Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Neologisms

Words & phrases coined in the last 24 hours out of necessity:

Anticipaintion: the half-second of intellectual awareness of impending and as-yet-unmeasurable discomfort that elapses between the moment you stub your toe and the moment your pain centers recieve, acknowledge, and quantify the resultant explosion of pain. See also Painticipate.

Kiddie Change: pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters found scattered across the carpet, in the bedcovers, and in one's shoes, especially in the weeks after a visit from grandma.

Commentsation: Any personal discourse exchange, occuring in the comments of a blogentry, which has nothing to do with the original blogpost. Somewhat related to argcomment, a blog phenomenon often seen on large sites like Fark and slashdot, in which disagreement about a fundamental position in a blogentry causes the comments of that entry to spill over with the resultant debate.

Bedhopping: Moving from one location to another in the middle of a night's sleep. Most often caused by waking up on the living room couch at 2 a.m. after a week's cumulative end-of-school-year stress causes you to pass out postprandially during the six o'clock news and realizing you'd be much more comfortable in bed. Related to Sleepwhere: the confused but temporary state of trying to figure out one's location experienced upon awaking on the living room couch at 2 a.m.

Potty Train: Any mad dash of two or more related people down the hallway to the bathroom after a naked half-toilet-trained toddler utters the phrase "Willow poop?" Synonyms include toilet troop, poop parade, and rapid bowel movement.

More, surely, to come.

Creepy Crawlies (Got Bugs?)

Warm weather brings greenery and heat, but it also brings ants, tics, black flies, newts and other smallscale fauna to the forefront of my life. Here's a quick midday compendium of some recent forways into the life of the tiny and slimy.

I'm not sure if it's alergies or just her tender baby skin, but Willow's turned out oversensitive to black fly bites; at the moment, though the spot on her temple has finally begun to fade, her belly sports several inch-in-diameter welts, as if a bug or two had gotten caught up in her clothes. The air is thick with these tiny darklings in many of our favorite haunts, from the swingset outside the dining hall to the otherwise-cool woods and stream just over the ridge from here; they even swarmed the hood of the car yesterday when I went out to try to unscrew the rusted bolts on the dead car's battery. Happily, the marks the black flies leave don't seem to be itchy, but boy, are those spots ugly against that precious skin: as a preventative, we've taken to carrying baby-safe bug spray with us at all times, which makes us smell of baby powder and sweet sharp synthetics.

At least one of those bites comes from a short post-supper trip down to the campus pond on Tuesday, bathing suited and bare footed, to stand sociably in the marshy sand at water's edge with other young parents while the kids netted newts and frogs and small schools of sunfish nibbled at our toes. 'Twas well worth it, though: Willow seemed absolutely ecstatic to be surrounded by so many kids, all splashing and sandthrowing, and though the water was cold, it was all in all a refreshing evening activity on both physical and spiritual planes. As late as last night's bedtime she was till talking about the newt she caught, purely by accident, when swooping a borrowed net through the muddy water's edge.

Closer to our own backyard the meadow grows long behind our house; we've taken tics off dog and cat several times already, and I fear for my long hair. Today I met a as-yet-unfastened tic wandering my shirt cuff before I had even left the house, an oddity on a freshly ironed article -- I can only assume, ominously, that it came from Willow's changing table, which doubles as an ironing board, and remind myself to check her smallparts dilligently as we move forward into summer.

Back home the ants go marching through our kitchen at all hours. and scatter desperately from the sink drain when we turn on the water for dishwashing. I've crushed an infinite number under coffee filter boxes and peanut butter jars, until the counters are paisleyed with curious black smears and tiny legs, but with the baby in the house we're reluctant to put out traps or liquid to stop them comprehensively. For now, we fight our rearguard mano a mano battle against the invading army through morning coffeemaking and evening television munchie prep ... but I notice Darcie's already purchased some traps, so stay tuned for further development on this one.

After a long hibernation, life has also returned to the attic room at the end of our long third floor hallway. Mr. and Mrs. Bat trill and swoop among the rafters at dusk and beyond; a presumed-dead wasps nest has come up humming, merely dormant; a single yellowjacketed flying thing buzzes around the bare bulb at all hours, a harbinger of stings to come. I've taken to leaving a tennis racquet by the door, just in case.

