Blogging
Of blogging about work, the Times says At Your Own Risk. (Thanks CB for the link.)

Of the possibility of my teaching a teen workshop at my work on blogging, the key people have said, basically, We like the idea, but there's a lot we need to look at. Which is what I expected.

Old News
A week ago, P and I enjoyed a day in that other Capital City, visiting Teaism, the Hirshhorn, the Sackler-Freer (including of course that gilded Age masterpiece, the Peacock Room).

At the Hirshhorn, I totally dug the c. 1930 moving pictures included in the exhibition Visual Music. I am sure it's an obvious observation, but Disney borrowed or stole from those works when creating Fantasia (1940). Some of the films in the museum were simple animation, playing with shape and a few colors, but some with lines and music were very similar to the first piece in Fantasia. They also (BLH) made me think of the movie we saw in January '04 -- the decaying movies. The similarity lies in how the movies lack clear, familiar figures and plot, yet I found myself imposing at lease a tone on them -- a sense of menace in both cases.

And as if that wasn't enough, we watched the Nationals beat the Astros, 4-2!

Capital City weather: three clear, clear days around 100, followed by a handful of days in the 80s, though muggy.

Get Out

According to the National Wildlife Federation,

By the time they are seven years old, most youngsters have been exposed to
more than 20,000 advertisements. They can identify 200 corporate logos, but they
cannot identify the trees growing in their front yards.

Learn more here.

Double shout out to Maggi -- first, congrats on your new home! Second, thanks for bringing this online collection of series novels to my attention: Library Career Romances!

Hey! Some varieties of marsh mallows grow in Virginia! They bloom pink and white this time of year. I did not know they were connected to sugary treats. Boing Boing knew. That means that early marshmallows were vegetarian-friendly.

Finished...
...reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince today. The death in 4 (or was it 5?) made me way weepier than this one. I was surprised by who the Half-Blood Prince turned out to be.

So the question is: will I start reading all the "HP6-spoiler" messages on my YA listserv, or will they be too fan-geeky for me? I guess it depends on how busy NP is tomorrow. I do have a set of 70-some non-fiction YA books to consider and select, and a 200s cart (i.e., shopping list for all branches) to create. Plus, you know, people need help working their e-mail and finding books and stuff.

I feel like I had at least 2 cool reference transactions today, but at the moment, I remember only the woman with a Zane book in hand. She wants to be a writer. Most of the so-you-want-to-be-a-writer books are at area (bigger) libraries, but I set her up with a grammar book, thesaurus, and a book on writing.

Capital City weather: hot; thunderstorm
On the Muzak at Ukrop's: "Louie Louie"

Testing. . .

. . . access to Blogger.com from filtered computers. Seems okay.

In HP news, did I tell y'all we still had one (of 14) book copies at the end of the day Saturday? The 2 cassette and 2 CD audio book copies went fast.

Capital City weather: hot.

Let's see, what's my source, here? Ah, The Guardian -- the English paper is running hypothetical Dumbledore death scenes, in the style of various authors. So far, I like Milne best. The Adams isn't bad.

More Birthday

So I went to the bank to cash the check the City sent me for my morning of jury duty, and I tossed my license into the drive-through container -- because they don't really know me at this new, near-work branch. And when the teller sent the box back, she wished me a happy birthday!

Also, we had cake at NP.

Not That It's a Race

... but I was pleasantly startled to see that my first birthday card came from CNB, the originator of Birthday Week (or does she celebrate Birthday Month?)!

Details remain elusive on the fire at Lovings last night. Meanwhile, how many restaurants will have to serve canned vegetables this weekend??

Oh dear, channel 35 news says it's Lovings' Produce that's on fire. For a fleeting second, as I went by on the highway, I thought a steam engine had pulled into Main Street Station.

Though a little on again-off again, Camp had a long-term relationship with Lovings. And they totally hooked me up with zillions of pumpkins for that wretched Autumn Adventure thing. Their candy-colored trucks -- they lost most of them in the flood last August -- always made me smile.

All Star

It's 82 degrees at 10 til 10 p.m. The good news is that the air conditioning at NP works again. It had to get to 92 degrees inside, yesterday, before someone decided we should close. Today, it's at full strength, driving me to pull on a sweater -- but after how unpleasant it was Monday, I vowed to refrain from complaining about it being too cold in there for, like, a week.

In other good news: the All Star game is on and I have chocolate chip brownies.

Birthday Week Continues: Day Trippers

Something I always praise my folks for is raising me to believe in the Day Trip. Sometimes they will say we took day trips as a young family because money was tight and national parks and whatnot are free or cheap. One plot twist they recently revealed was that when they (we) were just starting out, Dad's folks were paying the gasoline credit card bill, so climbing in the white Ponitac made good sense. Whatever the reason, I have tons of (sometimes sketchy, admittedly) fond memories of trips to the National Zoo, Luray, countless battlefields, antiquing trips, Charlottesville, etc., etc.

