It was a good outing, I stocked up on stuff for lunches (this is my favourite kind of lunch) and plenty of fruit. And I got a free hot dog while we were there. And it wasn’t as insane as I thought grocery shopping on a Sunday would be. And the mister bought eight T-bone steaks (the mister often stops at grocery stores to “browse” for meat, like you or I might “browse” for new shoes). Good times.

Yesterday, after excitedly telling you all about the new blogs I’m reading, I followed the links on a few of those blogs and found some more pretty treasures. To-day, Bloglines has been going back and forth between getting its plumbing fixed and just not updating at all, so at the moment I am feeling rather disenfranchised. The lesson here? Download Sage (or any other aggregator that integrates with your browser), export your Bloglines subscriptions on a regular basis, and use Sage as a backup the next time Bloglines’ pipes get clogged. Okay? Okay.

You know what I like to do? I like to trawl for new blogs every once in a while. Because, you know, there are more than 60 million blogs out there on the internets, and millions and millions of busy bloggers blogging away at them, so I feel that it is incumbent upon me to get out from behind my regular reads to find some new ones. It’s been a few months since I last went trawling, so last Saturday, after I sucked my aggregator dry of all its fresh newness, I set out to discover a few more delights to add to my daily roster, and discover I did! Here are a few new-to-me blogs in which I have been delighting all week:

Anna Maria Horner
Designer and Mum of 5, Anna Maria’s recent post about her kitchen remodel snagged me and I’ve been reading ever since.

Antarctic Journal
A group of researchers travel to Ross Island, Antarctica, every winter to study the Adelie penguin. I started reading this one last year but added it to this list because they’re back for the new season, so it feels like a brand new blog! The photographs and tales are fantastic, when I first stumbled upon this blog last year, I read through all the archives in one go. You will too.

The Hypothetical Wren
A grad student in New Mexico. I’m particularly enjoying her posts about her students & teaching.

Kerflop
I think I first discovered kerflop in 2004 and, for some reason, it dropped off my radar until I stumbled over it again last week. Like finding an old friend!

me, my life + infrastructure
Another grad student blog, a genre I’ve been oddly drawn to lately, in that “oh, I remember the pain” way. I loved grad school, really I did, but there sure was a lot of angst.

weapons of massdistraction
Stunning photography and good prose is an excellent combination.

What’s Alan Watching
Alan watches a lot of TV and he talks about, in entertaining detail, on his blog.

——

And you? Read any good blogs lately?

Oh, yes they are! Here’s another that has been in draft for a while (I don’t think I was tagged for this one, I just grabbed it off someone’s blog a few months ago (months!)). The list is pretty random, and since I’ve read and own most of them, I’ve included some notes and links to reviews where appropriate. Meme ad libbing! Doesn’t that just fly in the face of all the meme rules? I’m such a blog rebel.

How it works: bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, and underline the ones on your book shelf.

• The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (review)
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (read this as a teenager, didn’t get the hype; read it again in my 20s and fell in love)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (also first read as a teenager, one of my all-time favourites)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (you already know how I feel about this one; review)
• His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (I’ve pulled out this series every year during the winter break, swearing that I will read them all; not sure why it hasn’t happened yet but I do look upon these three books longingly every time I walk by my bookshelves. One of these days I’ll have some time to read these indulgently, all in one go, cover to cover.)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel (review)
• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien (yes, it’s on the shelves, it belongs to the mister. I have no desire to read it, although I feel like I probably should.)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (review)
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• 1984 – George Orwell
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
• One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
• Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (hated it!)
• The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
• The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (review)
• Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
• Angels and Demons – Dan Brown (also one of the mister’s)
• Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
• The Secret History – Donna Tartt (why do I feel like I should know this book?)
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (you’ve heard the story on this one too)
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
• Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides (review)
• Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
• The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• Good Omens – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
• Atonement – Ian McEwan (review)
• The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• Dune – Frank Herbert (one of the mister’s favourites. He’s tried to force it upon me many times, I’ve managed to resist).

Have you seen Denyse’s comment from a few posts ago? It’s my new mantra:

…balance is not so much about equal portions of everything, but rather doing enough of what feeds the soul.

Thank you, Denyse!

The point of this whole blogging for 30 days straight was to force myself to sit down and write, even when I felt like I had nothing to say. Some days I have indeed had nothing to say, other days words just seemed to pour forth, for better or worse. I’ve been at this blogging thing for over five years (have I ever mentioned that I had a diaryland journal for over a year before I registered this domain? No, I didn’t think so. It was pretty much just for me) and in all that time, I don’t think I ever sat down to write unless I had a somewhat well-formed idea in my head, complete with opening line and adjectives. So, this exercise in writing for the sake of writing has been nice, and it definitely feels sustainable. At least for another 15 days.

