Fall into Fall!

Fall is here and in fact, nearly gone! It's been a good one albeit extremely busy too. I picked pumpkins, hosted a cocktail party, inflamed my cornea, celebrated my favorite holiday, and almost been crush by the sheer amount of school work!

The next few weeks will be dedicated to finishing out this semester and trying not to pull my hair out. Below are pictures of my exploits!

Food spread at our cocktail party including stuffed mushrooms and graveyard cake

Pumpkin rum punch!

Babies in a pumpkin patch

Broadway: American Idiot

Wednesday evening, Lis got us discount tickets from the TKTS booth for American Idiot, Green Day's rock opera about punk rock kids in suburbia. The show was most excellent and brought a tear to my eye, recalling my own youth spent in anger and angst in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. The set was really awesome and the choreographer was extremely creative in the use of ariel space and the floor to ceiling rigging that dotted the set.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good video of the show, but I did find a number performed on David Letterman.

Fame!

I finally found the video of me being interviewed at Coney Island! My quote is available 0:28 seconds in the clip!

Urban Tornado!

Yo, Toto! We are definitely not in Kansas, but apparently the tornado gods don't discriminate.

A tornado/fierce storm hit New York yesterday, mainly affecting the Park Slope/Bed-Sty area of Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens where one woman was killed. My neighborhood wasn't affected, but it did screw up the trains for the whole city, so it took me two hours to get home. It took 40 minutes to get from 14th st to Essex st (normally a 6 minute ride), another 30 minutes standing around waiting in various stations, and then a 45 minute walk from the Lower East Side to my house. Luckily we live not too far from the Williamsburg Bridge; I shudder to think about what would've happened had I still lived in Ridgewood.

Here's some of the damage in Park Slope:


(C) New York Times

Moved in

After two and half long weeks, we are finally moved in! We still need a couple of odds n' ends, but we are done for the most part. Courtesy of my boss, who was also moving and getting rid of most of her old furniture, we now have a sofa, love seat, coffee table, floor lamp, and bookshelf...almost more furniture than our small living room can handle.



Kara arrived on the third and is adapting well. We are having a good time!

New Apartment!

It's official! I've found a new apartment, signed the lease, and put down a deposit. My new place is in Williamsburg, smack in the middle of the JMZ, L, and G trains which are the three trains I need to take to get pretty much everywhere in my life. It's also within walking distance of some really great restaurants, bars, and other fun stuff. All my commute times are getting slashed in half and I am now two stops from Manhattan.

I'm moving in with Kara, my former roommate from Seattle, and Mindy, who is one of my library school friends. I am very excited! This week is all about packing up my things and then moving this weekend.

ALA 2010 Conference

I just got back from the American Libraries Association Conference in Washington D.C. late last night. It was fantastic! I went down with my girlfriend from library school, Lis. This was our first library conference and we had no idea what to expect!

First on Saturday, we went to see the legendary Nancy Pearl speak....err, sorta. What it really turned out to be was Nancy Pearl interviewing a filmmaker who just made a documentary about the filming of To Kill A Mockingbird. Interesting, but not really what we thought we were going to. Next we went to a panel of romance writers. Now, I've never read any romance, and I wasn't particularly excited for this program, but it sounded more interesting than anything going on during the same time slot. However, it ended up being one of the best programs of the weekend! Every writer (there were six total) discussed their writing process and how the library related to that. Typically, I am immersed in conversation about libraries from a librarian's point of view, so it was interesting to hear about libraries from an author's viewpoint. My own bias made me assume that romance writers were vastly overweight middle aged single women who lived with their cats in a fantasy world where Prince Charming would really show up on their doorstep on a white steed. Instead, all of the women were very intelligent, articulate, and very funny! They came from a variety of backgrounds, including one who is a published professor of art history. Other programs attended include: the Feminist Task Force's Introduction to Women's Issues, Career Development for New Librarians, and Self-Censorship. The opening remarks were given by Toni Morrison, who is a fabulous speaker. She told a story about how she first "learned the brutal power of words". She truly is a wordsmith with amazing delivery and her speech was really one of the weekend highlights.

Sunday, we decided to conquer the exhibits hall, which featured 42 aisles of exhibitors, of which we had barely made a dent in visiting Saturday, despite three trips to the hall. The exhibits included everything from job recruiters to library furniture, to book ATMs, to database vendors, but the best part was definitely the 10 aisles of publishers. There was everything to the big publishing houses like Random House, Harper Collins, & McGraw-Hill, to tiny independent presses. They were giving away books like candy, and Lis and I both made a killing! Many of the novels we received aren't even out yet, and we are both excited to dive in to them. We concluded our conference weekend by attending the sixth annual Book Cart Drill Team Champions ships, where four teams from every corner of the U.S. competed with their book cart dancing...yes, I said book cart dancing, librarians know how to really blow off some steam!