November on the Prairies

The weather has been vile the past few days. Yesterday morning I drove to work in the heavy snowstorm, scraped frost off my windshield in the evening and drove home in the rain later that night.

Today was worse. Morning was fine-- snow was melting and the wind was ok. Then the wind picked up (Environment Canada had a wind warning out for us most of the day). Coming back from lunch I met horizontal sleet which had turned to snow by the time I went to pick up my parents for a movie. The doors of my car were frozen shut.

It's also very icy out there-- I may walk to work tomorrow (leaving early because the sidewalks are awful too).

I guess I should get the snow shovel out of the shed and buy more ice melt.

MADLibrarian

Work is hell

And you thought your job is stressful:


The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo

I'm enjoying a little vacation right now which means instead of getting up early to go to work I'm getting up early to run errands-- car servicing, vet appointment, house cleaning (I had family over for dinner on Sunday-- Cajun Turkey with Cornbread Stuffing and Gingerbread for dessert), drive to Edmonton (with the possibility of an Ikea run), car servicing (take 2), haircut (maybe).

MADLibrarian

I'm Unique

Tonight I searched my name on Intelius and discovered that I'm the only one in their database. By using the more common spelling of my first name I found only an entry for Yellowknife. Since I used to live in Yellowknife I'm pretty sure that's me as well (Canada 411 has no listing in Yellowknife for someone with my last name).

Wow!

MADLibrarian

Fun with office supplies

Thanks to Random Musings from the Desert


EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

MADLibrarian

It's a polka dot world

Last night Mary-Ann Kirkby made her much anticipated (previously postponed) visit to our library. A good crowd was on hand to hear to talk about her childhood and read from her book I am Hutterite.

If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it. It's available in most bookstores across Canada (if not sold out).

Growing up in Western Canada, Hutterites are a part of my daily landscape but I didn't know much about them. Mary-Ann's book gives a vivid picture of this wonderful culture that makes up part of our cultural richness.

As a bonus-- I got a mug from Polka Dot Press, the publishing company that puts out the book.

MADLibrarian

I'm back (and I got video)

It's been a while since I posted but August was very busy with the Arts Without Borders Festival and work. It took me over a month to get my lawn mowed.

Things are getting back to normal (I hope).

Found this cool, song from a blog I follow:



Thanks to Ruth Kneale of Random Musings from the Dessert. If you haven't checked out her blog you should-- it's not always about library stuff.

MADLibrarian

Festival of Words, Take 3

Just got back from the Festival of Words in Moose Jaw. Met my sister and friends Lorraine and Tim. Once again a great time.

This year we stayed at the Wakamow Heights Bed & Breakfast. A nice place (undergoing a bit of renovation) with great hosts. We're definitely going to stay there every time we do the Festival.

Here's the breakdown:

Favourite reading by a familiar author: Maureen Jennings. I'm a big fan of her Inspector Murdoch series (although I don't like the tv series based on the character). She has a second series featuring forensic specialist Christine Morris. I'm going to check it out.

Cool side note: At the Friday luncheon my sister Veronica went ahead and saved seats for us. A woman sat down at the same table-- it was Maureen Jennings!

Favourite reading by an unfamiliar author: Donna Morrissey. This Newfoundland-born writer was hysterical-- even though her book was more serious. Definitely a writer to check out.

Favourite film of the two I saw this weekend: Amal, the Festival selection. Also saw Mamma mia!

Scariest session: Wayne Grady, Sid Marty, and William Marsden talking about the environment.

Favourite Moose Jaw Restaurant: hard to choose. We ate at the same places as last year-- Nits for Thai food, the Copper Cafe at the Yvette Moore Galley, and Amuze! for tapas (and sangria--although only Veronica indulged. I had a Hazelnut Martini.) All good (although the service could have been speedier)

Disappointments: None of us won any of the raffle prizes or the books given away.

MADLibrarian

Bahamian Independence - July 10, 1973

Happy 35th!!




MADLibrarian

Too many coincidences?

Last week I read the Out of the blue : a history of lightning : science, superstition, and amazing stories of survival by John Friedman. It is an informative look at lightning with lots of stories of real people who have experienced lightning up close and personal. Now I have always loved thunderstorms but this book freaked me out a little.

Today didn't help:

• This morning on the news there was a report of a young man being killed by lightning at Jackfish Lake, Saskatchewan
• This evening a brief thunderstorm knocked the lights out at work for a second and set off the fire alarm.
  

I'm crawling under the bed now.

MADLibrarian

Separated at birth?

We were watching a video of local MLA Tim McMillan speaking in the Saskatchewan Legislature about the heroism of a local fire department. It was a nice speech and after it was over all I could say was: "Is it just me or does he look like Snake from Degrassi?"

You be the judge:

Stefan "Snake" Brogren and Tim McMillan

MADLibrarian

The Official Start of Summer

Although the Summer Solstice won't be for another month and we live with the risk of frost, this weekend was the official start of the summer season here on the Prairies-- also known as the May Long Weekend (really it's Victoria Day but very few call it that).

It was a nice weekend. I didn't get as much yardwork done as I would have liked-- none actually although I did change the oil in my lawnmower and replaced a leaky water tap on the front of my house.

I also made a torte (happy news for all my relatives coming to Dad's birthday party in July) and took my parents out for ice cream for their anniversary which isn't until next week but they will be in Portland with my sister.

Instead of yardwork I read a few books. In preparation for an author visit in June I read I am Hutterite by Mary-Ann Kirkby. Wow. I learned a lot about life on a Hutterite colony. I can't wait to talk to Mary-Ann about her childhood. I was looking forward to seeing her at the Festival of Words in Moose Jaw and now she's coming to my library!

