Marchwords

That sounds like it should be all one word. "Forward noble steed! Let us go marchwords!"

In any event we're actually now gone from March and my total word count is 5989. It seems I wrote an average of 500 words roughly 1/3rd of the days much like in February. Not as good as 3/3rds but better than 0/3rds. And as math that probably makes no sense at all.

Anyway I wanted a picture to define the month and so chose this one--the total eclipse of the moon which I actually didn't see because I was writing some paper or other. To be fair even if I hadn't I'm not sure I would have gone outside because I envisioned the moon simply disappearing from the sky for a time and couldn't understand what could be so interesting about that. Unfortunately it turns out to have been a lot cooller looking than I thought, what with the blood-red moon of death and all, so I learn to regret my general lack of interest and proper education in major astronomical phenomena.

Friend of the Week: Brian (Ahoy, matey!)

Yesterday...

I got paid to play board games with kids for a program our library had. We played the game pictured at the left and another called Power Grid. I was a little worried that I would be there for several hours watching other people play games but I was able to join in the fun. We had a really good turn out so we weren't hurting for people but the librarian said that she had to play last time because they needed enough players.

So right now the only downfall I can see to being a youth librarian is the constant feeling that you're getting away with something.

And losing miserably at strategy games. But I enjoyed it anyway.

Friend of the Week: Tim (Snape Song Vs. Angsty Harry)

A Mysterious Ticking Award, Jeeves, Unicycles, and Merciful Puppies

The Harry Potter Puppet Pals team won the YouTube Award of best comedy video for The Mysterious Ticking Noise (The Snape song).



I was also sad to learn recently that "Ask Jeeves" has been simply Ask.Com since 2006 (I feel so old and out of the loop!). I also belatedly mourn the passing of one of my favorite Internet characters. I just can't understand why they would get rid of him :(

As for unicycles. The other day I seem to recall seeing a man (most likely another college student) on a unicycle. Random sights like these seem more common in Ann Arbor but I feel as if it's harder to enjoy them under the crushing oppression that is grad school.

Grad school and taxes. I so need to finish my taxes. Sigh....

But something to keep me from being too glum is this clip from The Colour of Magic showing the one and only Lord Havelock Vetinari and his little dog Wuffles! Jeremy Irons plays Lord Vetenari. I think Irons is an excellent actor who has strangely never been in a good movie (at least none I've seen him in). Hopefully this is a break in his bad luck.



I should probably add that while The Colour of Magic showed over Easter in the UK it does not appear to have a TV release date for the US that I can find. And no word on the DVD yet either. But perhaps if all us Terry Pratchett fans band together and complain very loudly...

In all honesty Colour of Magic is not my favorite book by any stretch of the imagination but it is Discworld and Hogfather wasn't a favorite either (though I liked it better than Colour of Magic) but the movie was brilliant! (and also produced by the same company). So I have high hopes for this one. I'd prefer if they did Guards, Guards or Going Postal but we can't have everything. I also find the order they've done these films in to be quite odd since Hogfather was done first and that's the 20th book (and the 4th in the Death series) and now they're doing Colour of Magic which is the first (mashed together with Light Fantastic which is the second). So if they do do another there's no telling what it will be numerically.

Better Than a Link...

Too tired to give the awesomeness of The Graveyard Book the justice it deserves so here's a video the man himself reading chapter 4.



But, title of this post aside I think I'll give a link to Neil Gaiman's site all the same because his countdown doohickey actually counts down. For some reason he didn't share the version that does that with everyone else. But I forgive him this small transgression because he's Neil Gaiman.

Friend of the Week: Anonymous (Hint, if you click the "Name/URL" bubble when posting a comment, you can add your name. Or if you don't feel like it, add your name at the bottom. I like giving people the recognition they deserve. :) )

Give...To...Me

*Want. Drool. Cries.*

@_@

Hypatia

While answering a question for my reference class I learned about Hypatia, an ancient female mathematician and astronomer. She has now made the list of historical people I would like to have met along with Hatshepsut and Jane Austen. The other funny thing is that the picture you see of her above is from Raphael's painting The School of Athens which was in my high school math book a bunch of times for Pythagorus whenever we did the Pythagorean Theorum and she's standing right behind Pythagorus but I never noticed her. Of course, so many men in these paintings were too androgynous for me to have identified her as a female. But still, it's strange to think I saw her all that time without knowing it.

Friend of the Week: Mag (yay for historical fiction!)

