47 Seconds of Sunshine

Tuesday and Wednesday, continued running around with JK. We had a good time, talking about libraries and my former co-workers, about retirement, relationships, old age, and a meaningful life— and meanwhile laying on a tour of the Northwest Corner of the continental US, and the Makah Reservation. (Maps: (1), (2) and see below). It was warmish, grey weather; and the sky refrained from raining on us; that counted as good weather, both days. Tuesday we went to Cape Flattery; enjoyed some seabirds—(drat, the list has vanished) pigeon guillemots, black oystercatchers, tufted puffins, double-crested cormorants, sea lions at a distance, an eagle.

View from last viewing deck, Cape Flattery, June 28, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

Then headed to Sooes Beach, which is along Makah Bay. We paid a very nice Makah lady to park in her frontyard parking lot, used the access trail down the road as she suggested rather than the one on her property, and didn't pick up anything on the beach because she said not to.

The tide was low. We walked north to a seastack covered all over with trees, cow parsnip, and nootka rose. Roses, and roses, the whole thing was netted with roses in bloom. We poked around in the tide pools. Did you know that black turban snails (Tegula funebralis) are believed to live as long as 100 years?

Small island on Sooes Beach (Click for larger image.)Nootka roses on the side of the small stranded island (Click for larger image.)

We had the beach to ourselves, a degree of solitude essentially unknown on California or East Coast beaches. When we turned back, JK walked ahead. I realized how completely and extensively there was nobody else there.

Walking South on Sooes Beach. That's JK there, above the purple marker on the image. (Click for larger image.)

The drive is two hours each way and we started late, so the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay was already closed when we left the beach. We drove home through the Park, along Lake Crescent, and went back out there on Wednesday. We studied our way through the museum very very thoroughly, at least JK did, admiring the Ozette artifacts and reading every inch of display text. Then on to Hobuck Beach, where I decided J. and I were free to pick things up; because when we survey for dead birds at Hobuck, my bird mentors (one from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and the other who is Makah) always hand me little treasures as they find them... So JK got two sanddollars, and I got three limpet shells.

Hobuck Beach, after the minute of sunshine. (Click for larger image.)
Sand dollar. (Click for larger image.)

Early in our second beach visit, the sun came out for about one minute. Instant euphoria. We were capering and waving our arms to make our shadows dance. At the mouth of the Wa'atch River, JK stalked an eagle who was sitting on the sand, trying to get close enough for a good photo. The tide went out. The wide exposed sands were silky soft.

Wa'atch River, Hobuck Beach (Click for very much larger image and look for the eagle sitting on the ground on the other side of the river.)

On our way home we stopped at Washburn's store in Neah Bay. I needed caffeine, JK still lacked a couple of those bring-home-to-officemates presents. I got so invested in her hunt that I sent home presents with her for three of the people I used to cruise for souvenirs for on every trip away from the workplace. JK teased me. "Nyaah nyaah, four years later, and can't cut the cord."

There were LOTS of eagles around Neah Bay, handsome young ones as well as the white-headed oldsters.

Map:

Re: the black turbans, it's J. Duane Sept who says they live 100 years. Ricketts and Hedgpeth (whom I usually believe implicitly) say 20 - 30 years. Most of ours seemed to be occupied by hermit crabs, but some were going on their mollusc-y way, still doing their jobs. It's hard to walk around among the tidepools once you are aware of invertebrate life. You may have to Step On Them to get anywhere.

Black turban snails, and a limpet. (Click for larger image.)

Having Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Here

Fall quarter has begun at the college. I'm back at work, hanging out behind the desk; helping people find things, yes, but mostly helping people do things. Reconnecting with colleagues. Readin' professional stuff again. After this first busy week, must re-orient to the off-desk activities I left hanging at the end of spring quarter.

Back in the day, librarying was a much larger proportion of my life, in fact, practically the whole of it. I thought about the library patrons' needs and the library's needs day and night. My colleagues were also my circle of friends. Back in the day, any of us who spent time at the reference desk at Santa Fe Public Library might very well have found one of Peter Taylor's drawings left behind on the desktop amid the scrap paper. Sketched portraits of the library-user-traffic passing to and fro in front of us. We used one of these drawings in the Poetry Broadside about ten years ago. Here's another:

Peter Taylor, ball-point pen on paper (Click for larger image.)

Much more than I expected, community college librarying is not all that different from public librarying. There are these people, mostly young, who need help and have nowhere else they know of to get it. Fewer crazies, fewer passionate readers like the population who used to come haunt the new books shelves every day; and less continuity of faces, as the students cycle through the community college and move on. But it's the same work, really, and I'm so glad to still be able to be doing it, here where I want to be. Only, I miss my friends.

More Miscellany

The library here doesn't have Carolyn Reeder's The Secret Project Notebook. K. says it's a better Los Alamos juvenile novel than The Green Glass Sea — and she should know, she grew up there after the war, when it was still a closed city. I just hate it when I bump up against the fact that I no longer can command the universe to get me (and all the library's other readers, whom I serenely used to assume would like what I liked) whatever I want to read.

