Thanksgiving week

Next week is a special week--one with lots of things to be thankful for. For one thing, those of us at the Fort Worth Library branches will get four days off in a row--something very rare indeed! Ok, so maybe we won't get paid for one of those days as we take our second furlough day, but when you are so used to never getting so much as two days off in a row, the prospect of having four days is a treasure beyond comprehension. At least for us. I can't help but think, though, of how that will impact on those people who--for whatever reason--can't let a single day pass without spending huge hunks of it in our library. I often wonder just what their lives must be like, if we fill up such a huge place and time for them. For these folks, four days will stretch out endlessly. And I'm not talking about just the homeless who come in here just to get warm. I'm talking about the folks for whom our computers are their lifelines and four days out of touch will seem like an eternity. I know that I don't want to go four days without checking my e-mail or Facebook. Do you? So we are among the "haves" of the world and we don't have to depend on the public access computers in the library. We may think of the homeless at times like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but there is a whole subclass of "less than haves" but more than homeless that don't live very well and are at the mercy of others in this country. Thoughts like these take just a little of the joy of my four days off out of it for me. Ok, not much, as I jet off to Florida to join Cindy and Jason and Beth for a week of togetherness in the sun--but a little!

Bittersweet Day

Yesterday was moving day for Cindy and yes, I kept puddling up! While I'm happy for her to be starting a new adventure and finally getting a shot at a job that she will hopefully like better, it is still hard to see her leave. Thankfully the world is a much smaller place now than it was all those years ago when she moved all the way across a continent from Maryland to San Francisco. We had no free telephone service and no internet and no web cams. Ok, so I still don't have a web cam, but that would make a great Christmas gift-hint, hint!. Anyway, back in the day, she was so far away and so out of touch and I missed her so and now, I probably will still talk to her just as often and e-mail just as much and airfare from Texas to Florida is so affordable now. But still, she won't be able to come down for the weekend and the dogs will miss their friend Maddie and it just isn't the same as knowing she is just a couple of hours away. But as she said, I'm not losing a daughter I'm gaining a vacation destination, and we certainly wasted no time buying our plane tickets for Thanksgiving in Fort Myers! We are hardly giving her time to unpack before descending on her, just so we can lounge in the sun and enjoy being with our whole family for a holiday which hasn't happened for years but may happen a little more often now that both kids are in the same state.

Comments

Nothing is ever simple! If you are following this blog (and why on earth wouldn't you be!) and want to comment, it seems that I never bothered to set it up to enable you to do that. Now you can and comments are welcome. You will just have to choose a server and you may select "anonymous" but if you want to let me know who you are, feel free to sign in the body of your comment. Who knew you had to push a button here and make a selection there to enable this and that function?

Travels

Saw these maps on another blog, liked it, and decided to create them for me.

Countries I've visited

http://bighugelabs.com/map.php

States I've visited

http://bighugelabs.com/map.php

Jacksonville Weekend

I got so wrapped up in the budget woes that I never got around to elaborating about my wonderful weekend in Jacksonville. The last weekend in July we went to Florida to see our son graduate from the University of North Florida. He graduated with honors with a degree in Accounting. What a grand weekend we had. When we got there on Thursday, he still had one exam left to take. When he finished, he brought a bottle of Champagne home and the celebration officially started. On Friday morning we took a tour of the law school where he will start in January--Florida Coastal School of Law. Very impressive. Friday afternoon was commencement and Friday nite was a celebratory dinner. Saturday morning we went out on the Intercoastal on jet skis. Saturday nite we went to the dog track/poker room and Sunday we went boating around St.Augustine. It couldn't have been any better. One of the best things about the weekend was having both my children together at the same time. Having my whole family complete just happens so rarely that words can't express what a treat that is. Here are some pix of the happy event. The beautiful brunette is our daughter Cindy, the graduate is, of course, our son Jason, and the lovely blonde is his wife, Beth. Oh, yes, and the bearded hunk is my wonderful husband Brian!

Here is the image that I created for the Image Generator assignment. The only difficult part of the assignment was thinking of something to say. The tools aren't particularly difficult to use, or at least they don't seem to be, but my imagination is certainly getting creaky.

Here's my second try at a Mashup! Doesn't he look thrilled?

Ok, I've tried my first FLICKR mashup. I like knowing how to create a jigsaw puzzle, but I struggled just a little figuring out what to do with it once I created it. Had to read the directions (which I hate to do) several times. This was done on Big Huge Labs. I wanted to try the Spell with Flickr, but it seems to be a dead link--at least right now. Will try again later.

Getting caught up

Now that I've "recreated the past" a brief explanation is in order about why I'm so far behind. I've been off on vacation for the past three weeks--and what a vacation it was. We spent 4 days in London, then went on a two week Baltic cruise. We stopped in Copenhagen, Berlin, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Tallin Estonia, Stockholm, and Oslo. Fabulous time. So for the FLICKR assignment I uploaded a few of my travel pix in case anyone is interested. (oh, ok, I just wanted to look at them again!). They can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcaldowspix

Why the New Blog

Well, Becca turned stupid and did what she has cautioned many a patron never to do--forget their e-mail address and password. I've tried everything that I can think of, but nothing works, so I can't post anything new on the original blog! Ok, back to the drawing board and we start all over with a new blog! Here below are the original "words of wisdom from my first endeavor"--for whatever they are worth.

Post #1
"Hi and Welcome to my Blog! I'm Becca Caldow, the Branch Manager at the Ridglea Library in Fort Worth. I'm just getting started on this whole process--just like lots of you, and I suspect that the hardest part for me is believing that anyone has any interest at all in reading anything I have to say."

Post #2
" Thoughts about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0Not having been a librarian in the "old days" it is hard for me to imagine what it was like pre-technology. It is however, equally hard to imagine what the future will be like as the technology becomes more and more advanced. Hard to imagine that the city budget will ever stretch far enough to let us upgrade, and hard to imagine how we will ever learn to use everything that will come our way, much less be able to share the knowledge with our patrons. But I'm not absolutely convinced that everything that gets invented needs to be adopted. Some things are trendy and maybe we need to know about them, but we don't necessarily have to add them (or do them)just because the kids are doing them. Does that make me anti 2.0? Not at all. I'll get into this more as time goes on."