So hey, that Virgo Month of Leisure…  I guess if you call lying around a lot watching a bunch of movies leisure then I think I did a good job. The downside is that I did a lot of this because I have some sort of pinched nerve or pulled muscle in my shoulder and it makes doing things with my primary mousing arm a bit of a challenge, if not outright painful. I’ve mostly shut up about this online partly because I don’t want everybody’s helpful advice (trust me, I am doing all the things) but also because I’ve been spending a lot of time minimizing online time in general. I mean I still read and participate a little bit, but I mostly do it through touchscreen interfaces and speech to text, and pretty much have not touched a mouse in a week except what I need to do for class.

Class is going really well, except for the unfortunate aspect where I have to put together a bunch of slides and labs and exercises each week and spend a lot of time writing on the whiteboard which is suboptimal for healing. Students are neat and interesting, VTC is a great place to work, and it really is fun to have a place to go and do your job instead of sitting at home in pajamas where everything gets filtered through a technology hole of some sort. Real life people have their own sort of challenges, and it’s a different set of challenges than the ones that I deal with with my mostly Internet jobs.

I’ve been doing my share of stuff too. We did a table at Vermont ComicCon which was really well received and a bunch of fun. I just got back from an overnight trip to Bangor Maine where I got to give a talk to a bunch of enthusiastic librarians and got to see some beautiful scenery. I was interviewed for two separate podcasts this month, both of which I think are really interesting. And you can listen to them here.

• Circulating Ideas – talking about the next Librarian of Congress
• Rumblestrip Vermont –  talking about libraries and technology

The rest of the time I’ve been trying to stay idle which is hard. I have watched a lot of movies, I’ve read a lot of books, I’ve gone for some walks outside and sometimes just laid around and stared at the ceiling, and I’ve done stretching, a lot of stretching. The weird thing about whatever this injury is is that it’s kind of hard to narrow down what the specific thing is. And, of course, doing things like ComicCon and driving to Maine are not necessarily good for the shoulder, but are very good for morale (and the pocketbook).

So if I haven’t returned your email or done that thing I said I was going to do, it’s probably because it involves some sort of mouse work. My apartment is perfectly suited for just lying around and looking out the windows and watching the birds, unfortunately my brain is slightly less suited for that. I’ve got more stories to tell about birthday mascot suits and librarian cosplay, but it will have to wait a little longer until I’m back at the helm.