As promised, I FINALLY FINISHED THE SCARF:



I'm going to do a little dance of joy now. While wearing my scarf.

Apparently I have travelled back in time to 2001 or something, because my favorite form of entertainment recently has been Strong Bad's Email. I never paid Strong Bad that much attention back in the day, so there is plenty to catch up on now.

I am nearly done with my scarf (you know, the one I started working on two years ago? Yeah.) I'll probably finish it this weekend. Then I will post pictures. Then I will probably start a matching hat, and so help me, it had better be less boring. A couple nights ago I tried knitting while reading, a skill that I have been wanting to cultivate ever since a friend told me that her grandmother could knit and read at once. O the magnificent multitasking! Turns out I can do it too, but both the reading and the knitting go very slowly. At this point it may well be more efficient to do one at a time.

I was asked to catsit again, in March. I am excited for that. Cynthia is planning to visit in April so that we can see Nada Surf and she can take her engineering exam. I am excited for that too. Besides that, I finally booked my flight to Colorado to see Sarah. That'll also happen in March. I'm glad to have things to look forward to. There's nothing really scheduled for February, though, which I assume is because February is a pit of despair and nothing fun is allowed to happen then. But we will see.

Supervisor of Awesome's last day is tomorrow, and I have baked cupcakes for the occasion. (Hazelnut cupcakes with coffee buttercream frosting; both recipes from here.) I halved the frosting recipe but it still made way more than I needed. If anyone would like some coffee buttercream frosting let me know. I can totally hook you up.

At work today, two different Important Departmental People started chatting with me (separately) about My Future Career Path, with pretty much the same recommendation. I have been thinking about the future a lot lately, and my feelings about what to do change on nearly a day-to-day basis (and all of that stuff really deserves a post of its own.) Luckily for me, my workplace is filled with all these awesome, helpful people who want to encourage and guide me, and much as the place drives me crazy some days, I keep reminding myself that in the long run, it is very good to know and work with these people.

Okay, I have been a slacker. But it is not for lack of things to write about. It is mainly because I have been running around like a mad thing, and when I am not running around like a mad thing, I have been sleeping or staring at the television, because I could not muster the energy to write or knit or balance the checkbook or anything remotely productive.

So, posts that I have been intending to write but failed to, in order:

1. In which I ramble on about the weather, and wonder why anyone actually reads this blog, because if you wanted to hear about the weather, you could make small talk with someone at the bus stop, no?

In the first days of the year we had some kind of crazy heat wave in which it was near 60 degrees for several days in a row. This was both awesome and mildly disorienting. I went around doing things that I only do in the spring, like wearing my light jacket, listening to Transatlanticism (which feels very spring-y to me, probably because that is when I first heard it), and buying chardonnay, so as to make the illusion of springtime as complete as possible. Sometimes I became very confused about what month it was, for instance when I was listening to "The New Year" and thought it's funny how I never listen to this song anywhere near New Year's and then realized that it was in fact VERY near New Year's, seeing as it was only January EIGHTH. I joked with people about how it was hard to be concerned about global warming when it felt so good. In honesty, though, when I was out in my light jacket in the warmest part of the day and realized that the sun was not even close to overhead, it felt very creepy. I wasn't particularly looking at the angle of the sun, but I had a sense of the rays coming at me sideways, as they do in late fall, and it felt very unnerving in all that warmth.

2. I did say that I would talk about the writing workshop, didn't I?

So I went to a workshop a couple weekends ago, and it was very nice. One of the poems I brought was very highly praised, which happens infrequently enough that I was sort of at a loss for how to respond. Which is not to say that they are usually mean to me, or anything. I go to these people because I need poems picked apart so I know what is working and what isn't, and they help me out a lot. And because they don't praise me all the time, I know that when they do it is genuine. The one they liked this time was "Tatiana", a poem about the San Francisco tiger. The last one that they were a big fan of was "Laika" (after the space dog, of course.) Obviously I am on a roll as far as animals with Russian names are concerned, so if anyone knows any good stories about a ferret named Natasha, or something to that effect, please let me know.

It was also good to see some friends who I hadn't seen for a while, and to play with the cats, one of whom flopped in my lap for about half an hour. There is nothing quite like the feeling of a cat's muscles relaxing as it drops off to sleep in your lap. We also drank something called "gloog" which is apparently Scandinavian, and which seems to consist of miscellaneous types of alcohol mixed with mulling spices and warmed. One of my friends brought news that he got a new puppy, which I will apparently get to meet next month.

3. In which librarians take over Philadelphia

This past weekend was the ALA Midwinter Meeting, and I travelled down to Philly on Friday. In fact, I could have put in a full day of work in the amount of time I spent trying to travel to Philly on Friday, which is sad given that the actual flight was only 45 minutes. My first flight was cancelled due to some manner of Southwest Airlines incompetence, and the next one was delayed repeatedly. We boarded roughly on time, but then were told that we had to wait ten minutes before leaving the gate. Then, twenty minutes later, we were told that we had to wait forty minutes more, and would we like to get off the plane and maybe get snacks or use normal-sized bathrooms? Yes, yes we would. Forty minutes and a bag of trail mix later, we pulled away from the gate only to wait fifteen minutes more at the runway. Then we had the most turbulent takeoff I have ever experienced, and I thought that I may die before reaching Philadelphia, but fortunately that was just the Melodrama of Frustration kicking in, and we got there just fine and well after the end of a tour of a conservation facility that I had planned to attend. Grrrr.

