A Miscellany

We've found a new Latin American restaurant right here in Moore!  It's wonderful!  Amazonia Latin Flavors is on 12th Street across Janeway from Parmele Park.  The food is SO good!  The people are nice, too!  We've already been twice.  Can't get dessert too often, or I'll have to exercise 2 hours a day just to break even!

 One Week Later: 
Just got back last night from my week in Austin, TX at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference.  My colleagues and I had a great time, and learned a LOT.  Now I have to sit down and digest all that good info into useful chunks that perhaps our library system can find useful.  Also have to fill out an expense report for the reimbursable things.  (Meals.)

Not this weekend, though.  Today I had laundry and yard work to do.  Tomorrow I will finish laundry and of course, go sing at church.  It is also the 20th anniversary of the  Murrah building bombing.My thoughts will be on what happened 20 years ago, not on the conference just past.  Monday is soon enough to go over my notes and get them typed up.

Looking chubby for some reason at TXLA2015

Some observations from my trip:

And through the grey cool damp
We climb
And find once again
That the sun still shines
In spite of turbulence
And pain
Hope shines forth
For all again.

Wrote it as we climbed above the clouds as we were leaving for Austin.  Funny though, it fits the story of our recovery from the bombing, too.  We have climbed past the dark and pain, and hope and light fill our city again.

It's nice when an airline can keep its cool and just reschedule you around weather delays.

Adventures are fun but I prefer my cozy nook and my books.

It's really hard to write legibly when there's turbulence.

Need to develop a "Captain Obvious" character for our library videos.

For me, flying seems to be a diuretic.  Alas.

It's cool when your celebrity friends acknowledge your tweets.

Twitter withdrawal:  It's a Thing.

I may be a fussbudget, I may just be.  But I'm organized!!

Scenes from a walk to the conference from the hotel.

Austin is weird, but it's a beautiful kind of weird.

Bluebonnets growing close to the sidewalk in downtown Austin.

My great adventure, wherein I was bitten or stung by some obstreperous insect or arachnid.

How the bite looked the night after.

Library people are the best people there are - helpful, friendly, and caring.  (Except when it's a race for the free book table.  Then all best are off!)

Jewelry vendors do very well at library conferences.  (Heavily female crowd, mostly far from home with no time to go shop away from the conference... and you are selling shiny things!)

Trying to write a coherent report on this conference is going to be like trying to force the ocean through a tiny little funnel.  It's not all going to fit!

Digital citizenship session

Tomorrow is the day I will try to wrap my head around the fact that it has been 20 years since the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in down town Oklahoma City, just two blocks away from the church we attend.  So much has happened since, we've all grown so much since then.
Monday is soon enough to write my conference notes.  Tomorrow is for the remembering of the bombing, and tonight is for relaxing.

Further Reflections On My Trip and Return

One thing that amazed me is how many people ignore the view out the airplane window.  Do they fly so often that it now fails to amaze them?  I can understand if it is night time, or there are lots of clouds (though I enjoyed the cloud formations we flew above on Saturday morning), but on a clear, sunny day?  I'm glued to the window, watching the miniature world scroll by.  Farms, towns, factories, suburbs, vast stretches of apparently empty space.  It's all interesting to me.  I don't get to fly all that often, and the perspective gained by viewing our civilization from a distance can be heady stuff.  Our world really is pretty small, no matter how big it feels from down here.  What we do to the land matters, it shows up even from a distance. 

Though I like flying, and I like seeing new things, I don't like being away from my base of operations that much.  It unsettles me.  I guess I haven't found a good way to take it with me yet.  Ever since I got back, this song has been playing in my head, and refuses to be exorcised, no matter what.
Traveling Wilburys: Inside Out

The weeds in Alabama could probably rival the plants in Australia for vindictiveness and danger. Most of the vines I had to remove from in and on my mother's azalea hedges had HUGE thorns.  They are carnivorous, actively seeking the slight bit of bare skin between my long pruning gloves and my shirt sleeve.  I have multitudinous scratches and puncture wounds on my elbows.  I also ran afoul of the top of the chain link fence.  I was grateful over and over again for the tetanus shot I got shortly after the tornadoes.  At least I knew I was protected from disease.  Much antibiotic cream and cortisone cream have helped the scratches start to heal.  I also have bruises all over me.  Branches that argued with me, things that poked me through the sheet we used to transport our clippings to the curb, the abominable fence, my own pruners, these are the things that bruised me.  Stumps of old shrubs bruised my knees when I tried to kneel on them to reach the roots of some weeds. Also, I don't know if it is the bending and lifting I did while at Mom's or the vigorous workouts I've done since I got home, but my leg muscles are sore.  Something has worked them hard!

As hard as my sister and I worked every day, I still missed being really active.  I missed my walks and my elliptical time.  I listen to music and just move it when I am walking or using the elliptical.  Gets my blood pumping, and gets my heart rate up.  All that yard work was not aerobic.  Didn't benefit my heart or lungs much.  (In fact, being up close and personal with so much pollen was not so good for my allergies.  I am still living on antihistamines and eye drops.)
I also missed my regular clothes.  I had only yard work clothes at Mom's, except for the outfit I wore on the plane to and from.  None of my yard work clothes is the right size any more.  Most are about two sizes too big.  I felt really odd wearing those clothes every day.  (Although it was a bit of an ego boost, knowing how tight those clothes USED to be!)

REALLY missed my singing.  I just get lost in my songs and in the challenge of making my voice do what it needs to do to function properly.  Just couldn't do that at Mom's.  (Sister's snide comments didn't help, either.)  Voice lesson today was a challenge because I went so long without practice, and haven't really had time to practice much since I got home.  Once I found my groove, though, things went pretty well.

Since I got home, we have been OD-ing on the Pacific Rim Blu-Ray.  Lots of really neat extras on that set of discs, and we've been working our way through all of them.  I really love that movie.  It's just NEAT!!  (Added bonus, Ron Perlman is in it, and his daughter Blake  composed and performed a song for the closing credits .)

Matt framed our art posters that we bought at Dallas ComiCon Fan Days.  They look good in our hall.  Finally have art that really reflects our lifelong interests.

A Hellboy as an adolescent painting, and Gipsy Danger fighting a Kaiju by Devin Kraft of Cheshire Cat Art.  We met him at the con, and gave Ron Perlman a smaller print of the Hellboy painting as a token of our esteem.  (We thought it was cute.)






Here is a picture of a frog on the back wall of Mom's house.  May be a little blurry, it's zoomed in.

Here's the front of Mom's house after we got done taming the azaleas.


















When I got home, my Boot Campaign boots were waiting for me.  These boots are sold as a fundraiser for a program that gives aid to servicemen and women returning from overseas.  I bought them to support the cause, and to reward myself for a 30 pound weight loss since I started this effort in January.

Speaking of my weight loss, here are some before and after photos to give a little perspective on how much difference 30 pounds makes.

This is me at 168 pounds.

And this is me at 138 pounds.  BIG difference, eh?  Biggest difference is in how I feel and in the numbers on my health records.  BP lower, Cholesterol lower, everything looking good!









Guess that's about all for this outing.  I have wandered around in the wilderness long enough.  Hope you enjoyed the trip.