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It's a crab!

Why a crab emoticon, you ask? Well...
Earlier today Joules showed me this lovely pic of a nebula from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. I remarked that I could see a crab in the image, while Joules said she saw an Anglerfish.
All very interesting. Anyway, 'Crab Nebula' was ringing dim bells so I googled it, as you do, and found this on Wiki. We both thought - Joules and I - that that looked less like a crab than mine!
So yes, a crab emoticon was forthcoming from me.
What? You want logic? Pffft... :)

(Completely unrelated: [snerk] Cubs are off to camp in a couple of weeks. They're planning on recreating "The Parrot Sketch" for the 'talent' night...)

My suitcase compliments my flamingo!

Pretty!



Sur ma vacance! The story so far...

Not a lot to tell, actually. Cubs and I have just come back from spending the Easter weekend with my Mum - hence the pic of the suitcase. Mum picked us up from the train station on Saturday then we trundled off for a ride on the Healesville Trolley. Always fun.
On Sunday, Soulsis and her chicks came 'round for the day. Much chocolate was exchanged and consumed, as well as some of S's excellent biscuits!
After packing our suitcases on Monday we nipped out to the Patchwork Teahouse in Warburton for morning tea, and a browse of the fabrics. I saw some beautiful green batik - decorated with ivy, dragonflies and butterflies - but even on special it was too expensive so with many a regretful sigh I put it back. Next thing I know Mum's marching off to the counter, bolt of material in hand, and buying us some! We now have a metre each! Squee! (She justified it as being part of my birthday present, even though we're closer to her birthday now than mine. :)
On the way back from that we stopped in at a mega garage sale where I spent $5 and came away with armfuls of stuff that had to be squeezed into my luggage somehow. Mwahahaha Despite the fabulous array of stuff at brilliant prices I was restrained. Just think how much stuff I would've been able to bring home if I had a car...!

Last day of term I had an excursion to the State Library. Extremely cool place - I was all tingly!
It's big, too. A couple of years ago it took over the space the Museum used to occupy, plus it has an enormous off-site storage facility a couple of hours out of Melbourne. Wow.
My favourite bit was the Images department where they're digitising the squillions of images to put online. Photos and cataloguing? That's my idea of heaven! Where do I sign?

(Speaking of photos, and blatant self-promotion, here's my Flickr account...)

And finally...

Little did they realise that conventional weapons would be useless against the giant chocolate bilby...

There was a music DVD playing while the cubs, their father and I were dining at the Hog's Breath Cafe this evening. The not particularly interesting selection (Toni Basil, Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, Bananarama, Rick Astley, for god's sake...!) prompted me to snark mildly about it being a collection of 'the least threatening songs of the 80's', with the companion volume of 'slightly edgy songs of the 80's'. :) However, I did almost snigger my coffee up through my nose when 'Angel in the Centrefold' came on...

Last night's episode of Life on Mars (which I've really taken a shine to this second season) had a Camberwick Greenesque beginning that made me giggle.
And lo and behold, the clip's up on YouTube.

Study results!
I got 100% for the other test I had last week, but only 94% for the Cataloguing assignment. Admittedly, I lost 1 point cos I didn't fully understand the question - the rest were lost to silly, careless mistakes. Still, not a bad result. :) (What would Little Miss Overconfident look like, I wonder?)

Egad, it's almost the end of first term!

I haz a flamingo!




Hee, this is Raoul, and yep, as I suspected, Mum is physically incapable of keeping a secret. I hedged a bit though, when she asked if I had any idea about what she was getting me. :)



I've just spent the long weekend at Mum's, without the cubs. Was verra niace. I napped a lot.

LOLOL I recently logged in to flickr and got this:
"OH HAI Lutra! Now you know how to greet people in Lolcat!"

And I got 40/40 for one of the tests last week. Yay!

[head->desk] When engaged in cataloguing tasks it is very important to a: know what you're doing, and b: know what you're doing.
I've just spent 5 minutes trying to find the authorised subject heading for 'man-eating animals' on the Library of Congress' site. Couldn't find a thing, no matter which angle I came at it from. ('man eating animals'? 'killer animals'? 'dangerous animals'? etc.) Not a sausage. [oo! I wonder what the authorised heading for 'sausage' is? Tch, later, you mental butterfly...] Anyway, so yes, couldn't puzzle it out. Then, giving up in disgust and moving on to the next word on the list to search, I o'erglanced 'man-eating' and discovered it was in fact 'meat-eating animals'. [rolls eyes] Oy bloody vey... (The subject heading for 'meat-eating animals', by the way, is carnivora.)

[grump] One of the cubs has had a hair cut and now I'm getting them confused.
Not that they're identical, or anything.

Cool! Harper Collins has got Neil Gaiman's American Gods up to read online! Only for the next couple of weeks, though. Even so... Flipping through the first few pages reminded me how good it is and that I must read it again.

[And the LOC authorised subject heading for 'sausage' is 'sausages', with a 'see also' note to look under 'animal products'. Well, there you go...]

Ooh!
I've just had a thought!
Computer projectors = slide shows!
I can subject an entire room of people to my photos without having to muck about with slide film!
Mwahahahaha!

... mind you, slide film does give beautiful results. Rich and deep...
... but then I'd need another SLR...
... but then again I've seen some lovely stuff done with digital SLRs.

Hm...
Need a digital SLR, obviously. I wonder if there's any place that will let me put one on layby for about a year? :)

So yes, the major assessment assignment for one of my subjects was to investigate my local library and then give a verbal report to the class. I put in a lot of work for the assignment, trawling the website for information and prowling around the place taking photos. I was organised, I really was, in my head and on paper but I was disappointed with the result.

Part of the problem was that I wasn't organised enough, or perhaps more correctly, I wasn't organised in the right way. Yes, I'd taken the time to get the photos ready, and collate the info and set it out logically but I hadn't actually given much thought to the talking. I'm not an effective public speaker - I know this, I get tangled, and I talk too fast, I don't breathe between sentences - and yet being aware of this I still more or less decided to wing it. [rolls eyes] My own fault, entirely.
On the very plus side, however, I worked out how to use a computer projector! I mean, they're dead simple, really - you just plug it in to the monitor slot - but having never touched one before I was justifiably pleased with myself. (The trick was you had to press the power button twice. Once to switch it on, and then again to activate the lamp.) Hee.
My tutor said I did very well, though, so the presentation can't have been too bad, and I've probably passed. :)

Heh, four weeks in to the 2 years (possibly 2.5 for an Advanced Diploma) and I'm already pretty sure where I'd like to go with this. I don't have much enthusiasm for customer service, no, what I like is searching, cataloguing, archiving. Thinking of this Course purely in library terms is limiting - what we're learning is information management. The principles can be applied all over the place! How cool would it be to work in a photo/film archive? Or somewhere like our State Library that has a huge collection of ephemera? I could (read: am already thinking about) branching out, later, into conservation and preservation - which could lead in to allll sorts of cool things! Weeee!
This would be in conjunction with the writing and publishing of my novels. Naturally. ^_^ ([grinning] I was bored in my 20's, I'm enthusiastic now - I'm going to be unstoppable in my 90's!)