I'm Henry the Eighth I Am . . .

Well, actually I'm not, but today I saw The Other Boleyn Girl which I liked even though it clearly made great efforts to condense the book. However, as many people who know me already know, my favorite wife of Henry VIII is Anne of Cleves (pictured above).

Friend of the Week: Tim (Yup, though I'd prefer you to comment on my newer posts or at least say something relevant).

Plum Blossoms, February Words, Asian Heritage Month, and Library Wisdom

Here's a lovely picture I took of the plum blossoms in California that I won't be seeing again any time soon.

It also appears I wrote 5903 words for February, and I recently found out that March is Asian Heritage Month (Woot!)

A parting bit of library wisdom for the day:

Do not use animal crackers as bookmarks. If you give a librarian a cookie (in a book), she will throw it away!

Friends of the Week: Heather (Scrabulous) and Mag (Milk and Cheese...beware)

Flickr Update

Yup, I took that picture of what's basically a weed in the Auburn State Park here in California. My camera can be truly awesome at times.

I've really had no good excuse not to update over break. I just didn't. But now I've just updated my Flickr account with loads of pictures from my trip here so hopefully that makes up for something. I was tired of the first pictures on my Flickr account being of my not-so-impressive apartment.

A lot of the new pictures don't have descriptions, but they do have tags to say where they're from. For some odd reason they uploaded out of order though. If anyone knows more about Flickr than I do, I'd love to know what's up with that.

You can view the pictures here.

OR you can scroll down and click on the links called "My Flickr" on the left under links. Yeah, this post is partially just to remind you all I have a link to my Flickr account on my blog.

Friends of the Week: Stephen (Yes, I am a nerdfighter), Tim (Asian ladies), Brian (Pandora does indeed rock) , and Sarah (Asian ladies 2)

One of (or possibly the first) Asian American Film Actress

Was named Anna May Wong.

Anna May.

Yup.

Frankenstein CD Players and Poems

My CD player is the undead. I've dropped it several hundred times at least, broken the battery case to the point where I have to hold it shut with tape, and the other day finally broke the thing into two pieces. I put it back together with very little hope.

And it worked.

It's alive, Igor! It's aliiiive!

And today I hung out with some very cool kids at a teen poetry reading at my library which lead to my brief review on the book above. I even got paid for it, but I would have done it for free. I admit I was a little afraid I wouldn't like it, because my own poetry from my teen years was less than exemplary. But I really liked listening and talking to these kids. Probably something about elementary and middle schoolers that will spend a Friday evening in the library reading poetry and playing Boggle meshes with my own personality.

Scary Trousers Pep Talk

I have written 10,362 words for January! If I put the exclamation mark there, then it helps me look at it more optimistically. And really I think I've come to accept my limitations for the most part. At least it's not (yet) as bad as last semester.

I had a "banging my head against the wall" writing moment. I never like to admit to writer's block but this was either it or just as bad. But my sister talked me through it and managed to convince me that I hadn't just wasted the last twelve years of my life. Yeah. If I don't finish this book or it's no good that will pretty much make all of that wasted time. You might say, of course not, it was valuable practice. Or, everyone's got to start somewhere. But we all know the truth. I need to finish this book (to my satisfaction seeing as simply finishing it before wasn't enough) in order to validate my existence.

But no pressure.

Still I'm lucky to have a loving and supportive sister.

I'm also lucky to exist at the same time as the Rock God of Fantasy, Neil Gaiman. My Mom says he's old enough to be my Dad. I say I don't care. Unfortunately, it does kinda matter that he has a wife and kids... But, oh well. Despite how very good-looking he is I felt funny about putting up a real picture of him. Like, stalker-funny. Which isn't funny at all but exactly the opposite. It's weird because I don't feel the same about pictures of other celebrities. Maybe it's a hot married author thing. Anyway, I have settled for the cartoon of Neil "Scary Trousers" Gaiman. For back-story on that check out the video below:





Some of you may say a video's the same as a photo but for some reason, to my inner stalker sensor, it is not.

Anyway, I also read Neil Gaiman's blog and his January 28th entry had a link to a pep talk he had written to National Novel Writing Month authors (and found currently useful for using on himself.) I highly recommend the blog entry and the pep talk to anyone who ever has or is ever interested in writing a novel (or who maybe just wants to see what happens to authors around the middle of a book and why so many go crazy).


