May 2011
1 post
Back to work
I’m only three weeks out from the end of maternity leave and it has already taken on a hazy sheen in my memory, the days and weeks blending together in a magical wonderland of time spent relaxing and snuggling my baby. One thing this tells me is that we were incredibly lucky to get an easy, happy baby. I actually got plenty of sleep during the first 12 weeks of Freya’s life....
April 2011
1 post
Disclaimer
I suppose my last post was pretty harrowing. I lived it, and have told it so many times now, I know I’ve become a little desensitized. But I still can’t easily read the part where it all goes bad. Today someone asked me if they could share my story with a med student about to start her OB-GYN rotation. I’m happy to share; I did decide to make my story public, knowing that...
Freya's Birth Story
We wanted to have a natural, unmedicated childbirth if at all possible. We took a nine-week class in the Bradley Method and hoped we could use the Alternative Birthing Center at the hospital, but also prepared for the possibility that our birth wouldn’t go as planned. There were lots of factors that could intervene in our vision of a perfect natural childbirth. Unfortunately, we ended up...
January 2011
2 posts
2010 Survey
I’ve been meaning to do this again for the past couple weeks, so I’d better get ‘er done before it’s ridiculously too late. It’s only two weeks into the new year, so I still somewhat remember 2010…
I took out the more annoying questions, because it’s my blog and I can do what I want.
1. What did you do in 2010 that you’d never done before?
Went...
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
1 post
I'd like a do-over, please
My grandma died this week and it’s making everything else seem so much worse than it is. My lunch got ruined yesterday when I didn’t notice I was putting my soup into a mysteriously unplugged staff refrigerator until three hours later when I had to throw away all of everyone’s food that was in it. I had to go to a program 45 minutes away and used the last few minutes before I...
August 2010
2 posts
Too bad if you don't like it
This is why, when you get a couple Phish fans together, we start speaking our own language of setlists, venues, eras, and versions of songs.
phishnet:
“At a time when it seems that almost every experience can be canned, published or downloaded, Phish and its fans are deep in an oral, immediate culture of their own devising.”
—Robert Everett-Green, Toronto Review, 7/22/99
My Cupcake Fell, and other cake-related tragedies
I’ve been thinking about cake a lot lately because unfortunately it’s been a big craving of mine. And cake produces strong emotions. My mom’s family—her brother, to be exact—has a whole Cake Trilogy of stories that still seem to get under my uncle’s skin however many decades after the fact. There’s the marble cake on top of the fridge that he got excited...
July 2010
1 post
Life, One Week at a Time
All summer I’ve been counting my life in weeks.
Sometime in the last week of April I realized I was probably pregnant. It was too early to test and I was spooked about it anyway, so I waited. Two weeks later, the day after Mother’s Day, I confirmed what had been pretty unmistakable because I was already having symptoms. At that point the magic number was a measly five. Nothing to get...
June 2010
2 posts
“I could take Dave Matthews in a fight. No, I’ll be braver. I could take on Henry...”
– Trey Anastasio, quoted in Rolling Stone 4/17/03 (via phishnet)
Random Thoughts
Some random thoughts on a sleepy, cloudy Saturday afternoon:
I’m glad long skirts are back in fashion this summer, since long skirts and flip flops are one of my favorite summer uniforms. I feel a little fancy even though I’m just wearing a $6 heather gray v-neck t-shirt with my green skirt. Miniskirts can suck it.
I’m doing pretty poorly on the giving up caffeine front, but...
April 2010
4 posts
Successfully Doing Nothing
I spent Tuesday-Thursday of this week at Starved Rock, at Synergy: the Illinois Library Leadership Initiative. It was pretty fantastic. It was also incredibly exhausting. I generally like the pace of conference-type events, where I get up earlier than usual and spend busy and intellectually demanding days with little to no downtime, but I can’t keep it up for too long. So today I...
March 2010
3 posts
2010 Goals: How Am I Doing?
About two months ago, I posted the following goals:
Complete the Hundred Pushups Challenge
Knit a pair of socks
Sew at least one garment
Learn Continental Knitting
Write a review of each book I read on GoodReads
Give up caffeine
So how am I doing?
The Hundred Pushups challenge has been slow. There are three workouts per week, and I just completed Week 3, Day 1. The workouts build on each...
Vehicular Pet Peeves, and a Discovery.