Quite suddenly a desire to find the next roof over my head outweighs my reluctance to give up this very bright quiet sublet with its dual view. I glance out the kitchen window to guess what weather dawn will bring, assessing how clear the lights are on the Vancouver Island shore. La-di-dah. Another country glittering across the water in the dark. Yawn, so what. I could conceivably let it go. And a good thing too, as it's time to start apartment-hunting...

M. and I went to the Park visitor center the other evening to hear Suzanne Cox Griffin's presentation on the Olympic marmot. There are less than 2000 if them left. I took a lot of notes about population ecology, and marmot hibernation, and patterns of extinction and recolonization. The capsule news, though, is that the population is tanking in most parts of the high country, including the colonies out at Obstruction Point. (The marmot picture is from the Park website.)

Reading News

Heading for Tucson this weekend, and starting to pile up the books to bring along. I had to return the Karen Armstrong, someone was waiting for it. But there's another copy, already overdue, and I am back in line for it. I hope it'll be returned in the next couple of days so I can resume reading it, and bring it with. Don't seem to be especially interested in anything else.

Much later: oh my. Starting reading Ivan Doig's Winter brothers : a season at the edge of America. It's absolutely wonderful: beautifully written and about the native peoples of this Peninsula. Well, one. The Makah.

It's basically a Really Good Thing that coming here and no longer being able to read exactly what I prefer all the time — as I was able to do at my former place of work — has forced me to widen what I'm willing to try to read. Reading is more like a radio station with occasionally eclectic programming, chance widening the pleasure zone; and less like a party tape of songs, even a really good one.

Miscellany

Various things I haven't mentioned: frost almost every morning, some mornings the windshield requires serious scraping.

An otter at the Sol Duc Cascades, a couple or three visits ago: it was such a surprise, I barely got a glimpse before he went behind a rock. I think it couldn't have been anything else, though I didn't know when I saw it to try to look closely at the tail, which would be diagnostic. This is my third small Olympic National Park mammal. Some weeks ago watched an Aplodontia, the 'mountain beaver' who is not a beaver, near Madison Creek Falls, about a two-minute walk from the Elwha River entrance station. Robert Michael Pyle calls them sewellels. God he was cute, with his itty bitty ears and small twitchy habits. And back when I was going out to Obstruction Point, there were Olympic marmots. The marmots are all asleep now on their alpine ridges, hard to credit on a sunny day like this, but that's what Tim McNulty says: "By October, when the meadow plants have died back, the marmots have safely sealed the entrances to their grass-lined hybernation burrows and snuggled in for another long nap."

New bad bookbuying habits: as I run out of mysteries to look forward to, or facing a few days when I can't get to the library, I read one of the paperbacks I bought at the Goodwill; and if it turns out to be satisfactory, order some of the author's other titles from ABE. Presently waiting for the third of Kate Ross's titles to turn up in my PO box. (It's already listed in 'Reading News' over there to the left. No, I don't change the list every time I pick up another mystery. For one thing, some of them are really not very good, and not worth the trouble of mentioning.) I'm conflicted about buying books, because donating them to the library here likely won't get them in the collection even if I think they need this author. Like mystery readers everywhere, I hate to think of good titles other mystery readers would want to borrow ending up in the book sale. I've considered saving them up and then mailing them to My Former Place of Work, but that would make my reading habit even more complicated to indulge. If I had any sense I would just settle in and read Tim McNulty straight through about four times over—instead of just dipping into it like a reference book—and let everything else go.

From the Poets' Techie

Bringing another piece of my identity to where I am now: Issue #54 of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, Ever/ Glade, made it to the web last weekend, three months overdue but finally finished. It was pleasing that the artist is one of my colleagues at my Former Place of Work and a former Floridian, that her linocuts fit so well with M.S.'s Everglades poems.

It could be symmetrical to let the Broadside end here, with this chapbook of the poet/editor's own work. But no. Last summer I asked N. if we could have a collection of the poems he mentioned that are orphaned, that simply didn't fit into each of his published books as he assembled them; that were left behind, over and over. He said yes, so if he hasn't changed his mind, we can see ahead to #55 — and may be safely past the possibility that having the techie/editor geographically elsewhere might kill our little webzine. It might last to its 10th anniversary after all...

Somewhere Out There

Notwithstanding that I thought about very little else for long stretches of the past two and a half years, I am after only three weeks entirely disengaged from the blog at My Former Place of Work, the ineffable Icarus. Don't even need to avoid looking at it: they'll do what they do.

I don't have the same distance on the library's catalog. It was my baby, I abandoned it when I abandoned my job, there won't be anyone else in the position for at least some months, and it's very hard not to focus on what I can't make happen. Other libraries running our same catalog software are incorporating LibraryThing for Libraries. Danbury Public Library (CT) brought it up first, and now Bedford Public Library (TX) and others have begun to offer it. Realistically, something like this happens when one person's enthusiasm moves their library forward. At MFPOW I'd have had to push and push, but eventually the library would have added the feature. I knew what we [now They] needed to be doing, and they accepted my judgement when the catalog was at issue... Searching by tags, lumping editions, and a recommendation engine, oh my. But Santa Fe's library users won't have access to it, I can't do it for them.

