March 21, 2005
100 entries!
Well, a milestone of sorts, I suppose. A spammer (oh, yeah, that's a REAL good way to get me to buy from you-- drop your garbage all over my virtual lawn. NOT) forced me into a little site maintenance, and I realized I haven't posted since ::blush:: mid-February. This being... er... late March, I figured an update was in order. Besides, I've finally gotten all my recent pictures back!
So, let's see... what have I been up to...?
1) No good, of course.
2) A trip to the Metropolitan Museum to view The Gates (nonono, the ones in Central Park, not the ones in Somerville, or the ones made out of cheese crackers-- although I like the cheese crackers). Pretty cool, aren't they?
3) A nasty case of the flu. It came on suddenly, kept me out of work for a week at the end of February, and I *still* haven't kicked the nasty, barking, phlegmmy cough. The memory that kept preying on my mind towards the beginning of the week was of the patron who said he wanted info on TB because (lean close) he'd just been diagnosed with it (cough, cough *wheeze*). Ahhh, the perils of working with the germy public. (No, I didn't get it from him. It was upper respiratory flu, not consumption.) Lung, anyone?
(No pictures here. You're welcome.)
4) A trip to the NY Botanical Gardens Enid A. Haupt Conservatory to see the 2005 Orchid Show. It snowed and sleeted that day. Do you know how wonderful it is to visit a hothouse full of orchids and tropicals when it's snowing slush outside? (Bonus: the ideal atmosphere for orchids (warm and humid) was also apparently the ideal atmosphere for my diseased lungs. I didn't cough once while I was there, despite all the walking around.)
...And maybe indulge a small obsession with tree ferns (actually, one of these is a regular normal-sized fern, but the photo came out so nicely I couldn't bear not to include it)....
...Oh, and (ahem) the seed pod of Theobroma cacao. But that's a relatively normal obsession. ;)
5) Work. Work, work, work. I've been weeding prodigiously in biographies lately (prepatory to a recarpeting under that section-- less books to move is good. Of course, *I'm* moving all the weeded ones myself anyway, but hey...). Weeding biographies, let me tell you, is an object lesson in the fleetness of fame. (Boy, did I throw out a lot of Dan Quayle bios.) It's amazing to see the sorts of things for which one can become famous to begin with... or at least, famous enough to have a book written about you, or to get your autobiography published by something other than a vanity press. It's also amusing to see what sorts of things still get read, and which don't. For example: Gorbachev. We own a whole shelf's worth of thick, imposing 600-800 page tomes on him. Which title got weeded? The itty 200-pager. Russians. Go figure. And here's another: Russell. We have biographies on... let's see which I remember... Bertrand Russell, Charles M. Russell, Jane Russell, Ken Russell, Kurt Russell, Lillian Russell... and... hm. I could swear there was another Russell politician in there somewhere, but I'm not thinking of his name at the moment. Anyway, out of all of those names, guess which one *didn't* have a single book on my dusty books list? (I'll give you a hint-- Bertrand Russell never had a special cantilever brassiere engineered for him by Howard Hughes.) And it's amazing what you can learn from reading the jacket and flyleaves of a book. For example, did you know that Jean-Paul Sartre had a lazy eye? (Yeah, out of all the browsing, that's what stuck. Give me a break, it's late.)