intertext

Livejournals ads on free accounts just got exponentially more annoying. That's not going to affect me for my personal blog - I have a paid account - but it does affect my choices about what I ask my students to use. I would use Dreamwidth, but for the necessity to send invites; this gets problematical with classes of 28, sometimes several in a term :(

Anyone else using blogs in the classroom? Any suggestions?

I awoke early this morning and went out for a walk with my friend Jen from work. She's someone from the DE side of my work rather than the English side of things, and it's refreshing to talk about that side of things for a change. She loves dogs and gardening and computers - my kind of person!!

THEN after spending the morning actually sort of vaguely doing work related things, I went downtown and had a lovely lunch with superfoo and lidocafe at a Thai restaurant. Conversation was books and movies and just stuff and was fun. I learned that lidocafe watches Jeopardy and The Gilmore Girls, which pleased me no end because I always think of her as terribly serious and only watching Important Things like Nature and David Suzuki and The Passionate Eye (though I know her to be a rabid ER fan, like myself). It was great to see superfoo - I hope that she will keep in touch when she has gone on to Great Things at the University and left our Little College behind...

After lunch, we parted company, and I went in search of the Thursday market stall and discovered that it is necessary to go there Early if you want anything Really Good, although I did get some Morels and some Spring Greens and a beautiful butter lettuce. Then I went to Chapters Bookstore (selling out to the fleshpots, I know - and must have just missed superfoo) and got - yay - Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Jose Saramago Blindness and a book called Getting Started With Camera Raw which sounds terribly kinky if you are not a digital photographer, but you'll know what it's about if you are. So here's what's on my "to read" list for the rest of the summer:

The Things They Carried
Blindness
The Accidental Ali Smith
Rainbow's End Vernor Vinge
Saturday Ian McEwan
The Naming of the Dead Ian Rankin
The Consolations of Philosophy Alain de Botton

... and no doubt various lighter and junkier things as they become available. There is that new Potter book, of course, which I do have on order from Amazon...

And, as mentioned in my last post, I also took the time to buy a permanent account in LJ, which really does make me feel good. So there we are.

Happy Solstice, everyone!

I had my first LJ dream last night (ie a dream featuring LJ) in which oursin posted that she had been reading the childlit mailing list group and had encountered a very interesting member on it who was an LJ user and who had become a "friend." She was urging all of the people on her flist to "friend" this person. I don't remember who it was, except it wasn't Philip Pullman (who does subscribe to childlit, but I don't know if he's on LJ...). This seems, afterwards, unlikely - uncharacteristic of "oursin" I think to proselytize for another user, for one thing - but made me think about the differences between these two groups and why I vastly prefer LJ. ( Read more... )