I'm gonna make me a whole deck....

Where do trading cards originate from? After doing no research and little bit of thinking, I believe I know the answer: baseball cards.* Baseball cards I can relate to. I grew up with them. I even collected them for a while. Several of the greats are represented in my dad's collection (obviously, being a ballgame listener, he collected the cards too): Ty Cobb, Ted Williams...okay, I know that there are way more, but my brain is failing me today.

You can imagine my excitement when I realized that there is a program out there that lets ME be the subject of trading cards! So I created a couple myself. Here I am, the extreme librarian:


And here I am the seductress librarian:



And, as a nod to the tradition of sports trading cards, here's my brother, the ultra runner:

These are wayyyy to much fun. Like I said, I'm gonna make me a whole deck. And make sure all the other librarians make a whole deck. I know! Let's make the Bozeman Public Library Trading Deck. Include one with each book. Now that sounds like a money-maker.*

*I am not to be held responsible for the absurdity of these statments. I have a bad head cold.

Surprise, Surprise

A night by the road....

I do not have a digital camera. It is on my wishlist, but not a priority right now. Therefore, I have never really explored Flickr. In reading others' blogs, I can appreciate everything that Flickr has to offer, but haven't really considered setting up an account myself. Or so I thought.

It is snowing today (yes, snowing, in April, big, heavy snowflakes), so it seems an appropriate day to explore a bit on the internet. I decided to set up a Flickr account. All I need is a Yahoo email account. Huh. As it would happen, I have one of those, which I set up a long time ago to use for junk mail on the internet. I sign in my Yahoo address and WHAM! I have pictures. Yes, actual photographs with my smiling face. Hmmm.... I don't remember doing this. Suddenly, I am looking through the pictures and taking a walk down memory lane. The picture above? Well, here's the story....

I had finished up working for the summer as a seasonal interpreter, and it would be a bit before I started a new job in Red Lodge. So, I packed all my belongings in Bertha (my car...the name is another story itself) and headed to Glacier National Park for a week. After a hard day of driving, the shadows started growing longer and I realized a campsite needed to be found. By looking at my beat-up atlas, I saw a tiny green tent outside of Augusta, Montana. Perfect!

I nosed Bertha down a rutted, rocky dirt road, confident in her abilities to get me where I wanted to go. After driving what seemed like forever, I still had not arrived at my location. Darkness fall, the inky kind with only pinpricks for stars and my headlights not providing much visibility. The landscape stretched endlessly in all directions with nothing to break the isolation. Rhetorically speaking, there was not a lantern in a window anywhere. The road became rockier and ker-klunk, ker-klunk, ker-klunk. That's right, a flat tire. Panic and dread filled my chest. I think a million different horror movies crowded in at once...all involving a chainsaw, and ax, and maybe a big knife thrown in for fun. And a pack of wild dogs.

I was not prepared for this type of catastrophe. I unpacked the entire trunk looking for my headlamp...all by feel. Once finding my headlamp, I dug out the spare tire. Thank goodness I had changed tires several times before. With the bubble tire in place, I was not willing to continue on the never-ending road, nor drive all the way back to a small town with no hotel and a closed garage. So I did the only thing I could think of. I pulled my car off the road, set up my tent, and fell into an exhausted sleep. (I guess those wild dogs did not bother me all that much.)

This image is what I woke up to the next morning. It ends up I camped beside a small lake, and I even had a privy and a picnic table! How fortunate!

Thank you, Flickr. What a pleasant surprise to rediscover images I thought lost forever.

Broadcasting Across All Channels

My dad collects radios. Not every kind of radio, only the kind that he used to listen to as a kid. He has them lined up in the top shelves of the bookcases in the living room. There is the one from my great-grandparents' kitchen. A couple of others came from my grandparents' house. (At least, I think that is where they all came from.) My personal favorite is the one he listened to as a kid. It is small, about the size of a toaster oven, and brown with black knobs. His favorite programs included baseball games and Dick Tracy.