The weekend was lovely, if incredibly busy. Supervisor of Awesome introduced me to all kinds of different people, whose names I tried very hard to remember. I was up at 6am on Saturday and Sunday in order to attend meetings all day. The Midwinter Meeting took over the Pennsylvania Convention Center and also every hotel in the general vicinity, so I was constantly running around from place to place. Fortunately Center City is very easy to navigate, once you get used to the fact that City Hall is for some reason plopped right in the middle of a major intersection and that the roads continue under and through City Hall as pedestrian footpaths.

We saw the requisite tourist attractions (Liberty Bell, Independence Hall). We watched the Patriots game in the bar at our hotel. On Sunday we watched the end of the Cowboys-Giants game at a local pub, where someone yelled "CHICKS!!" as soon as we entered, leaving me to wonder if Philadelphia has some gender imbalance problem, or something. (The man who was eventually delegated to come over and hit on us was very nice, actually.) Then we went back to our hotel and watched Jane Austen's Persuasion on PBS. I had a wonderful time hanging out with Supervisor of Awesome, who is my friend as well as my supervisor, and who will soon no longer be my supervisor thanks to her new job, which will make it a bit easier to be friends. There is so much that you can't really talk about with someone who is your superior at work.

I learned, too, that this conference-networking business really does work, and really is important, and even though it sounds painful, it really doesn't have to be. I enjoyed ALA, and I think I will try to keep being involved with it, and go to the conferences when they aren't too distant or expensive (sorry, Anaheim.) I might not know for sure what my plan is, yet, but knowing all these people can only help me once I figure it out.


Okay, that is all. And I will try to keep up with writing a little better from now on. Maybe.

Ah, new year's resolutions.

Last year I made some vague resolutions about being more stable and less self-absorbed. I think I have succeeded in a lot of ways. Little changes in plans don't throw me off the way they used to. It is a bit easier to go with the flow. I am not afraid to be alone. I am doing pretty well at keeping in touch with everybody, and trying to be a good listener and a good friend. I suppose other people can assess that better than I can.

In 2007 I was bothered by anxiety and feelings of inability, which, it has been pointed out to me, are rather unfounded. I've started to realize that I need to not listen to the voices, both in and outside my head, that tell me that I can't do things. I used to have a certain level of confidence about trying new things, and my goal for this year is to try to recover that confidence. I am going to try to say yes more often than no, and be excited about new opportunities, rather than afraid.

The problem with not updating for a while is that I feel compelled to write some kind of catch-up entry, and the longer I wait the longer that post is going to have to be and the less I feel like writing it. But, here I am! Hi! Did everyone have nice holidays?

I did. Christmas was at my parents' house, so there was minimal travel involved, and the whole thing was very low-stress. I baked raisin babka, and on the 23rd my mother, sister, and I made Ye Olde Traditional Pierogies. Apparently the production-oriented mindset that I get from my job has started to make its way into other tasks, because I stuffed those pierogies madly as though it were some sort of race, and when I was rolling out the circles of dough I worked so fast that my mother and sister had a hard time keeping up with the stuffing. Calm down, Amanda. I did a fair amount of knitting and reading while I was there, and L dropped by for a while on the 24th.

I got to relax alone in my apartment on the 26th. Then on the 27th Sarah arrived and stayed for a couple days. We went to see the shoe exhibit at the MFA, which was a lot of fun. A scavenger-hunt type exhibition is actually a pretty good way to see the museum, since it's far too big to see all in one day, and it's nice to have a plan of some sort to decide what you want to see. And the way they placed the shoes near art that they were relevant to was actually very useful and interesting. It was also occasionally funny, because apparently they couldn't think of anything clever to do with the modern basketball sneakers and baseball cleats, so they placed them in the Greek exhibit with notecards that essentially said "unlike ancient Greek athletes, modern athletes wear shoes." Very enlightening, MFA.

Right before Sarah left, Maggie and Jason arrived. They were here for nearly a week, which is the most I've seen of them in ages. Other than a sort of dull trip to the ICA (a rather small, odd museum, with some interesting things and also some very claustrophobia-inducing exhibit spaces), our activities consisted mainly of the following:

1. Watching TV
2. Geocaching
3. Going out to eat

On TV we largely watched M*A*S*H, Dirty Jobs, and America's Next Top Model. As a result of watching Dirty Jobs, I have decided that Mike Rowe is my new favorite person. Did you know he used to be on QVC? Do you have any idea how hilarious that was? The hilarity, let me show you it. Okay, perhaps it is not the funniest thing in the world, but it is way funnier than I ever thought the QVC could be. Mike Rowe reminds me a bit of Jon Stewart -- something about the dry humor, and their facial expressions. So of course I found it extra-funny that Mike Rowe was on the Daily Show. Okay. I am done talking about Mike Rowe now.

I had never gone geocaching before, but Maggie as a geography nerd is into that sort of thing, so we found a few caches, and you know what? It was fun. And dorky. And fun! Not that I am going to run out and buy a GPS unit now or anything, because it is not really something that I am likely to do by myself, but it is a fun little group activity.

Maggie and Jason left on Thursday, and then I had to go back to work, which was very disorienting. This weekend seems unfairly short after my long break, and I am having a hard time convincing myself that tomorrow I have work again, already. This weekend is a two-day poetry workshop, but more on that later.

earlier --