Happy End of a Decade

It's been a decade devoted to chaos and confusion in a lot of ways. Our basic core family changed and changed again. Hopefully the changes will stabilize now. Our finances have been up and down. TC had a heart attack and retired from the university and wrote a book. My job has gotten more difficult and complicated, but I still have a job, and it's not a bad job. I have picked up more skills and learned about social networking. (Twitter is addictive, but it is also a great way to pick up new information and meet interesting people.)

I couldn't remember what we did for New Year's Eve #Tenyearsago, but tc reminded me that we sat around watching the new millenium arrive (although we missed it in the Central Time Zone.)

This New Year's Eve is going to be just family (including Marq and Patrick) and we are going to have cheese and crackers and bagna cauda.

I'm looking forward to the new decade.

another good day

Except for the interwebz eating my brain. Actually, it's kind of sad. We had to put kitters to sleep. If it had just been her thyroid we would have kept paying for the drugs, but she had an eye infection that was going to cause her to lose the eye and the vet found lumps that she was pretty sure were cancerous. I hope that if I am ever in a terminal situation that someone does for me what we do for the four legged members of our family.

I remember coming home from Worldcon in San Francisco in 1993 and finding this little white kitten that Lee brought home. Pure white Siamese mix, she had blue eyes and just slightly ivory colored points. Lee was 15 at the time and all attitude; kitters imprinted on that and for years she was a sweet, friendly loving alien face hugger. She'd purr and then latch on to whatever tender flesh was closest. She lost that as she got older...she suffered from arthritis and if you touched a sore spot she would snap at you, but mostly she just cuddled and purred.

May Bast bless her and may she cross the Rainbow Bridge to play again with Patience and Sara, Bear and Harry.

I'm working on alphabetizing my books. It was Kathi's idea...she figured it wouldn't be too hard. My library fills 25 book cases of various sizes, and that is AFTER we took the Heinlein, Robinson and King plus 16 feet of non-fiction upstairs. I'm working on the B's now. Brin, Baxter, Bear (both Greg and Elizabeth), Bradley, Bradbury, Bujold, Baudino. We mustn't forget Barnes, Brown (Rita Mae), Brunner, Bradford (Barbara Taylor), etc. Since I have to go out of town tomorrow to visit Minnie B. (my MIL) and we are probably going up to Michigan City on Saturday, we may not get done.

I must confess: I am a Twitter addict. Never got into IRC but twitter is like a private chatroom where I can sit in my corner and listen to fascinating conversation, immediately follow links to things that interest me and occasionally contribute something of interest myself. Twitter is both an aggregator like Google Reader and a social site where I can become acquainted with a variety of folks that I would have never met except for the net.

I can also use Twitter for "professional development" because there are lots of librarians who tweet. It's a quick way to share resources.

There are so many things I am interested in, and each new topic leads down another path. Topics I want to continue exploring in 2010:
1. Reading and reviewing books (both print and ebooks). NetGalley got me interested in this, as did all of the DIY author/publishers. Until just recently I haven't written a book review in decades, but it will make me think about what I am reading.
2. Zen paganism. Trying to meditate. Trying to "Be Here Now." Living in harmony with the earth and treading lightly.
3. Writing and blogging. I have 3 blogs that I neglect shamefully; journey of a kitten, circulating zen and the Womyn Making Waves blog for weft. I also neglect my regular journal. I write all the time. It's just not very directed or useful writing.

I could go on, because there are a hundred things I want to do. I know I won't do them and that will make me feel bad. So I will limit myself to the three listed, for awhile at least.

joyous holidays to all

It's Christmas. Got up around 9, showered, fiddled around. I made cinnamon rolls (popped the can, placed rolls on pan, oven was preheated but I misread the package (275 rather than 375) so it took them longer to bake than it should have. Presents were nice...I think everyone is happy. TC and Sean are playing Wii Metallica (metal is perfect background music for Christmas afternoon.) Ann, Brad, Becca, Lily and Matt are coming over for dinner. Dave and Heather are staying home together. That is their big present to themselves. Personally, I think it is a good one.

