OK. In the middle of the night I realized my cunning plan might have a flaw in it. I am so curious about how these blogs work, and I am naive. What would happen if I simply wrote the words "Santa Fe Public Library"? This is another test, at 19:21. Tomorrow I will try hyperlinks, and perhaps the next day, inflammatory language! (Is this just my pain talking?)

What! Twice in one day. I am going to have to write short posts more frequently in order to get back in the habit, and so I don't get too tired. When I have more two-handed mobility, I will start attempting to put pictures up too. One of my presents for Christmas was a package of rechargeable batteries for the little digital camera that Ulric gave me last year. Fortunately he also gave me a charger. I have a few details to master and then WHAM... you shall be dazzled.

And now, I have a cunning plan, as Baldrick would say. I am going to link to one of the few blogs that I check every day, the library blog that is my model for what a library blog should look like. Here it is, ICARUS.

The cunning plan has to do with ascertaining whether the ICARUS master picks up this reference to the blog and if so, how long will it take for there to be some response. It is about 6:15 Eastern Standard Time, or to be more exact,18:15.

My last post was on the evening before a big change in my life. I had not a clue as to what the morning would bring. In a nanosecond, a patch of invisible black ice transformed me into a one-handed person. My right wrist, my write hand, had been broken in 5 places. Surgery was on the 19th. Thank goodness for Brigid, my sainted sister, who took me in for surgery. Ivanhoe has been very, very supportive, and my friends and colleagues are truly wonderful. And I am learning to augment the use of my left hand with...teeth, right elbow, and either foot (usually not both at the same time.) I can wash my own hair, but I cannot file my nails easily. I cannot drive, at least not yet. (I have a stick shift.) Why am I writing this? It is hard to write anything nuanced while pecking the words out with three fingers. But I guess there are those who have written whole novels by tapping a keyboard with a stick in their mouth.

But an inspiration for me is one of my favorite illustrators, Glen Rounds. I had noticed that his more recent work was bold, with heavier black outlines than his previous pen-and-ink drawings. And in some illustrations one could detect that elements had been cut out and pasted in. But they were still wonderfully and unmistakably by Glen Rounds. Later I learned that
he had had a stroke and subsequently learned to draw with his non-dominant hand. I think he had been a right-hander, but his illustrations remind me forceably of my father's drawings, and Dad was a lefty. Brigid says my left-handed printing reminds her of Dad's printing, though he had a flowing cursive (usually.)

Right now I wanted to record a different on-line trnslation site which worked a lot better for me than the babelfish site did, at least for German to English.

I am continuing to have problems with my WILL (as in, motivation to do things, though I also have lacked the will to make a will, I admit.) Nevertheless, though I deserved no reward, I endulged in a movie tonight at the AFI (American Film Institute). I am not sure whether it was a movie or "un film" - Good Night... and Good Luck about Edward R. Murrow. It was obviously very timely ...and very, very sobering. The audience sat in silence at the end, just sitting there watching the credits.

The Ricardo said afterwards "Nobody is saying these things the way Edward R. Murrow said them -with simple eloquence." But then we remembered Bill Moyers.

OK - third attempt today to write something.

It is snowing here and thus we needed to cancel our library program tonight. Not that the weather was insurmountable, but enough people wussed out that we postponed it.

Life was rather slow in the library this evening and I actually resorted to playing solitaire ( I had forgotten how) in between chapters of a book which is actually quite good, but whose title I have forgotten. What a mess am I!

There was a message on my work machine today, from the children's librarian in Santa Fe, giving me the name of their director. It seems rather odd that when one goes to the library website, there is no place for finding out who the staff are or if there is a human resources division. But with some careful sleuthing and extrapolation from my own situation, I realized that the library is a division of the city government and probably all job postings and hirings get filtered through the city HR department. At least I know now that they have a new library director, Patricia Hodapp, who (I think) used to be with the Denver Public Library. She is also an artist and is on the board of Pandas International. I can relate to this since one of my young colleagues is totally obsessed with the new panda cub at the National Zoo. The baby's live cam is bookmarked on the toolbar of our Library's reference computer.

What should I report first? This is the second Sunday of Advent. I cannot find my most precious box of Christmas things, though I have put up the large Creche (inn, etc with lots of camels from the East}.

This afternoon I participated in the Advent/Midwinter Garden at our Waldorf nursery school. We filed into a dark and hushed room with only lyre music playing softly and one candle burning in the middle of a spiral path outlined by evergreens. We adults watched with glistening eyes as each child walked the path into the center, lit his/her candle (mounted in an apple) from the center candle, and placed it somewhere on a silver star along the spiral. I am sure the parents were a bit tense ... "Will my child know what to do? Oh, agony, her candle went out and she is going back to re-light it!" We teachers, on the other hand, apart from our eagle gaze that no-one set himself ablaze, etc.. watched each time to see how this particular child is incarnating. How does he or she move toward the light? What happens after the candle is lit? How confidently/slowly/ thoughtfully/ impetuously/ does this child bring the apple cum candle home to its star, and where on the spiral does the child place the apple? It is not that one analyzes all of this.... just noticing!

And then old friends over for supper, some of it left-overs (or carry-forwards, a useful concept from the Trinidadians). What a jolly evening. Lynn and I hardly mentio9ned politics (what a change from our customary conspiracy theories, perhaps because it all is so over the top these days) but she did Totally Agree that living in Washington is NO WAY TO LIVE.

Aha. Two postings in one day. I have decided currently to go for quantity, not quality. Mozart is blaring in the background as my house-mate tries to recreate the score of the 2005 movie version of Pride & Prejudice,which stubbornly refuses to reveal the originals of the soaring music in the background. Ahhh. I love each and every Mr. Darcy. Am I so fickle - or am I so very, very loyal?

OK. So now I need a link in this posting to make it worth your while, dear accidental reader. Today at work I was busy (totally busy work, believe me) translating the computer-use policy into German. Aaaaargh. Finally I was introduced to a short-cut. You still need a decent conversance with the language into which you are translating. But this is a nifty aid, believe me. The trick is to write the English into straight-forward, non-slangish language before pressing the button to translate.

The Mozart swells in the background as I reveal this wonderfully powerful tool to you, gentle reader.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Voila! Mozart sublime.

I just got home from a day at work. 8 hours of serving "the public." Among "the public," however, were old friends - a wonderful poet, craigy-faced and handsome, who looks like he could be a cowboy but has a passionate soul (though I guess some cowboys are of the poetic passionate soul genre); a old friend/journalist who has recently adopted a teen-aged girl who was a child/soldier in Sierra Leone and who is now flourishing in the barren soil of Blair High School - so perhaps it is not totally barren; etc etc. Those were the two connections that come instantly to mind from the 8 hours of manning the Desk. There were more. A few frustrating encounters, but that is to be expected. I am so fortunate... and so exhausted.