Eating well is more difficult by the day. Convenience foods are SO convenient but they're so bad for you. I'm skeptical enough to think most of the "natural" and even the "organic" products really aren't much different. Who knows? Sugar is bad for you but at least we know how it's bad. People have been eating sugar for a long time.

So, I've reached the point where I have to spend a lot of time thinking about food. Until recently I ate anything and everything I wanted. Now I'm trying to eat a modified version of low-carb and it's mostly not bad. It's hard to believe this can be a heart-friendly diet because it seems pretty loaded with high-cholesterol foods. But cutting the carbs is interesting. I used to get that overwhelming feeling of being hungry -- really hungry -- and that's practically gone.

I'm finding this whole thing tolerable. I don't really miss the potatoes and pasta and bread very much. Now that it's summer, I miss the chips. (Love chips.) And I have to admit that I'm still eating desserts occasionally. Ok, more than occasionally. When I really watch it and cut out the sugar, I can lose a little weight. And my exercise level makes a definite difference. I've been able to maintain my weight fairly easily over the past few months. I'd like to lose ten or fifteen pounds. I just need to force myself back onto the straight and narrow for awhile. We'll see.

So, nothing much in the post. I do have some ideas for future posts. Very little in my life is blog-worthy so we're left with manufactured non-topics. That's life.

CM

So, I'm going to try to get back into regular postings. They'll be of use or interest to me. The content may not be work-related but the activity is. Too bad I didn't decide to do this on Tuesday. Dates like 6/6/06 are always worthy of comment.

I really need to drink some different kinds. And I really, really need to get rid of some of the old stuff. Properly stored tea lasts a long time but I have some that's definitely past its prime.

Good things about tea: It's hot. When it's finished steeping it's still plenty hot. I frequently put it in a thermos and it's great to start with something really hot. And I don't mind reheating it. I don't think that hurts it. And obviously I like the flavor of tea. I generally drink it plain.

It's pretty lame when you're resolving to experiment more with your daily beverage. I live in a very deep rut.

Once in awhile I do add some dried orange peel or lemon peel to my tea. And once in awhile I'll drink mint tea or tea with a fruit flavor. I had some black cherry one time that was great. But I get around to that stuff about once a year. Must experiment more.

It's pretty lame when you're resolving to change your daily beverage. I live in a very deep rut.

Somehow going out for lunch is much more appealling than going out for dinner. By dinner time I'm usually tired and too grubby to want to go anywhere. It just depends. Dinner is a lot more appealling in the summer. Cold weather just makes me too tired. Well, riding and getting my chores done in cold weather makes me tired.

I rode yesterday. It was above 40 degrees but damp. I had on two pairs of wool socks, heavy leather riding boots, with rubber galoshes on over top of that. My feet were still cold. Oh, right, no whining. It was great to be out riding, even with cold feet.

Today I'm wearing clogs, thinking that tall shoes would keep my feet dry. It quit raining early so no worries about that. Enough drivel for today.

And a link to an interesting blog:
The Iceland Weather Report
http://www.icelandweatherreport.com/

I'm a weather addict. Some people watch sports, some watch movies, some watch news, I watch weather. It's too bad the Weather Channel isn't a little better. I'd rather watch a class on meteorology than Storm Stories. Actually, I'd rather watch almost anything else, and I do.

But the Iceland Weather Report isn't really about weather. These are:

WDBJ 7 weather
http://www.wdbj7.com/global/weather.asp?
We'll hope that link doesn't change but it wouldn't surprise me.

Weather Channel
weather.com
And this might work for local weather. Or not.

The Weather Underground

On a completely different subject, everyone should get an RSS newsreader or whatever it's called. The cheapest, and easiest that I've found is Bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com/. At some point I should experiment with putting up a button for subscribing to this blog via Bloglines. At a quick glance, I can't find that information. Maybe tomorrow.

I've been working on a cabled sweater. I should probably rip it out but I can't quite bring myself to do that. This yarn has already been half a sweater and gotten ripped back. Right now the problem is that the sleeves will be fairly narrow, not uncomfortable by any means but narrow, while the body will be fairly loose and boxy. It's not too late to narrow but body a little bit but better design would have been a better solution.

I've also been working on a pair of mohair socks but I think I'm going to give that up. The mohair has no elasticity at all. I think I should buy some appropriate yarn in a coordinating color and use the mohair as a lining or an accent or both. Too bad because it was knitting up pretty quickly.

It's pretty bad when I'm blogging about the weather. Boring.

Now if I could just train myself to think before I speak, or speak more deliberately, that would be a huge improvement.

