"discrete extravagance"

you gotta love it

"obsequious bullying"

asking for trouble

I have spent a substantial portion of my time away from the library this past week with sheets of graph paper and a tape measure. It has been a dream of mine to live with a larger kitchen than what I now possess. I know that remodeling projects are high on the life list of stress producers, yet I persist. As if I would have more time to spend in a bigger kitchen…………so send me your stories. I am asking for trouble here. Really. Tell me the horrors you experienced because of remodeling. Maybe I will snap out of it. Or if you have encouraging stories, I will dream on.

rant of the day

This morning’s Bellingham Herald got me all hot and bothered and I said to myself, “That’s what I can write about!” Now that I’m at work, I have cooled off. No, to be honest, I have forgotten what I was so exercised about at breakfast time. There is a vague recollection of the editorial page, 'though…and some semi-rhetorical wondering whether anyone else lives with a person whose political beliefs are 180° away from his/her own.

I’m boning up, as it were, for a discussion night later this month. The topic is: “Who is responsible for the dumbing down of America?” My glib first response is Garrison Keillor, but he was only picking up on a trend when he crafted his monologue tag line about Lake Woebegone. My generation was raised by parents who tried hard to give their children every advantage, the greatest one being the chance to go to college. Now, for some reason, instead of making the same effort for our own children, too many of us expect to continue receiving advantages. Our children can be nothing but above average, and we take great umbrage when they aren’t given the highest marks, the first place trophies, and the biggest circle of friends. We go to the principal when the teacher is not responsive to our complaints and to the school board when the principal backs her teacher. The school board DOES respond because we threaten to vote against the next bond measure. And so begins grade inflation. My class was not a bunch of dummies, but when I graduated from high school there was 1 valedictorian. I see that most high schools here in Bellingham produce 2 or 3 each year, and all of them have GPAs of at least 4.0. You don’t have to be told the rest of the story by Paul Harvey.
Let us not forget all the special interest groups and their pressure on the textbook industry. School boards approve textbooks for local use in most locales, but California has a list of textbooks approved for use by the legislature. And California is the largest market for textbooks. Who decides what goes into any given text book, and what influences his/her decision? Read The language police, by Diane Ravitch. We have it in our collection.

As I say, I'm just stating to do some reading on this, and I’d love to have some feedback. Everyone is invited to head downtown to three trees coffee house at 7pm on June27th to join in the discussion.

jumping on the bandwagon

Explaining blog titles seems to be the thing to do. All right, I'll play your silly game, as a college acquaintance used to say. So...why “que quiere decir”? This phrase can be translated a number of ways. For today, I like “what I mean is…” With an accent over the first ‘e’, it would be the question “how do you say…?” I hope to do occasional posting in Spanish, but first I have to figure out how to get this computer to switch to the Spanish keyboard layout. (However, I think the standard library issue software does not include what I need.) Meanwhile, this page will be my virtual soapbox. Yes, I am succumbing to the lure of the audience. Now anyone who pauses here will know my opinions, whether they wanted to or not. Now as to what I really mean........
that's just open to interpretation.......or you could ask.

the second time around

As I was trying to say, I think it is great that we can learn and play around with this technology on the job. My husband regularly deals with another individual in his profession whom, as he puts it, he has to “pull – kicking and screaming – into the modern world” of computers. I overhear his phone instructions to highlight file names, click and drag items, attach documents to emails, track editing changes, etc. and smile to myself. That could be me in so many areas. It is to be hoped that by the end of this summer, Library 2.0 will have pulled me into the modern world of blogging, wiki-ing, tagging, etc. Or is it? Just because I can do something (in this case keep a blog) doesn’t mean I should. But at least I will know how. Many discussions are going on around the library now about the 2.0 initiative. The most common opinions seem to be “it’s great” and “I don’t know if I want to put myself ‘out there’ for all the world to see.” This puts me in mind of a college class I took on landscape in literature. One assignment was to keep a journal. At the end of the quarter, the instructor collected all the journals and graded them. I was taught that journals or diaries are private affairs, where we practice baring our thoughts (and souls in some cases) to our own eyes. They seem to be less common today than in years past. Now Shakespeare’s statement rings alarmingly true. All the world is a stage. “Everyone” blogs and brags about the number of hits they get. I wonder - have those same bloggers considered applying the popular expression “too much information” to their own pages?

"beginnings are such delicate things"

In fact, they are so delicate that I have to take time out to recover from my first major blog error: thinking keyboard shortcuts will work here. I had several paragraphs composed and tried the ol' Office F7 spell check, only to have everything disappear.