File Under Stupid Novelist Tricks

Nice piece in the Telegraph today about the first novel written entirely without verbs; without the possibility of action, the book seems predominantly filled with "florid adjectives in a series of vitriolic portraits of dislikeable passengers on a train."

Unsurprisingly, critics have "commented unfavourably on the lack of action in ... The Train from Nowhere." A review in one respected magazine "describes his book as "disagreeable" and said its scathing descriptions of women travellers displayed "a rare misogyny"."

The article refers several times to pseudonymic author Michel Thaler as "eccentric," which may be the understatement of the year; Thaler, a doctor of literature, says his new work is "to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art," and claims that it was liberating to write without verbs, which he describes as "invaders, dictators, and usurpers of our literature."

Today's alternate blogtitle: When Novelists Sniff Glue

Collaborative Blogging
sushiesque rocks the bloggiverse

Newly crowned librarian Sushiesque has had a wonderful idea: a make your own Sushiesque post mad lib exercise. Here's what I had her do today:

Christine dreamed that she was forced to join a librarian polo league. She awoke to find that her hair was surprisingly humid but looked okay anyhow. She threw on some black corduroys and a Mel Torme t-shirt that she'd found discarded in a dorm laundry room at Texas Institute of Technology and headed out.

At the library, Christine "relocated" a number of bound periodicals (which had formerly been shelved by title) into call number order. She took a break to get a bottle of firewater and read Not All Who Wander Are Lost. Christine got lunch at the Liliputian-food truck on Avenue Louis Pasteur, and then went back to the basement to squirt all elenteen volumes of the Vaticanian Journal of Pickled Egg Studies. She found a shelf whose underside was adorned with two five six separate, differently-colored wads of chewing gum. By 1 p.m., she was begrudgingly covered in dust and ready to go home.

Christine spent the evening putting every poison ivy she owns into boxes. She decided to skip the end-of-semester party even though it'd been moved to the roof of the gymnateria. She ate the last of the fried bologna omelet left in the freezer while watching the Daily Show.

Think you can do better? Why not try it yourself? Don't forget to let Christine know if she did anything "exciting."

(By the way, what I like about Texas Institute of Technology is how the sweatshirt acronym reads. Oh, and two five six is my daughter's word for a whole lot.)

Technotes

1. Not pleased with Blogger's new look. Oversimplified and over-tabbed in design and interface, with too strong an initial emphasis on sign-ups where it once spread content accessibly across the front page, this week's Blogger is much more oriented twards the as-yet-unafilliated newbie than the millions of us already hooked on phonics; I'll especially miss the "entry on top, post on bottom" interface that preceeded the overhaul.

If I didn't know better, I'd say the fine folks at Blogger assume the post-initiated will use the popup Blog This interface (now playing at a Google toolbar near you!). but what about those of us who see our blogging as a creative act, and might prefer to do so in an immersive writing environment? Blogger's either misread the majority of its audience, or I'm not in it.

2. Made this Kinja digest of library blogs today as a follow-up to yesterday's library/edtech department meeting demo of the potential of and for RSS aggregation in schools and libraries; let me know if you know of any good library blogs that aren't on the list. Thanks to Shifted Librarian Jenny for pushing the exemplary work of Moraine Valley Community College; it made a great starting point for my presentation.

Other new aggregation tools I'm liking right now: FeedSweep, feedroll, and of course del.icio.us, which aggregates individual bookmarks and, when used as a collective tool, becomes a bloggish and wiki-like linklist library of and for an entire community, neatly categorized by subject area. I sold the school webmaster on this stuff in a meeting yesterday (what if you could let people click off a box next to each sport that they wanted to follow, and every subsequent time they showed up at the school webpage the right sidebar would show them the most recent of their favorite teams' news and game results?), and the librarians seemed excited, too: already, one's caught the meme and started her own blog. Huh -- looks like blog aggregation and the rest of the social networking toolbox set really is the next big thing.

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Today I taught two Media Literacy overviews for 9th grade Health classes, one final day on the too-long History class I've been instructing for their web class, my Advanced Web design class, served a full two-hour shift in the Information Commons, and was on dorm duty all night.

I saw Darcie and Willow for 10 minutes at lunchtime, and thirty minutes at supper.

