Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:55 AM

Sigh...

Well, classes are over for the summer.

Ian's out of town with his dad at an inventor's conference hosted by the U.S. Patent Office, so I've got the house to myself (and Boopsie) until tonight.

To reward myself for completing all my classes, I treated myself to a copy of the new CD by Pink, and I'm buying myself a baby-doll T-shirt based on one of my favorite images from the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper.

After class ended, I checked out about a half-dozen books from the school library for pleasure reading, including a recommended biography of Shakespeare, The Death of Marlowe (1925, by the researcher who discovered the coroner's inquest), and a couple more books on British fairy folklore. Yesterday, I went up to the Wakefield library, where I grabbed five books in Kathy Lynn Emerson's Face Down mystery series. I want to run by the Cambridge Public Library today, because they have a new book about the Peshtigo Fire which I'm really interested in. [In 5th or 6th grade, I wrote a school paper on the fire; at that time, I had to go to the state archives because there really wasn't much info out there. I'm glad to see Peshtigo getting some notice, and I'm interested to see what these authors uncovered.] Yeah, it's a lot of reading, but all library books, so it's not costing me anything. [As I updated my Books Read page, I was horrified to discover that I went an entire week without completing a book. (There have been longer periods between books, such as the ten days between Edward II and John Adams, but they were still completed in two consecutive weeks.) I don't like the way that looks, so I'm setting a personal goal to try to read something every week.]

This afternoon, I may go to the free performance of Much Ado About Nothing in Boston Commons. Tomorrow, I'm definitely going to see Henry V. I'm so glad that I can find so many cheap ways to have a good time. My mother-in-law invited me over to swim yesterday afternoon with several of the family; we had some pleasant conversation, but unfortunately it started to rain shortly after I arrived, so I didn't get to swim.

Let's see, I know I promised to talk about our trip to the Balsams. First of all, the place is absolutely gorgeous, and the food was exquisite and all included on the tab. I couldn't really let go and enjoy myself completely because I was trying to work on my papers while there, but I still managed to squeak in some time for boating around the lake. And... there were hummingbirds, hummingbirds, hummingbirds! Have you ever seen hummingbirds up close!? Amazing! I sat and watched them for hours. I want one! (but apparently they're illegal to own as pets, so we'll just have to get lots of feeders). We definitely want to go back sometime when I'm not preoccupied with schoolwork. Spring and fall are the off season, where rates are cheaper, they don't have all the organized events (which we really didn't do anyway) and they mostly cater conventions and conferences. Assuming I'm employed by then, I'm thinking of going up for a few days after I get my degree in May.

That's about it. I'm taking the weekend to relax and then am diving back into heavy-duty job searching. Just for the heck of it, since I'm in such a natural break point, I decided to try a Tarot reading last night. You can read the results and my interpretation here.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:45 AM

I know I haven't posted in a while; classes end tonight, so I should be able to write more over the weekend.

In the meantime, if you want to see what I've been up to, I've just uploaded my final paper for Management class, on the USA PATRIOT Act and library management's responsibilities, to my website. That's right, you can actually read it here before I turn it into my professor.

Enjoy.