etc.

For all the travel-kvetching I did, my quick fly-by trip to Newfoundland turned out to be good. It was neither crazymaking, nor was it draining. Here’s why:

- The flight was much shorter than I expected: just over 3 hours to get there and under 3 hours to get back.
- I resisted the temptation to get to the airport too early — left an hour before my flight, checked in, sat down for a minute, boarded my flight. Both there and back. No waiting!
- The extra night was a good idea. I originally planned on staying just one night, but that would have meant having to check out and schlep my stuff to the conference on Wednesday. Glad I didn’t.
- A great pre-conference day, good conversations with awesome librarians, and some local beer after.
- A fantastic hotel with free wifi, super-comfy bed & pillows, cheap in-room snacks, free telephone calls within North America. And all for a really reasonable nightly rate.
- A lovely stroll up Signal Hill on Thursday morning right before leaving for the airport.

Pictures are here.

I’ll be in St. John’s Newfoundland for approximately 2 days next week. As conference tourism goes, this one is definitely a highlight and I wish I had more than 1 afternoon + part of a morning to explore the city. I get in Tuesday afternoon, attend and present at a preconference all day Wednesday, and fly out early Thursday afternoon. I’m looking forward to the session and to seeing a bit of St. John’s. I’m also just a little bit happy that this is my last conference/speaking gig until September.

Thing is, I’ve grown weary of travel. I’ve always loved traveling, new places, &c., but the getting there — the packing, the waiting, the flying, the waiting, the hotels, the waiting — when it’s not crazymaking, it’s draining. In my world, the line between work-travel and pleasure-travel is now so totally blurred that all travel is beginning to feel too much like a chore. I’m making plans for some real off-time in August and, so far, those plans include a one car, one mister, one very remote location, lots of books, and zero networked devices. Oh, imagine!

Are you sick of my lists yet? Don’t answer that because if you say “yes”, I might feel guilty about this next list. Stuff I’ve done to-day:

• A whole lot of course management stuff. Time consuming!
• Sought, in vain, for a companion for the Killers concert tonight (the mister had to bail on account of work). If you’re on any of the other social spaces I’m on (facebook, twitter), you already know this. All sorts of people want to go, but no one can. It’ll be my first solo concert. No matter! The mister came with me in the end! And the concert was fantastic.
• Had our drains snaked. It went well, I’m extremely glad it’s done. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
• Met with a bunch of librarians from another Ontario university. Always enlightening.
• Did an hour of virtual reference in Second Life.
• Spent an inordinate amount of time searching local library catalogues for research leave reading. Net result? See next bullet point.
• Ordered an inordinate number of books from amazon for research leave reading.
• Responded to five emails from readers asking me not to consolidate my blogs! That exclamation point is not for emphasis but for surprise – I had no idea anyone would care! They raised valid points, so consolidation plans, nay thoughts, have been shelved for now. Thanks for the feedback!
• Ate two toasted crumpets with butter and maple syrup. An excellent tea!
• Filled the dishwasher and washing machine (which were both out of use on account of the aforementioned drain-snaking incident).

It all looks so much better, and so much more productive, when it’s written down. Now I’m off to go concerting by myself. Good day!

You know, in the almost 5-year history of this blog, I don’t think I’ve ever not posted for a whole month. One whole month of nothing. There is now a black hole in the etches-johnson.com archives where April 2007 should have been.

But, whatever.

Let’s catch up, shall we? This is a somewhat reverse chronological series of events (and non-events) I haven’t blogged about:

• I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2, finally. I’ve been planning to do so for ages, but kept putting it off on account of this blog pre-dating my host’s one-click wordpress installs & upgrades. Not being able to do it in a single click meant that I had to backup my database, backup some other wordpress files, and run the upgrade script myself. Really, not such a big deal, I was just lazy to perform those extra 7-10 clicks.
• A CMS upgrade means a theme change. Like my fractals? (OK, they’re not really my fractals, I swiped the background image from this theme and tinkered with it).
• My 6-week course on 2.0 tools for libraries/librarians wrapped up last week. It was fun! It always is.
• My LIS grad course starts Monday. I’ve been tweaking the course blog, updating course stuff (syllabus, reading lists, assignments, etc.) and generally getting my ducks in a row for the past two weeks. I’m ready.
• I was in DC for a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was all-conference all-the-time, which doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but it was. I didn’t blog it (I barely took notes at all), so the sessions have already become a hazy mess in my brain, except for the odd Good Idea. Note to self: write down the odd Good Idea.
• We had the runner on our stairs replaced. The old runner was blue, old, weirdly Southwestern design-wise, and generally horrid. The new runner is a lovely off-white sisal with plenty of underpad. The cats love it. The off-white loves their grey & black hair.
• It’s Spring here. And beautiful. Our windows are open and the scent of hyacinth and forsythia is wafting in with the Spring breeze. This is my absolute favourite time of year.
• I’ve polished off just one item from the spring cleaning to-do list: basement storage. We’ve settled in nicely to having the Pax wardrobe down there, even if it did look enormously out of place when we first assembled it. It’s keeping things nice & tidy for now, with excellent shoe and coat storage, plus a few baskets to organize the little things (gloves, hats, shoe polish) on the top shelf. I’ll get some pictures one of these days.
• Another home-related accomplishment: painted and put up a small shelf in the kitchen to store tea and hang aprons & such off of. Pictures of that soon too.
• I’ve started going for walks at lunchtime on account of the good weather. This is a big step for me; I had fallen into a terrible habit of never leaving my desk (unless I had to). Now, the brisk, 20-minute stroll provides renewed vigor to get me through the afternoon. I’ve only been doing it for a week and a half, so I suppose I have at least another week and a half before it becomes a habit, but I’m pretty sure it will.
• I’m on research leave for most of June and a bit of July. What will I be researching? Information architecture and user-centred design. Either on the deck or at the coffee shop down the road. I plan to blog through the reading and idea-gathering over at blogwithoutalibrary.net, so if you’re at all interested in the topic, head over there around June 11.
• Earlier this week, I considered making May another NaBloPoMo (one blog post a day for the whole month). As you’ve probably figured out, it was a fleeting thought that I didn’t bother jumping on until four days into the month. So, no promise of daily posts, but how about a promise of regular posts? This blog needs some care & feeding, and I need some discipline.
• [last bullet, I promise] Something else blog-related has been playing on my mind recently. I’ve started to think that two separate blogs (1 personal, 1 professional) isn’t such a good idea anymore. Once upon a time, when I used to knit and make things, it made sense to talk about the creative stuff here and the library stuff there. But (and this should come as no great surprise to you), I’m hardly engaged in creative things any more; work and related professional stuff (teaching, presenting, writing, committee-busybodying) monopolize my time almost entirely lately, which means this blog suffers. And when I get smacked with creative energy (which hasn’t happened in ages), bwal.net suffers. I don’t think I’m ready to retire either one, but I’m not really ready to consolidate blogs either. So, all of this is to say what? Not sure yet, other than this is something I’ve been thinking about and may or may not act upon in the near-distant future.

I’m probably forgetting a bunch of things, but that’s plenty for today. I feel like I’m back! And that’s a good feeling.