Salt Water View

This whole little town watches the Strait: there it is, at the bottom of every cross street. When it's blue and windy out, whitecaps 'way out there visible from anywhere. When it's thick and gray, Canada disappears. Big ships, little boats. At night, the lights of Victoria. The ferry, chugging out, coming home again. It's not the outer coast, but it is by golly salt water, and highly entertaining.

With luck, one has the 'dual view', able to look south to the Olympic Mountains and north to the harbor, the Strait, another country across the water. Now that the leaves are back on the trees, my own patchy water view between roofs, powerlines and conifers is even more interrupted. But water view it is. A cruise ship made a rare visit to our harbor on Friday. Had I been home, I'd have watched Zuiderdam come cruising by, caught a picture of it as seen from my front room; but I was at work, up at the college, where we are high up on the hill and have an improbable expanse of windows. Tweeted it:

We are much distracted, watching from our windows as _Zuiderdam_ comes into port. Will be here a few hours. Bigger than all of downtown. (1)Fri May 07 via webmb in Port Angeles
mir_b

(2) Binoculars #atthecollege ; truly, it's bigger than all downtown http://bit.ly/bHTLiv and it's coming around the end of the Hook NOWFri May 07 via webmb in Port Angeles
mir_b

Zuiderdam seen from the Peninsula College Library (Click for larger image.)

And it is so small-town a town. The ship had to tie up at the terminal where they work on the big ships, out there between the plywood mill and the dock where workmen were banging and clanging away on a repair to the tanker Overseas Long Beach. 2000 people off the ship wandered towards downtown wondering "Is this all there is?", while the official tourist-honchos and their volunteers made every effort to catch the tourists' attention, and the locals swarmed the dock to take pictures of this ship which was Bigger Than All of Downtown. We all but paddled out in our canoes hoping they'd throw trinkets and coins at us.

Zuiderdam at Terminal 1 (Click for larger image.)

Here comes the Showboat!
Here comes the Showboat!
Puff puff puff puff puff puff puffing along.

Electronic Woe

Letting twitter tell it (Click for readable image.)

Dropped off PC at the shop this afternoon. They'll tell me tomorrow if files retrievable. Prob'ly not.

Clock, So To Speak

I sure do love hearing the ferry. Hello, Coho. Good morning to you. I had no idea it was already 8:20. (Better get a move on...)

In Brief (139 Characters)

hard frost on everything this morning. blue sky. the ocean is calling. no posts on beachbunny journal for a week. displaced by twitterlife?

Today

Addressing a number of important topics, in the 140 character form (Click for larger image.)

A Week in the Life (Updates, Various)

Left out of Friday's beach-day account: eagles, lots of eagles. Hearing eagles, seeing eagles. At one point three of them flew by, one calling out determinedly. M. says because it is nesting season.

Saturday I read all day, while a sequence of mini-blizzards passed by (M. was snowed in again until yesterday). I had somehow ended up with too many library books coming in for me all at the same time, first time in my entire reading life that I was overwhelmed. Have spent the week winnowing, postponing, and reading reading reading.

Also spent much time this week following various librarianly types on twitter, and thinking hard about my (non-existent) professional web presence. It's because my workplace wasn't mine to tell about that this journal-of-a-sort has devolved to all-beachbunny-all-the-time. But I've decided that what I am doing at the tribe several mornings a week is work even if I'm mostly not being paid any more, and I need to figure out some way to account for the part of my life that is not about the water. Perhaps not here...

Sunday, between snow flurries,

Looking Across Freshwater Bay, March 8. (Click for larger image.)I went out to the mouth of the Elwha, but not until after the surf had begun to subside. It's all springy in the woods there, willow catkins and shrubs leafing out and flowers on the bushes. A lot more shells than usual. Sat on a log, watched the waves and the surfers. P.S. No, for heaven's sake, I'm decades past learning to surf. No balance left, and besides, it would take the world's largest wetsuit...

Looking Towards East Shore of River, Exactly at the Strait March 8. (Click for larger image.)

Tuesday the sunrise was especially seductive. The sun has moved well north of the vacant lot, and is shifting fast towards the spot where it rises on the equinoxes.

Sunrise, March 10. (Click for larger image.)

Wednesday was a perfect blue afternoon and there were a lot of b-i-i-g ships moving around. A Polar tanker dropped its pilot and moved on out of the Strait. A second Polar tanker came into the harbor, passing much closer to the inner shore of Ediz Hook than usual,

but by then I had discovered that my camera has died for still photos, though it continues to be ok for movies. This distracted me utterly. I couldn't even see the world, strange gorgeous big shipping passing by, etc etc. Could only twitch, and think, obsessively, "Camera. Must. have. camera."

Weather remains cloudless and gorgeous. Thick frost on the cars this morning.

Hurricane Ridge Web Cam, March 12. (Click for larger image.)

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.