My Hogwarts House

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose intelligence is surest.”

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron’s affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine’s editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

Hubby and I are re-reading the end of HarryPotter and the Half-Blood Prince now in preparation for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7). The countdown to July 21 continues!

More Librarian Humor

Check out this post. I just love it when comics talk about librarians: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/librarians.png

100 Things About Me Installment 2

32. I’ve been playing bridge for 19 years and I still have to play in the Beginner’s Room at MSN Gaming Zone (I love bridge, I just play it badly)

33. I make the best banana bread I’ve ever eaten.

34. If the world ended due to a plague and I couldn’t live in my house anymore I would want to live in Spartan Village  at MSU. I lived there in college. I liked it there. That is definitely my first choice in post-apocalyptic dwelling.

35. I collect bowls. I have four sets of day-wear bowls and a lovely assortment of serving bowls.

36. Interestingly, I do not own a soup tureen.

37. I’ve been taking my showers at night lately rather than in the morning.

38. I wish my fingernails didn’t grow so fast, I’m poorly skilled with an emery board. At 35 I don’t expect to suddenly get good at it.

39. My acne problems are inherited from my father who, in his mid-60’s, still has active acne.

40. I was thinking yesterday about what I would take with me if there was a plague and Hubby and I had to flee Lansing. The first thing that came to mind were my two good hair-ties. Long hair is a serious bit of work.

41. The latest book I’m reading is the Young Adult title “The Bee-Keeper’s Apprentice” by Laurie King.

42. Today I went clothes shopping for “professional” clothes – trying to step it up a notch at work after unpacking last year’s summer wardrobe and being underwhelmed.

43. I am really proud of my sock collection.

44. I’m considering throwing away my VHS collection of X-files complete with commercials. Pause for effect.

45. I recycle everything the City of Lansing collects plus cardboard plus phone books plus books plus of course returnables plus giving away stuff I don’t need rather than throwing it away.

46. I changed my mind. My favorite color is still plum/purple.

47. I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I am actually growing living things in my garden. Some of them might be edible in a few months.

48. I have accounts/log-ins at WordPress, Blogger, de.li.cio.us, Furl, Second Life, MySpace, Ning, Flickr, Gmail, iGoogle, Bloglines, meebo, YouTube, wikipedia and a few other wikis, and a few others I can’t think of sitting here plus my own Web sites.

49. My favorite male authors are Stephen King and Michael Crichton and John Grisham. I could lie and say Chaucer and Shakepeare but I don’t re-read Chaucer’s canon annually.

50. My favorite female authors are Katherine Phillips, Gloria Naylor, Ayn Rand, Mary Wesley and a bunch more who only wrote one or two books.

51. I keep a broken clock on my desk because my grandmother gave it to me.

52. My great, great, great, great, great grandparents were Nicholas Schryer and Mary Eastwood. Their children grew up to be drafted into the Revolutionary War but the family fled to Canada rather than have the boys serve.

53. My great, great, great, great grandfather Simon listed “atheist” as his religion on the census.

54. My great, great grandfather Davison was brought home dead on a cart after an accident on the railroad where he was working to his pregnant widow who already had 4 kids at her skirts. She listed “washerwoman” as her occupation on the next census.

55. My great Uncle Frank lost the union dues money one night drunk in a bar. Never had any idea how it got away from him. Paid it back (and kept his kneecaps).

56. My great grandmother Emeline owned two millineries (hat making shops) before she got married. In that day/time it was the custom of employers to provide lunch to female employees. Being women, and immigrants, they swapped dishes and recipes from all over the world. My family still makes some of those swapped recipes today.

57. My uncle headed the team at AT+T that invented broadband. He had his home, a middle school and a high-school on optical fiber links to the Internet in 1993. My family is so cool.

58. Another uncle parked his bike on the frozen river at MSU, got a ticket for parking out of bounds, and beat it. Yeah, that’s my family, and my family is cool.

59. My mother’s wedding dress was above her knee.

60. I was named after Dostoyevsky’s Sonya from “Crime and Punishment.” I highly recommend naming your kid after a classic. No one will ever forget their name.

61. Worf’s make-up took 2 hours. Adrianna’s (from Sopranos) took 4 hours. Just a little break there to talk about more television which has nothing to do with my feeling self-conscious for watching so much of it.

62. I don’t really like bagels. Am I still an American?

63. I really need a pedicure.

64. The tupperware tumbler I’m drinking out of is a 5 in recycling language.

65.  My favorite carnival ride is the ferris wheel.

66. I have hammer toes.

67. I never could bring myself to throw out those old college books I couldn’t sell on Amazon. They’re still sitting right here. In big ugly boxes.

