What I did on my blog vacation
(Okay, super-lame title there… but I’m sure I can’t be the first to have used it.)
My foot is okay, much to my relief, and even my bad knee is bugging me less than it had been. (I was going to say “not at all,” and then I stood up…) Picking up the pace a tad bit on the walks to and from work.
I discovered that despite Mondo Pay Cut, I’m less than $100 per month out-of-pocket once rent differential is taken into account. This is not at all uncool, though in its turn it doesn’t take into account that I was making way bigger retirement contributions in previous job. That will require some adjusting-to.
Talks are underway that may enable me to do a little something-something about Mondo Pay Cut. Further deponent sayeth not until matters are more settled… but no, not a raise; extra work. Fun work, though, and I hope it comes to pass.
I have to bite the bullet and (re)learn to drive. Part of the price of landing a job that serves the entire state. The story of my last ill-fated attempt to learn to drive is an amusing one (in a finger-pointing “what a maroon!” sort of way) that I may share sometime. In the meantime, it’s lessons for me… and annoyance that I can’t become a Community Car member until five years after I get my license. That’s just irritating. (Yes, I’m sure their insurer does demand it, but it’s still irritating—and not really protective, either, because I certainly don’t plan to own a car in the next five years, so I’ll be nearly as naive a driver in five years as I will when I first land the license!)
The loons are gone from Monona Bay. I suspect the cretin in the motorboat with his equally cretinous waterskiing friend is at fault. I’d hope the motorboat would sink, but that would just pollute the bay. I hate those damn things. Canoes, kayaks, rowboats, sailboats, windsurfing, that’s fine. I can even live with crew practice and its megaphones. But ban motorboats!
I did see a brown creeper last week, though (cute little nipper, he was), and a flock of cedar waxwings, and some redhead ducks, and on a trip to Green Lake for a meeting my boss stopped at a pond to look at some yellowlegs (greater and lesser) and blue-winged teals, and we also saw a crane flying overhead at one point. Oh, and wild turkeys. Yesterday’s trip to LaCrosse produced a stooping redtailed hawk, a peregrine falcon, a turkey vulture (surprised there weren’t more of those, actually) and some great blue herons.
(My boss is an avid birder. The chair of the unit’s steering committee is taking a three-week trip to Spain to do some birding. There is SERIOUS BIRDING going on around here. I am only an egg!)
My post on what can be done to reduce misogynist online talk has gotten a lot of attention, most of it positive, all of it (even the disagreements) civil. I find that encouraging. Curiously, it got loose on LiveJournal and became something of a mini-meme there, as best I can tell. I can’t tell much, because most of the entries citing it were friendslocked. If I were a sociologist, I’d be pondering a project about semi-private online spaces, who uses them, and what sorts of topics are restricted to them right about now.
Oh, and academic librarians are too nice, or something. Karen gets it right, but I just want to ask a quick question—what am I, chopped liver? (I swear it’s an Inside Higher Ed thing. I’ve been dissed-and-dismissed by them before.)
I didn’t precisely defend M-ch–l G-rm-n during the blog-people kerfuffle, but I did say that I thought his detractors were overreacting in unproductive ways. (When I did rip on the man, it was for something rather more important than ticking off a few bloggers.) I regularly chronicle how librarianship (writ large) and library systems irritate the living crap out of me, and I’m not particularly nice about it, either. And as for comments, I tell you what—I’ll have them when Mr. Bell agrees to moderate them for me. This is a female-dominated profession by the numbers, Mr. Bell, and being female has consequences online—never mind being female and outspoken in the way Mr. Bell seems to desire.
Privileged git. There. Not-nice enough for you?