1. Pedestrians who start crossing when there’s a left turn arrow and they don’t have a “walk” signal yet.
2. Amateur cyclists who take up lots of space swerving hair-raisingly all over a busy road.
3. People who don’t get all the way into the right-hand lane when they’re turning right, instead straddling two lanes while turning very slowly.
4. On that note,...
Nerd Alert
If you have no interest in Lord of the Rings or Battlestar Galactica, move along…
We’re watching The Fellowship of the Ring right now, and I had this epiphany that Starbuck at the end of BSG was like Gandalf the White. Unexplainable return, oddly different in the new version, and there for a world-saving purpose. It makes sense, right? I blew my mind.
Turns out that’s totally...
February 2010
4 posts
Bonus Recipe Edition!
I cooked dinner two nights in a row last weekend, which is unfortunately pretty momentous in my house. We’re constantly trying to cut our dining-out expenditures, but neither of us has a whole lot of motivation to cook dinner in the evenings. Jed does a lot more cooking than I do (I do other things!), though that’s been understandably wearing on him a little. So we’re trying to...
Day in the Life
Lots of people in the library world recently chronicled their workdays for the Library Day in the Life project. I was totally not up on it until it was happening. Maybe next year I’ll participate for real. But I decided that it would still be fun to diarize one of my workdays. I hesitate to call it a “typical” day, because one of the things I love about my job is that there is...
Tremors!
My eyes flew open a split second before the house started shaking, and for maybe five seconds I felt like my bed was a really boring amusement park ride. For about ten more seconds, something in our house rattled. I said to Jed, “What was that? Why did the house shake?” He answered, “Because there’s 50 mph winds out there,” rolled over and immediately went back to...
Chick vs. Man
Last week at family dinner, Jed casually mentioned that we had been watching Goodfellas before we left the house. His brother immediately exclaimed that he couldn’t believe that Jed got a woman to watch Goodfellas. Well, here’s how it had gone down in our house:
Jed’s flipping the channels. I see Lorraine Bracco on the screen and tell him to stay on that channel because...
January 2010
6 posts
Driving Skills
Something is afoot with my driving skills. For the last two days, I keep mistaking third gear for first gear, and wondering why my car is shuddering. Last fall I ground my gears all the time. It hasn’t been as much lately. But I’ve been driving stick for ten years, and I used to NEVER grind my gears. I know I follow people too closely (thanks for the inherited driving habits, Mom! :)...
Goals
I’ve had some ideas rolling around in my head for what I’d like to accomplish in 2010, in no particular order.
Complete the Hundred Pushups Challenge
Knit a pair of socks
Sew at least one garment
Learn Continental Knitting
Write a review of each book I read on GoodReads
Give up caffeine
It’s not a very long and illustrious list, but it’s definitely attainable....
So Dark
It’s amazing what a good strong dose of near-equatorial sunlight can do for one’s well-being in early January. It’s equally amazing how quickly it diminishes. It would be so much better if you could stockpile light, so that you still had a reserve to get you through all the Endless Darkness of wintry clouds and snow melt/fall cycles and the long nights that don’t yet feel...
Vacation!
We spent January 2-9 in the Puerto Vallarta area of Mexico. It was an amazing vacation—our objective was to relax as much as possible, which we did a great job at, and we missed some brutal cold here in Chicago while we decompressed from the holiday and our whole terrible fall season. It was a little sad to come home, but we feel so refreshed.
Day 1, Saturday:
Early flight out of...
1 tag
New Year's Survey
Sorry if I start boring you all with my incessant summing-up, but I’m still trying to get my head around this crazy year. I can hardly remember the beginning of it. Plus I like filling out surveys. I’ve seen this one on a few blogs I read, including my sister’s.
1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
Bought a house. Got pregnant. Went to Mexico. 2. Did...
December 2009
15 posts
Clean Slate
I’m looking forward to this year ending. I’d like to get over it and get on with things.
Compared with last year, I am both happier and less happy. In about the same shape, physically, but have gained and lost fat and muscle. Financially, we’re both poorer and richer—considering that we now own a house. I turned 30. I had a good year at work; I’m hoping next year is...
Suck it, AT&T
About a month ago I called AT&T and asked them to combine the bills for my Wireless and Dry Loop DSL services. I had combined billing at my last address, but apparently when you transfer service from one address to another, keeping everything exactly the same, you actually start all over again, almost like AT&T has never heard of you. So in that phone call, I got bounced around a few times...