68.  I currently have 5 Web administration clients if you don’t count my day job.

69.  I have one tattoo.

70. My best colors are blue and pink

Calder Dairy

Originally uploaded by SnakeLadyLibrarian

This weekend, hubby and I went to pay a visit to the place that makes the organic milk I’m so happy with of late, the Calder Dairy. They were awesome. They’d set up something of a petting zoo and little kids abounded. Best of all, they charged for nothing except in the ice cream store where they had really unique flavors like pineapple-orange and this one labeled after a Mexican drink that tasted like cinnamon. Highly recommended if you have kids or a life-long love affairs with milk, or just want to visit a farm. It was kinda neat to visit a place that makes some of the food I eat, me usually being so removed from agriculture.

Be sure to visit my Flickr page to see all the really cute animals and really awesome cows.

Query from Miss K.

“What is it about this town that they feel compelled to mark streets ‘2-way’?”

Oh Happy Day

Election results came in today and you’re reading a missive from the newest Member-at-Large of the Board of the Library Technology Division of the Michigan Library Association. Yay me!

Milk Facts

A few months ago, hubby and I switched to organic milk. I grew up on farm milk, unpasteurized, unhomogenized, we got lucky if they strained the straw out, and I can still taste that bitter aftertaste you get from regular store milk, so, we decided to switch. Hmmmmm, happy with new organic milk we are.

Two weeks ago I bought a bag of oreos. The first oreos I’ve had since we made the milk switch.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Oreos take less time to reach optimal soakage in organic milk. Someone should do a study. The dunking skills I’ve honed over the course of my adult life have had to be retooled back to childhood levels in the face of organic milk.

Now, don’t panic on me. There have been no crises. I haven’t lost half an oreo to the bottom of the glass or anything, I’m just saying, there’s something going on here and surely there’s a university somewhere siphoning enough money from undergraduate tuition dollars to throw this one at a few grad students for further study.

Organic milk good. Oreos good. Oreos dipped in organic milk: I can’t talk about that it in public.

The Roses Are In

 

I think I’m getting the hang of this gardening thing.

Favorite new quote from Jessamyn West at librarian.net

I read trashy genre fiction and USA Today and I’m a librarian.

Basement Day

When my brother and I left our mother’s home, nay even when we bought homes of our own, we neglected the golden rule of “Moving Out.” We did not take our stuff with us from mom’s basment. Recently, my grandmother’s belonging’s joined mine and my brother’s in the basement and mom called a halt to the whole thing this spring. It was time for us to come get our stuff. All of it.

This weekend we arrived to take on the task.

First to go was my entire auxilliary kitchen cabinet system of milkcrates from my first apartment. It now resides in the dumpster in my mother’s driveway. There is not a milkcrate in this world that can call me mommy.

Also in the dumpster are my brother’s stuffed animals. He vociferously denies ever having owned a stuffy, as I call them, but I can assure you that the green dinosaur with big teeth and wee claws did not belong to me.

I kept 5 boxes of keepsakes including my diaries from middle school and my Barry Manilow albums. Wham! albums, too.

On to some more items:

	“Hello Virginia! I’m Sonya from Harrisonburg and I like bean bags and rollerskating” Here’s the peach dress I wore in the Little Miss Virginia beauty pageant when I was 11. I almost threw it out but what the hell. I was a goddamned beauty pageant contestant once and I don’t think that’s something I’m going to be able to say about the next 35 years of my life.
My favorite stuffy from middle childhood. My third grade teacher allowed us to bring in our stuffed animals so the class could vote on a name. Blog reader, meet Jane. I thought Jane was very stern and sometimes I was a bit afraid of her. All of my stuffies had distinct personalities.
	This is an outfit I received from the husband of a friend of mine when I was active in the Muslim community in high school. He was a good and decent man. I socialized with him and his wife and they were kind to me. Later, he was imprisoned for taking part in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. I don’t know what happened between the time I knew him and his radical years. Did I wear this outfit? Of course I did. I adored it.
Here’s my riding hat. I took riding lessons for about two years. It even has a purple lining.
	Here’s the trophy I won for Girl of the Year 1979 when I was 7 at the neighborhood park. This means I was good all summer and didn’t hit anybody or steal anybody’s monopoly money or push anyone off the swings. It may also have something to do with the fact that me and my brother (who won boy of the year) were two of the only white children who played at that park. And this was the South, first, last, and always.