A Screen Capture from My Flickr site

This is Peter outside of the White House in DC. I left my digital camera behind in a session at ALA and amazingly a librarian found it, figured out it was me who had lost it and emailed me. She's going to mail it to me this week. Librarians are so cool.

Bye bye, little friend.

We couldn't have asked for a more devoted, loving or fun little companion for 15 and a half years. Maggie travelled with us from Edmonton to Nebraska to North Carolina to Ontario and was one of the few constants we had. We were ever thankful for her unwavering devotion to us, her insistence that she be hugged at regular intervals, her spunky "cattitude" and her determination to leap right into any new situation with excitement and courage be it a new paper bag or a cross-country car trip to a new home. We're going to miss her deeply.

By Request: What I learned on planes to and from Edmonton and to and from Washington, DC

1. People treat you differently if you appear to be a lone female traveler; elderly ladies assume you read Nora Roberts too and most men tend to think you really want to talk to them. But often you get more pretzels.
2. Maized and confused is a cool snack name (stay tuned for photograph-- more about why later)
3. My flight attendant's cat was apparently bilingual and answers to both OS-car and os-CAR. Sadly poor OS-car/ pauvre os-CAR is no longer with us. It was very sad. I saw a picture of him.
4. Having an entire back row to one's self for a 4 hour flight is pure luxury.
5. It's heartening to see a big burly dude with a Semper Fi shirt reading "The Root of Rejection" and reading about how he too can "be free from the effects of rejection!"
6. If you were to have your entire journal from 1995 to present on your laptop, it's probably not a good idea to fully recline your seat so that the person in the row behind you has a clear and direct view of your screen.
7. It's mighty distracting to imagine what the root of the marine dude's rejection might be. Romantic? Vocational? Political? Anthropological? (I don't know how one can be anthropologically rejected but thought it sounded cool)
8. Putting on one's iPod has about an 90% effective rate for signalling "Please leave me alone."
9. It's agonizing to wonder if, by rebuffing his early morning small chat with a smile and a nod, I have unwittingly contributed to the burly dude's overall sense of rejection. Ack!
10. Le pere d'os-CAR said he'd buy me a drink next time I was on one of his flights.
11. My new friend Khalil does not see iPod headphones as impediments to conversation and that's ok because he was an interesting guy.
12. It's mighty tempting-- especially during take off and landing when my own book is safely stowed beneath my seat and my tray table returned to its upright and locked position-- to ask the big burly dude "so... what _is_ the root of your rejection? Did you get dumped?"
13. There are times when someone's entire journal from 1995 onward is much more interesting than Virginia Woolf's early novels.
14. If you're going to read your journal on a really big screened laptop, reduce the font from 22 pt. Or don't use first and last names. I now know someone named _______ is a bad word.
15. When Oscar Wilde said "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train," I don't think he would have considered progress on the Atkins diet to be sensational.
16. There are 6 million Iraqi refugees and the population of Iraq is 23 million
17. Even though I really didn't want to read someone's laptop journal, having it a foot away was more tempting than I could ever have imagined.
18. If I ever do write or read my journal on a laptop on a plane I will reduce my font size.
19. According to one particular laptop journal, the life of a novelist is one filled with rejection (maybe the Marine should have loaned him his book!), backstabbing and mean people.
20. Other people's journals are just as dull as my own.
21. Apparently you really can lose 50 lbs on the Atkins diet. But you'll really miss bread.
22. If I ever do write or read my journal on a laptop on a plane, I will write things like "Colin Firth asked me to marry him again (underline "again" 3 times) but until Derek Jeter and I call it quits for sure, I just can't say yes" instead of "today I found a really neat snail in a package of impatiens I bought from Canadian Tire."
23. Yorkshire Terriers are pretty cute and remarkably well-behaved when tucked into a handbag for take-off and landing.
24. Seeing a "Honk if You Like Wookies" bumper sticker on a pilot's flight bag makes me want to reconsider taking Northwest Airlines.

You're a tough crowd; I'm back-ish... sort of... maybe

Thanks for the various subtle and not so subtle reminders that I've not posted in a while. As you might have noticed from my flickr site, I've been away for a bit and before that... I have no idea what I was doing but it certainly wasn't writing in my blog. Thank you for the gentle nudges. Anyway, it's 11:00 PM and the muse is getting a bit tired and cranky. But, for you faithful cafe visitors I will offer a few post titles that I thought about writing over the past few weeks and will try to get to over the next short while. Heck, if you're really inspired, vote for the entry you want me to write first and I'll see what I can do.

1. "Slow food, why not slow reads? Or, why I should have signed this Virginia Woolf novel up for frequent flier points"
2. "Orange Prize winners"
3. "An Ode to the Perfect Latte"
4. "Because our dishwasher was leaking, we now have a new countertop, kitchen sink, uber-groovy faucet, and dishwasher that wasn't working because it needed a part that we waited 10 days for but now it is working and that is a good thing because I realized I've become a very bad washer of dishes since I've owned a dishwasher and, now that the dust has cleared from that project, we've decided to install subway tile which means I've spent way too many hours looking at pictures of subway tile and thinking about the respective merits of grey, black and white grout and, I have to admit, that scares me: since when did I become a person who thinks about grout in her spare time? Then again last year I asked "since when did I become a person who goes for a walk and says, 'hey, check out the downspout on that house' so maybe this is all temporary."
5. "Why I still adore Curtis: Part 12"
6. "Things I learned on my recent flight to Edmonton"
7. "Groovy new web radio stations I've found"
8. Invent your own topic! I might could take requests.

I have Dale's voice in my head saying "say goodnight, Heidi" so I will say "goodnight."

From the "oh those nutty librarians" file: Pimp My Cart

You knew it had to be coming. Pimp My Library Cart. Based on the MTV show "Pimp My Ride," (where cars are given flashy new makeovers), a library in Wisconsin is now doing "Pimp My Cart." According to 13 year old Brittney Putzer "working on the old carts at the Racine Public Library was better than 'sitting at home doing nothing.'" And, as you might expect,this contest was not without controversy: "There were a few complaints that the library used the word 'pimp' in promotional materials,' said Anne Callaghan, the organizer and the children's services librarian. 'I don't think you should use an old dictionary to try to defend a modern meaning of a word,' said Callaghan. 'Language changes over time.' True, very true. Bookcarts, on the other hand are another matter all together. Read all about it here.