My late 90s Civic is certainly smaller than that early 70s "midsized" car, nonetheless, it handled not only the baseball roadtrip below, but also a Saturday trip to Jamestowne, with my reprint edition of the WPA guide for Virginia in hand. Yup, serious history geeking-out with P and H. For those of you playing at home, see page 628; for the rest of you:

State 5 parallels the north bank of the James River through woodland and crosses the Chickahominy. The route is exceptionally beautiful, particularly in season when heavy foliage frames its ever-changing vistas. It traverses some of the oldest plantations of Anglo-America.

As true today as during the Depression. P read for us -- Revolutionary and Civil War tidbits, and about the homes of Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Harrison and President John Tyler. Meanwhile, H burst into the most random song snippets, and I was birdwatching (only, all I saw were cardinals, flying up out of the roadside gravel).

We wandered around the Jamestowne site for a couple of hours. Not the re-creation, but the site of the 17th century town -- at least, what the James River left us of it. A few monuments and markers from the Jamestown 1907 Exposition remain, as does the church tower, with its c. 1906 rebuilt chapel. Also 100 years ago, they built brick outlines of foundations of buildings identified at that time. Recent archaeology reveals the post-holes of the palisade.

It was a hot day --but not the hottest day I ever spent there (that distinction goes to a trip made with fellow Val staffers) -- and that always make me ask: what on earth were they thinking? Humid and low-lying land, and what must have been serious forest undergrowth, surely made for an unlikely spot to build a town -- or city. And yet they built a couple of sets of brick rowhouses! (LoC has some broken links. It looks like there ought to be a HABS drawing online, but I can't get to it.) Right on the river, we got a bit of a breeze, and a display of osprey fishing. Thanks fo the shop manager for loaning his very own binoculars!

For the return trip, we boarded the Jamestown-Scotland ferry (we took the "Surry," built 1979, I see) and then wandered over to U.S. 460. Obviously, that meant dinner at the Virginia Diner. (Oh brave new world that allows that to be hyperlink! A stop for rural townies and midcentury travellers now has a web presence.) Duh Moment of the day: those fields that don't have corn or soybeans must host peanut plants!

Birthday Week Begins

Not ones to be cowed by media hype over weather, or national security threats, John, Charlie, and I took to the road to celebrate C's and my impending birthday. Though roadblocks were thrown up -- bad traffic on 95 caused by a bad southbound accident involving a fertilizer truck near Massaponax; we didn't really get to RFK the most efficient way; we had to play a crap-shoot game to wait for seats to the sellout Nationals-Mets game to be "released" -- we had a swell time!

The game, a nice example of small ball, included a nifty double-play involving a throw out to home (guys, help me describe it right) and Nats pitcher Armas hitting safely to first (ah! the National League!). I made rather a mess of my scorecard, so here's MLB's box score. We had outstanding seats -- thanks John! -- on the 3rd base side, and were in place in time for the national anthem.

With 95 southbound still closed at 8 or so when we reached Quantico, we slipped over to Route 1. After three and a half hours, a startling number of Avril Lavigne songs, and only one bathroom break, we reached Mulberry Street, just as buckets of rain dumped down. I hope you guys had a nice swim to your cars, an uneventful drive home!

Geeking Out

Where to classify works on blogging, you ask? So does this librarian blogger, right here!

Random

Drifting around looking for different blogs to read, I found this via Laurabelle, whom I read on occasion. I think Charlie is right: I need to take off the link that says where I work if I want to feel better about telling goofy little patron tales. And I do want to tell more, 'cause they're fun to tell. I'm just still so smitten with having a job I like, that I like just seeing the North Park link over there on the right.

Sette (on 23rd - just north of Main -- important instructions I wish I had paid attention to yesterday so we wouldn't have had to wander so much) does indeed have good pizza, and a waitress who -- for a hipster place -- was very nice to the 11-year-old.

As well as the restaurant review, which was tougher than Mom & Dad's review, Style had a great back page item on Summer Heat, Get Over It -- a favorite theme of mine. I drove up 301 to work the other day -- because I had time after my World Cup breakfast and because it's a nice change -- and just giggled with delight that I am not in charge of summer camps any more. I never again have to have inane conversations about how my counselors are cruelly forcing children to drink water, or about how Jim Duncan said it will be too hot to breathe, today, so please keep my-little-darling in the air conditioning. Yeah, lady, her and all 100 other people on the property are going to fit in the tiny day camp office.