






I am vacation right now. I took a little break from reading and watched some Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 on my computer. I have my new earbuds plugged in right now. It is a nice break from reading.
Well, I was going to talk about Cadbury, and the history of the chocolate Easter egg. Faberge eggs, too, and how all this sweetness got its start in Europe. But gosh darn it, J.R. and Jackie have already done such a good job with this topic, I've been scooped.
So instead, I'll answer J. R.'s question. What do we do, as a family, to celebrate Easter? Well, plans are already underway to put together our annual egg-coloring event. Every year, rain or shine, my sister & I and our two daughters break out the Paas pills and vinegar, boil up a whole mess of eggs and arrange 8 coffee mugs with spoons. We have the requisite white (or colorless) crayon handy. Newspapers spread on the counter, and a rag or two at the ready. We decorate, with rubber banks, decals, stickers, etc. Ooh and ahh, and compete for the prettiest egg.
Happy Easter!
Oh, and by the way, Paas has an excellent page here on creating your own Easter egg eggstraveganza!
Pam Ripling is the author of middle-grade mystery, LOCKER SHOCK! Buy it at Quake, Fictionwise or Amazon today! E-book version now available for your Kindle! Visit Pam at www.BeaconStreetBooks.com.
Daily Thoughts 3/29/2010
I watched a film on dvd called Wordplay today. It was about crossword puzzles. It featured Will Shortz who is the editor for the New York Times crossword puzzle. He arranges for puzzles from about 110 different people every single year. Will Shortz has a degree in Enigmatology which is puzzles. It was a quite enjoyable film.
There were cameos by Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina, Jon Stewart, the Indigo Girls, and many other famous people. They talked about why they did the crossword puzzle. It was very interesting to listen to.
The film also covered the National Crossword Championship which runs for seven days. There is a crossword for every single day. It was interesting watching champion crossword puzzle people prepare for the event.
If you like words and thinking about words, this film is well worth seeing.
The dvd case includes a booklet with five crossword puzzles fromt the New York Times.
I went to Barnes and Noble this morning. I looked at an advertisement for a Nook. It asks if you would like to carry Barnes and Noble in your hand wherever you want to go. I am looking forward to when there are less dedicated ebook machines. I would like to be able to download from whichever bookstore I want. I think a laptop would be the best choice for me because I think you can download the Kindle software to a laptop as well as the Nook software and other bookstore sites.
There were a few interesting books worth looking at. I do not order a whole lot of science fiction and fantasy series books. I am thinking of getting a few World of Warcraft paperbacks, as well as a few paperbacks from the Forgotten Realms series and the Warhammer 40,000 series. I also saw a few novel that seemed interesting, Frank Delaney, Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show as well as a new humorous fantasy book by A. Lee Martinez, Divine Misfortune.
I read another science fiction book today, The Crucible of Empire by Eric Flint and K.D. Wentworth. It is a military science fiction novel. What is different about this story is that humans have been conquered by an alien race, the Jao. However, they are not enslaved. Earth has become a kind of partner in a larger interstellar war against an aggressive species called the Ehkat. This is the second book in a series started with The Course of Empire. There is another humanoid species added to the story in this novel, the Lleix who convinced the Jao to separate from the Ehkat. I am finding it quite entertaining.
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Today has been a relatively quiet day. They are working on shifting books in the storage area to make more room. I finished weeding the fiction in the storage area. Now, it is more of a job of moving things around. I still have weeding to do in the oversize books on the main floor.
I am also planning days to do collection development meetings. One of the days, I would like to focus on special areas like government documents, maps, the job information center, different areas of genre fiction: urban fiction, mysteries, romance, inspirational fiction, science fiction, and other categories.
I learned from one of our library patrons there is a Kids Comiccon on April 10, at Bronx Community College. Bronx Community College holds a kids comic con free for kids under 18 -- April 10 in Bronx, New York http://www.kidscomiccon.com/ It looks kind of interesting.
I finished reading Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley tonight. It is the sequel to The Quiet War. Like most very interesting science fiction or literature there will be very mixed reactions to the story in this book. It is very much a book about biology, ecology, and society in the terms of hard science fiction; not so much physics. This makes it a different kind of hard science fiction.
I mostly relaxed today. I am becoming fond of lemon ginger tea. I returned a few books to my local library. Today is a quiet day.
Daily Thoughts 3/24/2010
I finished reading A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel. I was thinking about Borges today and I tried looking up The Library of Babel. In an odd coincidence, I found out that the nickname for the Ellis Island library in its early days was nicknamed the "Tower of Babel". There are some images with these words in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.Daily Thoughts 3/23/2010
I am going to read How Philosophy Can Save Your Life: 10 Ideas That Matter Most by Marietta McCarty. It caught my attention when I was going through the new books. It also has some very nice reviews. It is a book of practical philosophy, or philosophy put into every day use.
