You Tube

I don't know what number Thing this is, but I just had to jump on the bandwagon and share a few of my fave Youtube clips. This vid of the Tuttle Kids (Molly Tuttle has a CD out now with her dad, that I love!).




I also like this song a lot - by Molly and Jack Tuttle . . .


And, for a bit of difference, this great and moving song by Labi Siffre:

Poetry Friday!

First off, it's Poetry Friday, and I want to direct you all to one of my favorite "spooky" poems. Little Orphant Annie is by James Whitcomb Riley, and I've always found it delightful. I first heard it performed by my friend, Jeri Kladder, and I will forever hear this poem in her voice. She does a remarkable job (thus my remarks!). Go read it!

I WON! I was at Zaproot, while doing surfing for my library's Learn and Play (Library 2.0) initiative, and I entered my name and addy in a drawing to win a cool bag. The site is all about promoting GREEN stuff, and this bag is really nifty! I can't believe I won! You can see that smooshes into the little stuff-sack to be much smaller than my coffee mug, and . . .


when opened out, it's bigger than my cat! It's like tent fabric, and since the stuff-sack is integrated into the bag it'll always be there. There's even a little carabiner clip (but I'm going to have to replace it because it's already not springing closed) attached. Once I have a new clip, this will be the perfect Bag-To-Keep-With-Me-All-The-Time-So-I-Don't-Have-To-Use-Plastic. :-) As cool as this bag is . . . the coolest thing, though is still that I WON! I WON! I WON!

Speaking of my cat, I've been wanting to get some better pictures of Rosie. Thing is, she doesn't lay around like a slug pose like Sam does. She does, however, like to sample my glass of water before I take it up to bed with me each night. You can see her sniffing, and then looking at me like she's not done anything wrong.


The flash reflecting in her eyes seems so appropriate for The Look. I should have real Halloween pictures posted sometime later this weekend - at least one of Simon. His Bible Study group is going Trick-or-Treating tonight.

What's in a Name?

1. YOUR REAL NAME: Catherine Williams

2. YOUR GANGSTA NAME: (first 3 letters of real name plus izzle.) Catizzle

3. YOUR DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color and favorite animal) Pink Panther (hmmm - sounds familiar)

4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (your middle name and street you live on/or neighborhood if it's a number) Louise Blythe

5. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name) Wilca

6. YOUR SUPERHERO/CRIMINAL NAME: (Your 2nd favorite color, and favorite drink) Purple Mocha

7. YOUR IRAQI NAME: (2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, 1st letter of your last name, 2nd letter of your moms maiden
name, 3rd letter of your dads name, 1st letter of a siblings first name, and last letter of your moms first name Alwrcvlc

8. YOUR WITNESS PROTECTION NAME:(PARENTS MIDDLE NAMES): Doris James

9. YOUR HOOD NAME: (first 3 of your first name and add -iqua) Catiqua

10. YOUR STRIPPER NAME: (first pet's name and first house's street name, or neighborhood if number) Sammy Shorehaven (sounds more like a mob name, so I"m going to use current information) - Rosie Blythe (there, isn't that better?)

Literature Map

My friend, Jim, posted a cool meme . . . and you know I can't resist memes! For all the L bloggers who read this, please note that this Literature Map link came from a non-library person - go civilians!

A simple, two-step approach for generating your own, fully personalized, 21st century, Web 2.0-based reading list:

1. Make a list of the top three books that have influenced your life, and make a note of the authors’ names
2. Visit Literature-Map, plug each author name into the text box (one at a time, naturally) and generate a cloud of related authors. That ought to keep you busy for a while!

Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.

My list of 3 life-changing books (I won't include the Bible, although that continues to influence my life):

1. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. (map) (Oh, you like Sendak? Have you read Sylvia Plath yet? LOL)
2. Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop by Chris Raschka. (map unavailable because the site hasn't heard of him before)
2a. (to replace Charlie Parker) Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (map)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. (map)

I'm a librarian, so, predictably, I can come up with a VERY long list of books that have changed my life. I limited myself, though. :-)

Carousel

If you want to see more of the pictures I took of the carousel . . . have fun!

Great Long Weekend!

