For all of you who occasionally miss sleeping under mosquito netting... Hmm. Check out the Free Lance Star's article about Camp Kittamaqund. When I was living in Fredericksburg, it was difficult enough to get them to submit a blurb about a local scout receiving her Gold Award, and now they're printing whole articles about summer camp. I'm pretty pleased to see it.
Incidentally, and on a somewhat related note, why in the world has GSUSA decided that 14-17 year old girls can no longer have a name that classifies them within the organization. This years catalog simply referred to them as "Girls 14-17," and now the website is referring to them as "Studio 2B." I have to say that I'm not fond of the removal of the words "Girl Scout" from their online presence for that age group. What's up with that? So I understand that it's not exactly "cool" to be a Girl Scout, but somehow I just can't back the solution to that problem being removing the name from the group. Maybe I'm not looking at it from the right perspective.  ¶ 9:23 PM (2) comments

  Back to the grind... Well, classes start again today. In fact, I'm on campus, waiting to attend my first History of Libraries class. It should be interesting, particularly given the instructor. She's the reason I signed up for the class. In the meantime, work at NIEHS has been interesting. OCLC's Connexion service, which I use on a daily basis to try and catalog the innumerable documents and monographs that come into our possession, seems to have become demon-possessed over the last weekend. I can search and update our holdings, but I can't seem to download bibliographic or authority records at all, which is one of my primary responsibilities. Argh. I keep hoping it will heal itself. I'm not the only one having problems with it, which is comforting, yet still not satisfying.

In other news, I still need to comparison shop for textbooks on Amazon and vacuum my house. It's amazing how vacuuming is always the first thing to go when my schedule gets out of hand. Also, mom and dad got two new cats over the weekend. They've been saying for years that they wouldn't replace their pets as they aged. However, they finally lost their last cat about a month ago when Hercules succumbed to liver disease at 11. It was very sad. But I didn't figure they'd remain petless for long. Sure enough, they now have a male, 18 month, black bobtail cat and a female, 5 month grey tabby. Not sure on names yet. But Mom sent me pictures, and they're awfully cute.

Today's Weather: It's a lovely 80-some degrees here, and the undergrads are out in full force on campus tonight.

  ¶ 5:46 PM (0) comments

  Better late than never? Yahoo! has been spoiling the results of Olympic events for me all week. Today, as I look, they have installed a "Hide Olympic results on this page" checkbox. About damn time. I accidentally read about both Paul Hamm's win and Laura Wilkinson's near miss in qualification just by signing on. Oh well. You can bet I'll be checking that box now.  ¶ 3:05 PM (0) comments

  thoughts on hurricanes... So, with the remnants of Hurricane Charley having passed through, I thought I would take a moment to record some of the lessons I've learned about weather and the forecasting thereof...

1. Weather forecasting is an inexact science. A friend with a meteorology degree has reminded me of this fact on countless occasions. Still, it is apparent that I need to be reminded more frequently, as I seem to forget. If more than two forecasters concur that something significant will happen weather-wise, I still tend to believe them. That said, I'm more than pleased that we didn't get much in the way of wind. We had some serious rains - we probably got a couple of inches dumped on us yesterday. It was still a good day to stay inside.
2. Murphy's Law probably applies. It's very easy for me to invoke numerous cliches when thinking of my experience in getting ready for severe weather. Whenever I don't listen to the forecast, whenever I think, "This will probably miss us altogether," we end up with gale-force winds or 20 inches of snow and ice. When I listen, and go out to buy a two-gallon container of distilled water, replacement batteries, and non-perishable food for me and the cat, I usually don't end up needing it. My mother always says, "Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it." I suppose that she's right. Silly me, I'd still rather have things and need them. Otherwise, I've spent some money that could have been contributed to the Buy My Textbooks fund. (=
3. I must be some weird sort of weather thrill-seeker. In a weird, twisted way, I was looking forward to seeing what the storm would do. This used to happen at camp too. We'd be down at the Cove or out on the river, and it would start to look ominous, and I would get pretty excited at the possibility of watching a really nice thunderstorm. My campers noticed it, and some years it even seemed to rub off on them. Then, I mostly thought that if they saw someone who really enjoyed watching a storm, even when they didn't have the degree of shelter that they were used to at home, then they wouldn't be as likely to be scared. That's the thing with teenagers - they still get scared of thunderstorms, but they're not like Brownies, who let you know it. They try to pretend like they're not scared, and it can come out in all sorts of other emotional reactions. Anyway, when I heard about Charley's Category 4 status, and when it seemed almost certain that after traversing Florida it would come up the coastline and head straight for the center of North Carolina, I went into a mode not unlike my previous Thunderstorm Mode from camp. I was realizing this last night when, after the storm took a more easterly path, I was feeling a little let down. Grateful to have my power on, mind you, but still a little disappointed. Strange.

Today's Weather: Thanks largely to Charley, it's raining fairly heavily here. And last night I needed a blanket to stay warm. Interesting, for August in central North Carolina.  ¶ 9:49 AM (1) comments

  It's gonna be a long hurricane season... Here in the lovely city of Chapel Hill, we're officially experiencing some Hurricane Season weather today. Over the next few hours, we're expected to get about 3-6 inches of rain from Tropical Storm Bonnie, and then after about a 24 hour respite, we'll see some similar weather, possibly more severe, from Hurricane Charley.

Currently, we're in a thundering downpour. The kind that the drainage system in the parking lot at work has a hard time handling. I'm wondering whether I'll be able to walk across the lot to my car, or whether I'll have to wade!

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night shall keep me from my weekly knitting appointment at Weaver Street!

Good luck to anyone else in the storms' paths!  ¶ 4:14 PM (0) comments

  Interesting find of the weekend... A friend sent me to this site recently - it's a comparison of Harry Potter in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV) translation. If you're a word nerd like I am, it's definitely worth a look. I particularly liked looking through the translated titles of the made-up magical books throughout the series. It's interesting to look at the words that have direct counterparts in the various languages and those that don't, and how the different languages express the words that don't exactly come through translation without some alterations.  ¶ 9:57 PM (0) comments