My quarter-long assignment in my Special Libraries class is to pick a company and design a library for them, including my role as their special librarian. Which means that I get to spend this entire quarter day-dreaming and designing my dream job, pretending that I work here:
This may be the most fun assignment I’ve ever had.
The only thing that could really make this quarter more fun is taking Nancy Pearl’s “Deconstructing Genre” class again.
For Spring Break this year I went to visit my sister in Dallas, and among the number of fun things we did was watch the BBC’s 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, which abounds with smoldering glances from the misunderstood John Thornton, played by Richard Armitage.
I had already seen and admired Mr. Armitage on the BBC series “Spooks”, which they play here in the U.S. as “MI-5”. In that series, like in North and South, he plays a tortured soul, haunted by memories of his past. Someday, perhaps, I will understand what exactly it is that makes the tortured soul so attractive.
I’ve also recently discovered the novels of Georgette Heyer, and while my appreciation for these novels is somewhat more reserved than my appreciation for the smoldering glances of immensely good-looking tortured souls, I have certainly enjoyed becoming acquainted with them. They are a delightful distraction from the day-to-day.
Imagine my joy upon discovering that Richard Armitage recently recorded three of Georgette Heyer’s novels for Naxos AudioBooks (The Convenient Marriage, Sylvester, and Venetia)!
It would also appear that these are available from Amazon.
I’m just saying…I do have a birthday. In July.
These shoes and I are ready to go to Dallas!
New shoes!
The salesman was good enough to tell me that they weren’t meant to be worn with hosiery. Indeed.
Why is it that February, the shortest month of the year, always feels like one of the longest? This year, February has been the month of interminable winter.
Just this past Wednesday, we were hit with a snowstorm. Foolishly, I chose to disbelieve the forecast and to defy the promised snow by wearing my better black flats to work. This was a mistake. I also chose to wear my less-warm coat and failed to include mittens in the outerwear ensemble, which made brushing the snow off my car after work even more delightful than that particular chore typically is. By Thursday morning, we had about a foot of snow, and the temperatures had plummeted to truly frigid depths. When I left for work on Friday morning, it was four degrees: sunshine, blue sky, and four degrees.
I’ve been meaning to enliven the blog with photographs, and while the sunshine and the snow was quite pretty — picturesque, even — I just couldn’t bring myself to photograph snow in late February, especially not in four-degree temperatures.
One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost talks about a reluctance to yield to “the drift of things”, the inevitable passage of time and the changing of seasons; but I don’t know that he really meant it about winter. I think maybe about the time February reached its middle, Mr. Frost might have been just as ready to see the end of winter as I am, right now.
Ms. Grammarian 