"Alone, alone, oh! We have been warned about solitary vices.
Have solitary pleasures ever been adequately praised?
Do many people know that they exist?" - the other Jessamyn West
It's feast or famine around here. While the "eat less food, exercise more" plan is easy and doesn't involve any wild swinging one way or the other, the travelling thing is not as stable. I came back from DC/BWI with a tickle in my throat that soon turned in to a football behind my sinuses and then became a copious flood of blech from my nose. It's gone now. All I had to do was sit and write, mostly, so it was not difficult to manage. Garlic, ginger, Nyquil, sleep, water. One of the bits of wisdom that seems to come with age is being able to recognize when something you're dealing with is "more of the same" and when it requires a different sort of attention. Odd to think that anything here could be "more of the same" but there it is. I went from having people to talk to almost every waking minute of my days, to having most of my conversations come out of my fingers instead of my mouth. Rattling around this house has been satisfying. The baby birds are out with their haphazard feathers eating all the sunflower seeds, and I saw a fox cross the road.

I head to Boston this evening to go to the wedding of some dear friends and then off to Chicago to do a one-day training for librarians on tech support and power searching. I'm a good communicator about tech support stuff, but I'm less confident with my power searching, compared to everyone else out there. I've been struggling to put what I know into words and slides, when what I really want to do is sit down with everyone and learn as I teach. This would happen to me sometimes when I was teaching tech skills in Romania a decade ago. People would stay after class to talk to me, but they seemed to want me to pour knowledge into their heads. They didn't have questions, they just wanted answers. I never knew what to do in that situation. I assumed it had something to do with the weird post-Socialist state that Romania found themselves in, in the post-Revolution 90's, where learning had always been something that people in power deigned to parcel out to chosen acolytes in tiny increments. It's a hard mindset to undo. Librarians aren't like that usually, but sometimes they are.

I was on a podcast yesterday, talking about libraries and nerdy geek stuff, and MetaFilter. I don't know if you're into the wholepodcast thing, but if you are, you might like the Library Geeks Post-Social episode, a production of my friend Dan over at OneBigLibrary.