A-typical Friday

Last Friday, the library was closed for a staff day so that we could all go to a conference. What I took home from the conference was this:
1. Library Conference = Practical Shoe Convention.
2. Too many women stuck in a community college on a rainy day is an automatic recipe for snarkiness.
3. Poet Laureate or not, never extemporize your opening remarks to a room full of librarians.
4. You can do more with Google than search the internet.
5. Friday, May 21, 2010 was Pacman's thirtieth anniversary.
6. Great Blue Herons will not stick around if you aren't very very stealthy when sneaking up on them.
7. Even librarians will think you're a dork if you're taking pictures of bushes during break.

But I wasn't taking pictures of bushes. I was taking a picture of this really elegant little moth! This is a Pale Beauty. Well, okay, when I started out, I was taking pictures of this bush with tiny white flowers, but if I hadn't been, I never would've seen the moth, so I feel justified.

Anyway, also during break I saw what I could swear was a Great Blue Heron land in the college's run-off pond. I immediately soaked my loafers running through the grass to go see him up close. Just as I got close enough for the picture, he saw me and went flapping lazily away. *Pout* I was also unable to get a picture of the very unafraid but very good at hiding orangey yellow bird that was so not a Goldfinch. I chased that sucker around for fifteen minutes, just to cement my oddity in all my fellow librarians' minds. My best guess so far is that it was some sort of warbler or a female oriole, but the world will never know...

"What the heck is that bit about PacMan?" you ask. During one of my training sessions, which was being conducted via webinar (we are SO 2010) the presenters got all discombobulated because they were trying to show us something on Google and all these PacMan sound effects started playing and they couldn't figure out how to turn them off. Why? Because the Google Doodle for the day was an interactive PacMan in honor of PacMan's 30th birthday. Ha ha ha... millions lost to a Google Doodle! By the by, if you are a chronic link skipper, you should really clicky that last one. It's interesting and funny. You really can do more with Google than search the internet... They're called Google Apps, and all you have to do is click that little word "more" at the top of the screen to find them. Who knew!? (Shut up, Joel.) But the Google Apps session wasn't nearly as interesting as the Google Doodle session...

Do you really want me to recount how many times Kentucky's Poet Laureate said, "Um-uh" in a five minute speech? You'll be asleep faster than I was... And the less said about snarky librarians, the better, I think. Although that does conjure a delightful mental picture of women in tweed shushing and smacking each other... For "Practical Shoe Convention," see line about loafers getting wet and multiply it by 100. Oh, a good time was had by all.

After all that, I thought it would be fun to take the boys to Newport to walk our feet off. On Friday nights, we often go to Newport to "dance" to the free music on the patio at Newport on the Levee, but the concert had been rained out. So we wandered instead, as we often do, and found things to photograph. The Ohio River was high, and that made the urbanite critters` restless, I think. I saw what looked like two beavers, but they were not in the mood to have their pictures taken. Ambitious beavers... the Ohio River? Where would you get enough twigs for that dam?

Anyway, we walked down by the water and played...

Duck, duck.... Goose!  (Oh, come on! That was funny.)

We crossed the "Purple People Bridge" to the Ohio side...

and strolled in the Riverfront Park. We even dipped our toes in where the steps of Yeatman's Cove meet the water. Our toes have not fallen off yet, but they have begun to grow this fungus that glows the most amazing shade of bougainvillea... Speaking of bougainvillea, it's a flower, isn't it? Here is Charlie amongst the flowers. He's holding a green rock he found. It's the little things, you know?

(Yeesh, he looks like I just fed him three double chocolate chip cookies and an espresso...

It was only two cookies, thank you very much, and he didn't like the espresso!)

After all of that, I have drawn one sweeping conclusion:

It is not wise to walk all over the riverfront with a twenty five pound toddler and no stroller.

Words to live by...