Windsor was good, the symposium was excellent, if you have any interest at all in the future of the ILS, head over to my other blog for a play by play (non-librarians: the ILS is the monolithic platform that runs most aspects of what a library does: the catalogue, the book-buying, the borrowing & patron info, etc. And, oh yeah, it’s in crisis).

It’s good to be home. Now I get to go upstairs and curl up in my own lovely, but seriously pillow-deprived, bed.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Windsor, Ontario enjoying free wifi and tons of downy pillows. Seriously, tons. There are so many pillows on this bed it’s a bit ridiculous; it’s a good thing the mister is happily tucked into our bed at home because he would be seriously freaked out by all these pillows.

I’m in Windsor to attend a symposium about the future of the Integrated Library System (weighty stuff, truly). It’s been a long, long day but the free wifi meant that I had no excuse to not blog tonight, so here I am, blogging with not a whole lot to say. I’m tired and this embarrassment of pillows is lulling me into a blissful stupor, so I think I should just say good-night.

Good-night.

I’ve been feeling decidedly uninspired by my surroundings lately. Part of it has to do with the fact that once we made the decision to get a cleaning lady, I wanted a clean house stat. But it doesn’t quite work that way unfortunately, finding the right person takes time, and we’re still very much in the early stages of the process (talking to friends & neighbours), so my clean house is still a bit of a distant hope at the moment.

The other part of it is my overall indecision about what actually inspires me as far as room design goes. A part of me wants to strip away all the clutter and embrace clean lines, wide open spaces, and white white white (all our walls are white); another part of me wants to surround myself with colour and fabrics and texture and objects that are meaningful to us (this pretty much sums up my studio, where I have been spending NO time lately). We haven’t been thoughtful at all about what we’ve done with our surroundings, so the end result has been a combination of neglected white walls (the white is fine, the lack of things hanging upon these walls is not), some clutter-free corners, some spaces dense with colour and character, and no sense of balance whatsoever. I’m starting to hatch some plans for a few additions (nothing major, just a few little things that I can whip together using my sewing machine and fabric stash) and whenever I’m in need of inspiration, I turn to Flickr (where else?) where I get absolutely lost combing through tags and groups and where inspiration is very easy to come by. Here is a mosaic of what I added as favourites this morning (while sitting in bed, waiting for the meds to take effect and allow me a last hour of sleep). Take a look at my favourites page to see these images individually.

As you can see, colours (blues, reds, pinks, yellows) figure prominently, as do fabrics and textures, which gives me a pretty clear indication of where my head is at at the moment. Looking at this mosaic (and I’ve been staring at it all day!) makes me want to beat feet up to my studio, fire up my sewing machine, tear through my stash, and reinvent my surroundings instantly! Of course, if it were that easy, there’d be no fun in it, would there?

I think I might have scared away the worst of the cold with sleep and that trio of warriors I cursed yesterday (Echinacea, Vitamin C, Cold FX). I’m still a bit mopey from the general malaise but I haven’t sneezed once to-day and no more throat irritation either!

Of course I’m not feeling near well enough to tackle the front yard, which is still not ready for winter. I know I’m playing with fire here because we’re probably perilously close to that first snowfall (I’m pretty sure this time last year we’d already had one) and the leaves have not been raked, the hedges have not been trimmed, the lavender has not been pruned, and the bulbs have not been planted. How about this, Universe? How about you give me a single hour of sunshine to-morrow and I’ll have it all done in time for you to rain your fury down upon us? Great, thanks.

And, lastly, it was brought to my attention recently that there are a few crafty librarians out there who read this blog but not my library blog, so I thought a little cross-posting might be in order. If you work in a special library that uses 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, RSS, IM, etc.), would you help me out by answering a short survey? More info here. Thank you!

So that hour I thought I might carve out this weekend to sew? Blown. I woke up this morning with my head in a fog, the nasty cold the mister has suffered with for the past three days has finally caught up to me. Echinacea, vitamin C and Cold FX have all failed me, damn you, all three of you! It seems I’m getting quite good at catching things, this is my second cold in six weeks. I slept 10 hours last night and another three this afternoon, and I’m still pretty heavy-lidded this evening while trying to watch the Maple Leafs beat the Canadiens.

While I realize that this post is a most pitiful offering, I’m sure you won’t mind if I just close my laptop and curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and a blanket, will you? Thanks.