Happy New Year!

I started 2013 gleefully telling my Big Boss that I planned to retire in September.  Looking down the months from January to September I thought the time would never pass. 

I was able to look around and say goodbye to the library and its denizens and think warm fuzzy thoughts, especially at the end. 

My plans for how to structure my days have worked out perfectly.

As I look back on the year, everything is suffused with a very happy feeling of contentment that I have been able to snuggle down at home, cook, bake, plan my garden, work on crafts, take lots of breaks to daydream...

I have been in one of those odd periods for awhile where I didn't read much, but now I'm in that ideal state where you put down one book and happily pick up another.  That's the life for me.

Wishing you the very best in 2014,   Librarian D.O.A.

Happy 2010 and welcome to a new decade!

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Anyone who is a fan of re-inventing themselves has got to be quite excited by the opportunity to begin a new year and a new decade. So, here we go, instead of making those same old New Year's Resolutions you make EVERY YEAR...doh, let's take a hint and figure we aren't going to make wholesale and immediate changes that will discourage us by January 15th at the latest.



Let's think more broadly about what we'd like to do that will be fun or interesting and will make us happier people and make us less something or other to the people around us who adore us but they wish we weren't such grumpy dogs! Some days. We're just glorious on some other days. Right.




To begin, I don't even care what I proposed for myself last year at this time. I either did it or I didn't. Meh. Onward. That was THE OLD ME.


This year I think I'd like to write more on my blogs. I have alot of interests and why shouldn't I share them with my faithful and not so faithful readers? Blah blah blah, I say.




I've already started reading more science fiction which I think was vaguely a goal last year. I really like the forward thinking general optimism of science fiction writers. I'll still read mysteries but that genre has taken a temporary turn towards a darker less optimistic view of humanity and it isn't what I'm looking for. I will be sticking with my favorite mystery authors and looking for more, but the good guys need to triumph. The bad guys have got to go down, they just do.




I have let my bad knees keep me from being the fine amateur gardener I'd like to be, so I'm going to find a clever way around that and make things beautiful. I'd like to learn to preserve foods again...long ago I knew how to do canning. I have also wanted to work with dried and pressed flowers. I have the flowers, I just need to use them a bit more creatively.



Although I still can't draw a nice stick-man, I really like cartooning. They can be so fun since they capture an idea in a succinct and hopefully charming manner. Watch for at least one cartoon a week, not drawn, but using some of the great web based cartooning tools. I use Witty Comics at www.wittycomics.com for the "On the Desk" series.

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Since I am an actual librarian I will try to write about more library topics. As I go into my last decade as a librarian, I might as well talk about the profession I love and which was secretly created just for me, lol, as they say.



Happy New Year! Librarian D.O.A.

Keeping Things Lively in 2009

I love New Years and the alleged ability to start over, do better, make fewer mistakes, and make tons of improvements. For years I happily made a New Years Resolutions list. In the last couple of years, I decided it would be better to list instead things I’d like to learn. This gives me a zero base for messing up because I am already at the newbie bottom. I can only go up! The sky is the limit. Here is my 2009 short list:

1. Learn to sew I was terribly scarred in Junior High by my stern and exacting Home Economics teacher “Mrs. K’. We made simple beach bags for our BIG PROJECT. I spent most of the project time “ravelink the edges to make sure they were straight!” Mrs K. had a rather Doctor Ruth like accent. She had zero sexuality, so don’t think anything like that.

Side note to the Home Economics teacher in high school who answered a student’s question about what sex was like by thinking deeply before saying it was “like pulling a t-shirt over your head”. Yeah sure. An obvious laundry freak….

Anyway, I have modest needs as a potential sewing meister. I would like to make my own curtains, and I’d like to make skirts and jumpers and perhaps do some dolls of the sort mom used to make for craft fairs.

A customer this week was taking out books on learning to sew and I mentioned I was going to learn too but I had been cowardly so far. She said she had been that way too, but she just got an old pillowcase or towel and practiced the basics on those and it was a good way to reuse materials and no worries about messing up a nice piece of cloth. Great idea!

2. Master photograph restoration in Adobe Photoshop Elements I use this program at such a basic level. The skill set that would be most useful for my purposes would allow me to replace the missing sections of very old photographs of my dad and others who need a bit of restoration.

3. For the library computer classes I teach, I would like to hone my presentations and my public speaking skills (which have already leaped forward just from teaching these classes). I need to be able to read the audience better so that I can see when they need additional explanation. I’m hoping we can move forward this year and teach an e-mail class and I think I know Publisher fairly well so I could offer that as well.

4. HTML basics I have meant to learn HTML for a long time. I copy a lot of already done widgets and pictures and stuff from others, but I would like to understand colors and making banners, page layout, etc so that I can really customize my blogginess.

5. Become an excellent Bread Baker. You’ll see in a separate post how I have already begun the process. When I graduated from college I was baking my own bread and for some reason I just got busy or lazy and stopped. I am really enjoying small artisan breads available locally, and why not make my own?

So I cheated, and there is a bit of improvement in these but my current skill level is such that any improvement would be miraculous!