It’s been two years now since I started this blogging journey.  I’ve spent a bit of time looking back over the things I’ve written, and there are a few posts I’m quite proud of.  Others are a bit mundane, but I suppose that’s the nature of the beast.

I started blogging because I felt I should.  I now blog because I enjoy it, though I’ve noticed that as life gets busy, the blog posts drop precipitously.  Probably not such a bad thing.  Over-stressed navel-gazing is not all that entertaining.

And so here we are, faced with another year.

It will be an interesting one, though hopefully not in the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” sense.  I know that I’m counting the hours until the Iowa primary is over, as I’m becoming increasingly irritated with all of the political ads.  (Rochester is close enough to the Iowa border that the local news covers southeastern Minnesota and Iowa, hence the plethora of earnest ads.)  It will be interesting to see who emerges from both parties as the final candidates.

Both DH and I turn 50 this year, which seems incomprehensible.  My knees tell me otherwise.  I’ve asked DH for a trip to Ireland for my 50th birthday, and being the wonderful husband that he is, he agreed.  Can’t wait.

I’m not sure how the world of libraries will change in the coming year - if at all.  It seems that we are one of those bastions of civilization that changes a bit to keep up with the times, but the fundamental purpose stays the same.  I’ve often posited that librarians and libraries have two main functions: 1) get stuff and 2) organize it so folks can find it.   You can pretty it up with fancy names and organize it in interesting ways, and you can use different tools and delivery systems, but the basics are just those two.  We get stuff, and we organize it so folks can find it.  We are the keepers of the information.  I can’t imagine that function will grow less important in the coming year.

So, Happy New Year to all.  Here’s to many more for all.

I just realized how long it’s been since my last post.  Been one of those months, I guess.

We’ve been getting ready for Christmas, and are now organizing for the drive home.  We’re missing the Yukon, though - packing three dogs, suitcases, and Christmas gifts in the Trailblazer is a bit of a tight fit.  A bit nicer on the gas mileage, though.

For many years now I’ve done the lion’s share of my Christmas shopping on the internet.  It’s much less stressful - you choose what you want, order it, and a nice UPS person drops it at your doorstep.   No trolling for a parking space, no fighting crowds, no aimless wandering through mall hell trying to decide what to buy.  I must admit, huge crowds and malls make me cranky.  I’m sure DH much prefers me this way.

One of the gifts this year is a car seat for our darling granddaughter, at DSD’s request.  I was rather appalled at how expensive those things are, and that got me wondering about how we’ve so legislated our lives.  I know DH and I are old but we managed to survive in cars that not only lacked car seats, but didn’t have seat belts.  I suppose there was the occasional horrible accident, but all in all our generation survived just fine - and lots of us were sitting on our mother’s laps in the front seat.  Now we’ve told young parents that they MUST have these seats for their children, or they’re horrible people.  And the seats now have to be provided for kids up to 4′9″.  God, I would have been in a car seat until I was 12.  It’s getting a bit crazy.  And for young parents who barely are making ends meet, mandating a car seat that can run $100 or more is just nasty. </rant>

On the work front, MPOW was just awarded a huge grant from the folks at ALA and FINRA.  Work starts on that in February, and I’ll be heading to ALA Midwinter for a day-long workshop to learn about the grant and its administration.  I wish I was in Philadelphia longer - I’m a history lover and have never visited Philly.  One of these days DH and I will have to wander through the colonies and visit the nation’s history.

And on a final personal note, blessings and congratulations to my sister Judy and her husband Greg on their 25th wedding anniversary.  Their wedding day was an unusual one for Wisconsin - it was so warm I didn’t even wear a coat to the church.  It was lovely for us, but a real disappointment to Greg’s brother.  Greg and his family lived in Florida, and his younger brother Mike couldn’t wait to see snow for the first time.  Oh, well.

The reception was at Mom and Dad’s place, and they had decorated the house in a more formal way than we normally do for Christmas, so the decorations doubled as lovely wedding decor.  Mom even got a number of lifelike doves to put on the tree.  The only problem was that their dog at the time was a 6-month old Irish Setter named Casey.  Casey was a natural birder - a real case of how the breeding influences the dog’s behavior.  (She once flushed a robin from a bush and presented it - unharmed but dripping wet - at my mother’s feet.)  Casey thought it was her duty to rescue us from all of those doves.  We’d come home from work to find dove carnage all over the living room, and a tired but satisfied Irish Setter in the midst of the mess.  Mom must have gone back and bought doves two or three times before she finally gave up.  I think by the wedding day there were one or two doves on the top of the tree, out of Casey’s reach.

Happy 25th, guys!

And if I don’t wander back on here before then, a very Merry Christmas to All!  I hope you’re blessed with friends and family, with love and laughter, and with all of the magic of the season.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can now see Santa at his workshop via webcam.  The folks at Neatorama alerted me to this, well, neat thing.

Santa Claus keeps his office in Santa Claus Village near Rovaniemi, Finland (a part of Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle). He welcomes visitors year round, but if you can’t go, you can watch via webcam! There are two office webcams, inside and outside. Santa doesn’t work 24 hours a day, so mind the time difference in Finland. You cannot judge when it’s night by the outside webcam, since the sun will not rise in the Arctic Circle for weeks.

Go ahead and take a look!