Yeah, I know I’ve been slacking. Too bad. I’m pregnant and tired and I’ll write when I have energy. In the meantime, here are my latest ultrasound pics. The bottom two are face shots - you can see the baby’s little skull. Kind-of macabre, but very cool, eh? That’s my little baby Skeletor.

This is a bit on the first Gulf War - still rings true.

*Not safe for work*

RIP, George Carlin

We continue to move forward, slowly but surely, on the kitchen remodel. Eric’s been working on the electrical for the past couple of weeks, and got all the lighting installed and switches wired. On Saturday his brother Ivan came over and they tore out all the old tile.  Poor Ivan - he always gets roped into helping us when we’re having a heat wave! It was miserable, messy, noisy work. Eric and I spent a good chunk of time yesterday cleaning up, and still have a lot to do. Even though they covered stuff up with tarps as best they could, there’s still a layer of dust over everything in that general area.

I’ll try to post some pics later this week - we’ve got our existing cabinets and appliances set up in a very rough approximation of the new layout so that we can live with it for awhile and see how it works. We haven’t ordered the cabinets yet, so we still have time to make some final tweaks to the plan.

So, I’m sitting at the Teen Center desk, reading the archives of Sweet Juniper because the library has been really quiet all day, and just as I’m reading a post about Jim helping a cow give birth I hear this mooing noise over in the corner. For a brief moment I was really disoriented. We have a display spinner in the Teen Center at the library that we use for graphic novels. It needs a little WD-40, I think, because when it spins it sounds exactly like one of those cylindrical cow sound toys.

A few months ago I read March by Geraldine Brooks, which tells the story of Mr. March, the largely absent father from Little Women. I thought it was interesting, but I was disappointed by the ending - it was a bit of a sucker punch. Lately I’ve been hearing good things about her latest, People of the Book, so I thought I’d give it a chance. I’m glad I did - I really enjoyed it.

The main character, Hanna Heath, is a rare book conservator who is called in to examine an unusual illuminated manuscript with religious and political significance. As she examines the book, she finds several tiny artifacts and deposits (a wine stain, an insect wing, etc.) that offer clues to its history. The story alternates between Hanna’s experiences as she investigates these clues, and the stories of how the book came to acquire the mysterious items. While Hanna’s research only gives her an inkling of how and where the book may have traveled, the reader gets to meet the various people involved and gets a richly detailed understanding of the history of the manuscript and the people involved in creating, preserving and passing it along. A very enjoyable read.

I’ve been catching up on some items in my Netflix queue, and I recently watched Waitress, a movie from 2007 starring Keri Russell.  I thoroughly enjoyed it. Russell plays a small-town waitress stuck in an unhappy marriage who gets pregnant and then starts an affair. It’s sweet, funny, sad and hopeful all at the same time. It’s a well-acted character film, with some wonderful supporting performances in addition to a very good peformance by Keri Russell. If it has a flaw, it’s that the husband character is such an ass that it’s not believable that she would have ever married him in the first place. However, the rest of the movie is so strong that I wasn’t bothered too much by that detail. And I guarantee that after you watch it you’ll want to rush right out and order some pie!

Why do I love my husband? Among other reasons, because he does stuff like this:

Eric’s cutting holes in our ceiling to install some recessed lighting, and he taped plastic bags over the areas where he’d be cutting to catch and contain the mess. How awesome is that? It’s working like a charm, too!

Yesterday we had the final inspection on the wall removal part of our kitchen project - woohoo! It’s a relief to have that signed off. The building inspector told me “your husband does really nice work.” When I passed that on to Eric, he said “he must see a lot of really crappy work if he thinks mine looks good.” The man can’t take a compliment.

I’ve been having a couple of weird issues with wordpress lately - formatting gets lost between preview and post, especially when images are involved; video won’t embed, etc. So I’ve been spending my little bit of free time trying to troubleshoot instead of posting. Hope to get back on the horse very soon.

Think you don’t like documentary films? Think again.

New York Doll tells the story of Arthur “Killer” Kane, bass player for the New York Dolls in the 1970s. It discusses the band’s history and influence, Arthur’s struggle with alcoholism, and his conversion to Mormonism and subsequent life, but the heart and soul of the movie is Arthur’s desire to get together with the band one more time. For a rock doc, it’s quite tender, and Arthur has a surprising innocence for someone who lived the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll life to the fullest.

The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters is one of those movies you have to see to believe. It’s the saga of suburbanite Steve Wiebe’s attempt to beat the world record score for Donkey Kong set in 1982 by Billy Mitchell. The vintage arcade game community has its own celebrities and sycophants, and you sometimes have to remind yourself that these are real people. However, it’s a great underdog story and clearly demonstrates how people who takes themselves way too seriously are just inherently funny.

I’m a little over halfway through Here Comes Everybody, and I’m reading with a box of Page Points by my side (of course, the book is a library copy - I’ll have to buy my own so I can leave my markers in place and go back to them later). I’m up to the 7th chapter now, but so far Chapter 3 is the one with the most passages marked. Shirky discusses the effect of the internet on more traditional media and the mass amateurization of tasks that used to be the purview of professionals. He gets right to the heart of some of the things we’ve been discussing in the library world, and particularly just this past week at Eureka. Here are just a few choice tidbits:

For people with a professional outlook, it’s hard to understand how something that isn’t professionally produced could affect them….Most professions exist because there is a scare resource that requires ongoing management…a professional learns things in a way that differentiates her from most of the populace, and she pays as much or more attention to the judgment of her peers as to the judgment of her customers when figuring out how to do her job….Sometimes, thought, the professional outlook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have the most at stake - the professionals themselves - from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession….It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence. In any profession, particularly one that has existed long enough that no one can remember a time when it didn’t exist, members have a tendency to equate provisional solutions to particular problems with deep truths about the world. This is true of newspapers today and of the media generally….A professional often becomes a gatekeeper…Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society; we don not want to see a relaxing of standards for becoming a surgeon or a pilot. But in some cases the change that threatens the the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations the professionals can be relied on to care more about self-defense than about progress. What was once a service has become a bottleneck.

This chapter really made me squirm. I don’t agree with everything Shirky says (and he does mention libraries as well as the media), but I think he brings some valuable insights to the discussion. I don’t believe that libraries and librarians are obsolete, but I certainly think we could become so if we focused on the wrong things. Anyway, this book is challenging me in a lot of ways, AND it’s really interesting. Read it, think about it, talk about it. I’m curious to hear what others have to say.