Friends of the Week: Becky an Dejah (a.k.a anonymous SI friend)

Pandora's Prince

Interesting Book Fact: While going through the collection of Large Print books I maintain I saw the hardcover large print version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and it is both smaller and lighter than the normal print version. Wrap your brain around that.

And now that your brain has exploded I'll say that the book appears to have no margins.

And Pandora...?

I am admittedly suspicious of new things. It took me a long time to start using those new fangled mechanical pencils. So when Tim suggested that I listen to an online radio called Pandora that adjusts to your musical tastes it sounded like too much work. But YouTube, where I keep my music playlist, went down for the upteenth time last night and I didn't want to listen to the classical music radio I normally do so I gave Pandora a shot. And it is awesome. I recommend it to everyone else. The only thing that bothered me and I wasn't sure if it was even supposed to happen was that some of the songs would stop abruptly in the middle and it would switch to the next one. But that wasn't too often and there are no commercials which is a definite plus. I thought it would be too much trouble to put in my info but if you're as lazy as me, you can pretty much just write in one artist or song you like and it plays a whole bunch of different songs like that without you doing anything. If you wanted you could click a little button to say whether you liked the song or not and that tailors them even closer to your taste but you don't have to do that.


So yeah, the title of this blog post is cooller than the actual post but still vaguely related as you see...

Another Review

I've done another review on the Ann Arbor Library website. This one's of the Sabriel audiobook.

Friend of the Week: Tim (I could hang up if I wanted to.)

Mom of the Week: Mom

My Milk Assures me that it's Real

I found this logo on my milk carton. Good to know.

Today I Quit Not Being a Quitter

(completely random pic of Wonder Woman from this site)

I've never dropped a class in my life but today on the first day of class, while the professor was describing the course, I realized it was not for me. The professor also said we could walk out at anytime if we felt we were just wasting our time. One guy took her up on her word 45 minutes after the start of the 3 hour class. I followed him 15 minutes later. I went straight to the student lounge's computers and dropped that course and signed up for another one. There were actually computers in the class I decided not to take but it seemed in poor taste to use these to drop the class. Anyway, the little part of me that was terrified and appalled by quitting the first class of my life was sufficiently quashed by the part that really did not want to take that course. To be entirely fair, I didn't really research it sufficiently. Having been blocked out of two classes and having one of my alternates also not work I was scrambling to take 12 credits. Hopefully the class I signed up to replace it is better. It at least sounds more relevant to what I want to do and comes as highly recommended to the LIS program. This one was pretty random.

Sadly this also means that I will not be able to do the storytimes I committed to at work but I did not have a lot of other options. I hope I will be able to work something out in that respect or do storytimes next semester.

Oh, and if you're interested, I did a review of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman here.

Best of 2007

I thought it would be a nice indulgence to squander my free time on a movie that I had never seen, but sadly I did not end up liking the movie (In Pursuit of Happyness). I did not even hate it enough to take pleasure in tearing it apart in a review. It was simply one of those movies where I get to a certain point and know I'm going to be underwhelmed but I'm the kind of person who has to finish unless I really hate it.

Anyway, that's completely off-topic but it's the reason for this post since I actually do like writing in my blog. I spent the crucial moment of New Years in an airport this year. My New Years are never spectacular but this one takes the cake for depressing. Top that off with the fact that I was returning to grad school from visiting my mom and sister who I'd far rather be with right now.

But this is all about good things that happened in 2007 so here goes...

Best Movie to Come out in Theatres: Stardust. Easiest question ever.











Best Made for TV movie: Northanger Abbey. (J.J. Feild=Squee) Although, I should note here that my 2006 New Year post lists A Good Woman as the best movie of 2006. And it may have been for the theatres (in the US anyway, it came out earlier in a bunch of other countries) but for (British TV) the best movie of 2006 was easily the Hogfather and my sister and I quite enjoyed watching it this Christmas (now that they've finally given Americans a shot at buying it).


Best Book: Well...if I went by books I'd read in 2007 that would be difficult as I have 37 books in my booklog (10 of which are audiobooks and one of which is just me rereading Northanger Abbey.) But if we go by best book published in 2007 then I'd go for Making Money. Yes, I know the last Harry Potter book came out this year and that was pretty awesome, but Making Money is still better written in my opinion. You can read my mini-review on the Ann Arbor library website here: http://www.aadl.org/node/9540

Best Writing: Okay, well, I can't speak for the content, it could be Shakespeare or it could be average fantasy novel. My personal opinion changes depending on my mood. But I can say that the bulk of my final (I really mean it this time) draft (let's face it, it's a draft when you rewrite 90% of it) was written in 2007 which means that I wrote 103,281 words in 2007, and if anyone's curious that is already the length of a healthy novel, and I would have a book by now if I didn't have a disease that prevents me from writing anything remotely short. The total word count is 109,152 words (I didn't write much in 2006 having started in November). But I refuse to make it as long as the last one! I have also changed the title of my story. I like the new title but fear it doesn't fit as well as I would like.