I need to pick music for WMW because I'm doing the show Sunday. Looking forward to it. I will call mom when it is quieter and I called Lee before everyone was up and around.

So my plan for 2010 is to declutter my life....HA! first thing I did was look at Siva V.'s syllabus for Into to Digital Media 2010 http://tiny.cc/SJ9KF and try to figure out how much of the literature I want to read. TC says there is nothing wrong with having a broad shallow scope, and my communication problems aren't my fault, but .... in any case, I need to quit trying to do everything half assed and do a few things well.

a challenge

The 2010 Tournament of Books Long List

All books available for sale at Powells.com

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker
Rage, Sergio Bizzio
The Women, T.C. Boyle
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
Trouble, Kate Christensen
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
Fever Chart, Bill Cotter
Four Freedoms, John Crowley
Everything Matters!, Ron Currie Jr.
Spooner, Pete Dexter
Homer & Langley, E.L. Doctorow
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis
The Believers, Zoe Heller
Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving
The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
Under the Dome, Stephen King
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, Victor Lavalle
Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem
The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Ransom, David Malouf
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The City & The City, China Mieville
Manituana, Wu Ming
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
Miles from Nowhere, Nami Mun
Once a Runner, John Parker
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Generosity, Richard Powers
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
Wetlands, Charlotte Roche
My Abandonment, Peter Rock
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Far North, Marcel Theroux
The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower
This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper
My Bird, Fariba Vafi
The Book of Fathers, Miklos Vamos
The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez
A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert
Half Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead
Lowboy, John Wray

—Published December 9, 2009

Ignite

Ignite Show

Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. Imagine that you're on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you're ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.

QOTD

I'm just saying any day that involves needing a hammer and a bayonet is a day that should end in someone buying you dinner. GrillGhod to Saoba

John Lennon, RIP

I remember exactly what I was doing when I found out the John Lennon was dead. I was the school librarian for a small school district in southern Illinois and I was married to my first husband. That was the day I realized I did not want to be a school librarian or English teacher.

FTS-Thx, @MikeCane

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dreams.png

Open Letter from Kate Bornstein

Open Letter to LGBT Leaders Who Are Pushing Marriage Equality. http://bit.ly

Kate Bornstein is fabulous and what she says is so important. Just a brief bit of her blog post here:

Stopping the violence against women and freaky children, and backing another run at the ERA have got the good chance of creating national front, lots of allies. On the home front of sex and gender, there's plenty of room for change that doesn't require millions of dollars and thousands of hours.

Looking into the community of people who base their lives on sexuality and gender, there's a lot of door-opening to do. Beyond L, G, B and T, there's also Q for queer and Q for questioning. There's an S for sadomasochists, an I for intersex, an F for feminists, and another F for furries. Our community is additionally composed of sex educators, sex workers, adult entertainers, pornographers, men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and asexuals who have sex with no one but themselves. You want to create some real change? Make room for genderqueers, polyamorists, radical faeries, butches, femmes, drag queens, drag king, and other dragfuck royalty too fabulous to describe in this short letter.

I urge you to read it in full.

It's better to leave them in obscurity...

Harlequin has published a collection of Harlequin Vintage books from 60 years ago. Great. These could be valuable for lots of reasons...teachers of writing could use them for examples, my mom could re-read books she read a long time ago...who knows? Unfortunately, I was pointed to the Harlequin page by @mikecane and found the article about this effort, which included the quote below:


Now for the books: Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.

WTF?! Harlequin has been in FAIL mode lately, first with the Vanity Press and now with deliberate censorship. I am not a proponent of mass boycott, any more than I am a proponent of mass anything, but I am not going to patronize them.

also posted to Circulating Zen and LiveJournal (barbarakitten_t)