Laura sent me a link a friend from grad school sent to her: video of a compelling high school art show. I'm adding a link to it here:
http://www.collierhighschool.com:80/video/artshow2007.html

Two new Flip video camcorders for the library just arrived today and of course I had to test out and surf up and over this new technology's mini learning curve. Cool device, software's somewhat limited, but it seems all decent vid editing software requires a credit card somewhere along the route, so not too surprised by that. Excellent ease of use and upload to PC. Here's my first test run using a canned vid editing template and a soundtrack I grabbed at random:

Here's a quick look at our first real snow storm of the season. This one is wrapping up with a shower of pelletized ice, slippery in the extreme but musical as it pings over and over again against bare wind rattled branches.

Finally Friday, and a three day weekend at that. Life is good!

 

Photos of some trees in our backyard, the great sweep of branches reminds me of lines of poetry, one more formal like a sonnet, the other free verse.

 

Believe it or not, here's a card catalog in use! Isn't it beautiful? I'd forgotten how noble they looked. This one is in the library of St. Norbert Abbey in Green Bay. Where better than an abbey to find a relic....

 

Josef S. Katz is showing off here modeling as part of the oriental rug pattern.

 

New day and out the door in a moment. I've been doing a lot of work on the library wiki http://boscobel.pbwiki.com trying out new widgets, etc. With all of these useful web 2.0 tools, the real problem becomes not, as it used to be, figuring out how to use the tool <>, but instead how to find the TIME to use all of the tools. Here's a chat widget that will let you text me no matter which chat client you use.Just type "hello?" in the message box below and hit the enter key. If I'm online, I'll reply!

{Update 11/9: I jsut moved the chat widget to the upper left navbar, so it won't disappear into the archives as this post ages}

She's back. Sorry for the long silence, this winter and spring whirled in a pile of major life changes. Everything old is new again! I'm just now beginning to feel like things are settling down.
Updates: Goodbye Chicago, hello Boscobel 24/7! I left the bank at the end of March and moved into this big old house for good. No more 3AM runs to catch the train to the Windy City. This is a good thing and was way overdue. Sleep deprivation and stress make you ugly inside and out :). I do miss the energy of Chicago but she's there waiting anytime for me and anyone else who wants to visit. You know who you are pals! If you're curious about Chicago, Devil In the White City is an excellent historical fiction about the city and the World's Exposition of 1893.

Busy now working as the Boscobel city librarian, making time to dig in the garden, strip floors in the house and go fishing on the weekends. Writing and painting will come again soon- takes a while to rediscover thyself.

Also have been playing online at secondlife.com, myspace.com and meez.com. This started in an effort to better understand the POV of the teens who frequent the library, but its changing my own point of view. Social networking tools present some compelling possibilites for defining new identities within the parallel universe of cyberspace. Here's our library avatar. More soon.