Making Myself Type Something

So I haven't felt much like blogging lately. I've been generally suffering from a bout of inexplicable laziness/insomnia/fatigue. I'm starting to think it's not Seattle's lack of sunlight doing this to me (plenty of sun lately) but the wild swings in daylight hours. I can't properly sleep when the sun is up, or for at least a few hours after it goes down. Lately I've been wearing one of those primadonna sleep masks. It helps me "sleep in" until about 6:30 on sunny days, so that's nice.

I'm really busy at work and feeling lucky to have a job at all. There have been six layoffs in our library so far. The university is in bad, bad shape. The library where I worked in Ohio actually closed down last Friday, so it seems I am dodging bullets left and right.

Well, isn't this a happy post so far! Let's see... I got to go to Honolulu a few weeks ago for a conference. It was tropical and lovely. It was also a conference. I really loved the warm ocean breezes and being able to wear flip flops all the time. Photos from our one non-work day are here.

I tried to read Michener's Hawaii in preparation for this trip, but I'm still only about 1/3 of the way through it because it is insanely long. It's really interesting, though. I've never read any Michener. I know it's just a novel, but it's easy to imagine that the way Michener describes things is the way they really went down. Take, for example, when the first human inhabitants of Hawaii sailed from Bora Bora on their canoe. They crossed the equator, and all of a sudden all the stars were different, and DUDE, that one star wasn't moving! Trippy. A sign from the gods. The section about Abner Hale (not a real guy) and the Christian missionaries was fascinating, too.

So yeah, Hawaii, and I was in Montana last week, too. Bozeman is a fun place. Going to Missoula in August... or was it October? Or was it Billings? I don't remember. I just go where they send me. I'm getting really good at putting myself back together after clearing airport security. Portland's coming up, too, and I'll be in Ohio for the week around July 4.

My trusty digital converter box provided me with several new TV channels to check out this weekend. I have one called RTV: Retro TV. This afternoon I watched a show called The Bold Ones: The New Doctors which, according to Wikipedia, originally aired from 1969-1973. It was like an early version of House from the days when a cancer diagnosis was automatically a death sentence. The radical thing the House character did was to convince patients they weren't necessarily going to die immediately, then proceed to pump them full of chemotherapy drugs. There were women patients who weren't told they had cancer because their doctors and husbands "didn't think they could handle it." During the closing credits, there was a message about how the treatments presented during the show were "based on real developments from the cutting edge of medicine." My, how far we've come. Now if we could just get those 50 million people insured...

I'll try not to write such a bummer of a post next time! Oh, and Frank, I owe you a vegetarian chili recipe.