I also read this year's Lloydminster Reads selection What I'm trying to say is goodbye by Lois Simmie. Lois will be in town in August as part of Arts Without Borders which is the cultural component of the Saskatchewan Summer Games. It's a pretty cool book with Alcoholics Anonymous, a philandering MLA, a slightly vengeful poltergeist, religious cultists and others. Funny, sad, serious. Another author I'm looking forward to meeting.

MADLibrarian

Reading the unread

Thanks to Marlyn Roberts for mentioning this meme on her blog Stuff and Nonsense. LibraryThing is one of my favourite time sinks.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing. The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (too long, too boring)
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley*
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (but I have no desire to see the movie)
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire (and a lot of his other stuff as well)
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert (I tried-- got through the first page only)
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (it isn't divided into chapters!!!)
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale a better distopian novel)
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli* (Political science and political philosophy class)
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson ( think I remember reading this a long time ago during my RLS phase)
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
103.Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

A lot of these books I read when I took 18^th century novels and 19^th century novels at university (and no I was not an English major-- I have a history degree!)

MADLibrarian

The Librarian Song

I'm definitely in the peeing one's pants camp on this one.

MADLIbrarian

Happy birthday, little bro

Today is my youngest brother's birthday.



Have a good one Neil.

MADLibrarian

Bahamian video

As promised-- the video I shot of Peter and Ginny launching the rowing shell.



My little video camera did pretty good.

Peter did 6K that morning. He's now looking for a suitable roof rack so he can take the shells to Lake Cunningham.

That morning was one of the two times I got my feet wet during my week in The Bahamas. On the Monday I walked along the beach on my way to Traveller's Rest where I spent the afternoon on the patio reading and drinking strawberry daiquiris (ok I only had one).

I did one day of touristy things. On the Tuesday Ginny dropped me off at The College of The Bahamas and I got to see almost everyone I wanted to. I then took the 10A (blast from the past!!) downtown and then the ferry across to Paradise Island. Very little shade there and I got a little too much sun. Lunch was back on Bay Street and after a quick wander I spent the rest of the day in the garden at the British Colonial Hilton-- sitting in the shade and reading.

On Thursday I drove in The Bahamas for the first time in 5 1/2 years-- and it was a right-hand drive car to boot! Every time I wanted to use the turn signal I turned on the windshield wipers.

My trip home was worrisome-- nothing went wrong!! I managed to make it home early enough on Saturday to pick up some breakfast, get home to feed the cats and be at work for 9:00am.

MADLibrarian

Voter conundrum

Today was election day in Alberta and like for so many elections that came before, my choice was slim. The incumbent, who is most likely going to win, is from a party I won't vote for and the other candidates weren't even from the constituency!!

I did vote. I believe that if you want to have the right to complain about government the very least you can do is vote.

MADLibrarian

What I read on my winter vacation

Just One Look by Harlan Coben

Matilda by Roald Dahl

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Fowler

Arms and the Women by Reginald Hill

Children of men by P.D. James

A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King

The Darwin Awards 3 : Survival of the Fittest by Wendy Northcutt

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Tribune (newspaper in Nassau)

Up! Magazine (Westjet's inflight magazine)

Vanity Fair (February 2008 issue)

MADLIbrarian

A (Near) Perfect Day in Paradise

I'm taking a little winter vacation right now. On Friday I flew to The Bahamas for a week. I'm staying with friends, Virginia and Peter-- and their two labs Chippie and Berry.

Travel day was long. My flight from Edmonton to Calgary left over an hour late and the flight to Nassau left three hours late. I read two novels and 1/2 a Vanity Fair magazine. It was 9pm local time when I arrived at Virginia's.

Saturday was full. I went out to the Farmer's Market with Virginia (new!); witnessed the launching of Peter's latest interest, a sculling shell (video to follow when I get home); accompanied Virginia to her Saturday violin lessons (she teaches beginners); took in a quilt show; hit the straw market for about 30 seconds to pick up a tote bag (I left mine at home); swung by The College of The Bahamas (saw 5 people who remembered me from my time there); checked out the new campus bookstore and Starbucks; and played endless games of fetch with Berry. I also got a blister.

Today (Sunday) I started with tea by the pool and we're off to quintet rehearsal this afternoon. Blister not so bad today.

The weather is glorious-- sunny, warm with a nice breeze.

MADLibrarian

Baby, it's cold outside

Today was Day 4 of the deep freeze-- meaning the 4th day in a row that I wore the snow pants to work. Yep, I'm walking in -30C (with a wind chill in the -40s). It's not so bad provided you don't mind putting on so many layers you can barely move.

I'm not driving for 2 reasons. Number 1 is that cars really don't like to operate in frigid weather. Number 2 is that the extension cord I use to plug in the block heater is still in the shed-- the shed with the lock that's frozen. I have not been prepared to tromp through snowdrifts and mess with de-icer in this weather. Alas, I need my car this weekend so I'll be out tomorrow morning risking frostbite.

MADLibrarian

An interesting social experiment

CBC started a program tonight that shows another take of the battle of the sexes. Called The Week the Women Went, this reality program shows what happens to a small town in Alberta when most of the women-- wives, mothers-- go away for a week leaving the men responsible for the care and feeding of their family. It was filmed in Hardisty, just under 2 hours southwest of Lloydminster.

The women are convinced that the men will be totally unable to cope. The men think it will be a piece of cake-- they're even planning a little town beautification project for that week. The town's teenagers are planning a week-long bush party.

I can't wait for next week's segment.

You can check out the show' website here