I drove up to Youngstown (Boardman, really) on Wednesday, to my parents' house. Early Thursday morning, Mom and I got on a bus, were joined by my second Cousin, whom I call Aunt Nancy and her daughter, Kim, and went to NYC.
(picture shows Nancy, Mom and Kim)


It was a long trip, and there seemed to be several delays, the most dramatic of which was when the other bus blew a head gasket (whatever that is) and started billowing nasty smoke, just before we reached the Lincoln Tunnel. We were late to dinner at Pellegrino's in Little Italy.


The folks on the other bus missed dinner (they packed it up and loaded it onto our bus for them for later), and we were late to the show (Chicago, which was great, but missing my favorite song sucked). But, I haven't laughed so much in a long time. Aunt Nancy and Kim and Mom are EXCELLENT travel companions!





The main reason we went to NYC was for Friday morning . . . to see and ride the restored carousel that was the carousel of our youth. Idora Park was a smallish amusement park, originally constructed to entice people of 1899 to the end of the streetcar line in Youngstown. When I was a kid, we used to hold backyard fund-raising fairs to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy and get free tickets to get in to the park.


The carousel has now been restored (took her 22 years), and is in a warehouse in the DUMBO district of NYC. It is now being called Jane's Carousel, for Jane Walentas, who is the artist who did the restoration.
(This is Mom with Jane)




We got to see it, ride it numerous times, and I took over 100 pictures.

Each horse has a medallion like this one that tells what row it is in and what model it is. Very cool!

Jane's resoration work is nothing short of miraculous. The precious-metal leaf used, the beautiful color, it is all amazing. It was cool, too, to see these people (mostly elderly) so thrilled to see this bit of their childhood.

I loaded more pictures to my Facebook Account, if you want to see them. Let me know if that works, or if not, I'll load them into Flickr.

Of ships and sails and sealing wax . . .

Does anyone else read bloggers from the kidlitosphere? I've been reading/lurking at a few blogs for a while, now, and I have to say that one of my fave things is Poetry Friday. Every Friday they (some of them) post a poem or link to a poem or whatever. It's fun! I can't imagine I'd be able to keep up and stick to the schedule, but I like reading what they post! They even have roundups to stay in touch with one another and draw the reader around the web. Cool, huh?

Can I draw on the walls, too?

Just a quick link to really cool marker art.

Searching for stuff, Thing #19

I LOVE Firefox. I had it, then my computer got mussed up so I didnt' have it, and there are some apps that I need for work that don't use FF, so I didn't bother loading it at work, but then I was at IT one day and they teased me a little because I only had IE on my computer (and for goodness sakes, guys, YOU are the ones in the department that built this laptop anyway, so either give it to me or don't tease me for not having it . . . or something, and really, how crazy is that!?!?!?), so I finally caved to peer pressure (and knowing better) and loaded it again - both at work and at home. {end breathless rant}

My fave of the CML Power Tools is the Catalog Search Plug-in for Firefox. It's brilliant! I can simply choose to search DP instead of Google whenever I want. LOVERLY!

I don't have more to say (isn't that miraculous?).

Comiqs - Thing #18

I've made my first online comic strip!


Simon's New Sweater from Caterwauller on Comiqs

It was fun and easy, too! I wish I had more photos of people in my Flickr account to fool around with . I'll have to work on that! I think this is an app that my son will get a kick out of.

Google Docs - Thing Something or other

So I decided to check out Google Docs. I have gmail, and I like gtalk . . . and I've used the calendar and Google Reader . . . so I finally opened the Docs thing. Guess what! I already had a bunch of documents there and I didn't realize it! They were all from email attachments! I was amazed.

I started by cleaning out the docs that I don't really need. Then I added a new one - with information that, truly, I'd like to have access to from any computer. It's easy and fun! Just like they said!

I'm interested in trying out more apps, but honestly, I'm a little bit under a pile and I want to catch up on the rest of the Things before venturing beyond google for this one. You know - make sure I taste every dish on the buffet before coming back for seconds. :-)

New Blog!