Tomorrow I've got two instructional sessions for basic precalculus class powerpoint and research projects, a meeting to introduce the school webmaster to the wonders of RSS, a presentation on the same subject at a Library/Media staff meeting, and another four hours in the Information Commons.

There will likely be no blogging on other topics this week, as my brain is crammed full of class prep on the fly and little else. Hope the mundania doesn't bore anyone. At this rate, I might have something interesting and non-work-related to talk about by, say, Thurday night sometime -- if I'm lucky.

Until then, why not check out the tinyblog, or my current blogreads.

Fog Blog

Dew shimmies on the grass in the windy mornings. Fog covers our cars in the mornings, burns off the roads as we hit the streets, fringes the mountains long after it has risen from our fields and footpaths.

The air gathers up the rain and the river. It swells like a tic on the dog, creeps like the red roadside poison ivy in the sun.

Under its scrunchie my thick red hair grows heavy, a sponge. Its moisture presses, a sauna at the hidden nape of my neck and along my ponytail-smothered spine. I am stale and sour with sweat by noon.

Resistance is futile. Showers are useless. Some days it rains. It's never enough.

Thank god for music in cool basement studios. As always, here's tonight's playlist.

Tributary 5/10/04

Bob Dorough -- Too Much Coffee Man
Phish -- Cavern
Skavoovie and the Epitones -- Old Man Of The Mountain
Billy Bragg w/ Wilco -- My Flying Saucer
Manu Chao -- Me Gustas Tu
Negativland -- Yellow, Black and Rectangular
Ben Harper -- Steal My Kisses

-- storybreak: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Keller Williams -- Best Feeling
Sarah Harmer -- Almost
Tony Furtado Band -- Miles Alone
Tish Hinojosa -- Hey Little Love
The Jayhawks -- Save It For A Rainy Day
They Might Be Giants -- Particle Man

-- storybreak: Where The Wild Things Are

Acoustic Syndicate -- Pumpkin And Daisy
Lucy Kaplansky -- Hole In My Head
Mark Erelli -- Little Sister
Alison Krauss -- 9 to 5
Indigo Girls -- Galileo
Norah Jones w/ Dolly Parton -- Creepin' In
Jorma Kaukonen -- Waiting For A Train

-- storybreak: The Giving Tree

Patty Griffin -- Mad Mission
Jonatha Brooke -- War
Timbuk 3 -- Born To Be Wild
Girlyman -- The Shape I Found You In
Juliana Hatfield -- Slow Motion
Deb Talan -- Forgiven

You've been listening to Tributary, your ten to midnight Monday night show here on WNMH 91.5 FM -- the station that blows Deerfield out of the water.

Blog Tired

The last month of any school year is a awash in a swamp of pomp and circumstance, surely. At the elite prep school, however, the sheer force of a proud hundred years of history and tradition makes for a nonstop morass of suit and tie evening ceremonies and weekend required events. At some point, the only possible way to make it all fit together is to bull forward, head down, overcaffeinatied and snappish, saving sleep for the impending summer.

It's funny how sudden it comes on. One week you're looking forward to the weekend, and the next you're looking in the mirror for signs of comprehensive system failure under stress on Saturday night -- brought on by Friday night 7-11 dorm duty (and 7-12 tonight), an early Saturday morning buying Prom and Commencement Eve Dinner Dance supplies at Home Depot with event-designer Darcie and the baby, tonight's tech set-up and event stand-by for a trustee slideshow at the high-donor's sea-bass-and-champagne supper, and tomorrow's breakdown of same.

Even the sidetrack to Shelburne Falls for a sweet-scented family walk along the Bridge of Flowers now gloriously in bloom, a gentle lunch in a cafe, a trip the watch the glassblowers and a peek at the Salmon Falls Glacial Potholes fades into the blur of days already.

Tomorrow the girls are taking my in-laws out for Mothers Day while I spend the long afternoon suit-and-tied, chaperoning this year's Sacred Concert. I've got extra classes to teach in the week ahead, and an advisee group yearly hot tubs and sushi outing the following Sunday; Darcie's got to design and implement the decorative concepts for two big events coming up, and a few more AP exams to proctor.

It helps to know that it's almost over, that we've lived through the same final quarter dash five times before. But I hope with all my heart there will be enough time for our little girl in the days and weeks ahead. Summer, and almost three months of full-time homestaying, just the three of us, cannot come too soon.