Danbury Public Library has also put a search box on their home page that searches BOTH their catalog and their web pages. I want it, I want it. Well, no I don't. MB at Reference doesn't live there any more.

Danbury's single search box triggered a long and increasingly acrimonious thread on the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries email list. Posts with titles like "Elitism in Libraries"; discussions of whether either we as librarians, or the 'AmaGoogle monster', will still be around in 50 years; and arguments triggered by Martha Yee's paper, "Will the Response of the Library Profession to the Internet be self-immolation? (written testimony to LC’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control)". KGS blogged 'Relevance Ranking and OPAC records'. The whole topic is as seductive as it is geeky-to-the-max, and all week I've been grieving that I have no relationship to it anymore.

Because I Can

Sitting in the Albuquerque airport, at one of the wonderful convenience counters they offer. Free wireless, powerstrips, wide tabletop, comfortable chairs. There's a little girl next to me watching a cartoon movie on a weentsie DVD player, only about 5.5" by 8". I rather covet it.

I do lo-o-o-ve wireless. One of the early wireless provider networks around town was called 'Working Wild'. That's how I think of it whenever I connect out in the world, and I try it whenever it might work. I'm down with the concept of working wild. :-) Won't it be wonderful when the City wires the Plaza, and MFPOW can join the rest of the planet in offering wireless connectivity. Which the tinfoil crowd continues to successfully prevent, 18 months and counting.

Anyway, en route to see Mom in Tucson. She turned 89 this month. I don't think the constraints I have assigned myself regarding personal information on this blog will allow me to offer pictures.

Getting All My Input in 140-Character Bursts

At the moment, except for email I mostly just use Twitter for librarianly input, wandering off to the links people post, or to the posters' blogs, or the other links and blogs they point to. When I came back from Europe last week I sat here in a jet-lagged fog, gratefully re-submerging in the cheerful conversation almost always running somewhere out there among librarians. The 80-odd people whose posts come to my timeline feel near-enough like a community as they respond to each other, and to me, and to other people whose posts I never see. 'I missed you like crazy,' I posted when I got home.

One of the weekend's fun finds: a Web Trends 2007 map, which its makers tell us is built on a map of the Tokyo subway system. (Twitter is on the blue Social Networks line, and on the dotted Insiders line.) Lo-Fi Librarian posted it to Twitter, and to her blog, along with a bunch of other very interesting topics. Today's fun (somewhat librarianly): Grand March of the Librarians, a video made at last month's ALA convention. I found it by wandering from from one of DesertLibrarian's twitter posts to her blog, Random Musings from the Desert; thence to Hedgehog Librarian's blog. She'd found the video on Michael Stephens' Tame the Web. Do you see how it goes, reading around and following links?

Several people attending the Techsource Gaming, Libraries and Learning Symposium this weekend were sending tweets via text throughout some of the sessions, giving quotes and links and getting excited about what they were hearing. Gaming in libraries? Yikes, My Former Place of Work certainly knows zilch about the world of gamers... Two different twitterers passed on the remark of a teen panelist, "my teachers tell me to use official sites that end in .gov but who are u going to trust? The government or the people?" And people tweeted many quotes from Eli Neuburger as he presented, two simultaneously giving us "there are more gamers than recreational readers at your library".

I could sit here all day, wandering from topic to topic, librarian blog to librarian blog, and throwing the links and webpages into del.icio.us as I go so I'll remember to get back to them. There's a human computation project called Galaxy Zoo "the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be" which Neil Stewart blogged about in the context of social media. The project hopes to use crowds of internet volunteers to visually classify a million galaxies. Or, did you know there are libraries in Second Life? And onward... If I were still blogging for the library, there could be a whole array of topics and trains of thought which have floated by from emails and twitter postings, what KGS calls "Link Love"; I miss the happy pretense that of course the library's readers are interested in whatever I'm thinking about.

Stylistic Remarks

a) When Suzanne V. turned my composition, "Things That Want To Be Counted" into a broadside, not only did she rearrange all the parts, and use very large type for the words she thought most important; she also edited out every single parenthetical aside and explanation. I took that as an important piece of literary criticism, and ever since have been rewriting to eliminate as many parentheses as I manage to notice. If I concentrate I can write without parentheses.

b) For now I will continue to point to posts on either Icarus or Many An Afternoon, as seems pertinent. I haven't quite let go of all that work that it turned out wasn't quite mine and couldn't come away with me. I imagine I will stop pointing to the past after a while.

c) Immediately I will begin to use LibraryThing for bibliographic links, instead of the catalog at my Former Place of Work.

d) I will not necessarily explain myself all the time. Today the haircutter said, as she wrapped the sheet around me, "Didn't you used to work for the library?" "Still do," I said, without thinking; heard myself; but declined to correct it.