[Yes, this is here primarily to take up space in the exercise of posting daily. I may have to resort to Quote of the day. (Hmm, that's "Four humorous quotations each day from The Quotations Page." I may have to find another source.)]

Many blogs but not all are highly focused. If you're an expert in your field, people are interested in what you're doing, how you're doing it, and what you think of everything else in the field. The best blogs, measured in any way you want, are well-written. Humor doesn't hurt. Two of the most popular blogs I've seen, in terms of involving a large audience, are Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/) and Yarn Harlot (http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/). These blogs have a regular readership ("community") and they're vocal. I think that over 100 comments per post is a pretty good indication of success. Item of interest -- the biggest responses are generated by off-topic issues! Think politics and social injustice. (Perhaps I should say perceived social injustice.)

What does this have to do with libraries??? Not much. But. Blogs can take on a life of their own. They are not just the product of one person. The best of them morph and change and reflect the world. If you read the books of P G Wodehouse, you'd never know that a war took place over the course of his career. It's never mentioned in the Wooster and Jeeves stories. That's not what you want from a blog, especially a library blog.

What do we want? Why create a blog? Or what kinds of blogs should we create? The best answer is, just create it and see what happens. We can come up with some highly contrived uses for a blog. I think the thing to remember is that you've got to start somewhere. If you've never used a blog, you won't recognize the perfect use for it when it comes along. You've got to use it enough to be comfortable with it, to even be bored with it, before you can explore what else it might be good for.

I think there would be great utility in an internal library blog, archiving posts created by library employees, for library employees. Ideally this would be a blog with multiple "owners." If we couldn't stand the thought of that much chaos, the Reference group comes to mind as a logical group. What kinds of things might go on a blog like that?

First, there are the "look at this" items. Tag them with the appropriate category or keyword and they're easy to find. Not just new databases or new reference books. When we're looking at websites at other university's libraries, or when we're debating what an information commons should be, a blog might be a good way to get input from multiple people and store it in one place.

Second, there are local "what's new" items. We probably don't need to record the water problems or the elevator malfunctions but it might be nice to know when Leyburn switched to card-access at night. It might be nice to know when certain positions were created or substantially changed, without asking someone to look it up in their paper files.

Third, there are the reports from meetings and trips and workshops and classes. Sometimes these end up on someone's web page. Sometimes they end up in the minutes of a staff meeting. Why not one place where they can be retrieved based on a variety of searches (including where the meeting took place, for example). Certainly the search utility on Groupwise leaves something to be desired.

[Just a few thoughts. I've actually spent a little time trying to organize and edit and rewrite this and I'm still not happy with it.]

OOOK BLOG (Hugh Blackmer), http://oook.info/mt/

From a class on starting a blog.
Dave's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/davetest/
Elizabeth's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/teafftest/
Karin's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/karintest/
John's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/tombargetest/
Laura's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/turnertest/
Vaughan's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/stanleytest/
Wendy's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/wendytest/
Yolanda's blog, http://bloggery.wlu.edu/merrilltest/
Wythe Whiting's blog (not apparently linked from the department's webpages?), http://home.wlu.edu/~whitingw/

I could envision a blog for Acquisitions. I don't actually know how this stuff is tracked or filed and there may already exist a perfectly good method for doing this. Several weeks ago it came up that we hadn't had a new issue of a particular periodical in a good long while. Wendy talked to me about it and we were inclined to think they'd ceased publication. She called and was told they were just running way behind. [Slight understatement. I think it was nearly a year behind schedule.]

Is that sort of information tracked anywhere? If someone else wondered about this next week or next month, would we have to rely on Wendy remembering she'd placed that call? Or is this stuff put into an Annie record? I have no idea.

If the information was in a blog, any one of us could look it up, presumably by searching on the title fo the journal (which would require that this was correctly entered in the first place). Would this be useful? Might be. It's going to depend on whether and how this information is currently tracked.

And someone would have to decide how this should be organized. Particularly with something new and experimental, I think flexibility would be beneficial. There's no point in documenting everything but it's hard to know what's of value until a certain amount of "stuff" is available.

I've always thought that these things require daily updates. I prefer to read frequent updates. I suppose the RSS feeds have changed that but there's something to be said for the habit of daily updates. Many, many people begin their day with their first cup of coffee and their favorite websites, whether blogs or news or something in between.

For the writer, every benefit is on the side of writing daily. Whether it's beneficial to publish that dailly product is debateable.

Back when I used to do this, I strongly preferred to write first thing in the morning. Part of the reason that stopped is because my mornings changed from solitary to . . . not. Such is life. How much navel-gazing does anyone need? And if it becomes a simple recitation of the days events -- that's not without value but does putting it in the public sphere add to its value?

[I like the automatically inserted navigation MT uses.]