Miscellaneous summer stuff

Part 3 of Summer 2011 Coverage

Early in the summer, Mike and I went to Boulder, Colorado for the day. It's a beautiful place, with the University of Colorado campus, downtown shopping, an amazing independent bookstore, and a great farmer's market. Here are a few pictures:

Tulips downtown

Flowers at the farmer's market

Mike at the Dushanbe Teahouse, where we ate lunch

On a different note altogether, one of my library classrooms got new laptops (yay!) and white boards. I'm very pleased and excited to teach there this fall:

For the first time since moving to Laramie, Mike and I were in town for Independence Day. Laramie has a huge celebration called "Freedom has a Birthday." Here's a picture of the main musical stage:

Freedom has a Birthday was really fun -- there were four stages in Washington Park. Also, free ice cream from the Freemasons and lemonade from the Democrats. (I heard the Republicans were giving away watermelon, but didn't run into their booth.)

Mike's mom visited us this summer, and we had a great time introducing her to Laramie. We went up to Vedauwoo for a walk around and to the Snowy Mountains. It was mid-July, but the Snowies still had tons of snow that shut down our attempts to go on a hike! On our way down from the Snowies we stopped for pizza at the Bear Tree Tavern and noticed this sign for the restrooms. It made us giggle.

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series of books, visited Laramie for a lecture and a reading. I went with my friend Kennedy and met the author. I'm reading the series now, and it's pretty entertaining. Her books include time travel, romance, and historical fiction, set (at first) in the Scottish Highlands.

Me, Kennedy, and Diana Gabaldon

Finally, a few food highlights from the summer. Mike and I have a share in Community Supported Agriculture, and every week we receive a box of vegetables and fruits from a farm in northern Colorado.

Here's a zucchini quiche, right before I popped it into the oven. It was delicious!

Pad thai, made with lots of the vegetables from our CSA share

This raspberry freezer jam does not represent produce from our CSA, but is actually made from Mink Creek raspberries given to us by my mom. It was my first-ever time making jam, and it's totally delicious.

Spring Break, Part Deux

Today I baked and frosted a bunch (about 5 dozen) spring sugar cookies. Most of them are to give away, but many are for eating! I think they're super cute:

Pink tulips, yellow chicks, and blue bunnies

Democracy & Bread bowls

Mike and I took advantage of "early voting" at the Champaign County Clerk's office and did our civic duty on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. After we came out of the ballot boxes Michael wanted to know who I voted for! I informed him that voting is private and confidential and it has to be that way for our democracy to survive. Later that evening we went bowling. Mike still isn't sure who I voted for.


The picture below is dedicated to Rachel Terry Lund, who made it possible. She gave us the recipe for these excellent bread bowls that looked so lovely I had to take a picture of them. We had a couple over to dinner on Saturday night and had mulligatawny soup in bread bowls, a fun game of Uno Spin (I lost) and Skookies for dessert. Good times.


What I'm reading:
Getting Things Done by David Allen. I'm actually reading this for work because I'm helping to teach a workshop on keeping all of your research organized and we're using this guy's method. I think it's pretty useful.
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles. Garth told me a few months ago that he was reading this, and I was intrigued. Now I'm about halfway through and it's a really fascinating history of libraries that starts with the ancient world and the Alexandria library in Egypt.
What's up next:
Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. These are two sci fi, cyberpunk novels recommended by the professor for my class Library, Information, and Society. I'm pretty interested.

Happy Thanksgiving

It's hard to believe that the holiday season is here. We're counting the weeks (4) until our Christmas trip to Cache Valley!

We had a really wonderful Thanksgiving. I baked pies and rolls and Mike cooked the apple and yam dish. It all turned out great! And I only called Mom twice on Thanksgiving morning to find out what to do with the rolls.


Mike carved up the turkey after we were done eating. We've got a ton of leftovers in the fridge, but we're sure enjoying them!

We had Thanksgiving dinner with the Holms, a sweet family from our branch. Kira and Steve Holm are a couple of years older than Mike and me and they've been living here (in St. Joseph -- about 15 miles from Chambana) for the last few years while Steve has been doing his residency in oral surgery at Carle Clinic. (His supervisor is extracting my wisdom tooth this coming Tuesday!) Kira and Steve have three kids: Maci (almost 4), Micah (2), and Caitlin (1). They are a high-energy herd.

This is Micah and Maci. We were playing while Kira and Steve finished getting dinner ready and I asked the kids if I could take their picture to show to my family. They suddenly got very awkward and Micah's hands went straight to his nose.

Micah likes to play rough sometimes. He enjoyed running and jumping onto my lap and Maci enjoyed running to the kitchen to tell her mom that Micah was being rough. Ahhh, big sisters.

Maci took this series of pictures of me, Micah, and Mike:
We missed being with our families very much, but I felt a lot of love from the Holm children. All day they were saying, "Sister Terry! Sister Terry!" and sharing stories with me. They gave me lots of hugs and kisses and made the holiday very happy. We hope that all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, too.

Autumn musings

It feels like an early autumn in Urbana now. Temperatures have been in the 70s during the day and the 40s at night. We're enjoying the cool temperatures and I've been using my bike more for transportation in addition to recreation. :)

We were very happy to have lunch this week with Mike's Grandma and Grandpa Brough. They were on their way from Washington, D.C. (where they've been on an LDS mission for the past 18 months) back home to St. George, Utah. We enjoyed chatting with them and only wish we could have spent more time with them. Don't roll your eyes at this and think that I've turned into one of those Mormon housewives who do all that self-sufficient stuff that M.H.'s do (I'm really not there yet), but I've started doing lots of baking on the weekends. We're eating nothing but homemade bread these days:


and I also make the granola that we eat for breakfast every morning. It's wonderfully therapeutic to not think about class and work for a few hours and make something delicious.

Me in our teeny-tiny kitchen

Classes are going well. I'm working on several projects that are all due in the first week of October. These projects are: redesigning a website for a public library (with a group), a group presentation and website on research ethics, a presentation on choosing biographical reference sources for a small academic library. It's sort of frustrating that all of these projects are due within the same week, but it will be nice to get it all done and not have to worry about it later in the semester. The project I'm most interested in is the biographical reference sources. There are lots of things to take into consideration, like scope, arrangement, cost, usability, and more. I'm finding that library science is theoretical and philosophical enough to satisfy my intellectual side and also practice-oriented enough that it satisfies my practical side in ways that the study of literature never did. So here's my love song to library science:

Library school
you satisfy me
in ways I've never
been satisfied before.
I love you for your
practicality
for your theoretical constructs
and for information theory.