This is more of a major event than a "Best" but I graduated from undergrad in 2007 though it seems like it was so long ago already. I will not post a picture though because I do not look nearly as thrilled as I should have been.

Well, there you have it. I hope you've all had a great 2007!

Gingerbread Men, A Thousand Words, and Private Thoughts

Last night my sister and I were walking when we came upon this scene of holiday terror. Observe the gingerbread man face down in the grass. Observe how his side of the of the house has gone dark. And observe, the bright and jolly jubilance of his wife shining brightly over him.

Speaking of tragedies some of you may have noticed that I did not report how many words I wrote in November. I know you all wait in breathless anticipation of such reports, so I apologize profusely for my oversight. Partly it was due to not having time for anything, but partly it was so sad as to only increase my depression by reporting it. But as I'm feeling quite a bit better now after a hefty dose of blissful vacation nothingness, I will finally fess up to the hateful number: 1,158 words. That was my yield for all of November. I wrote more words than that yesterday in less than two hours. The frustrating thing is that I know there was time in November. There just wasn't the mental energy to use it properly. But a large part of me doesn't really accept that as an excuse and has concluded that I'm just lamentably weak. I worry that this will become my life--being too tired to write. But I try to remind myself that my sister now has much more time and energy ever since she graduated from grad school. I will just have to hope that grad school is the culprit and not work in general. In any event, I have gotten quite a lot written over break, though it cannot make up for what I could not write any other time, and while my yield for December will be a lot less depressing than October and November, it probably will not even surpass that of September which is when things all started going downhill in the first place.

Now that I do have a little extra time, though, I find that I am lacking something else. A diary. I did not so much forget to bring my diary as omit it from the packing list because I haven't written in it in quite some time. The whole point of starting this blog was because I'd mostly run out of the sort of private thoughts that I would not wish to share with everyone. But for the first time in a long time I wish I had my diary to confide in. Nothing wrong with all of you, but I suppose every human being gets a little bit of existential angst every few years that is best not shouted merrily across the void of cyberspace. They're the sort of thoughts that you may read over and still be moved by later, or could just as easily be glad that no one else knew they occurred to you at all. It may also simply be a case of missing what I don't have. True, I could write on anything, but there is quite a bit less security on writing one's innermost thoughts on spare bits of paper or even on a computer. I considered writing them in French since very few people I know could read it, and those who could aren't likely to see it if I keep it to myself. But that's slightly more effort than I'd like to put into random mental rambling. I could also buy another notebook but the economical side of me rebels against this since I've already got two unfinished diaries. Also the thought of writing in just any notebook doesn't really appeal to me. Oh well, perhaps I'm just spoiled. One way or another I'll either write them or I won't.

Anyway, I can't exactly make up for the recent lack of blog posts. But I hope this is something for those of you who've missed me. I miss all of you as well.

To all my dear Gilpatricians, it was wonderful to see you all again. It was good to see you too, Eric, if you're reading this. I am sorry to the rest of my Denison friends that I wasn't able to visit. Chalk it up to very limited time and poor planning on my part. But I hope I can come back again sometime. And to any of my friends that I wasn't able to see at all recently, I hope I can see you all again sometime. I hope you all are well and have all had a great holiday and will have a very good New Year.

Friends of the Week: Becky (I think the cat is cute too) and Anonymous (you guys really need to remember to put your names down)

Mom is Mom of the Week.

A Town Bereft...

...of magnetic poetry! I went to the Borders and five, that's right five other book stores and a novelty shop but one little box of magnetic words cannot be got in this town for love or money! There is much to be said for Ann Arbor, its lovely trees, its inspiring old edifices, its bubble tea, but this lack of magnetic poetry to me seems a great failing indeed.

More Frightening...

More frightening than any ghost, ghoul, or beastie stirred up at Halloween is my word count for the month. 2188. An all time low. I basically feel about it how this cat looks.

Friends of the Week: Mag, Ishani, and Tim ! :)

Mom is also Mom of the Week.