Finally bought a new desktop machine yesterday and it’s already resulting in new content. Specifically, that means photos (finally) from last year’s Great Canadian Road Trip:
More stuff to come.
The little websites that could but rarely do anymore™ turn 19 today.
A lot of the small updates have moved over to Twitter and the larger, more thoughtful updates seem to be in a holding pattern right now, but you never know what that coming year might bring.
Anyway, thanks to all of you who have hung around this long. I still think it’s been a pretty entertaining ride.
Because it’s more fun than thinking about the slightly depressing Mom-related thing I just finished doing, i will now think about travel.
I decided last night that I’m going to New York for Spring Break. It’s been more than a year, so it is way past time. It’s still relatively inexpensive in early March–although not as cheap as in January–and the climatological odds are more in my favor. So yeah. New York. I may run into streamlined ska librarians, craft beer bars in Jersey, and klav kalash with all the trimmings. It’ll be fun. Maybe I’ll actually get the pictures from last year’s trip posted before I go.
And I found out today that I have to be in the Bay Area the last week in June to present at the RBMS Pre-Conference in Oakland that’s held just before ALA. I’m not wild about the destination, but I’m planning to do what I need to do in SF and environs and then get the hell out of there and head for either Los Angeles or Seattle. This should be shortly after I submit my tenure portfolio, so I imagine I will be very much in need of a significant vacation at that point.
I also might drive down to Charlotte to go to IKEA and hit some thrift stores tomorrow but that’s not nearly as exciting, I guess…
On 7 February 1975, Belk opened its new 160,000 square foot department store in Greensboro’s Four Seasons Mall (now Four Seasons Town Centre). On opening day, the full-line department store featured not only the standard clothing and housewares departments, but also a “Sight and Sound” electronics department, a books and records department, a fabric and crafts section, a candy counter, and a Swiss Colony outlet.
When I was five or six years old, I loved Julia. Aspire TV is running it right now and I caught a couple of episodes this week. It reminded me that my first TV crush might have been on Earl J. Waggedorn, Corey’s best friend (left, with cereal bowl haircut). In retrospect, though, I now realize it wasn’t so much that I had a crush on him, but that I had a crush on his name.
One of these days, I’m going to show up on Facebook or Twitter as Earl J. Waggedorn. Watch for it.
Sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning watching the weekend “In the Heat of the Night” marathon. It’s like the last sixteen years never happened. Except:
- The marathon is on WGN now instead of TNT.
- I’m watching it from Greensboro rather than San Francisco.
- Both my TV and my living room are much bigger now.
- I’m not really craving cheap sex and didn’t watch anyone else having it last night.
There are probably several other minor changes too, but my coffee is ready now so they’ll have to wait.
Never really noticed this coincidence before. On 8 February 2000, I announced that I was going to be moving back eastward at some unspecified point in the future. Exactly five years later, I announced the actual move. It took a while, obviously, but here I am. And I still stand by my decision. As it happens, 8 February 2007 also was the start of my transformation into the librarian you know and love today.
Pretty good date, all in all.
I used to do these “five years ago, etc.” posts fairly often. I haven’t been doing them so much lately as I’ve been trying to focus on the present and the future. But I was looking for something tonight in reference to another post, and I got sucked in. So here you go…
(Adapted from a recent Facebook rant about this essay.)
San Francisco in 1992, when I moved there, was a deeply dysfunctional city. San Francisco in 2015, ten years after I departed, is still a deeply dysfunctional city, albeit in a very different way. I personally found the (early) 1990s dysfunction much more entertaining and inclusive than the current very expensive and corporate version. That’s probably because “pot truffles and hashish ginger snaps”, $4000/month studios, and hand-forged artisanal turnips from Bernal Heights are not really my thing.
While the author of seems only to remember the “sadness” that enveloped the Castro in the 1990s, the gay San Francisco I moved to in 1992 was actually a pretty happy place, one that was finally emerging from the darkness and paranoia of the 1980s and beginning to enjoy itself again.
I get that the author is trying to put a positive spin on change and question people’s assumptions about “the good old days” and how they were always “better” but the problem with this essay is that it mostly cites examples that say more about how much more sanitized and pretentious and wealthy the city has become in the past twenty years than about how much “better” it is. It may be a better place for many people, but not for me…not based on this essay, anyway.
I lived in San Francisco long enough that I’m allowed to have an opinion, but I’ve been gone long enough that no one has to pay any attention to it.
If you’re keeping up with such things, I’m having a great time in New York. Got to spend most of yesterday with my friend Dan, who — despite our only having been in the same physical space four times in the past 18 or 19 years — manages to be one of my closest friends and Who also bears some significant responsibility for my midlife career change. Ah, those interwebs the kids keep talking about…
I have eaten enough red meat to render my colon virtually useless and have taken many pictures, some of which you’ll get to see later. And so far, I’ve been really good about the books. I’ve only bought three. That may change.
Tomorrow night, it’s dinner with my friends Lori (who holds the unusual distinction of being the only person who has lived simultaneously in every city I have, if only for a few months) and Margo (who was the partial inspiration for one of my first major road trips way back in 1988). We will be frolicking in the Lower East Side, if you happen to be in the neighborhood.
I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years getting back in touch with old friends I missed and some I’d neglected. I can hardly express what a very good thing this has been.
I also have to admit that, while I’m not really a travel snob and don’t really need four-star (or even three-star) accommodations, it’s still a lot more fun being grown up and middle-class enough that I don’t have to stay in toilets and eat at McDonald’s. Just sayin’.
But damn, I take exhausting vacations…