Is someone going who might be willing to split a room with me? Or is there someone who lives within public transport of the University of Chicago who might let me crash next Thursday and Friday nights?

Email me if you can help; all my email addresses are currently functional last I checked. I will be eternally grateful!

We did a weekend rent-a-car thing, as we have taken to doing every now and again, and after yesterday’s dutiful errand-running, today we drove up to Horicon Marsh. It was a perfect driving day: clear and bright and not too much traffic even on the Beltline.

We arrived at Blue Heron Landing in time for a leisurely al fresco lunch before the afternoon pontoon-boat tour. A small flock of egrets flew by across the road from us, and the first great blue heron of many sailed past over the river. “Marc” presided over the boat tour with aplomb, pointing out cormorants, a bunch more herons, painted turtles, some just-hatched goslings, and a showoffy yellow warbler. The wind kicked up a bit, but in the sunny stern of the boat, it wasn’t bad at all.

After the boat pulled up at the landing, we drove to the north end of the marsh to go for a walk. It’s still very early spring here; the trees are just budding, and the cattails are still winter-dry and rattly. The frogs are in full chorus over the deep-green grass, though, and the trails are rain-springy and moss-covered.

At length we reached the boardwalks into the marsh. Two pairs of blue-winged teal dabbled placidly among the coots and Canada geese. David gleefully watched a pair of muskrats grooming each other atop their lodge. A goose guarded her nest atop another lodge, while rough-winged and barn swallows swooped and chattered and chased each other about.

We took a return path that led us through a couple of copses, in which we saw palm and myrtle warblers as well as pretty white lilies and asters. Something chattered at us while we were taking a break on a fallen log, but we never did see what it was. We went on over dragonfly-dappled meadows, and at an overlook where our binoculars barely made out some redhead ducks, a sandhill crane floated past, serenely alone.

As we ambled down the last gentle slope before the parking lot, a beautiful lilt of song made me stop and look. If there’s anything made of purer happy than a meadowlark singing, I don’t know what it is.

We took a circuitous route back into Madison, because I wanted to try Monty’s Blue Plate Diner and I wasn’t sure where on Atwood it was. Found it, though, and had a ginormous and very tasty meal.

There should be more days like this. Just perfect.

Image ganked from here, and found via the slick and useful Flickr Storm search engine.

Nothing particularly gnomic about this utterance, so I won’t insult intelligences by explaining it; I’ll just point and shut up.

By the end of next week, I’ll have another beating-things-with-rocks project to show all y’all. I’m quite proud of it.

Yeah, don’t start, okay? It’s been a bad week.

I got such a charge from that that I got to work seven minutes early. (Well, yes, I did catch the lights, too.)

Happy spring, folks, from Loony Bay.

This afternoon as I went on a small detour in order to vote in state and local elections (bye-bye Frankenveto, I hope), I stopped to watch a brown creeper sidling up a tree. Couldn’t go three steps without startling a robin.

Yes, okay, some of the big snowpiles still haven’t quite melted. It’s still spring.

In other news, since my JCDL preconference proposal got a big fat THANKS BUT NO THANKS stamped on it, I have a little more time to spare, and I’m going to spend some of it writing an article on authority control in institutional repositories for Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. Got to admit, I’m kinda jazzed about that. C&CQ is high-class stuff for this low-class repo-rat.

Plus, authority control isn’t nearly so vexed an issue as the stuff I’ve been writing about in Roach Motel. With any luck, this one won’t be like pulling teeth.

And I’m going to the summer data-curation institute being held by UIUC in June, which causes me to utter a hearty w00t!

Me, I’m not so sure. We saw moulting goldfinches at our feeder last weekend. There’s a flock of grackles in the neighborhood that makes disrespectful-teenager noises at me when I go to work in the morning. The cardinals are everywhere. There are veritable holes in the ice of Monona Bay. Yesterday walking home I took my gloves off because I didn’t need or want them.

Spring is slow, here. You take the signs you can get.

The Mouser-cat graduated from kittenhood this morning, polishing off the last kitten chow we’re going to buy her. From now on, she eats what the Goths do. She doesn’t appear to mind; I gave her a little of their food to eke out the last of the kitten chow, and she inhaled it.