I read some more of Alberto Manguel A Reader on Reading. Each chapter is a separate essay on reading. In one of the essays he describes a variation on Borges infinite library. It is a single volume with infinitely thin pages which comprise all knowledge. Alberto Manguel makes the observation that is very similar to an ebook. I thought this was interesting.
Daily Thoughts 3/22/2010
I skipped a day to get some extra rest. Right now, I am reading Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading. Alberto Manguel is famous for having written The Dictionary of Imaginary Places which is quite entertaining. The opening chapter is on Alice In Wonderland which is one of the best fantasy books ever written.
I am reading about Callimachus who was the first bibliographer and cataloger for the Library of Alexandria. He invented the first subject headings in his Pinakes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinakes_(tables) . It is a nice reminder that there were great libraries before our time. Supposedly, the Library of Alexandria had some 500,000 volumes.
While reading Library Journal, I came across this article. It is about Opencourseware and the need for libraries in a virtual university. It seems people providing information to students in the online environment is being pushed aside. Libraries are being removed from the equation. It is quite interesting, and in some ways disappointing. MIT Opencourseware are classes designed to be taken for free over the internet. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6723299.html
I'm a Twitter addict.
Which is funny, because I never thought Twitter was something I'd get into -- after all, you've only got 140 characters, and why would people be interested in knowing what you're doing? All the time? Every waking minute of every day?
But I was curious.
So I signed up, and...
What's that saying about killing the cat??? ;)
~*~
Heather S. Ingemar has loved to play with words since she was little, and it wasn’t long until she started writing her own stories. Termed “a little odd” by her peers, she took great delight in exploring tales with a gothic flair, and to this day, Edgar Allan Poe continues to be her literary hero. To learn more, please visit: http://ingemarwrites.wordpress.com/ or follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/heatheringemar
Buy a story (or two or three): Heather Ingemar on Echelon Direct
Daily Thoughts 3/18/2010
Today is another quiet day. I went through and marked items missing from the storage area this morning. I am also checking the labels on the paperback to make sure they are all consistent and the same. I also plan on checking the fiction mass market paperbacks and the trade paperbacks for African American fiction that needs to be relocated. I'll probably be working with one of my colleagues on this.
Sometimes when you are talking to people at the reference desk, you learn about things which stand out. This is a creative commons ebook by Lev Manovich called Software Takes Command. It looked quite interesting to me. Someone was asking for a book about digital art by Lev Manovich and it led to this book. I am convinced that there will be many more textbooks coming out as creative commons.
http://softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.pdf
Sometimes, there are repetitive things which need to get done. I have to look at the shifting in the storage area tomorrow. I got my confirmation for my first order through BWI. I am going to work with someone who is ordering CDs tomorrow to help them place their order. Today was more predictable than usual.Happy St. Patrick's Day. We had green bagels in the staff room. Anyways, today has not been that bad. I finished going through the shelves checking for discards in the storage area for fiction. Now, I have to go back through and mark the items missing which I did not find. I also am looking at the arrangement of the relocated paperbacks.
We had an ordering meeting today. It went quite well. I had a chance to try the BWI ordering system. So far, it seems like it works well. I am going to be looking at it a little more tomorrow.
While I was going through the web, I noticed another interesting title, The Vanished Library by Luciano Canfora. It is about the ancient library at Alexandria. I also put in a request for the fantasy book, The Other Lands by David Anthony Durham.
Today has been a relatively quiet day. I checked the displays and did some weeding this morning. I am going to finish weeding the storage fiction this week. Try and do are two different concepts. When you try to finish something, it puts in mind that you might not finish it. I am almost done. I also spent some time reading Publishers Weekly this morning.
Brandon Sanderson has a new book coming out called The Way of Kings. I like the cover art. It is done by Michael Whelan. Hopefully it should be a very enjoyable fantasy title. I also just put Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley on hold. It is the sequel to The Quiet War which I enjoyed a lot.
I was reading the Oxford University Press blog which had interesting book suggestion; A Better Pencil Readers Writers and the Digital Revolution by Dennis Baron. It makes the argument that people are already becoming writers because of computers, so it is almost a moot point on whether or not it is particularly wonderful writing.
I spent some time talking to people about a poetry program I am working on for April 10, 2010. I am going to try a Saturday afternoon this time. I also think that I will have more local people interested in this kind of program now.