Max continues to get up several time during the night and managed to, for the past two mornings, end up in bed with us without knowing until it was too late. I swear he's now hardwired to get up and stumble over (with incredibly ninja stealthing abilities) to our room.

Listening to Pink Floyd's "Coming Back to Life". I remember listening to this in university, alone in my dorm room. It starts out as a very "pity me", "how could you" kind of song but then turns into "Damn straight, screw you, I'm gonna make it" kind of song.

Did a HUGE literature search for a faculty member/resident/grad student (not sure really... it's very complicated... LOL) yesterday on zinc. Yes zinc. That's pretty much all I had to go on. Rather broad don't you think. Just RCTs and reviews of course, but still. Now you're jealous of my fantabulous job, aren't you?

The fire alarm went off yesterday... Thank GAWD it was a pretty nice day, weather-wise.

Found out that a co-worker of mine is pregnant. Congratulations and good luck and all that, yeah, yeah... go on maternity leave already so I can stay at Bracken a little longer please!!! LOL

Watched a couple webcast/webinars today. One on the databases Expanded Academic ASAP and Academic OneFile (didn't learn much new, already played around with them a few weeks ago), but the other one was about getting new knowledge to clinicians more and faster (see a summary of the session). We thought, "Hey, that sounds like libraries should and would be involved in that. Nope. He didn't really put librarianship in too flattering a light. In fact, he put us in a column of other "ways for doctors to stay current that DON'T work". Thanks, Bri.

But in a way I agree with him. We don't do enough. We do a lot of work, and, what we do, I think we do well. But when it comes to pushing the information out to the users, changing people's minds about the value of good research practices, helping answer the questions that people have and may not even know that they have, we're not pushing hard enough. Most of the time we're not pushing at all. We need to be proactive, to be out there in people's faces, showing them that we exist, that we are valuable, and that we want to help. We can't always wait for them to come to us. That may sound odd from a librarian, but we need to be "loud and proud" and prove out worth. But it will take more work and smarter work for us to do it. But we can. I hope we will.

Labels: family, librarianship, music, thoughts, work

Funny rain today.

My 2 year old son woke up, like, a million times through the night, and, as usual, got out of bed, left his room and came into our room to climb into bed with us. We're not having any more of it so we had to get up too, every time, to take him back to his own bed.

Since my ears were on full alert, listening for the tell-tale squeak of his bed to tell me I've got to get out of bed again, the incredibly loud thunder scared the hell out of me, conjuring images of furniture falling on my son as he stumbles around in the dark.

Then it doesn't really rain that hard all day (of course, how can I tell, the nearest I can see a window from my office would require me to lean out my doorway and squint 30 meters or so) but seems to wait until I have to walk to my car on my way home.

As I've said before probably, I like the rain. And it's nice to have a change of weather after so much cold and snow. Of course, I like snow too. I like the weather people grumble about the most.

I'm listening to Tori Amos' cover of Billy Holiday's "Strange Fruit" right now. It strangely fits into talk about the rain. It's a sad story about... well I'll let the lyrics speak for themselves:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Here's the allmusic.com review for the piece.

Labels: family, music, work

Ok, I did it. This is what my blog used to look like. But only in IE. If you saw it in FireFox you would break down and cry.

I liked this template. The image was randomly displayed out of a bunch of "blue" images: a blue bus, a blue sky, a blue tablecloth, the drawing shown in this screenshot, etc. And I liked the layout of everything but I've gotten bored of it, I'm switching the whole concept of my blog, it wasn't FireFox-friendly, and didn't leave room for all the cool things I'm going to put in now. You just wait and see...

Labels: internet

Notice a change? I've just applied one of those Blogger style templates (titled Mr. Moto, I think) to my site to clean it up and make it FireFox readable while I work on a new template of my own. I've include a screenshot of it here so that when I do finally update it, I will have a record of this temporary state of affairs.

Damn. I should have got a screenshot of the way it looked before! Hmmm... Maybe I still can. Wait and see.

Labels: internet

Borg nanoprobes are real! Very very basic of course but the development of the technology has begun.

What a great time to be alive! LOL

Labels: reading