Communication is quite changed in such a short amount of time. I find the internet overwhelming. There is so much information out there to be had, and all with the click of a button. I can appreciate Bloglines as a tool for helping me filter the information to stuff that I really want to know about. I struggled a bit, at first, trying to figure out exactly which information I want to know! Initally I wanted to simply follow different blogs that I enjoy. Then I realized that there is the weather, NPR, community events, world news, movie information, book information, the list goes on and on. And suddenly, Blogline did not become a filter for me...I had subscribed to so much that there is no way I'll sort through it all. So what did I settle on? A couple blogs (my brother's being one), local news, the weather, and a book line.

Oh, and I have a feed on baseball scores, in honor of my dad.

Raise your hand....

I've been a learner all my life. Yes, dub me the goody-two-shoes of the class. I'm pretty sure I will have blood circulation problems because of how many times I raised my hand to provide the answers to questions. For the longest time I focused on completing classes and getting the grade. I think going straight through college and into grad school does that to a person. I didn't really get the "real world" check until I started my professional job. Suddenly, the time I had spent studying before was free. Free and unstructured. Hmmmm....what to do?

Well, I hate to say it, I stopped reading. It was an act of defiance on my part. I'd spent so much of my time reading in grad school that I didn't want to read another word. I watched T.V. I know, I know, such a time-suck. I would rent stacks of movies, and burn through half of them in a day. Honestly, I can't remember the storylines. I think I even gave myself headaches with how much time I spent in front of the screen.

And you know what happened? I got bored. Mind-numbingly bored. Bored to tears, literally. So, without realizing it, I did what any natural learner did, I figured out something to break the boredom. I learned how to knit. Why? Because it kept my hands busy while watching all those movies. Then I learned how to crochet. And spin. And then, bored with cereal and toast for every meal, I learned how to cook.

My point? Life-long learners are never bored. I find it fascinating when I hear someone say "I'm bored." I cannot imagine being bored. I'm to the point now that I have so many hobbies and things that I want to learn that I can hardly find time to do it all! I think that is my greatest strength in life-long learning, I am able, and more than willing, to take responsiblity of my learning. Learning is not stuck in the classroom, it is in the everyday scenario. For example, my car is making a funny noise. Yes, maybe I'm too cheap to take it to a mechanic, but I know that I don't want to get fleeced by the mechanic, so I learn as much as I can before I take it in.

But, my many, many interests result in my greatest weakness with life-long learning. I am a horrible, I repeat horrible, goal-setter. I dabble, I dibble, and I don't become really good at anything. I have a dress half-sewn, a sweater that only needs a neckband to be complete, a painting partially finished, and at least six books beside my bed that I am part-way into. I have snowshoes, cross-country skis, alpine skis, a mountain bike, yoga mat, cookbooks, spinning wheel, sewing machine, art supplies, nikon camera...the list could go on and on. All of these represent different things that I am in the middle of learning.

So here I am. I am taking the bull by the horns. Here is an honest-to-goodness goal. I will complete the Web 2.0 by May 1st. Okay, that was the deadline given to me...but we all have to start somewhere, right?

Whew!

I am aware of blog-land. In fact, I am a notorious "lurker," meaning I hang around the fringes; reading posts, looking at beautiful pictures, following the stories of lives around the globe, and then, poof! I'm out. In fact, blogs feed into what I refer to as a 'human condition.' Humans are curious by nature, and each harbor a fascination about what is going on in other humans' lives.

So here, let me stand up and shout--I enjoy blogs! To me, it's way better than People magazine, simply because it is normal everyday people doing normal everyday things. For the most part. I read my brother's blog because he is a hard person to get a hold of. I read my friend's blog because she is currently living half way around the world. And other blogs I read because, I admit it, I've been sucked in. I started reading them because I was interested in these strangers' hobbies, but now, it almost feels as though I know their lives a little bit. Blog celebrities.

I've entertained starting a blog several times. I've always stopped, though. Do I really want to throw my thoughts into the wind (or rather, cyberspace). Because up until this point, my thoughts have been just that, thoughts. Voicing them gives tangibility, and suddenly, accountability, to them. Am I ready for that responsibility yet? I'm still not sure. But I do plan on taking Web 2.0 as an opportunity to test this all out.