More Favorites
I’m going to knock out some of these prompts, survey-style.
December 12: New food.You’re now in love with Lebanese food and you didn’t even know what it was in January of this year.
Well, I used to completely avoid mushrooms, but this year I’ve found myself enjoying them when I try mushroom dishes. Sometimes even when Jed isn’t coercing me to get over my wimpiness...
The Best Place(s) 2009
Well, of course I have two favorite places.
I didn’t pick our parents’ second homes, in Galena, IL and Palmyra, WI, because though they are some of my favorite places to escape to, and they are beautiful, they will always be favorite and don’t stand out this year in particular.
Pine Ridge, Palmyra, WI:
Galena Territory, IL:
Ditto the mountains, where I wish I could always...
Best Album of 2009
It’s physically impossible for me to ever pick just one. As soon as I think I’ve settled on a favorite thing, I remember the virtues of other things, and why they’re also the best. Everyone should get their fair shake. My musical tastes range really far, and are based on any given mood. And I’m devoted to live music—so determining a favorite album is NOT the same as...
The "Best" Challenge of 2009: Good and Bad
I’m going to make this a two-fold response. I faced a lot of challenges this year, and I’m giving honorable mention to becoming a homeowner, because I think that’s a hell of an accomplishment. But the winning challenges are a really woeful, tragic challenge, plus a professional challenge that I felt pretty good about.
First, the woe. We lost a baby this year. In an early...
Moment of Peace
Here’s the prompt for yesterday (I’m still catching up on a few days I missed when I had strep throat): “Moment of peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?”
Well. I guess I’ve had a couple of those this year. Obviously they haven’t been that memorable. Our year has really...
Blog Find of the Year
My favorite blog of the year isn’t really a revolutionary find, since Jason Kottke has been blogging at Kottke.org for almost 12 years… but for whatever reason I just started reading this year. If I had to stop reading all blogs but one, his is the one I would pick. His posts are usually brief, timely links to awesome information—ranging from thought-provoking articles, to flash...
Best Conference
I love going to conferences! I’m a professional development junkie. In the two years that I’ve been at my workplace, I’ve been fortunate to have been sent to two out-of-state conferences—an experience that many librarians never get to have entirely on their library’s dime. In late March I went to Computers in Libraries 2009, which I was excited about because the...
Best Night Out
We didn’t really have many EPIC nights out in 2009. We’ve slowed down the party train over the six years we’ve known each other. Sadly, we saw fewer concerts this year than ever before, and ate out a lot less, focusing our time and finances on buying and owning our house and, briefly, being pregnant. But that doesn’t mean we had any less fun together, or that our...
My Best Book(s) of 2009
Well, I’m a librarian so you’re not getting just one book out of me. And this is by no means a list of what I objectively think were the Best Books published in 2009. They weren’t even all published in 2009. Just the books that stand out to me as being the ones I liked most. And for being a librarian who tries pretty hard to read widely & outside my typical preferences, I...
Best Article(s) of 2009
I had to choose an article that I read, re-read, shared with friends & colleagues, and referred to throughout the year. This was a tough one for me, because I read a lot of blogs, so many library-related articles, and I do a fair amount of skimming, so I could very well be missing something hugely awesome that I read this year. But I chose what stood out in my memory. And being an insufferable...
Best Restaurant Experience of 2009
Jed works at a great restaurant called Nightwood, in Pilsen. Shortly after he started working there, we went there for a great dinner. Nightwood is owned and run by the same people who own and run Lula Cafe, in Logan Square. We also ate a great dinner there over the summer. But the best, most fun restaurant experience we had wasn’t either of those times—though it was thanks to the fun,...
Best Trip of 2009
Does it get any better than a beach trip in the winter? I really don’t think it does. We went to Mazatlan, Mexico for a week in January. Jed’s parents took us on the trip, along with Jed’s sister-in-law Leslie and her kids Luke and Shaina. The in-laws like to get the earliest flight out, so we got a limo ride to the airport in the dark, in a nasty snowstorm. They had to de-ice...
Here I Am!
The last couple years I’ve thought about summing up my year “formally,” and by formally I mean in a blog that almost no one will read but that feels more official than making myself a list I will eventually throw away. So! I’m going to do this challenge. Seems fun.