Gorditas

Its Sunday and that must mean that I am in an airplane or trying to get on an airplane. After the BCR meeting in Denver I flew to Moline in order to pick Cely up and bring her back to Corvallis. My flight was delayed because we were waiting for a plane from Chicago and there were thunderstorms and hints of tornados in the Midwest. I didn’t get into Moline until 12:35 in the morning. Since Alexis is in Milwaukee and no longer in Iowa City she couldn’t come to pick me up. Everyone else that we know in the Quad Cities is like us and 12:30 is way past our bedtime. So I ended up taking a cab and it cost $32.00. It killed me to have to pay those big city rates in the Quad Cities. The nice thing about this trip was that I got to see Tony Cardoso. I hadn’t visited with him in quite a while. He has been busy exploring a new medium for his creative talents lately and has really hit on something. He has been painting gourds. Any description I write does not do justice to how beautiful his pieces are. I hope that he will provide me with some pictures that I can use here. He has a piece in a gallery in Atlanta and three pieces in the Bucktown Galleries in Davenport.

Today Cely and I had a hard time getting out of Moline, which was really stressful but once we got out to Chicago things went really well and we got on the first available flight to Portland. I am writing this on the plane to be loaded later so I don’t know if our luck will hold out in Portland. We have to catch a plane to Eugene because I flew out of there to go to the BCR meeting in Denver. I don’t think I will be doing that again. Its hard enough getting back to Portland let alone adding another leg to our travels.

Denver and BCR

Today I was in Denver for the BCR Board of Trustee orientation meeting. Tomorrow is the full board meeting and promises to be pretty interesting. I don't have much to say about it just that Denver still holds a special place for me. As I was working in my hotel room this afternoon I was able to look out the window and see these spectacular clouds form and dissapate leaving Mt. Evans to appear and disappear in the mists. The Rockies are truly spectacular. They don't have that in your face quality of the Alps and the Cascades have a different, individualism based on their volcanic ancestry but the Rocky Mountains are just so vast and continuing.

In terms of library stuff, it will be interesting to be on the board because I will need to keep in mind how I can use this activity to benefit OSU. First off, I think it will be in finding out what kind of training they can help us with as we move into new areas and need to train staff as their assignments evolve. Serving on the BCR Board now will be interesting because the issue of how OCLC interacts with the networks is still up in the air. Brenda Bailey-Hainer seems to have a smart outlook on the entire issue and knows that they will need to be looking towards developing new revenue sources in case OCLC drastically alters its relationship with the networks. This promises to be a challenge for the future.

Colbert on Oregon

One of the librarians here sent everyone a link to the Colbert Report on Wikipedia. Another of his reports was an interview with Darlene Hooley of Oregon's 5th legislative district. She's not from my district but once again Colbert digs deep and provides a concise picture of what it is like here in Oregon. So if you know about where we live and our representatives in D.C. are up to, watch Colbert.

Guilty Pleasure

I didn't think I was capable of it. I didn't think it could happen but it did. I'm a little embarassed to admit it but I found a middle aged man running around in his underpants funny. What's worse I thought it was just as funny the second time he did it. Yes, this weekend Cely and I went to see Taladaga Nights: the ballad of Ricky Bobby and we liked it. I want to share some of the shame with my sister Linda. We went to it on her advice. She told us she would pay for the tickets if we walked out but I guess she is off the hook. This is definitely a guilty pleasure, its a funny movie with a lot of laugh out lot moments. I think the reason it was so funny was that Will Ferrell shared the screen with a capable cast.

The Museum of Glass

Last weekend Cely and I took a drive up to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. It was a great day for day for a drive. The museum was smaller than we expected to see more glass. They had one great show Absence Adorned there by a glass artist named Karen La Monte. Her life sized glass dresses were really incredible. These pieces were worth the price of admission. The cone shown in the picture here forms the heat vent for the hot shop in the museum where the work gets done. We watched while the artisans worked on goblets for some new La Monte pieces; nothing as spectacular as her dresses. The museum was set up by the city of Tacoma and Dale Chihuly. The picture also show his Bridge of Glass which has a lot of his pieces in large shadow box wall designed so that the light can come through the pieces. As you walk across the bridge you also pass under a ceiling of glass pieces that look like sea shells. Here is another photo of the bridge that shows the passage with the sea shell ceiling and two other very large installations.

The High Cost of Textbooks

The article on textbook prices and academic libraries that Anne Christie and I wrote has just come out in E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship.

Trip to DC and Milwaukee

WashingtonDCMilwaukee 017
Originally uploaded by jpollitz.

I'm behind the times again. A couple of weeks ago Adrienne had some days off so we went out to visit her and do some touristy stuff. Fortunately Lin could get some time off on Wednesday and she took us in her boat on the Severn river all the way up to Annapolis. The next day we went to the Mall in DC and went to the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian and the National Gallery. When we left the gallery we saw this car that the local pigeons must have thought made a great toilet. They chose this car and none of the others around it.


I didn't realize how fantastic the National Gallery is. We kept running into paintings that we recognized. They had a wonderful traveling exhibit of Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting. It was very impressive. On Friday we went to visit Mount Vernon, ate at Zed's Ethopian restaurant. They had pictures on the wall of Hilary Clinton, Clint Eastwood, and others. This is the only place where I have eaten Ethopian food but would recommend it to anyone visiting DC.

On Saturday we flew to Chicago on the plane Adrienne was working. It was so much fun to see her in action. Then we took a short trip to Milwaukee to visit Lex for the day. It happened that the Mexican Fiesta was going on that weekend so we went downtown to get some food, hear some music and listen to the grito contest. In the evening we went to see Little Miss Sunshine at the Oriental Theater. The movie was very charming and the theater, a renovated 1927 old building was fantastic, complete with six huge buddhas with lighted jewels in their navels and set into the walls around the main seating area. Here is a picture of Lex at the grito contest.