There is still a lot of hissy-spitty in the house. It’s never quite clear who starts what, but it often ends in cats being unceremoniously ejected from the housemonkey bedroom at five in the morning.

Still, Mousers do have their uses, even for staid offended Goths. This morning, some hours after the cat-ejection, there was a set of unearthly piercing squeals outside the door. No one was being murdered; Mouser was just making known that her breakfast was an hour late and she would like it now, please.

Minus the please.

Besides, I’m not all that sick. I’ve only sneezed a few times today, which is a good thing, because every time I do it’s like somebody took a razor blade to my tonsils. Ugh.

Of course I bought a big jar to take home. How not?

The star of the show in absentia was a pileated woodpecker, who had gone and made abstract sculpture out of a dead-but-still-standing tree trunk. He’d taken a two-and-a-half-foot tall by half a foot wide by half a foot deep hollow out of that thing, and the pile of shavings on the ground before it was more than respectable.

After that we found our old favorite eatery, Sai Ram, discovering that it’s really every bit as good as we remember it. I’ve never had lighter pakoras, and the masala vegetables were absolutely divine. In the same little strip-mall is a genre-specific bookstore, used and new; I found another Melissa Scott novel and a James Tiptree Jr. anthology, while David dug up an anthology of antique (1930s) skiffy.

We drove downtown, found a place near Lawrence University to park the car, and wandered about College Avenue for a while. The Outagamie history museum is small, but has some fun tidbits in it, and the Houdini stuff is almost as good as their advertising suggests. After that and a peek-in-shop-windows stroll, we got back in the car and I drove home. I think people go insanely fast on Highway 26, but I’m a notable fuddy-duddy about highway driving.

This morning I was feeling decadent, so we drove over to Bluephies for a tasty brunch. David suggested a drive through the Arboretum, and by pure chance we arrived at the Visitor Center fifteen minutes before a scheduled nature walk, a big old redtail hawk wheeling and soaring overhead. So we did that, crunching and slipping over more snow, and damned if there weren’t some hints of spring: a carpet of green watercress on one of the open springs, turkey and deer tracks everywhere, tufts of coyote fur, cardinals furiously claiming territory, and last but not least, the humble skunk cabbage poking its odiferous shoots up in the marsh.

I like these weekends. They are immense fun, and they keep me comfortable behind the wheel of a car. I’d still be happier if Community Car would let me in, but oh well—something to look forward to when I’m forty.

I picked up Dream’s heart pills first, and then I hopped over to Hilldale to pick up the Bibliomedusa, which I finally got framed. It looks unbelievably fabulous and I plan to post a picture of it, because how can I not post a picture of the language-geekiest library in-joke ever?

I stopped for a tasty lunch at Pasqual’s at Hilldale; I still prefer the Monroe Street one because it’s a bit rough-and-readier, but the Hilldale one is just fine. Next was a stop at the hardware store for a curtain-rod so that we can put up the chunk-of-Bayeux-Tapestry reproduction my mom got us; while I was at it, I got a hangy-post-thing for the back yard so we can put up bird and hummer feeders. I then tooled over to campus to leave the Bibliomedusa in my office and pick up the extra office chair I’ve been meaning to take home for ages. (Oh, hush. It’s mine, only I no longer need it because they bought me one.)

And now I’m home catching up on email before I hop out again for a bulk-buying run. I promised to pick David up at work, and we’ll catch a little take-out dinner before I come home for Dragonhunting.

It’s not spring yet, but “late winter” is fair. Like a snake shedding its skin, Madison is slowly losing its snow cover. Walking outside with no gloves and coat open is quite comfortable in the afternoons. I saw a huge group of geese the other day, going around in circles trying to decide which lake to head toward—this being a difficult decision because the lakes haven’t even started to open up yet. Walking to work yesterday morning, I saw two rabbits nosing around a cleared patch of yard looking for something vaguely edible.

I still seem to be okay at this driving thing. Can’t perpendicular-park worth a damn (though I’m good at parallel-parking, go figure), but the world seemed to conspire today to show me drivers way worse than I am—one guy managed to hop a curb, couple other people did parking jobs so bad that I would have backed out and started over, and one idiot completely ignored that his lane was ending until he had to beg to be let in.

So if you see the orange-copper Chevy Aveo tooling around Madison and environs this weekend, wave and say hi. But don’t honk. Please. Makes me nervous.