Back on the Peninsula

I had a boffo time at the New Mexico Library Association, talking about the new MPOW to a very engaged SRO crowd (in a conference center with free wifi). Sandy and I then hitched a ride to Santa Fe with Miriam Bobkoff, blogmom to the nifty Icarus blog from Santa Fe Public Library, and an engaging personality in her own right. Sandy and I spent the next 24 hours visiting with my mother and gorging on sopapaillas and green chili. I had more carbohydrates in the last 48 hours than I’ve had in the last year–and it was well worth every toothsome bite. Next time you’re in New Mexico, order your enchiladas “Christmas” (with red and green chili) and wake up your palate with a complex explosion of fresh, roasted, bright, and mellow flavors.

It was fun to see the responses to Friday’s FRL post about Library Journal’s jest entries for April Fool’s Day. I confess when it comes to ALA governance, going higher than division councilor or Executive Board member doesn’t appeal to me. It’s not a lack of appreciation for what someone in those roles can do; I’m just happy where I am. Crazy as it may seem, I’m fond of ALA Council, which in its own glacially slow manner can express the best side of librarianship. It was Council who ultimately said, yes, we do have values and we know what they are. I also like representing LITA on Council, because it gives focus to my role, and because the LITA people are good ‘uns, and because it’s a crowd that knows what I mean when I rend my shirt about invalid code or vendors who don’t love me enough.

It’s almost midnight on Saturday, and I’m writing about ALA governance? Excuse me while I get a life! Happy April, happy Daylight Saving Time, happy spring. I’ll be posting this week about blogs of note, juicy good things I’m reading, the last thoughts I have for now about improving MPOW search, and other tidbits I have in draft on this blog. But in addition to my homework, which is delicious this week–please be so lucky as to have to write about Nabokov at some point in your life–I also have gardening that beckons. Four new miniature rosebushes arrived while I was away. They’re just tiny green things right now, fistfuls of leaves tucked into four inch plastic pots, but someday they promise to have fragrant blooms that are white, light pink, dark pink, and dark red.

For two decades I have been buying miniature roses from Nor’East (which should now be called So’Cal, after their recent move to West coast, but never mind; the move seems only to have improved them). I plant, I tend, I nurture, I move, and then I arrive someplace new and buy more miniature roses. My newest babies join eight two-year-old plants, sturdy mature bushes arching one or two feet high in 14-inch pots. Now the new seedlings need to be dug into their capacious new homes with handfuls of bone meal and manure stirred into the soil and mounds of nose-tingling mulch patted over their pottings. Then I’ll consecrate the newly-expanded rose community with a hearty misting of Miracle-Gro for Roses, and finally sit among my plants, feeling smug and re-reading Nabokov.