I'm part of the Ready to Read Task Force at CML, and as we move into the implementation of this year's phase of the ongoing project, we've been recruiting and training a big team of Ambassadors who will be going into the neighborhoods and meeting families who are not generally visiting the library. They'll be talking about early literacy and sharing the Ready to Read research and information with parents and caregivers to try to improve their children's success in school. Because there will be so many people involved and so much going on, we've started a dedicated blog to share with one another. Feel free to follow along!

Vocabulary Building?

I was just reading CodeMonkey's blog, and noticed he has a reading level on his blog. So, of course, because I am a meme junkie, I had to do it too, even though I've done it before . . .

TV Reviews

I've improved! It must be all the L&P thing we've been doing. I'm talking about work instead of just life.

Reluctant Wiki-er, Thing #16

Well, I am sure you could tell a few posts ago that I wasn't too thrilled about the whole wiki thing. I mean, we have discussion boards and we have other collaborative web things, and I just figured that a wiki would be more of the same: clunky to use, challenging to keep up, short-lived novelty, etc.

I'm starting to think maybe I was wrong! I know, I know, it seems impossible (hmm, I guess you're all thinking that what is impossible is that I'll actually admit I'm wrong - me being wrong is fairly normal?) I finally had time to watch the little vid clips that the L&P team provide on their blog, and I think they might be right - Wikis are cool!

What I'm thinking about wikis:

• Someone on my branch staff had suggested a month ago that we should start a local history blog for the Linden Community. I'm thinking, now, that a wiki would be more functional and use-able. It would be great to get local folks contributing as well as library staff. I'd love to make/post some video footage of interviews with community elders!
  
• A Wiki would make it much easier to handle things like the Ready to Read Ambassador organization. We just need to figure out how to make/use a calendar in it.
• Sharepoint kind of sucks (I've always found it clunky), and a wiki would be easier to keep up with.
• I'm still convinced that a wiki is only as valuable and as strong as the people involved in it's writing.

FO, growing boy and Long Overdue

FO = Finished Object (knitterly terminology) Here you go - Simon's sweater! This is the Ravelympics event I tried to compete in. I did a lot of knitting during the Olympics, but still didn't finish. It is now done, and Si loves it. I purposefully made it too long so he has room to grow.





Yes, he is a growing boy! Sometimes I wonder if we could actually see him growing if we sat him on the couch and used time-lapse photography for a week. LOL Here he is in my dad's old fatigue jacket and hat. Dad was part of the Korean Conflict. He doesn't talk about it much, but his old fatigues all ended up in our "costume box" and Si has taken bits recently to use for actual clothing.






What would you call a group of 3 Librarians who are performing music together in public? We tried out a lot of names, and in desperation settled for Book Notes for this gig at the Clintonville Farmer's Market yesterday. While we were playing, Jami's hubby and our friend Joe came up with "Long Overdue", which we all like better than anything else we've thought of, so for now that's our new name. We have no other gigs booked, but boy, did we have fun!


Mike took the pics, of course.

Wiki wiki bo biki- Think #15

Boy, I'm definitely going to fall behind in the L&P thing. First was The Great Blackout of Ought Eight, and now is The Paperwork Pileup, made worse by the fact that my MODEM at home is BUSTED! I never really realized how much I take care of online work while at home until this week. It's very hard to keep up with everything at work in just 8 hour days . . . and then I was sick on Monday and Tuesday . . . and my finger tips hurt . . . and the dog ate it.

Ok - enough whining.

I took this "learn about wikis" thing as an opportunity to finally look into the ALA Ready to Read Wiki. I have to admit that I'm completely underwhelmed. Of course, the most recent posts seem to be from 2007, and many of the categories, etc, seem to have just one or two posts on them. I didn't find it impressive or useful at all, which leads me to my main point for this post.

MAIN POINT>>>> A WIKI is only as useful as the group that uses/writes it.

So, creating a Wiki is cool. Writing and contributing to a wiki is cool. However, just like the more antiquated "discussion boards", if the community that is using the wiki is boring, so will the wiki be. I'm still looking for library wikis that honestly look useful and cool, so if you have something specific to recommend or explain to me, have at it!

Hopefully my home connection will be healed tomorrow (laying on of hands should occur between 4 and 6 tomorrow afternoon, so look for the lightning). Maybe when I have my house back in order I'll be less cranky.