Packed Days

Gainesville

Ah good, the "Draft" posted in its proper sequence. Blogger takes the date/time from when the post was started, not when it's sent. It can be overridden, but in this case it works as intended.

I am drained from putting in five overlong days at the tank. Between cooking and trying to keep up with minimal routines, there's been no time for reading, blogging, or napping. Very sleep deprived. After getting home from Outback last night and getting the evening routines started, I crashed bigtime. Probably a good thing, as we needed to be at work very early this morning, and I never would have made it through the day without that extra couple of hours down time.

The staff picnic was today-- the one that infamous poster was for. That same image was printed (in black and white) on all the tickets to the event! It will live long in library lore. People were expecting Bill to be behind one of the grills doing his Samurai Chef act, but he chose to be low key. I, on the other hand, wore a t-shirt with a yellow triangle sign reading: "CAUTION: HOT LIBRARIAN" (which Bill bought me at ALA one year). A bit less low key.

There has never been a more perfect day in the history of the world for a picnic than today-- sparkling clear blue skies, a slight breeze, temps in the low 70's. Unbelievable! Obviously whatever voodoo John, the Director in charge of this thing, was doing all week worked like a charm. Plus, it's term break, so all the kiddies are gone, and we had the whole Plaza space to ourselves. By far the best one of these I've ever been to. No flies or other crawlies! Good food too-- they've got that part down by now.

Good news on the auto front: it seems the Ford dealership has found us a car in a nearby state that has everything we want except the color-- always the LEAST of my worries. Instead of our first choice (Titanium Green) it is our second choice (Silver). It should be here tomorrow or Monday at the latest. Okay, NOW I've got my hopes up! I will be disappointed and let down if it falls through. But it looks promising, indeed.

I was in the office yesterday solely because of the comics that were to be delivered by Randy, the librarian at Michigan State. Surprise! He showed up right on schedule, and instead of 10 boxes, he brought 15-- and they were large boxes exactly configured to hold a couple hundred comics standing on end. Wow! As it turned out, I was the one to meet/greet him, as I'd given him my cell phone number. Our loading dock was inaccessible, since they had a backhoe there to repair a pipe that had been obviously leaking for weeks-- (why THAT day??) so it was a bit of logistical challenge to get them unloaded and into the building, but we managed.

When Randy called, he told me he was the guy who looks like Santa Claus, and he did-- and of course as far as our comics collection, he IS Santa. He told us he could have brought 60-80 boxes, if he'd had room--!! There is already talk of renting a van and driving up there to pick stuff up. MSU has a policy of keeping two copies of each comic, and giving the rest away. They apparently get tons of stuff because they're the premier comics library. He said he hadn't gone through it looking for "value," so there are probably rare gems hidden in there. I feel so happy to have been a part of this transaction. It all happened because in the course of writing that "Springsteen in Comics" paper, I chanced on a reference to "Bruce Springchicken" in a comic parody, "Peter Porker, the Incredible Spiderham," and found that MSU had a copy. I wrote to Randy, he sent me the image, learned of UF's growing comics program, and...

Well, enough of my hobby horse. (Speaking of which, I have on order what looks to be a very delightful comic adaptation of Tristram Shandy, Sandy...) And let the record show I posted a comment to Charles Hatfield's blog, going on record as interested in working on a genre study of funny animals. You can see that the last few days have been packed.

I didn't get a chance to post your Thursday blog til now, Mom. I will give it a try when I'm done here, and try to get it sequenced properly. I continue to marvel at all the neat stuff in that baby book. It must have been Cordie's mom doing most of it. The entries are so random-- it's very blog-like in that respect, especially the kind of time-surfing blog we have here.